HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Ranjani K. Shettar

Spectrum, Installation at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore, India, 1997
Ranjani Shettar
Photo courtesy the artist, Bangalore, India

Ranjani K. Shettar

Ranjani K. Shettar b.1977 (India)
lives and works in Bangalore, India

launch interview with Ranjani Shettar

Having trained in sculpture at Chitrakala Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, Ranjani Shettar creates three-dimensional works that explore the confrontation of the urban and the organic, the metaphysical and the mundane. Employing a wide range of common, everyday materials such as wax, India ink, paper, resin, cotton, PVC pipes, plastic sheeting, and mud, Shettar constructs sculptural artifacts that speak obliquely to the effects of urbanization in newly high-tech Bangalore. By using a formal language that invokes the organic and a material language that suggests the industrial, she operates in a manner similar to that of Bangalore itself, where industrial urbanization is colliding with (and collapsing into) the once rural countryside. But above all else, Shettar's work asks phe-nomenological questions about the way in which we inhabit particular spaces in our built environment.

The organic qualities of Shettar's work might be profitably read in the art-historical contexts of Arte Povera artist Marisa Merz, postminimalist sculptors of the same period such as Eva Hesse, Brazilian Neo-concrete artist Lygia Clark, or Argentinean artist Gego. Like these precursors, Shettar uses industrial materials at odds with the biomorphic qualities of her work, setting up a dichotomy between the man-made and the natural. Likewise, Shettar emerged within the context of a slightly more senior generation of Indian artists working in sculpture and installation, such as Sheela Gowda and Anita Dube, each of whom negotiates a terrain similar to that of the artists mentioned above but within a specifically Indian situation.

In her solo exhibition Home (2000), Shettar launched into a sculptural investigation of the concept of shelter. Employing a biological idiom in these works, the artist constructed a series of archetypal structures from nature that might be thought of as "homes," ranging from those of insects and birds to silkworms and even plants. Invitations, for example, is a series of pod- or cocoonlike resin forms that are piled rather haphazardly in a corner. Another work in this exhibition, Thousand Room House, is reminiscent of a beehive, although its strangely organic honeycomb structure is constructed with the decidedly artificial materials of plastic sheeting, rope, and rivets. Each of these works speaks to what philosopher Gaston Bachelard has described as an "intimate immensity," in that each structure invokes a shelter that is poetically suggestive of our oneiric ability to invest spaces with our own desires and phenomenological memories. As suggested by Bachelard, "A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space." Such a specificity of inhabited space, of the space of a shelter invested with a particular kind of living and spiritual energy, is operative in Shettar's work. As she herself suggests, "Home is the body. The body is not the physical alone but the mental, emotional and the spiritual." In all of her work, Shettar maintains this explicit dialogue between the spiritual and the everyday.

Shettar had a solo exhibition at the Chitra Art Gallery, Bangalore, India, in 2000. Her work has appeared in a number of group exhibitions, including On the Edge of Volume, curated by Martha Jakimowicz-Karle for Sakshi Gallery and Alliance Française, Bangalore (2001), and Concept Shop at Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore (2000).

--Douglas Fogle

Flow Into Me
Ranjani K. Shettar

2000
PVC pipes, galvanized iron wire
96 x 42 x 18 in.
243.8 x 106.7 x 45.7 cm
Courtesy the artist, Bangalore, India

Since 2000, the artist has launched into a sculptural investigation of the concept of shelter. Employing a biological idiom in these works, she constructed a series of archetypal structures from nature that might be thought of as "homes," ranging from those of insects and birds to silkworms and even plants. Invitations, for example, is a series of pod- or cocoonlike resin forms that are piled rather haphazardly in a corner. Another work in this exhibition, Thousand Room House, is reminiscent of a beehive, although its strangely organic honeycomb structure is constructed with the decidedly artificial materials of plastic sheeting, rope, and rivets. Flow Into Me is another such amorphous lodging. It is this specificity of inhabited space--that of a shelter invested with a particular kind of living and spiritual energy--that is operative in Shettar's works. As she herself suggests,"Home is the body. The body is not the physical alone but the mental, emotional, and the spiritual."

Invitations
Ranjani K. Shettar

2000
cloth, resin, synthetic cotton
30 x 30 x 30 in.
76.2 x 76.2 x 76.2 cm
Courtesy the artist, Bangalore, India

Since 2000, the artist has launched into a sculptural investigation of the concept of shelter. Employing a biological idiom in these works, she constructed a series of archetypal structures from nature that might be thought of as "homes," ranging from those of insects and birds to silkworms and even plants. Invitations, for example, is a series of pod- or cocoonlike resin forms that are piled rather haphazardly in a corner. Another work in this exhibition, Thousand Room House, is reminiscent of a beehive, although its strangely organic honeycomb structure is constructed with the decidedly artificial materials of plastic sheeting, rope, and rivets. Flow Into Me is another such amorphous lodging. It is this specificity of inhabited space--that of a shelter invested with a particular kind of living and spiritual energy--that is operative in Shettar's works. As she herself suggests,"Home is the body. The body is not the physical alone but the mental, emotional, and the spiritual."

Thousand Room House
Ranjani K. Shettar

2000
plastic sheet, cotton rope, galvanized iron wire, etc.
50 x 50 x 18 in.
127 x 127 x 45.7 cm
Courtesy the artist, Bangalore, India

Since 2000, the artist has launched into a sculptural investigation of the concept of shelter. Employing a biological idiom in these works, she constructed a series of archetypal structures from nature that might be thought of as "homes," ranging from those of insects and birds to silkworms and even plants. Invitations, for example, is a series of pod- or cocoonlike resin forms that are piled rather haphazardly in a corner. Another work in this exhibition, Thousand Room House,is reminiscent of a beehive, although its strangely organic honeycomb structure is constructed with decidedly artificial materials. Flow Into Me is another such amorphous lodging. About this specificity of space--a shelter invested with living and spiritual energy--the artist says, "Home is the body. The body is not the physical alone but the mental, emotional, and the spiritual."

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

How do I impact Mozambique, how do I impact Brazil, how do I impact Japan if I am bringing artists from those countries? That has become my definition of global programming.

PB: How have you achieved that with Africa Exchange, a program you helped organize, and also with your current NJPAC Global Exchange project?

BS: Africa Exchange was created in 1995 at 651 ARTS Center in Brooklyn, thanks to a Ford Foundation grant.[2] Other institutions that received funding--working in other geographical regions such as Asia, Latin America, and South America--were focused primarily on doing the projects in their own institutions. We decided that we wanted to bring other organizations into the program, create a network, create an advisory committee, and hold convening sessions and conferences. We wanted to expand the number of institutions in our field working with African artists. During the first three years alone, we engaged more than fifty artists from the African continent, including composers, choreographers, theater directors, dancers, and musicians. They were in residence at sixteen different arts institutions throughout the United States. Works were commissioned, collaborations and residencies happened, and amazing products came out of that endeavor.

PB: Africa Exchange has sponsored a broad array of artistic exchanges and new collaborative projects between African and American artists. The program greatly increased the number of African artists who were seen in the U.S. and it developed deep ties between artists from different continents. What did you learn from that initiative, and what would you do differently?

BS: Ping Chong was on our initial advisory committee. When I began thinking about the design of Africa Exchange, I asked artists, "How should this program operate? How would it work for you?" Ping said, "American artists have frequently voiced concern that any exchange that does not provide funds for both African and American artists to visit each other's countries and communities will put the artist who does not have such an opportunity at a psychological and cultural disadvantage, and will create an unequal partnership in the collaborative process."

With the Global Exchange at NJPAC, I wanted to create a residency program that allows artists to travel both ways and that is not just performance-based. In other words, the process and the residency are the essence of the program itself, so the exchange isn't necessarily predicated on an artist having to do a performance in my hall. What I really wanted to do was to facilitate relationships, artists meeting other artists.

A key element of Global Exchange came from the model set by the Walker's global initiative. When I learned about your program taking at least three years, if not more, to develop the idea, to develop the plan, to develop partnerships, I said, "That's what artists need." In almost every residency that we did with Africa Exchange, the artists said that there was not enough time. So Global Exchange gives artists three to five years to work together.

PB: My sense of the funding realities in America right now is that if a new work does emerge from a collaboration, it takes much longer these days to fully fund and develop a project. The timelines have stretched from a year and a half to three years or more to be able to realize a work.

BS: The collaboration we have developed through residency exchanges between the Urban Bush Women and the National Song and Dance Company of Mozambique has taken five years. Finally, in the 2002-2003 season, we will have a new work by the Urban Bush Women that received input from the National Song and Dance Company in Mozambique and we will have a new work by the National Song and Dance Company in Mozambique that received input from the Urban Bush Women. So I'll finally present those two companies together.

PB: And the two works were influenced by each other?

2 Africa Exchange was jointly conceived by Baraka Sele and Mikki Shepard (then at 651 ARTS Center in Brooklyn, New York), Stephanie Hughley (curator for theater and dance at the Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta, Georgia), and Laura Greer (Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem, New York).

Revolt, Dysfunction, Dementia: Toward the Body of “Empire”
Otori Hidenaga

From Dysfunction to Dementia in Theater and Dance
After 1995, our body came to experience a more difficult state than simply being dysfunctional. Being dysfunctional means that there is something wrong with the function, but it is somehow still functioning. It was possible, therefore, for Furuhashi, with his own dysfunctional body, to create S/N. His death seemed to herald a shift in which the world was not even dysfunctional anymore. Something more drastic than being dysfunctional has arrived, and at least in Japan, bodies are behaving very strangely in the streets. This is what Kayama was referring to in her essay on Murakami. And I would call these bodies, "bodies of dementia," which came after the representation of the dysfunctional and are now emerging in representational genres. But if those representations are emerging as something lacking any sense of critique, the bodies themselves are, in a sense, in a state of dementia by lacking any circuit for self-examination. That is why, even if the bodies in J-theater practices are "bodies of dementia," they are only simplistic reflections of the bodily dementia that we are experiencing in Japanese culture at the moment. I would take Uchino's analysis to mean as much. In fact, not only in theatrical expressions but in our everyday lives, more and more people are satisfied simply with having their desires fulfilled, without any consideration for self-reflective thinking. In such a state, the status quo is silently affirmed, and those desires are never articulated in terms of history, culture, and society.

We can understand the emergence of this kind of non-self-critical circuit by looking at Paul Virilio's analysis of acceleration. He writes in Politics of the Very Worst (1996) that in contemporary society, which was made possible by the extreme progress of speed, human beings lack the ability to respond to the emergence of absolute speed:

Because the nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power. Today, we have achieved the three attributes of the divine: ubiquity, instantaneity, immediacy; omnivoyance and omnipotence. This is no longer a question of democracy--this is tyranny. Multimedia confronts us with a question: will we be able to achieve a democracy of real time, live time, a democracy of immediacy and ubiquity? I don't think so, and those who are quick to say yes cannot be very serious.[26]

According to Virilio, there is a loss of space and time in the globalized world, and the lack of distance not only oppresses us with its instantaneity but deprives us of our self-critical circuit since we have to think with our bodies. But we humans do not know how to respond with our own bodies, and we can only go mad in such a situation. It must be noted, however, that what happens here is not that our minds go mad. Dr. Caligari's madness in the 1920s, for instance, can only be nostalgic. What goes mad are our bodies, and this occurs without being filtered through our minds. Freud once said that to realize the pleasure principle we need a certain amount of oppression of our libido, but in the current situation, libido is completely oppressed, and when it is completely oppressed, it looks for an extremely violent burst to the surface. In such a scenario, the system of the symbolic is completely destroyed, and the body transfers itself from the dysfunctional to the demented.

It is so easy to lose a sense of history and geography when there is a lack of distance. Many have described postmodernism as the end of history, but if the world is in the state that Virilio outlines, then what we have been experiencing is not the end but the loss of history. Of course, geography is lost as well. I refer to this latest phase of globalization as the emergence of "Empire," following Hardt and Negri. In this absence of outside (there is no distance, so there can't be an outside), in this singular dominance of power (in which otherness is lost as well as the possibility of dialogue), there is still an attempt at restoring history and geography by discovering a circuit for self-reflection--a process of restarting our memory. Walter Benjamin wrote about the notion of "awakening," and this concept is useful as we struggle to devise a strategy for deconstructing the contemporary myth that, in our discussion, is none other than globalization and Empire. Benjamin asserts the importance of "awakening" as an action for restoring history:

Here it is a question of dissolution of "mythology" into the space of history. That, of course, can happen only through the awakening of a not-conscious knowledge of what has been.[27]

26 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Michael Cavaliere (New York: Semiotext[e], 1999), p. 17; originally published as Cybermonde: la politique du pire (Paris: Editions Textuel, 1996).

27 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 458.

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

Embracing the same sort of tension are works by Turkey's Gülsün Karamustafa and India's Sheela Gowda. In her installation Mystic Transport (1992; p. 205), Karamustafa gives poetic form to the issue of deterritorialization that is so much a part of our imagination when thinking about urbanization and late capitalist development in many of the locations selected for this project. Mystic Transport presents twenty colorful oriental blankets stored in twenty wheeled buckets. On one level we identify with the blanket as the smallest common denominator of nomadic populations. Karamustafa's strength in this particular work is in keeping the emotional association of the blanket with a body at a distance. The installation suggests that the audience/protagonist can manipulate and reconfigure the location of each bucket/blanket/body as he or she sees fit. This estrangement effect--wherein the audience is the center, the decision maker--raises questions about the responsibility of the viewer and the nature of his or her engagement. The seductive quality of the work does not sacrifice the content, and in fact it reinforces a concern for avoiding being overly anthropological.

Sheela Gowda adopts a comparable, though not identical, pattern in her work And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001; p. 193). To create this labor-intensive piece, she passes an unbroken 700-foot-long thread through a sewing needle and doubles it in the middle. She then repeats this action with another eighty-nine needles, coats the threads with Kum Kum,[26] and glues them together to make a 350-foot-long thin rope. Like a drawing in three-dimensional space, the long cord is installed in the architecture of the white cube, looping up and down the walls, across the floor, marking the physical environment. In many ways, this piece, and the work of Ranjani Shettar (pp. 233-235), can be read according to the sculptural language described in When Attitudes Become Form and by Krauss in her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" as belonging to a modernist aesthetic of abstraction and dematerialization of space. But such a reading of the work would trap it in a mold cast by Euro-American language and its hegemonic, nominative strategies. Gowda works with traditional materials and traditional skills identified with female labor. In doing so, she produces a work that not only comments on a specific Indian cultural situation but also implies a critical stance toward art history, aesthetics, and the perception and production of artworks.

The complexity of practices, in whatever media, associated with the notion of thirdness stems from the fact that these artists locate themselves on the periphery of dominant aesthetic models and distribution networks, but do not embrace a Manichean opposition to the question of form. They do not seek to reinvent language from scratch but instead choose to twist it, distort it, translate it. These practices lie in the narrow gap that Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn identified when highlighting the distinction between making political art and making art politically. Robin Rhode's work, merging hip-hop culture, fashion, sports, and other aspects of the every-day (pp. 225-227), seems to echo such a notion of thirdness and pulls it toward a resistance that is not necessarily oppositional. Rhode tries to identify a practice that allows him to take pleasure in the reductivness of youth culture and popular culture while remaining critical of them.

The notion of thirdness, of in-betweenness, is central to the practices we are considering here as well as to larger theoretical constructs developed to analyze recent cultural shifts. For Homi K. Bhabha, thirdness is a key element in enunciating and conceptualizing a new international culture based on hybridity: "It is the inter--the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space--that carries the burden of the meaning of culture."[27] He locates culture in what he calls a "third space," a space that collapses new cultural practices and historical narratives.

This idea is presented almost literally in the work of Turkish architect Can Altay, notably in his investigation of what he has termed the "minibar." Through photo-documentation he focuses on those no-man's lands in urban areas where teenagers gather to socialize (pp. 162-163). By reinventing underground communities--often controversial aspects of a neighborhood--these minibars carry new cultural information and problematize the construct of urban spaces. The Japanese architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow displays a similar interest by establishing an inventory of what they call "pet architecture"--a type of architecture that relates to small units built between larger buildings, existing almost like parasites. The Atelier strives to develop a new architectural language based on every possible solution for utilizing such "leftover" spaces (pp. 169-171). Both the minibar and pet architecture stand as metaphors for locating an alternative space that can generate new knowledge,

26 Kum Kum is a red pigment used in rituals and as decoration. It is also used as a mark of marriage on women's foreheads.

27 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 38.

Ranjani K. Shettar

“American artists have frequently voiced concern that any exchange that does not provide funds for both African and American artists to visit each other’s countries and communities will put the artist who does not have such an opportunity at a psychological and cultural disadvantage, and will create an unequal partnership in the collaborative process.”

According to Virilio, there is a loss of space and time in the globalized world, and the lack of distance not only oppresses us with its instantaneity but deprives us of our self-critical circuit . . .

. . . "pet architecture"--a type of architecture that relates to small units built between larger buildings, existing almost like parasites.