Noam Toran: Accessories for lonely men

http://noamtoran.com/NT2009/projects/accessories-for-lonely-men

Very intriguing.

reflections

learning from my last work, i succeeded in not relying on the concept note too much.
but the narrative to my "memory radio" was lacking to some extent. i plan to take this idea forward as i think its a great storytelling device, and is worth further development.

it will be nice if i can edit the sound peices together like a film, where each sound peice is carefully placed with thought given to what comes after and before it. there have to be sparks between adjacent sound pieces which give dynamism to the whole narrative in terms of rises and falls, and other narrative devices like suspense, anticipation.

Ranbir Kaleka: projections on pantings

Family Album: inspiring work By Malena Barnhart

http://malenabarnhart.com/index.php?/projects/current-work/2/#

The memory radio: exhibit at JAAGA shanti nagar, Bangalore

Concept note:

24 Sep 1995, Plague Outbreak, Surat

                                             
                                         

This piece consists of a radio and a set of 3 pictures. The viewer is supposed to turn the knob on the radio and tune to different memories that i have used to tell the story of how the plague affected my ancestors and me.

--

Some reviews: 

"Intriguing and effective as a storytelling tool, i like the mix of the family narrrative with a public instrument such as the radio"

"Great work! I really liked the interface.The radio sets a great mood and the tuner just creates that mystery that prepares the listener for whatever he/she is about to hear"

---

The memory radio project- beginnings.

Im in the process of hacking on of those old transistor radios that i remember my grandma used to have. i want to make it a memory radio , the content of which im figuring out as i go. i like the form, and the idea of tuning in to the memory, and the sound of the static.

ive begun playing around with an arduino board, which is electronics prototyping platform, and have kindof figured out the code. the idea is to play my own mp3 sounds with the turning of the transistor knob. im using a potentiometer for this purpose.

i will post the code and a video soon.

old transistor radio

I used to have one in my grandparent's house in punjab.

Might be really interesting to use it as a device in one of my works.

yuan yuan yang: a fictional memory

http://lukayangworks.com/index.php?/installations/memory-installation-no2/

inspirational installation work.

real time birth meter

There used to be a hoarding with an electronic meter near our house in delhi. it showed in real time how many births and deaths had occured that month. and as i watched the numbers would go up, faster than a clock. it was so hard and absurd to know that in the last second 10 kids were born.
i always wondered. were they boys? where they girls? what are their names? how do the look? where do they live? what are they doing now?

although this link is not the same at all, try and see what it makes you feel.
comments are welcome.
http://www.worldometers.info/

The year of my birth

Right now im in a phase of researching what was happening in india when i was just born, the year 1991.

after some researching and long phone conversations with my parents in delhi, i found that rajiv gandhi, the prime minister of india at that time, was assassinated in chennai. i would have been a 3 month old baby then.

what interests me is how at one point in time, there are so many things going on around and so many stories are being created. some large, some small,some known, some unknown, all fitting into their own frames of view, whether large or small. 

3 months after i was born, i was probably sitting on a chair crying for my mother to come, at the same time, an iconic figure in indian history was lying lifeless in a pile of bones and blood. 

i sometimes try and imagine what must be happening at this moment. as i write this blog post, what events are happening which i have no clue about?

as i write this line, thousands of stories are being created , and it feels like many of them will just pass into a vast sea of memories never to be known again.and some will be known by everyone. 

its always nice to hear stories in retrospect, i guess thats what makes them a story.

but there are so many of them around me, right now, at this moment.

Time puncture: first exhibition at srishti.

the first exhibition, where i exhibited "babuji's funeral" turned out to be success. for the first exhibition as a group, it was nice to see how everyone had put up very different kinds of work.and it was an interesting experience working with the Museum and gallery practices class.

personally, i learnt a few things by watching people interact with my exhibit.
i felt i relied too much on the concept note, and that maybe the work would fall apart without the concept note.not that i wanted to go for this, but in the struggle to disaggregate, i realised i got a little bit caught up with the idea of fragmentation.and i fragmented without the bass narrative being too strong. which might have made bits of the work seem too open, maybe even random to some viewers.

for the next work, i will try and make the base of my work. the basic narrative clear and strong. and at the same time will try and fragment and acheive and interesting balance,which allows different experiences, yet communicates the content loosely.

also, this has got me thinking about the idea of abstraction. Why fragment? why abstract?
although i have realised to some extent what these things do to the narrative, the work opens up and in some sense becomes more experiential and looser, in a way allowing different entry points for different viewers.
at the same time, i want to read up more and study this idea and how it has been applied in art forms throughout history.
future posts on this subject soon.

babuji's funeral

When my grandfather passed away three years ago, i decided not to attend his funeral, i figured i had other things to do, and somehow i could not feel what had happened. on the day of the funeral, as it happened in my hometown around 500 kms away, i was overcome with a strange mix of emotions. this installation takes off from this event and is an attempt and understanding my own roots and the relationship i shared with my grandfather.

(the video, was playing on loop on a laptop as a part of the installation)

i tell myself 

its nothing

but a body

lifeless

lying on

a bed

afire

in a barren land

surrounded

by faces

familiar

its a lot more

than i think

i think

i think

smoke rising

in a heavy atmosphere

and my 

eyes burn

from the smoke

im guessing.

ink. playing with objects and metaphors

The cosmetics

Of adolescence

the muddled up jargon

And abracadabra

Have begun

To spill

slowly over

virgin nature

And games

Once played

With

A father.

--------

Grandfather says

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
in the dark.
It's after dinner playtime.
We're outside,
hidden by trees and shrubbery.
He calls it hide-and-seek,
but only my little sister seeks us
as we hide
and she can't find us,
as grandfather picks me up
and rubs his hands between my legs.
I only feel a vague stirring
at the edge of my consciousness.
I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
It gives me pleasure
that I can't identify.
It's not like eating candy,
but it's just as bad,
because I had to lie to grandmother
when she asked,
"What do you do out there?"
"Where?" I answered.
Then I said, "Oh, play hide-and-seek."
She looked hard at me,
then she said, "That was the last time.
I'm stopping that game."
So it ended and I forgot.
Ten years passed, thirtyfive,
when I began to reconstruct the past.
When I asked myself
why I was attracted to men who disgusted me
I traveled back through time
to the dark and heavy breathing part of my life
I thought was gone,
but it had only sunk from view
into the quicksand of my mind.
It was pulling me down
and there I found grandfather waiting,
his hand outstretched to lift me up,
naked and wet
where he rubbed me.
"I'll do anything for you," he whispered,
"but let you go."
And I cried, "Yes," then "No."
"I don't understand how you can do this to me.
I'm only ten years old,"
and he said, "That's old enough to know."

Ai Ogawa
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this beautiful poem made me think about how events of the past can mould you into how you are now. even when shes 35, the author finds it hard to grasp what could have happened to her. im very intrigued how human nature can be so complex, so mucky, so grey. certain situations arise where its just impossible to be logical. i think this is where the real stuff of art lies, this is where it really hits, and stays with you, haunting you. as these words have, in my case.

When they fight, i hide under my blanket and play

Although the struggle with this work was to disaggregate the narrative, the story, to use different mediums and modes of experience in a sort of fragmented way to capture the moment, i sort of got too overwhelmed with the idea of relevance.

I could not understand how a personal memory of me playing with my toys while my parents fought was relevant, or could be relevant. in that attempt i tried to juxtapose and play around with these toy sounds and images of war.

in my attempt to make it relevant the work became too general, it could now be about any kid to some extent,
so although on some level its interesting to watch these juxtapositions and how ive played around with image and sound, it did not resonate at a deeper, physical level i thought.

Ramkinker Baij - The fruit gatherers - exhibit at NGMA bangalore

This sculpture really jumped out at me when i was going slowly, through the multitude of work that was on display at NGMA recently.The artist in spotlight was ramkinker baij. an artist from west bengal and one of the pioneers of modern indian sculpture.

I stood in front of this work for a good hour or forty five minutes, and i loved it.but i didnt know why.
And now after ive gone back to susan sontag's article, its become clearer to me that i was trying my hardest to make sense of what i saw. so that i could "understand" it. and move on.

Strangely though, to this date, i dont know what the work is about, yet this image has been in me head ever since. the title says "fruit gatherers" so that atleast gave me some lenses to look at it from. and the figures look like that of tribal women who would go around gathering fruit in the woods. this i think comes under the studium part of the work. it gives me some idea of the setting or cultural context that the work arises from.

But what really caught my attention, punctured me, the punctum is somewhere hidden between those intertwined, abstracted forms of two females with the fruit falling our of the basket onto their rough stone figures. i dont know what it exactly is, and i guess the fact that i dont know is what is magical about it is what really interests me.
it really lifts the work from a representation of two tribal women gathering fruits on a studium level, to a point where it is exctremely personal, it punctures, it is not any two women, but these two women. i want to know their names, what they are doing. in a strange way, and i hope its not saying too much, this scultpture excited/aroused me on a very visceral, physical level and i was left intrigued and trying to imagine these two women, how they would have been, how they would have been feeding each other the sweet juicy fruit they had just plucked off the trees.in a sense this work really captured that moment, not just on an information level, but with all its confusions, its nuances, emotions, sparks, and resonances.

Against interpretation:Susan Sontag

Form vs. content

In her essay against interpretation, sontag starts with introducing various ways of looking at art. according to Plato's aesthetics and the theory of mimesis, art is an imitation, and there is no particular value to art, nor is it truth.Plato challenges art to justify itself.

Aristotle too talks from a similar point of view but according to him, art is not useless and its value lies in a certain catharsis, and a purging of dangerous emotions.

According to these western theories or ways of looking at art, art is in a constant struggle to justify itself.And its this need of justification that has led us to seperate form from something that we have learned to call content. And this way of looking at things always looks at content as the main thing, and form as accessory.

Sontag argues that there is a need to revive that innocence of the time when art did not have to justify itself. when it wasnt about what X is trying to say etc.. but rather a wholesome experience of the form and content as one.

According to sontag, this is the intellect's revenge on art. it has always tried to pin an artwork down to its content.this according to sontag its only a hindrance. and in the current scheme of things, there is a need for art to be more experiential. as many times, and even i have experienced this myself, i try to intellectualize the artwork to an extent that i cant feel anything from it. at times art as made me uncomfortable, and pinning down meanings becomes a way of putting aside that discomfort.it seems to me an escape.

When i read this article, what came to mind was the use of metaphors. from the previous work i have done, i realise now that i have used metaphors in a narrative for what they signify, and that to some extent is the job of metaphors. but i in the past at times was too obsessed with meanings. and now when i look at such work, i see the metaphor first. its like woah! metaphor. even though it might not fit into the poetics of the narrative.

honestly, its safe to say that i am a little confused at this point. although i agree with sontag completely, there are a lot of questions in my mind. for example, if art does'nt need a justification, then can anything be art?

i guess i will abstain from too much intellectualizing for now, and hopefully some answers will emerge through my practice.

A childhood memory

When i was young, whenever relatives would come over, i would look forward to getting new gifts.i have tried to recreate this memory through image and sound.and although i started with a specific moment, while working on it, its evolved into not a specific event as it was, but just a small fraction of how i remember things to be, in relation to who i am now.