Once Upon A Time There Was A Little Old Lady.docx

MVA II

Towards an Archival Fetish? Dayanita Singh in Baroda with BV Box and other Museums ASSIGNMENT ON CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART PRONOY CHAKRABORTY

Once upon a time there was a little old lady, a museum herself: full of curiosities, walking tiptoed with utmost care. She would be carrying museums in the pockets of her fancy jacket and in her designer suitcases; and would tell young students of art about her life as a museum, in a distinct tone and tenor…

Seeking to be a mortal embodiment of the twin concepts of ‘archivization and museumization’, Dayanita Singh arrived at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda on the 28 th of February, 2018 to deliver what happened to be her first lecture in an art institution in India. The moment was also marked by the preview of her very first exhibition in the Maharaja’s City at Gallery White: a photo-architectural new work: BV Box, a photo-graphic archive of ‘Manisha house’ designed by the Pritzker Prize Laureate B.V. Doshi for his artist daughter, Manisha Doshi, and son-in-law, Vasudevan Akkitham. The exhibition also included recent drawings by B.V. Doshi and Dayanita’s two-other works hinged on the notion of archives: Museum Bhavan and Museum of Shedding. This essay taking cue from the lecture delivered at the Faculty of Fine Arts, attempts to critically locate Dayanita’s practice in the Archive Fever (Derrida 1998) that seems to take a strong hold on contemporary visual art practices in India. Dayanita’s presentation, specifically addressed to the students, began with The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard’s Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (dated 1840 with a suicide note at the back) (Sapir 1994 ) in a tone of urgency to recover the traces of this first photographic self-portrait, that too as a dead body (Image 1). Dayanita’s citation of Hippolyte, the unsung inventor of photography before the famed Daguerreotype, also foregrounds at the onset of her presentation the falsity of the dominant ocular-centric scopic regime of the Enlightenment (which Hippolyte dared to bare through the self-photograph parodying the Death of Marat painted by David) critiquing the assumption of an innocent transparent relationship between photography and truth (Sapir 1994 ). Dayanita’s second visual reference before turning to her own photographed image at several stages of her life (clicked by the artist’s mother Noni Singh) probed the female origins of photography through the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, often considered the first person to publish a book with photographic images of British algae as early as 1843 (Image 2). By introducing her own artistic practice by referring to these two “lesser known” modern artists, Dayanita silently posited her engagement with theoretical writing on photography and theories of archive, which she proposes to devise and revise in what she calls

“Photo-architecture”. Also, there is a tangential reference to the artist’s own position of coming from outside an art school with academic training in Communication from the National School of Design, Ahmadabad. This academically refined ‘design-sensibility’ is precisely what characterizes Dayanita Singh’s archival aesthetics: from the portable quasi archival structures to the format of the artist’s book to the Museum Bhavan and ultimately to branding herself as a living museum. By creating “Photo-architecture”, she tries to constantly deposition and reposition the punctum outside the frame of each black and white photograph, aesthetically pleasing in their very own right. The suspension of the punctum of the photographic image is a point she particularly stressed on, in the artist’s walkthrough of the exhibition in the same evening at Gallery White for the students.

Museum of Shedding (2016) For Dayanita, photography is simply a starting point rather than an end in itself as she constantly pushes the limiting boundaries to display and exhibit a photographic work of art. The structures of display often also become the tools for dissemination, by the virtue of their compact portability. In realizing that the world is already full of good pictures and needs no more beautiful images, but strategies to archive and thus categorize them; Museum of Shedding, a work displayed at Gallery White and explained by the artist in the walk-through becomes significant for its discursive potency (Image 3) Museum of Shedding is even more emphatically architectural than Singh’s previous Museums. It is a space that we can imagine the curator of the museum or gallery occupying: a bed, a desk, a bench, a table, a stool, and storage for the museum’s collection. This collection, drawn from Singh’s personal archive, consists of black and white photographs of architecture. Some of these spaces are ancient, some contemporary, but they are all linked by an austere, pared down beauty. Museum of Shedding is a meditative work that ruminates on the artist’s relationship to photography, to the archive and to her own practice as a kind of “home.” Parallel to the idea of the personal home, is evoked the Derridean notion of archive: the physical house or the domicile of the intangible archival knowledge (Derrida 1998). Against the grain of topographical and typographical tensions of Freud’s archives, this work as an apt example of “Photo-Architecture”, tries collapsing the house and the home within to bare necessities, open to countless permutations and combinations. In the walkthrough, she also demonstrated the inter-relatedness of one image to another in the Museum of Shedding displayed in the format

of boxes (much like ‘BV Box’), by taking out one image (for instance that of the photograph of eyes of a votive icon) and locating the lack in the total thematic as well as formal composition created by shedding of one constituent unit.

Image 1: Self-Portrait as Drowned Man, by Hippolyte Bayard in 1840

Image 2: Anna Atkins, Photographs of British algae: cyanotype impressions, 1843

Image 3: Museum of Shedding, display view at Fifth Street Gallery, London (8 November 2016- 13 January 2017)

Museum Bhavan (2018) In Museum Bhavan, Dayanita Singh creates a new space between publishing and the museum, an experience where books have the same if not greater artistic value than prints of photographs framed and hanging on a gallery wall (Images 4 and 5). Consisting of nine individual “museums” in paper-back book format, Museum Bhavan is a miniature version of Singh’s traveling exhibition of the same name whose prints are placed in folding expanding wooden structures (her “photo-architecture”), which she likes to interchange at will (Image 6). The images in Museum Bhavan—old and new, intriguingly literal and suggestive— have been intuitively grouped into lyrical chapters in a visual story such as “Little Ladies Museum” and “Ongoing Museum,” as well as more specific series like “Museum of Machines” and “Museum of Men”. Following her Sent a Letter (2008), the starting point for this project, the books are housed in a handmade box and fold out into accordion-like strips which Singh encourages viewers to install and curate as they wish in their own homes. The exhibition thus

becomes a book, and the book becomes an exhibition. Towards the end of her slidepresentation, she thus pops up like an enthusiastic sparrow taking out the tiny museums from the pockets of her jacket, which had on the back written: ‘My Life as a Museum’. After giving out the accordion-folded museums to members in the audience to touch, feel, open and see; she quickly recollected them and mounted them on the table for a temporal exhibition. It is this performativity of the archive that book permits Dayanita to dislocate the domicile of the museumized/archived object.

Images 4 and 5: Museum Bhavan, accordion-fold books

Image 6: Museum of Chance and Museum of Moments from Museum Bhavan, Display view: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

BV Box (2019) BV Box, dedicated to the veteran architect B.V Doshi, hailing from Baroda, becomes a fitting tribute for the Pritzker Prize Laureate as well the city of Maharaja Sayajirao. Dayanita pays the tribute in her own style, staying true to Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘dissemination’; disseminating through the box: photographs of the domicile of Manisha Doshi, the daughter of B.V. Doshi, for whom the architect designed a beautiful house, captured in Dayanita’s equally beautiful black and white images (Images 7 and 8). Elements of ‘natural’ beauty such as the peacock heighten the ‘stadium’ (or what creates interest in the image), whereas the artist tries to leave the ‘punctum’ (or what bruises and hurts) oscillating in constant flux. It is however, Dayanita’s emphasis on spreading the limited editions of the work within Baroda during the course of the exhibition and keeping the price within the reach of parents (for the collection of the next generation)- that signs the BV Box with An Archival Impulse (Foster 2004), which may tend to incline towards an ‘archival fetish’ (if left unchecked: something that sprung up in the question and answer session at the end of the lecture at faculty).

The formal aspects of the photographs within the BV Box is as much the creation of B.V. Doshi: the play of light and shadow through and on the concrete, as is the product of the lens or the Camera Lucida (Barthes 1980) behind which Dayanita posits herself, initially. Dayanita withdraws herself gradually from behind the lens and becomes the conceptual agency to fulfil perhaps what W.T.J. Mitchell rightly asked: What Do Pictures Really Want? (Mitchell 1996) Images in Mitchell’s Picture Theory emerge as the “face” that faces the beholder (and not merely the surface) with its own consciousness, agency, will and desire (with the capacity to affectively shape the desire of the audience). In Dayanita’s case, the structural and formal improvisations (“photo-architecture” or “book-objects” or “boxes”) may make the images (and the consumer along with) regress to totemism, fetishism, idolatry and animism if we do not realize that pictures by themselves want “nothing at all”.

Conclusion: Towards an archival fetish? Dayanita’s Museum Bhavan and other archival works lie unsteadily in the threshold between archival impulse and archival fetish. While the artist proudly presented to us the picture of her youngest collector of Museum and claimed to have made calendar prints of her photographs (making limited editions available only at Dharavi in Mumbai), she must also be reminded of the snares of auction houses and fetishism for her Museum sometime ahead in distant future. Though Dayanita seems to be truly committed to ‘dissemination’ of the archive, of dismantling the domicile, she must also be aware that archivization implicitly bears the traces of fossilization and of the Death Drive, a seminal idea Freud postulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) which in turn becomes crucial for Derrida’s understanding of the Archive. For Freud, the death drive is related to the instinctual compulsion of repetition, striving to go back to an inorganic state by destructive aggression. The archival photographic works of Dayanita, likewise bear the latent potency of the death drive or the urge to return to a life-less inorganic state, where each house (of the collector) becomes a museum and each museum a house of archives, dead and fossilized. Ambivalently poised between a theoretical practitioner and a practising theorist, Dayanita’s challenge is to break open further new grounds, both practically and theoretically towards the end of dissemination. One way as she herself suggested would be to disseminate through images printed on something mundane like a match-box (where she has to be essentially a part of the production unit), but again she has to see to it if the desire to possess a

work of art by Dayanita Singh, can be replaced with the possibility of having it by pure chance (for instance, if the match-boxes are randomly packaged with other match-boxes and therefore leaving the fate of the art-work to uncertainty: to possessors who may not have the desire of collecting nor knowing the value of it). Archival strategies and modes of dissemination for Dayanita Singh’s “photo-architecture” and “book-objects” thus require constant revisions and upgradations as fixity of form and concept would render the archive to a mere collectible commodity, creating an addictive fetish for more and more. (Image 9)

Image 7: A still of Manisha house from BV Box, Gallery White, Vadodara

Images 8: BV Box, Display View: Gallery White, Vadodara

Image 9: Dr Doshi Signs the BV Box for @ashieshshah while he admires the Museum Bhavan by Dayanita Singh .#bvdoshi #dayanitasingh #museumbhavan #bvbox#boxofshedding (From the social media page of Gallery White)

References Barthes, Roland. 1980. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York City: Hill and Wang. Derrida, Jaques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Religion and Postmodernism). Chicago: University of Chicago. Foster, Hal. 2004. "An Archival Impulse." October (Vol. 110) 3-22. Mitchell, W.T.J. 1996. "What Do Pictures Really Want." October (Vol. 77) 71-82. Sapir, Michal. 1994 . "The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte Bayard's Self Portrait as a Drowned Man." M f s, Vol 40, No.3 619-629.