Suresh and Surekha’s works, created together in the same time-space nexus reconfirm such a construct. It is a ‘construct’ to represent (a) the Gandhian culture and (b) a renewed notion about the idea of Kannada, beyond a mere linguistic framework/constraint. They also comment (c) on the vanishing greenery from Bangalore. And finally while performing all these, the two works also (d) ascertain what Buddhism holds best-identify that all such ‘constructs’ are bound to be forgotten/changed/modified in urban sites, as if it is a character of the urban—unlike the rural and very much like life itself-to hold change as constant.

In other words both these works are not about M.G.Road /Gandhi /Environmentalism/ Buddha /Bangalore/Kannada but are about the fast deterioration of such construed ‘notions’ as themes for artistic expression. That an artwork can hold such ‘deterioration’ as a theme-is also a ‘construct’ that is put to stake through these two works! It also means that the notion of ethics of positivism within Indian contemporary art’s historical approach to artworks created by Indians, in India, that is put to stake in general. In a way, the historic truth that the artworks (in India) have made popular, historicized through institutionalized programs of shows, curatorial appropriation etc. happens to be the works that are also already famous.

(iii) To begin with, irony is good. Artworks (a) seemingly addressing issues and then - at a second glance - (b) addressing the actual failure of such issues outside the issues of representation; and further (c) themselves deteriorating as ‘everlasting’ representations (due to the absence of an institutional recognition of its own self, like, critical acclaim, documentation, being subject to curatorial program etc.) as if to imitate the death of their own subjects gives way to multiple ironies. Irony serves those who point it out with a sense of intellectual supremacy and then, when it becomes excessive, loses its self. Too many ironies refute to be confined within an ironic situation. An excessive world of ironies leads to amnesia. The two artworks in question, addressing a gamut of ideals-excessively so-lost out on too much of lamentation about too many issues and in the due process imitated its own ‘content’ by becoming absent in the world of, say, Indian art. While walking on M.G.Road and having an in- depth knowledge of Mahatma Gandhi, one forgets the irony that exists in between its ‘name’ and ‘appearance’ and proceed to the next step-the ethics of constant irony, in turn, which informs that the changing irony has changed the definition of the very ethics itself. I shall elaborate this with specific examples of Suresh’s “ATP Center” and Surekha’s “Do Not Urinate” as case studies. It has already been two decades since the advent of new media in Bangalore. However, the works were a part of a changing tradition of alternative sponsorships, scholarships and residencies but never has it been an art imitation-of-its-own content. Neither are the works monologic, soliloquist, self-representations because these were an expression within which was a fast diminishing sign. These two works succumb to the pressure of its own thematic concerns. Interestingly this happened while addressing the deterioration of a set of culturally valued values. I would like to draw the readers’ attention to a related article: Derrida’s “Meaning and Representation”. Husserl’s notion about the self, its own expression to itself without communication and Derrida’s quest as to whether there is a representation while expressing one’s self to itself and the derivation “I am he who am”  helps me place these two works that are no more (at most in a short while) (4). My concern is towards the newer possibilities of visual culture through these two works which echoes Derrida’s conclusion that, “the self presence would be as indivisible as the blink of an eye”

(iv) Suresh had borrowed saplings from a Bangalore-based agriculture university (Gandhi Krishi Vignana Kendra) and was giving it away to the audience ‘in reality’. It was a ‘live-reality-show’ in the name and form of art. While taking away and borrowing specific kind of plants, the onlookers had to ‘mark’ the place of their residence on a map of Bangalore city and write down their address.  The ‘map’ and ‘plants’ as motifs of Suresh’s works could be inferred into Bangalore’s history as the Green City that was. The addresses written down in the book were ‘real’, by real people; the plants were ‘real’ and also suggested a specific class hierarchy of those who sought such saplings. Consider this: those neo-rich living in pent houses would not opt for a sapling of a jack fruit tree! So much for the ‘projected’ history of the terminological constructs of Bangalore as a green city, now replaced by terms like Silicon Valley, India’s IT City and Singapore of India. The map of Bangalore has the neo-rich and the slum dwellers co-existing, almost literally. Sociologically, Suresh’s work worked as an ‘optimistic expectation’ that the credited would plant and nurture the saplings, which also functions as an ethical test for the audience, who would never be testified (by anyone) even in the future. It was ‘live’, ‘real’ in more than one sense and also ‘symbolic’ but succeeded in failing at both instances to a great degree!

 (v) A network of ironies (that was, is and will be):
Surekha cleaned up an already existing defunct room-earlier misused due to vested interests and social abuses–located on the other side of the richest street of the IT city of India (sic). The room was so positioned that the illumination and glory on the other side were not powerful enough to reach out. The physical distance between the two sides was just 80 feet and was called M.G.‘Road’. The artist lit up the stinking room with serial lights, as if to mock at the pompousness of what M.G.Road stands for. Hence the only way M.G. Road has been able to evoke various ‘signs’ to the ‘idea’ of Gandhi, has been through such seemingly everlasting ironies.
 
 (i) It is the irony of being named after a street where many even to this day consider the  street to be M.G.Ramachandran’s Road, owing to the absence of a Gandhi statue, presence of a Tamil dominant crowd (in the vicinity, around it and the Tamil population in the city exceeds that of the localites, the Kannadigas, as it happens with most Indian cities) for whom MGR, the ex-chief minister of Tamil Nadu, was a demi-god.

(ii) The second and stark irony lies in the fact that the road is well known for trading class, a class that Gandhi in reality hailed from.

(iii) The third and the best of the irony lies in the fact that though one has been seeing him the most, on a day to day basis, on Indian currency notes from past half a century, he symbolizes something opposite to what a currency promises - more of an idea of the barter system between public politics and a private spiritualism, admixed in the way only he could manage. Ironies and symbols clash at this point, like the past (a clean room) and present (defunct room as-it-is) in that defunct, desolate room decorated by Surekha (yet another irony).  The artist invited that class of people (middle, high-middle and the educated) to enter the room for the first time (in their lifetime), which marks a parody instead of an irony. It is so because the posh Burton Tower, Bombay Store, G.K.Vale, Utility Building and the like are the kind of buildings that the visitors have in mind while visiting M.G.Road and not a desolate building that actually belongs to semi-slum areas of the city like Srirampuram, Ashwathanagar, Guttahalli which, curiously enough, always seem to be attached to bungalow-areas: a typical characteristic of Bangalore! Thus the work also denotes the class difference (amongst localities) as well as the fast vanishing aspect of this very class difference due to the arrival of migrants also meaning the diminishing of localities.

(iv)The fourth irony is that the room, today, just doesn’t exist! And the coincidence between the erasure of her work as this defunct room and the BMP authorities bringing it down immediately after her project might not be as coincidental as it seems!  

(iii)Re-locating the erased:

Around the same time, in Afghanisthan—one of the earliest metropolis city in the human civilization, which Bangalore opts to become in its contemporary sense—there were more ‘ironies’ and ‘symbols’ clashing with each other. Buddha, was a familiar ‘image’ for the Afghans, perhaps like Picasso was to the Russian Marxism. The latter’s popularity was sought but not for what he actually stood for (Ref: John Berger’s book “Success and Failures of Picasso”). The Talibans forced those very native Afghans who had lived with the image of Buddha, to bring down the already defaced and mutilated Buddha. Earlier, the Soviet troop had damaged the statue. At once, the sculpture had been treated as a mountain of various meanings. Ranjit Hoskote, in his article in Hindu magazine section, immediately after the destruction of the image of Buddha, made an interesting observation. He said that the very teaching of Buddha should give us wisdom not to lament over what is a loss, and not to lament it because since it is a ‘no loss’. U.S was ready to store the image of Bamiyan Buddha as a museum-object and make a neo-ritual out of it in Carol Duncan’s sense in which visiting a museum is a ritual* (Ref: Carol Duncan’s book of museum visits as “Civilising Rituals”). The mechanical reproduction and other kind of memories of both Bamiyan Buddha and its erasure ‘remains’ to remind us of both its presence as well as the presence of its absence!  Or is it the absence of its presence that is given to us? It has been three years (2003), post 09/11, since Suresh Kumar and Surekha created these time and space bound/specific works. The memory of the Bamiyan Buddha and these two works share a common point—both have undergone physical destruction. Not much has been posthumously circulated about these two, unlike say, Nam Jun Pyke’s famous ‘still’ Buddha’s video or, even for that matter, unlike the other works of Suresh and Surekha. It finally brings us to the question of what Hoskote said about the loss of the image of Buddha.

(iv) Crediting Values and Plants:
It might not be deliberate that these two works are the least shown, talked about and circulated amongst these two artists’ portfolio. The photos, video and records of plant-monging people’s addresses and their markings of their own residence on the map-all in all, are mortal parts of an idea that ‘was’ and is ‘no more’ (artworks). Coincidentally, or not so very coincidentally, Surekha’s room was functionally, earlier, used for burning waste, collected from the footpath of the most popular road of Bangalore. The dirt was destroyed on the very street where it was generated. One of Gandhi’s virtue, as Surekha points out as ‘the’ inspiration for this work, “is contemplating cleanliness”. The soot within the ceiling and walls of Surekha’s room-of-intervention was due to ‘recycled’ wastes collected from M.G.Road—a mark of ‘recording’ of the ‘taste’ of commuters which includes their upbringing and notion about cleanliness. The work that addresses this issue, now, exists only in a recycled form, as well.  Nothing informs us better about the personality and behavior of those commuters, when they are puzzled about how to dispose peeled off bananas or groundnuts, in the absence of a dustbin. And, the work—that was—itself doesn’t know how to exist in the absence of a methodology to survive in itself, while its essence/content is something opposite to survival.

Since the garbage was constantly burnt, the soot formed by the interior of the room, the ceiling as well as the walls ,served as ideal dark spaces for the doodling. The visitors scribbled, drew, wrote – the three partial acts that belong to the past tense within a work whose tense remains ambiguous. More or less, the art loving and artistic community who visited the “ATP Center” was that which was or is in the process of being transformed/metamorphosed from a known class within the defined class hierarchy into a defined class of a known variety–the art loving community. This gives rise to a nostalgic sojourn into the city’s past with pre-electricity homes and factories with soot-burns, called Bengaluru of the 1970s. These two works try to either bring out a sense of sanctity for Bangalore city or allege a character to it, but end up treating the city itself as a probable subject of art. This shift—within the city—from being a place of new media works to being a part and the very subject of art, is specific to the city. The whole string of new media artworks produced over a decade in this city share this ‘redress’ and hence ‘redefine involvement’ of Bangalore from being a city to becoming a thematic concern (5). However, identifying a street within Bangalore with relevant themes for it or themes that gain relevance after addressing the street is also an attempt to look a bit closer and more intimately at the physical, geo-cultural space to which one belongs to.

(v) Anatomy of the new idea about one’s past:
What happens to the nature of these two works while doing so, due to the things and the way they evolved might be more relevant on one hand. The belief of a work is lost to gain a new belief. Within new media, often it was a habit to address issues of a wider context, at the cost of being specific and aesthetic. That visual argument would comfortably fit into the cliché of the global-local, national-international and often innocently rejoiced, while all it might do is being able to achieve a cliché. While Suresh Kumar and Surekha’s current works were about deteriorating values and ethics-as an important aspect of the given city-the works themselves imitated their own contents-they gradually deteriorated. On the other hand the works of Shyamala and Srinivasa Prasad, realized at Ulsoor lake (very close to M.G.Road) and a defunct theatre house-Samudaya, respectively, as a part of Pushpamala’s curated show “Sthalapuranagalu” (literally meaning and addressing the local myths.) were about celebrating that aspect of the city which had ‘already’ perished—the tradition of lakes and regional theatre, within the city.  Almost all other works of Srinivasa Prasad, the “Earthwork” by M.S.Umesh, “Sakshi Gudda Sakshi Gode” by Sheela Gowda’s, “Pages from a Burning City” of Vistaar (and the like) addressed various aspects of the city and began addressing the city itself. But most of them formed a dialogue with the city while Suresh Kumar and Surekha’s works were simulacra of soliloquies of a culture specific city that was. By and large, these works (and a few more of lesser relevance) address issues that are relevant to the belongingness of a city through buildings, a news agency (“PFBC”) or a shooting site (“SGSG”). Earthwork was a gestural homage to a site-specificity of farmers; ‘Sthalapurana’ and ‘SGSG’ were homage to specific locations which served as ready-made signs for expressive communication of a cultural sort.  My concern here is the loss of ‘art’ which becomes a gain to its ‘subject’—the street called M.G.Road. And the relevant specificity it acquires. For instance, in the intimate “Kuvempu Smaaraka” work by K.T.Shiva Prasad, the ‘memory’ of the design of the famous monument “Stonehenge” is difficult to do away with. It is like a private myth of a public poet in a cornered site, too far away from the reach of those who really matter for art.

(ix) A lost city and regained nostalgia: M.G.Road has been more than a mere prime road of Bangalore. Bicycles were banned for a while, during the reign of Sangliana as the police commissioner, re-affirming the belief amongst the non-elitist, that it is obviously an elitist street. The older ‘monkey top buildings’ are fast vanishing from the streets, owing to the land value leveling that of gold. Surekha’s project refuses to be ‘framed’ within an artificial premise of high-art. It is/was an open ended work with specific observations that cater to high-art, but refuses to end at it. On the other hand, Srinivasa Prasad’s work in “I as in India” was a mono-litchi, nostalgic rendering of the factories of older Bangalore of the 1970s. Surekha and Suresh Kumar’s work on the other hand, were the first of their kind as public projects that fine balancethe high art characteristics from within a public interaction mode, that has been qualitatively watered down by the street plays and NGO-kind of projects by mediocre artists, over the decades, that too in the name of new media art in Bangalore. The observation in the last sentence of the previous paragraph brings us finally to the specifications of Kannada culture. It is this culture, that is basically literature-oriented and literary minded in attitude. It expects a high-art quality, or formal reading well mixed with a public appeal. Not

too long ago, the illustrations and high art of Karnataka were inseparable. So it took so long–three decades to be specific and a disapproval of conventional media artists/critics—to delve into the realm of new media. New media in Bangalore ‘also’ meant creative travels in unimaginable vehicles. At a certain point, Dr. D.R. Nagaraj observed two important points that get well connected to new media works in Karnataka in general and Surekha and Suresh Kumar’s specific projects in particular. These works try to re-locate, re-realise, and give rebirth to a set of cultural experiences that have been long forgotten. Nagaraj calls it as cultural amnesia, which has affected the institutions of education but very much alive among the mass. These two works re-capture that which was lost due to amnesia. Gandhian notion of swaraj, the Durga pooja concept of ‘immersion’ of the physical deity giving way to rebirth etc., could be tangentially connected to these works that were, are no more but nevertheless are remembered for two reasons: (1) for what they addressed and more importantly-‘how’ it was done!

Foot Note:

     (1)For the Local Afghans (LA) around the vicinity of Bamiyan Buddha (BB), the latter was a form with a derived meaning of belongingness. The fact that it stood for Buddhism a la Buddhist teaching –whatsoever is its essence—might have been irrelevant to a great extent. What BB meant for the LA allegorically occupies a middle path between the two categories that marks the difference between Old Master artists (OM) and the Modernist artist according to Clement Greenberg. If the old masters initially created an illusion and then made aware of the actual surface, the Modernist reversed the process (see article: “The Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg). Talibans are said to have made the LA destroy BB. It was an act wherein (a) what BB stood for actually, (b) what it meant for LA and (c) what Talibans thought it meant to make LA destroy BB-created a web of shifting meanings within the premise of Greenbergian differentiation between OM and Modernists. The ethical embarrassment that the LA’s felt while undertaking such an assault of an imagery was a fresh take, but not new-in the history of wars and destruction of something that one doesn’t believe in!

     (2)‘Bangaluru Habba’ (annual ‘Festival of Bangalore’) begun in 2002, is a Government-sponsored festival of the city that has already begun to project the city only as a specific construct. It is, allegorically speaking, a festival that treats the posh M.G.Road as yet an allegory to Bangalore while the other aspects that are mundane are pushed under the carpet, so to say.

     (3)&(4) I would read into these two works (that were), rather differently, for, first of all, they don’t exist anymore. These two works also implies those other avant garde experiments that tangentially escaped any and all kind of institutional recognition. The second reason as to why I cannot withold to any (one) specific known mode of ‘looking’ at these works—in the due course of this write-up—is due to the desire to attempt to read these two works as “Object of Post Criticism”. In other words, I intend to  tangentially touch these already-non-existent-works, attempt to  escape the formation of visual collages of their formal details (called criticism) from ‘within’ the works (that are already no more), and avoid playing the relational role of pest(criticism)) and host (artwork), as inferred by Gregory Ulmer in his essay of the same title (Read this essay in the book “Anti-aesthetic essays in Postmodern Culture”, Ed: Hal Foster, 1983).

     (5) Read: Article ”Trends, Motifs and Affinities in the Contemporary Art of Karnataka” by H.A. Anil Kumar, in Lalitkala Contemporary Issue No.46, New Delhi, June 2002. Ed: Amit Mukhopadhyay.

Surekha - All works : “Do not urinate, Mahatma Gandhi Road” A site specific project 8-13th December 2003. Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore.

Suresh Kumar - All works : “ALL TIME PLANT–A.T.P” series. A.T.P (All Time Plant) No.1

A.T.P (All Time Plant) No.2 etc.