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| Chandni Guha Roy |
Chandni Guha Roy, final year MVA Art History, MSU, Baroda,
the cub curator in discussion in this part of the series has a bachelors’
degree in Applied Arts from the illustrious College of Art and Craft, Kolkata.
She has a curatorial theme in hand which is magnificent in content and
ambitious in approach and has immense possibilities as a curatorial project.
Chandni calls her project, ‘Rhetoricity’ (Rhetoric and City). When she presents
the concept everyone is keen because it is for the first time one cub curator
is going to handle the notion of public space as a space of public opinion, how
such spaces are created in generating public opinion. The theme has already
been doing the rounds and everyone is keen to listen from the curator herself.
According to her concept, Chandni does not want to deal with any kind of
opinion/action that is expressed in the public domain. She wants to see how
public opinion is created in the form of hand written posters. She further
explains that her curatorial theme finds its anchor in the Naxalbari/Naxalite
posters that had once generated a public domain for itself and created a
thorough social change. I look at the faces of the peer group gathered around
the table. Some faces have this expression of ‘disbelief’ and some faces are
absolutely blank. I can see justification in both of these expressions. The
faces that show some expression all belong to the students hailing from the eastern
part of our country including West Bengal. The faces that are blank belong to
the students from elsewhere. I don’t want to praise the Eastern students and
condemn the rest.
Naxalbari Movement celebrates (?) its golden jubilee this
year. This statement reeks with the smell of establishmentarian language.
Taking the history of Naxalbari Movement of 1967 in Naxalbari Village near
Siliguri in North of West Bengal, and the Naxalite Movement that followed in
various parts of India including Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, the party workers
and revolutionaries living today may not take it as a occasion to ‘celebrate
its golden jubilee’. Fifty years of struggle and what has it brought to the
country that they have been wishing to revolutionise? From the imaginations and
partial realizations of an armed struggle against the state as well as a
cultural struggle against the minds of the people that had been gone numb by
the rhetoric of the changing governments both in the central and states, the
erstwhile revolutionaries have transformed into spiritual seekers, staunch
critics of Communism as a political ideology itself, completely sunk into
cynicism, crossed over to mainstream parties, established new revolutionary
outfits thinking that the initial moves were wrong and the current one would
change the scenario, shifted their field of action to social work and
environmental protection and many into complete silence. They all have seen how
the country moves from red to saffron and the rhetoric has absolutely changed. However,
this is the year when Naxalite Movement turns fifty years old. The bearded
guerrillas of that time have now become sixty year and above old men and women.
For all of them it is a time for retrospection and introspection.
I could justify my students’ reactions to Chandni’s theme
because by the time they were born the Naxalite Movement had already turned
thirty years old. And by the time they are able to understand the nuances of
that political movement, it is already fifty years old; half a century. Then it
all depends on how political the contemporary students are; if at all they are
political how they are interested in the history of a movement that had shaken
up the foundations of feudalism in this country but frittered away due to the
suppression and cruelty unleashed against the Naxalite revolutionaries by the
state/s. I don’t say that the revolutionary romanticism has totally abandoned
the minds of the contemporary students (Chandni is the best example as she
would like to look back at the public opinion that this movement had generated
through its posters pasted in the public domain); in the universities we see
how students organise and agitate taking ultra left positions. Also we see
contemporary students coming out in gangs to protest against the state and even
hold candle light vigil. These are the transformed versions of the
revolutionary zeal which the youngsters in the Naxalite Movement had held up
thinking that instead of candles and placards they could hold guns and bombs.
But they were not just wielding guns and bombs only, they were holding placards
too. Each night those revolutionary youngsters used to stick posters with
revolutionary ideas and slogans. Each day people used to read it and form
opinion about the ongoing political developments. Even if the middle class of
the time remained insular (as today to certain extent) they too took notice of
these bills that spoke to them with such vehemence. Public spaces were
effectively used by these revolutionaries through interventions with posters,
songs, street plays and so on.
Chandni wants to deal with the very idea of forming the
public opinion using the public spaces through posters. She focuses only on the
posters, not any other medium that could generate public opinion hence it is a
very focused project. She does not even consider the film posters as potential
ideological vehicles. She wants to see how the letters, calligraphy, slogans
and the messages in them influence people’s opinion. It is also a sort of
social experiment to see whether more and more people could be influenced
through this project. The class room/board room asks her whether she wants to
come up with the actual exhibition of the posters that had been written by the
revolutionaries in those years. However, Chandni informs the class that there
are no such posters archived; there are two reasons for this absence of such
posters- one, they were temporal interventional and were not archived. Two,
even if someone had wanted to archive them for the posterity to understand the ‘handwriting’
of revolution, the public as well as administrative interventions had sanitized
such public spaces immediately. Three, even if none had touched them and let
them be there in the public spaces, the time had eventually destroyed them.
Besides, children used to tear them, the other bills were stuck on them etc.
Chandni tells us that such posters could be now seen only in the photographs of
the streets or the protest sites and she may not be able to procure them as
example in the limited time that she has in her hand to execute the project.
As a curator, Chandni wants to create a wall of public
opinion. Her idea is to bring a carnival of languages, underlining the
plurality of this country as reflected in the student population of the Fine
Arts Faculty itself. They all congregate near the canteen for their daily bread
and banter and one of the walls which is already a sort of notice board by
default is going to be marked out for the students to intervene with ‘posters’
that speak of their minds. And Chandni insists that the participants/the public
constituted by the students should write in their mother tongues. There
shouldn’t be any visual element in them to retain the quality of the
revolutionary posters of the Naxalite times. The project seems to be really
exciting even though the idea behind it may not be really what the students
understand as they contribute/intervene/express in that space. Chandni would
give them papers, felt pens, colours and brushes to create their own posters
then and there. Soon the peer group is alert. They ask the curator whether she
is confident about the students that they would come up with something really
revolutionary or nasty. The area she has chosen as the ‘public space’ is under
CCTV surveillance. While Chandni assures anonymity to the sloganeers/poster
makers, can she stop the intervention of the CCTV cameras? When the CCTV
cameras are there, will there any student dare to put up some ‘revolutionary’
comment for the fear of being implicated later of insurgency, considering the
prevailing political atmosphere of the country and the general suspicion within
the campus? Even if they do, how that public space would become a public space
as Chandni as the curator insists that there should be only mother tongue? So
how this reduction of meaning into the aesthetics of calligraphy be challenged?
Even if she tries to give a translation of these posters in the link language,
will it do justice to the given topic? How curatorially sound is this whole
process?
Chandni insists that it is a public project and a project in
process hence she couldn’t give any conclusive answers to these questions
because she is equally unaware of the outcome of a project. I understand that
it is an interesting project with more chance of falling apart than turning
into a very colourful one mainly because of the questions that have propped up.
However, all of us want to see how the public space is formed and the public
opinion take shape in the given public space. So, here we are with Chandni and her
Rhetoricity. Even if she pegs her ideas to the history of poster making during
the Naxalite era, there are a series of curatorial challenges involved in this
project. I number them as this: 1) The word ‘Public’ is a hugely debated one in
any curatorial project. 2) The word Rhetoric is now taken more as a hollow
posturing than a wise statement directed not particularly at any but applicable
to all, if need be. 3) Rhetoric also has a propaganda agenda behind it, as in
the case of the Naxalites. 4) In a world of Information Technology, posters
have a romantic and vintage value than real communicative values. 5) Due to the
same Information Technology, the people who form a ‘public’ have become more
‘private’ than public. 6) There is always a herd mentality when making and
receiving public opinion as we see it in the social media. If someone writes a
certain expression as comment, the comments that follow are always
subconsciously directed by the already existing ones. At the height of laziness
people even cut and paste the same comment.
The postulation of public is problematic, especially when we
see it in the context of Chandni’s project, Rhetoricity. The very definition of
public is now varied and liable to be contested at each juncture. In the
context of an art or cultural project, the public assumes a different role than
it forms in a city square for a public rally or a protest march. The complexion
of the public is absolutely different when it is in a bus station or railway
station or in a restaurant or a fair ground. Public does not have a proper for
or shape; like a drop of mercury it could stand in perfect shape and with the
intervention of a magnetic field it could behave differently and change forms.
Hence a unilateral approach to the idea of public is always fallacious. We
always think that the public spaces are always public spaces; but not
necessarily so. The public spaces, even if it is a street or a gallery or
museum hall or corridor, are no longer public spaces as they are directly and
indirectly controlled by surveillance. In the case of public as formed by human
beings, we are not sure whether the members of this public really want to be a
part of the public or not. Let us take the example of a crowd gather around a
street magician. He can make his program successful only if the crowd/public
behaves according to his demands. He needs volunteers as well as viewers. And
there is some sort of temporary agreement between the magician and the crowd.
And the next moment it is not necessarily so. This is what exactly happening in
the case of an art project also. The public could absolutely fail an art
project if they are not interested to be willing participants. However, when
you are invited to be a part of public, as in the case of a performance art within
the museum hall, you are a willing member in a willing public where your agency
is minimum and your gullibility is maximum. But the real public is a volatile
lot and it could be swayed only using some sort of rhetoric. Besides, the
implosion of public into itself has considerably prevented them to be willing
participants in the real time public interventions, which perhaps they would
happily do in commenting in the social media or by making innumerable forwards
in whatsapp, instagram, pinrest and so on.
Chandni’s project takes off almost three days before the
commencement of all the other curatorial projects. However, the initial
response seems to be not so enthusiastic. Chandni’s friends respond to it and
they make some small posters and stick it there. But that is a willing public
in a defined public space. We wait for a few days anticipating that the wall
will be full of posters and slogans. But finally the result is not as expected.
Students/people/the public is cautious about making a statement, even in a
playful way. The atmosphere seems to have been vitiated by some kind of
invisible fear; the fear of ostracising and rustication, expulsion and
condemnation. Here is a curious generation. But can I make such a judgement
soon? No, I can’t and I should not. There is an interesting example that I want
to bring into your attention. Many years back, when the Disney Corporation
created a Township in the US, they created a graffiti wall along the outer wall
of the complex in order to pre-empt the graffiti writers, street artists and
hopeless vandals. Their idea was to protect the rest of the complex from
graffiti interventions. They put a large board ‘Graffiti Wall’ inviting the
street artists to make interventions in the given space. The result was shocking.
That wall remained as clean as ever and the rest of the complex was severely
attacked by the street artists. It could be the reversal of the ‘nudge’ theory.
The public generally behaves just the opposite as they are asked to.
Curatorial lessons learnt: one, Chandni’s is a perfect
concept, perfectly presented and perfectly argued. But it did not take shape
the way the curator wanted. The reason is that the curator did not debate the
possibility of public’s behaviour; she expected the public to respond as per
the cue. That means, whatever be our strategies to involve public in a
curatorial project, a sense of regimentation should be avoided. That involves a
lot of covert strategies of involving the public. A lot of interactive works of
art fail within the galleries or experimental spaces mainly because the public
becomes conscious about the results of their interactions. Even the presence of
a security guard could change the whole fun of your idea of interactivity. Two,
in a visual art project, whatever be the idea and the possibility of textual
domination, the outcome or the process itself should have some visual effect as
far as the viewer is concerned. In Chandni’s work this visuality was lacking.
Of course, we should remember that there is always an open-endedness to the
projects but even in that case there should be a method in the madness when it
is a curatorial project. Three, Chandni’s project has immense possibilities as
there is no dearth to textual materials regarding the Naxalite movement and its
public interventions though posters are not available in the public domain now.
A research based approach to the same theme could result into a wonderful
museum scale curatorial project.
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