Limited Security / Security Ltd.

‘Limited Security/Security Ltd’ looks into the aspects of how the notion of security moves from the socio-political spheres to philosophical and cultural realms. Also it attempts to focus on the notion of ‘insecure viewing’ or to put it in other words, how certain works of art try to push the viewer out of the comfort zones of viewing. The realm of aesthetic enjoyment, which is secured by the physical conditions of a gallery or a museum space, is even threatened when the works of art in question themselves are intended to rupture the secure notions of viewing. The show, ‘Limited Security/Security Ltd’ showcases the works of two Mumbai based young artists, namely Bhuvanesh Gowda and Amitesh Srivastava in order to debate the notions of limited security and security ltd.

Post September 11 world is a different world altogether. Once again terror and aggression redefined the world when they struck the Indian shores on 26/11. Since then, it is not just religious tags or regional affinities or racial qualifications that prevent the human movement across the geographical borders. Any imagined or perceived threat could stop anybody at any place. Security has become an obsessive notion to worry about not only for the nations but also for the individuals. The more the world dissolves its borders using technological means, the more the borders are conceptually strengthened by the preoccupation with security issues. We, in our contemporary world seek security from everything. Yet the question remains: are we secure in this world? Is there any agency that could provide us with fool proof security?

Physical manifestations of security measures are evident in our domestic and public spheres; they take the shape of surveillance mechanisms, security personals, policing, patrolling, check points etc. These manifestations have been largely dealt by many contemporary artists including Coco Fusco to Shilpa Gupta. However, it seems that there is an intense need to take a re-look at security matters not as a socio-political matter but as a philosophical and cultural issue. While security measures re-draw the map of our social spaces, they facilitate a change in the philosophical and cultural attitudes too. It could go deep into the negotiation of personal fears to the negotiation of socio-cultural mechanisms in the individual lives.

Despite the reassurance that the governing agencies give us, in our personal lives we, with a shock realize that we have only a limited security. And also we recognize the fact that the notion of security itself has become a corporate entity that ‘manages’ and even ‘controls’ our lives in both the public and private realms.

Defining the position of an individual in the domestic and public realms, whether it is based on class, caste, job profile, dress code etc, is one of the ways through which a systemic society imparts and inculcates the notions of ‘security/insecurity’ amongst its members. With an information/image saturated world in place, any individual could be defined and discerned by the social ‘space’ that he/she occupies. Amitesh Srivastava critically, aggressively and in a way satirically analyses this issue of ‘security/insecurity’ by consistently portraying the image of a dog in his works. A menacing dog that occupies the central stage of one of his canvases, done using an impasto technique suggests that we are living in a ‘dog eating dog’ world where the self positioning and attribution of status of an individual becomes all the more important than any of his/her personal worth as a human being.

A very normal and mundane note of caution, ‘Beware of Dogs’, though not pronounced loudly in the works, seems to hold the core of critique raised by Amitesh in his paintings. Dogs assure protection to their owners’ selves and belongings. In a way, Amitesh would like to say that we are all living in a society where everyone would like to have a dog, if not in the natural form, at least in its mechanical variants. Going by this argument, we come to know that we live in a society, which has cordoned off itself from ‘others’ using dog as a caution. Besides, dogs become a symbol of social status. In his work titled ‘Breeder’ Amitesh portrays a man, a surrogate of either his own social position or that of the others, with a lot of high breed dogs in leash. A certain sense of suggestive animation makes this work move dynamically from within in order to capture the onlooker to discern the breed of one dog from the other and the ‘quality’ of their proud owner.

This social satire tinged with a fair amount of positive cynicism gains different articulations in a work titled ‘Rare Reading’. Here the artist tries to portray a set of people in a seated posture in different types of chairs that assure the ‘security’ of sitting, relaxing and reading. Amitesh, through an interesting twist, changes the Epicurean theory of relaxing into the contemporary notion of sharing ideas and emotions with distant people using modern information technology. The symbolism of power, connectivity and position as exemplified in the image of chair, in turn becomes a secure self positioning of the individual and his/her ways of coping with the imagined feelings of security. Here the act of reading becomes an apparent excuse for making oneself comfortable in one’s own cocoon. Adaptability to changes transforms into a sort of ‘inert kinetic-ism’ in the secured zones of existence.

Amitesh’s concerns spill over from the general to the particular as he paints the images of a man with his children. He envisions a world of loneliness and the human being’s ultimate interest to step out into the zones of unknown. The work titled ‘Metro Dad’ shows the image of a man with his son and daughter at an imagined cross road, perhaps between the present and the future. According to the artist, it is almost like a self portrait of himself as time. He seems to be thinking about the security that he left behind in his rural background and his un-chartered journey into the ‘new’. Here the artist once again evaluates his convictions on adaptability within the given definitions of social positioning.

Dislocation of the individual from the lived past to an imagined future through the transition of technological present and the losses that this transition might incur, is one of the issues that Amitesh deals with in his paintings. His ‘Farmer’ series, though apparently detached from the prime notion of social security, indirectly takes the onlooker to an agrarian reality from which all other economic realities find their origin. Amitesh does not play the role of a judge in this context. On the contrary, he paints a couple of animated rural workers in the field. The economic insecurities of our immediate times, despite all our claims on industrial and technological growth, have found the core reason as the agricultural deficiencies caused by the so called ‘growth’. Amitesh draws an interesting parallel between the insecurities in social positioning and the basic cause, which is always overlooked by the common man, who leaves it to the experts. Amitesh, though not overtly political in his articulations, is political in his thinking and he finds cultural parallels and symbolism for expressing his concerns. His use of colors, subdued yet direct, hazy but thrusting is interesting, perhaps the renewal of a surface, which has been deliberately avoided by contemporary artists for making their image surfaces glossy and glittering with an unblemished perfection.

Bhuvanesh Gowda is a master of minimalism in sculpture. In his early works done during the student days in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Bhuvanesh played around the idea of ‘objects and their use values’. He picked up a few sheets of broken asbestos and converted them into railway compartments giving a feel of the moving trains. As he observed that many bus conductors in Delhi used coins to tap on the body of the buses to attract the commuters, he made a set of metal rings attached with small leather strap holdings and distributed to the bus workers so that they could use for the same purpose. In another set of works he made a set of 1” x 3” clay bricks inscribed with his initials and proclaimed that they could be used for any kind of ‘constructions’. It was a spoof on the bricks made by the Kar Sevaks (Volunteers) for making Ram Temple at Ayodhya.

It is interesting to see that Bhuvanesh carries on with his idea of minimal objects even in the present suite of works, which are sculptures and sculptural installations. The notion of security comes into play in his works as the security of viewing and the pleasure of ambiguous threats that one feels in the process of viewing (a work of art). According to him, an onlooker goes into the gallery with a preconceived notion of viewing. Once their mental conditioning is collapsed, viewing becomes a sort of play; a play with the unknown. Bhuvanesh incorporates the idea of meditation and concentration and the insecurity that one encounters during the process of meditation. The question comes back repeatedly; am I concentrating enough? Has the ego melted down? Do ‘I’ still exist? Between the materialistic and spiritual notions of security, Bhuvanesh works oscillate with a strange kind of energy.

In the works titled ‘Himalaya I’ and ‘Himalaya II’, Bhuvanesh places small little metallic and marble shapes resembling mountain peaks respectively. These objectified peaks are kept on a raised platform and one need to crane the neck to catch the view of the peak, almost a replication of looking at the high peaks elsewhere. Bhuvanesh derives this idea of viewing as a pleasure and threat (to the security of viewing) from his personal journeys to Himalayas. A person afflicted by the mental state of acrophobia (vertigo), Bhuvanesh’s attempt is to negotiate his personal insecurities through physical involvement. He recreates the same feeling of overcoming through the sculptural renditions and asks the viewer to share the same and also emphasizes the need to record/register the difference in viewing.

In ‘I Secretly Admire My Enemy’, the artist uses the same technique of showing the intended at a raised platform in order to ‘enhance’ the encounter with the object/image. Here the image is that of a goat. Goat is his zodiac symbol and it is a creature that does not fear heights. Bhuvanesh sees the irony of the image meaning and that of his personal reality. Highly autobiographical, this work’s title shows the apprehensive feelings of security that Bhuvanesh carries within him.

‘Bus Accident in Kashmir’ and ‘Free Fall’ are two minimal sculptures that depict the depths and heights in an interesting format. Bhuvanesh uses cotton wool pulp as his medium. In ‘Bus Accident in Kashmir’, the artist once again revisits his fear for heights but this time he dares to look down. The image is that of a bus fallen into a valley while the undulating land folds move like waves around it. In ‘Free Fall’, which looks almost like a sequel to ‘Bus Accident’ emphasizes on the image of a falling human figure into the bottomless pits, with the land folds standing witness to it.

Both these ‘falls’ deal with the notion of security in a very personalized fashion. On the one hand it indicates the personal fears pertaining to acrophobia and on the other it transcends the personal into general. The personal fears become a stand in idea for the fear of the public. However, Bhuvanesh’s interest is in the minimal visual text that he develops for articulating it. Through an act of defiance ( in terms of using an uncommon medium in an uncommon way), the artist creates ruptures in viewing and at the same time provides the viewer with a different idea of looking at a work of art.

JohnyML
New Delhi
September 2009