A body of art

Uneasy at the increasing commodification of art, a number of Indian artists are turning to radical experiments with performance art.

Delhi played host, last week, to an art event with a difference "" Khoj Live '08. "India's First International Performance Arts Festival", it was a six-day-long affair, with performances by 22 artists from 11 countries, including Pakistan, Nepal and Indonesia, supplemented by lectures, workshops and symposiums.

"Live art", according to the festival brochure, "is an umbrella term encompassing a range of performance, performative- and time-based practices that are unrestricted by art form boundaries."

"It traces its origins," says Pooja Sood, director and co-founder of Khoj International Artists Association, which had organised the festival to mark 10 years of existence, "to the Fluxus movement which was anti-object, which said that art had become too material, and so artists needed to concentrate on the body, because no one can buy that.

Later, it became more 'performative', working with the community, forging a relationship and an aesthetic with it. That means the context to the art work became as important as the object itself."

Confined largely to one-off performances in a few galleries and studios like Khoj in Delhi, Chatterjee & Lal and Chemould in Mumbai, Khoj Live '08 was an eye-opener on how many Indian artists are using aspects of "performance art" in their practice, and how they have created a not insignificant body of work over the years.

Khoj, of course, has been a pioneer in this area, providing the much-needed space for experimentation and dialogue through its residencies and workshops. So performance art in India isn't exactly a new phenomenon or one confined to young artists, with major names like Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Pushpamala N having used elements of time-bound, performative art at some point in their careers.

Besides the performative, there are a few other aspects that can be discerned as recurring in such art "" a preoccupation with the inside-outside binary, a fluidness of structure, media and space, and, most important, an emphasis on the body which frequently translates into dressing up and role-playing, and a propensity to shock.

Nudity and stripping were, of course, the most common manifestations of this body art (as the performances of Sushil Kumar and Steven Cohen, a South African, Jew and gay, who stuck various things up his orifices, showed), but there was also "doing" things "" injury mostly "" to the body (Neha Choksi injecting herself with a sedative and Indonesian Reza Afisina knifing "pride" and other words into his skin).

Is this art? You may well ask, and dismiss all of it as experimental, radical, esoteric, dense, self-referencing (to the point of seeming narcissistic), pretentious, even offensive.

But clearly all the artists felt they were trying to evolve an alternative discourse to conventional, "high" art, with its emphasis on the making of an "object" that then comes up for "consumption" by the art marketplace "" the auction-houses, the galleries and so on, as art historian/critic Geeta Kapur, who attended most of the performances, said in a symposium.

This aspect was best encapsulated in Inder Salim's performance, a sham auction of photographs taken by a cobbler who lives near his house. That, with a festival of this kind and the attendant media coverage, this alternative discourse ran the risk of being "coopted" into the mainstream, thereby losing much of its edge, was also an issue that a lot of these artists were aware of.

However, it needn't always be a negative as Sundaram (his most recent work, Barefoot with Husain, was performative in that it consisted of footprints of visitors traced on the floor of the gallery in indelible ink and signed) sees performance art already gaining force with all the support that the festival had gathered from institutions like Alliance Francaise, corporate sponsors, and so on.

On the positive side, performance art merges mediums, takes art out on the streets and that can have electrifying effects as anyone witness to the De Motus performance at the New Friends Colony community centre would have seen.

It is also "democratic" in the way the artist and the audience share the same plane and time. Then, it seeks to make art accessible, to demystify the art process, or as artist Nikhil Chopra says, "I want the experience of a work to precede the object and I want the making to be at the centre of it."

So, in Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing III, Chopra undertakes a walk to the site of what he'll come back to the studio to paint "" Satpula dam, which offers a panoramic view of the glitzy malls that have come up in Saket and all the construction activities, and the ruins of a Mughal-era mosque.

The other aspect of Chopra's three-hour enactment is "becoming" through costume change, first the "brown gentleman" in smart casuals, then, the coalminer, face and clothes black with charcoal, a maid in suspenders and hoop skirt, and finally, an empress in elaborate Victorian dress and crown.

Audiences peering through the window of the performance "stage" could see Chopra undress, shave his face and head, make up his face; they could walk into the room and sit against the wall, and they could, as many did, take a break to go fetch a drink.

Chopra's earlier performance in Mumbai's Chatterjee & Lal was a 72-hour-long marathon, with audiences walking in night and day, whenever they felt like it. "In a five-minute glimpse, the audience may not be able to draw all the connections. But if I'm sweating it's because I am tired from making the drawing; if I'm flopping, it's because I have a cramp...every moment is a gestalt of all the experiences I've gathered."

One couldn't walk in and out always with Rehan Engineer's night-long performance, 377 Bedtime Stories and Songs, requiring registration by the 30 member audience that could be accommodated.

But then, Engineer was working with sleep, weaving a loose narrative of his own "sleep-history (where/ how/with whom)" interspersed with passages from sources as diverse as Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, to mirror the "bedtime story ritual".

"Ritualistic", or, as K T Ravindran, urban designer, calls it "an inversion of the ritual" is the other important aspect of performance art. And like all rituals, the implements it works with are simple, basic; everything is symbolic and meant to be read metonymically.

So a dress an artist may wear may have "violence", "envy" and so on written on it, which, when cut out, would symbolically mean excising these undesirable qualities from the world, and so on. You could say it's simplistic, but who said art always has to be complex?