SITEUNspecific- a tale of an work

It was the half immature winter of 2013-14 in which artist inside him was shifting itself from one existing language to another. He was crowded with multiple ideas, little learned forms, histories and narratives. The impurity within him was growing and he was hungry for the liminality. The notions of being artist, in a specific studio space and making art in that studio were shaken by the very short experience in his wilderness. He was looking for a wider space for his art to get seeded, grow and die. And he found it on the edge of his little knowledge.

The place was a village named Hirapara, Azara, on the outskirts of Guwahati. He was a guest there slowly turning into insider but always remained OTHER.

A banned construction site revealed itself in front of him through the various means and mediums to explain about the tragedy. The tragedy was its waiting, and the ongoing legal conflict which weaved into that site. And because of that, the site was in waiting. The site waited long for his arrival and when he encountered that site then waiting of the site momentarily got over because he was there to put another angle into that conflicted and contested space. His perspective was loaded with an academically charged /trained eye of an artist. He scanned the site with drawings, photographs, conversations and with an eye of a foreigner, and the site scanned from him an experience, curiosity, a type of knowledge, and a dreamed sculpture, and in-between all these he was left with the conflicted creative urgency.

The grasses were quite like a post holocaust aggregate. The corner of his vision with the help of polluted sunlight experienced an object full of rusts on its body. The object was deeply physical on its base. Grasses were holding it with their softness, the aged and half dead softness. And he was unaware, and then suddenly the object was able to make its presence as a beautiful thing in the mind of a native villager. Then he was informed about the beauty of that object and started working on that, trusting the sense of beauty which came from the outside (non artist). In the context of this work the sense of beauty was borrowed, the inspiration was not his own. The work begun with borrowed inspiration.

The context in which he was injecting an aesthetic inquiry was a loaded narrative. The land was transformed into a site by both cultural and political acts. Its geological components, age, character, life giving quality was tried to shifts towards privatization, objectification and commodification because of the cultural and political relationship of man with the land. The site started investigating his knowledge, experience, and skills, and he was ready to move on every layers of that site for a dream. And this primitive step in and around site laid the foundation for an act which was cultural in political and political in cultural. The site offered him all ingredients like air, light, forms, colors, people, and equipment's of modern construction. An aging cement mixture was one of such element of that site. That everyday utilitarian, sculptural/industrial entity was rained in rusts and was waiting to be explored in a much softer way for a different cause. And that cause was the re-construction of layered meanings, Identities, and occupations. His interest was to shift the object in much softer zone both materially and conceptually by questioning its role and functions in the construction of cultural landscape.

Mapping of a place for the sake of cultural, economic, political, ecological/DE-ecological reasons transform a place into a site. Therefore a site is not a place but it is the way of seeing, which construct the identity of a place. A site is simply a culturing of virgin location to fulfill human needs. It gives a location its name (address) and cultural characteristics. Address is the location of a place in a textual form which makes a location democratic and vice versa. Manifestation of site as a concept in art world which started growing from 1960-70s was a desperate try to relocate art practice beyond modernism and connect art to everyday occurrences and dreams. The story of development of the notion of site specific art both as practice and as a concept is still infant, infant because the place lost its siteness, the site lost its specificity and blurred itself again and again into multiple dreams of modern fabrication of art.

The relationship between man and his immediate surroundings produced multiple forms which later became the cultural leftovers (tales, material culture, festivities, proverbs etc.) later becoming museum objects giving the birth of museum culture (a type of site). Site is less about the physical location and more about that how the location transforms physically in the course of time and with that how that transformation processed in the mental structure of its inhabitants. Site is air, season, light, gravity and living/non living inhabitants and their interactions with each other. Site is not only a piece of land but it is also a sky- a space with infinity of our dreams and possibilities. Site is debate which combine with multiple geological components to constructed the physical location for cultural birth. Therefore a site is physical, geographical, biological, political therefore it is cultural.

The place at Hirapara village was a site because that was a banned construction space. That site was site because that was banned, conflicted, and in waiting. The land was transformed into site because it was wished to rise vertically for maximum utility. The cement mixture is a tool to realize that maximum utility by exploring the landscape. A symbol of modern time, a tool to re create landscapes, dreams and hopes for future landscapes.

He invited himself to spontaneously create art that exists directly with the reality, with the real places and in real context- an anti illusionary art. His gaze was of the other. The other gets inspired from the other air, other light, other season, and other smell of that place making Hirapara a signifier of his nostalgia. He started exercising within a signifier. The nostalgia became soft like clay and the ‘’Other’’ was ready to shape it for future utility. In this context the notion of site was in regular flux from a contested place of Hirapara village to the nostalgia of a native (?) space. The nostalgia as a site is signified by the contested space of the Hirapara village. This sculptural exercise was an out come from the connections of binaries of past and present, conceptual and physical.

The practice was in a tunnel, constantly shifting from one site to another, from physical to conceptual, from present to past. The aim was to build an inquiry of the ongoing shifts by a sculptural exercise. In this context the site started locating itself in the different zones of realities asserting itself beyond the physical attributes of any kind of materiality. The site at Hirapara village displaced itself towards the different pockets of time and space through an aesthetic exercise for the sake of becoming meaning. The meaning or meanings evolved from the sculptural exercise became itself the site to rest on. The regular flux of notion of site is a momentary and fragile process. Site is more in movement and less specific and static.

He went there, he saw the object but before that the object saw him, choose him, affected him, attracted him and invited him. His aim was to understand the object in context and layered it with the possibilities of meanings. He was left with the drawings, memories and many quarries.

A cultural act which creates the situations, art, context, and the bodies external to his own body and vice versa itself is a site to which he wishes to add something through his practice. His practice situates at a junction of uncertainty which is sometime deliberate and sometime not. His search for the possible links and tunnels to communicate not only aesthetic but also concerns, hopes, worries and uncertainty of today’s time itself is a site - a contested space.

By

Dharmendra prasad