CATALOG: Branching Visuals over Flying Concerns
Rahel
Branching Visuals over Flying Concerns
Rahel Hegnauer’s images of tree trunks are specifically from Bangalore and particularly from the spots chosen by the authority, in order to build flyovers. The display of these photographs had been ‘mapped’ into two possible artistic routes:
(a) To publicly display them, as they appear now, on hoardings, on a larger-than-life scale, within the city and be made available even for those outside the art community. This would give way to an embarrassing confrontation, which one would wish to avoid ‘viewing’, while they are already ethically responsible for such an ‘act’. Or/and
(b) To appropriate their capacity as site-specific-imageries and hence display them to the specialist cultured crowd within the city, that has, first of all, given way to –the subject, the orphaned tree trunks. In summary, this particular mode of the display-design of the show seems to jolt its audience from its comfortable viewing position. The audience’s overall watchful physique is pinched off its gravity from within the picture frames.
The first idea was more ambitious as against the second one which is economically feasible. Either way, the current display, the net result of the artist’s contemporary articulation of photography—of what is ‘viewed’ as an experience but not only as a ‘viewed experience’–addresses the issues of and makes a statement about (a) travelogue, (b) Diaspora, (c) urban dilemma, (d) cultural spaces and its inevitable association with the politics of power and economics. While (a) and (b) are specific to Rahel’s personality as an artist*1*, (c) & (d) are about her current preoccupation with the visuals of flyovers’ umbilical relation with tree trunks, that I would focus upon.
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In each of these works, the image of a single tree trunk floats freely in mid-pictorial-air, as if its relation with the surrounding world is erased, deleted but not marked as dispassionate blankness. The white spaces are not only about urban emptiness but about serving the city as‘site’-of-blindness. Flyovers have offered only leftovers—the tree trunks—for visuality, while the natural topography of window views, an aerial view of greenery, so specific to Bangalore (i.e., not so very long ago) has been ‘white’ washed. The fact that each of these images belonged only to tree trunks*2*, in specific streets and share a specific bit (no matter how little) of Bangalore’s history, makes the emptiness and/or whiteness all around it–now, that too while having become an image–more paradoxical. While the popular belief among environmentalists and urban specialists is that the urban concrete jungle is a pest that leaned on the host called greenery, the phrase ‘trees-in-Bangalore’ invites for a deeper relation between a tree trunk and a flyover.*3* .
In other words, one needs to be cautious about the difference that lies between the tree trunks and their imagery-as-artwork, while experiencing these artworks. The slippage between the two can lead to teasing ontological debates. Who are we ‘seeing’ and ‘imagining’ the tree trunk images, which is the result/end product of an authoritarian definition of the urban? We are actually witnessing that which is actually drawn from our helplessness towards a contemporary issue of urbanisation. And hence, we are trying to perform that act of witnessing that we are unable to resolve (the crisis of the urban/ water/weather). While watching these images, visuality is severed, like the tree trunks that we watch, and like the flyovers that became the reason for this.*4*
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Parallels can be easily drawn between this despotic nature of the authoritarian voice and the notion of history of urbanizing the city as ‘progressive’. Both share the same irony of being the decision of the privileged minority. By turning the tree trunks into solitary figures, the artist celebrates (but not ‘endorse’) such dilemmas. Our gaze’s attention is immediately drawn to the ontological ambiguity regarding this definition of the white space around the tree-trunk, both in art as well as in domestic life. White space, in domestic translation, might mean the urban catch-22 situation that Bangalore alone faces throughout the country, but that would yet be a literal translation as such*5*.
The centralized tree-trunk-image itself seem to be a catalyst for this act. What is ‘depicted’ is refused during the process of ‘looking’. We tend to believe that there is something ‘erased’ (in Derridian term) around the image. The strength of the erased lies in the ‘memory’ of what was being erased. That would deter experiencing in detail the actual image itself as purely a set of visuals. The absence of imagery, all around, draws the gaze’s attention but not its sight! This is the site-specific quality about these works. They are being ‘framed’ and ‘displayed’—through chosen visuals (and angles) of fallen trees–in order to have an open debate about how the city is ‘framed’ and ‘displayed’ (sounding like ‘caged’ and ‘imprisoned’), at the cost of its reputation of being a green city. The way our looks meander between the seen and the felt, between image and white space, is similar to the sight-less gaze of the imprisoned citizen, while facing the authoritarian dictum as well as the prison walls. The prisoner can watch, but there are not too many varieties of what is being watched. Perhaps the artist’s works are the end product of such domestic inefficiency of a collective mass.
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The tree trunks and flyovers are both indicators. ‘Indication’ is a mark that doesn’t draw attention onto itself and never fail to hint at something outside itself. Both constantly exchange their roles from host to pest, in a pattern that resembles a two way traffic, that is becoming rare in Bangalore main roads. These tree trunks have branches-like-arms that hint that they are severed as well as loaded with extra visual energy to guide the looks even outside and beyond themselves. So do the fly-overs. Today’s flyovers are yesterdays asphalted and grounded roads. Both are self sufficient in their respective period. During other times, the former improvise upon the other, serving the latter handicap. The tree-trunk images seem incomplete as long as they draw (or fails to) attention to that which is erased, to give way to mere white spaces all around. Yet this crippling feel of the eye itself convinces it to perceive them as self-complete figures that indicates directions, though not roots. Similarly flyovers are no roads. They are bypasses, artillery corrections and connections of already existing roads.
Such a simulacra between the displayed tree trunk-images and existent flyovers suggest two images alternatively: (a) that which is ‘depicted’ (tree-trunk imagery) is the avenged cultural representation of that (b) which was ‘construed’ as a quick-fix solution, as the only possible solution to traffic jams (as fly over, as argument). The blank space around the trunks is an anti-thesis to flyovers. While the latter was imposed on the Bengaloreans, the former is served open to creative interventions! This gives way to metamorphosis of two similar entities of the same family*6*. Rahel’s images do not let one rest upon either of them, for long.
Flyovers go from nowhere to nowhere. They only facilitate an already existing path. Hence it is a matter of the artificed heart. Yet it is an evocation that divides audience into those who (a) are informed specifically about Bangalore and (b) those who will to view the images as fodder for the mere retina/pupil. Linda Nochlin’s famous refusal of ‘visual-for-mere-retina’s consumption’ as a male construct, (“Why have there been no women artists?”) might assist one to shift positions between (a) and (b). The tree-trunk’s dual identity (as an actual fragmentary organ of a whole in the past, and as a self complete artistic entity in the present) and flyovers meet at the audience’s retinal position: both mutually disagree to resemble in anyway other than their appearances!
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In these images, one can trace out that what we see, is also what could (not ‘should’) have been. What ‘is’ is the only visual that could not/cannot be, otherwise. Only one of the several possible views of a portion of an actual tree is depicted in one of the possible modes of displays, bearing the nature of a site-specific-work. This repeated rupture belongs to a chancy, chancy world. What we ‘see’ could/can be anything else, in another display, in another context, in another site. In a discursive mode, the tree trunks are neither/nor self-complete units or fragments. The discourse around these non-complete, non-fragment imageries demand for a viewing process, that sheds off its prejudice of looking at images as one, set, series and a given media. Neither are they certain about what time ‘tense’ they live in (“a fragment called tree trunk was an integral part of being –a-tree, once upon a time”, thinking in lines of Gilles Deleuze, known for his argument about differences and repetition).This might seem paradoxical, yet there are many such paradoxes ‘within’ these visuals. The problematic of traffic woes of Bangalore might be snowballing because they are not addressing the issues and issues of such creative paradoxes*7*. In terms of ontology, it should be relevant to stress the fact that the image is a pointer (‘indicator’) that makes it a different kind of ‘cultural container’ of the pensive discourse between urbanization, deforestation and environmentalism.
Every tree trunk acts as a flying object, often gaining the dimensions of a science fiction asteroid, for those who would consider this mini-deforestation within the urban space as trivial. However, the floating character of these images is a sort of tongue-in-cheek advertisement of the divide that the city has seen in recent times. We prefer a specific set of visuals of the city, digitalized sauvy and refined as against the mundane crudeness of the city’s streets that are deliberately made insular. In other words, while a tree is always ‘rooted’ to its place of origin, an ‘image’ of a portion of itself (ex: tree trunk) might become an advertisement for floating sites that is everywhere but belongs nowhere. This is true not only with urbanization but also with perceptive theories of visual kinds and paradoxical site-specific works, like the current one. Be it the strength (or not) but this is the site-specific essence of these tree trunk images.
Foot Notes:
*1* the very fact that a European traveler’s account about India always need to address the issue of Orientalism first and Exoticism next, has to be served as a cliché, both in the culture of visual theory and practice. Since earlier Rahel was on an artist-residency in Bangalore and then willfully came back afterwards, and doesn’t plan to emotionally settle down here, makes her position to avoid such clichés. This insurance to her works against clichés is like a driver’s security amidst traffic jams, on the city’s flyovers, around which the tree trunks were found. You can’t crash when you can’t drive! In fact such a position is what availed the not-so-very-xenophobic sight with those subjects which are the product of bad planning–the tree trunks! So much for her brief, recent biodata.
*2* Switzerland based artist Rahel chose to shoot tree trunks, lying out there, uncategorized and temporary, to make way to flyovers as if to metamorphose. The fallen trunks are ‘converted’ into shot-images of tree trunks. Epistemological violence—as artworks—provides a rebirth to those urban discards, the tree trunks! Further, other artistic acts like the artist’s desire to rotate, modulate the actual trunk’s size, and the choice final print size—all in all seem to follow a pattern-of-willful fragmentation. Inevitable partial view of a given definition of what constitutes urban structure, is the overall focus of this show. Totality of urbanization and that of imagery are mutually related in this case; they are impossibilities. Hence the tree trunks should be seen as a visual surface of deeper urban concerns.
*3* I would like to thank Harun Faruki, the German filmmaker for drawing a similarity between the elevation of flyovers and the frontal view of a church. Travelling on roads is today’s pilgrimage. Similarly the flyovers (pest) and tree trunks (host) meet in spirit when both are turned into grids, as they are. They indicate many and multiple images, issues and concepts elsewhere, outside themselves like a typical catalyst. As a tangential argument, I would like to take the support of Gregory Ulmer’s argument of the relation between art (host) and criticism (pest) as not only an analogy for the subject addressed in this essay, but as a path-finder for reading these tree trunk images in a way that starts with visualizing but does not end at that. (Read: Ulmer’s essay “Object of Post Criticism”, Anti-Aesthetic Essays in Postmodern Culture, Ed: Hal Foster)
*4* The ‘images’ of tree trunk you are watching is one of the several symbolic, metaphoric, analogous and physical layers that it has passed through and evoked over the decades of its being there. However, it is the socially governing body’s fate that has been subject to ‘intervention’ herein by the artist. It was the uncontested government’s decision that ‘reversed’ the meaning of the definition of a tree, over a period of time: from being a natural ‘pathway-marker’ shade to a ‘hindrance’ to the flyovers.
*5* it is not a mere coincidence that the greenery in general and trees in particular (of Bangalore) began to diminish with the maximum migration into this city throughout the nation and the increase in the bypass surgeries regarding heart diseases, since 1980s. Incidentally, the flyovers appear like a bypassed heart. The notion of ‘local’–which is equated with parochial and anti-constitutional–is yet held on as a core theme of the cultural discourse of the land (to which the city belongs) a la the discourses of the ‘raitha sangha’ (the farmer’s movement protest against urbanization and KFC, initiated by Prof. Nanjunda Swamy), U.R.Ananthamurthy and the like. The visually tensive relation between the artist’s image and the surrounding space pinpoints exactly this. The tension is relaxed as an arrested discourse!
*6* Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra suggesting that ‘we live in a science fiction; and the thrill of nostalgia is hence lost’, could somehow be applicable for these images only in a reverse order. Science fiction, in the form of fly-overs is an imposed kitsch while the tree trunks are morphed into images of nostalgia!
*7* The consideration of London city streets, as zones of varying prominence and Ananthamurthy’s protest to building ropeways to Sravanabelagola mountain as insult to the religiosity of physical movement of the devotees are two such paradoxical addressal of the socio-politics of geography.///