Alien waters, images exhibition

Alien Waters by Ravi Agarwal India International Centre October 24-November 1, 2006

It shouldn’t be tough to write down about images that present the polluted Yamuna. The problems come up when the pictures below assessment weren’t taken for the print media however for an exhibition. And not even a conventional exhibition that presents the pictures as artistic endeavors. The exhibition shouldn’t be an easy visible documentation of the state of the river; it is a photograph documentation designed to affect the powers that be and, hopefully, have an effect on a cleanup of the polluted Yamuna.

It is images’s a number of roles in modern society that lie on the coronary heart of the ‘drawback’ one faces in writing about an exhibition that’s caught in transit between images as social documentary and images as a postmodern artwork within the digital age.

The delivery of images in the course of the nineteenth century was purported to have heralded the loss of life of portray. Slightly over a century later the digital age appears to be sounding the loss of life knell of “photography as we know it”, as Ravi Agarwal places it. “Has the photograph reinvented itself as we have?” he asks and wonders what {a photograph} means to him. “How does it relate to my state of being? How comfortable am I with its unpredictability?” It is these questions that underline the exhibition. There appears to be a conflict within the photographer and social activist in him (he’s the founder director of Toxics Link, an ngo coping with disposal of poisonous waste).

ModernismPainting didn’t die with the invention of images. It merely moved away from its representational function and have become a formalist artwork kind that was not attempting to imitate or reproduce nature however was self-referential artwork for artwork’s sake: what mattered was composition, color and texture. It was artwork that sat extra comfortably within the secular and politically sanitised areas of the fashionable world’s museums and galleries than within the extra political, ritualistic and non secular areas of its delivery in caves, church buildings and the road. Modernism negated artwork’s spiritual and political significance and neutralised its vital energy within the identify of kind and the worth it connected to an artist’s expressive perception.

Photography appears to be following the identical path. Its latest transfer into the quick increasing artwork market is an growing rejection of its vital representational function, its social areas and its political energy.

Photography’s documentary function appears to have been reassigned to documenting, preserving and presenting performances as artwork. The physique is seemingly the brand new artwork medium of our occasions. In performances, as a performer, the physique strikes from being an objectified ‘composed’ within-a-frame physique to changing into the “self-posed” physique creating and controlling its personal area. It is now used to discover the subjectivity of an expertise as towards the objectification of an goal viewpoint.

Ravi, in truth, describes his ‘The Shroud’ efficiency sequence in private phrases as ‘an immersion and an emergence’. And the exhibition, shot over a interval of two years, is a couple of private ‘nostalgia for the clear waters and lengthy gone wagtails, about recovering a way of the self, and lowering an growing alienation’.’Performance artwork’ was, apparently sufficient, a protest towards the commodification of artwork. It started as ‘protest artwork’ within the late Nineteen Sixties and moved from exhibiting the physique to utilizing the physique politically for a bigger social and political remark. It was a manner of asking questions as a substitute of attempting to point out info.

Photography, as a type of social criticism, isn’t just a report of city experiences however a option to change them. It is a rejection of the function of the artist as a hero and sees the creation of artwork as intervention, as a social therapeutic that creates environmental consciousness and is conscious of what it means within the bigger society. One wonders concerning the separation of the photographer/activist /artist function of photographers at this time. Why do they insist on this separation? Photographers as photojournalists or as social documenters have all the time been social activists. As unbiased documentary photographers, they’ve all the time supplied the vital depth that their media colleagues’ couldn’t.

The Museum of Modern Art’s projection of images as a formalist, self referential artform that raised(or ought to that be decreased) documentary images to a sanitised ‘documentary type’ superb artwork kind is a reminder of the facility of the artwork world’s establishments. We want to speak about and problem the facility of those establishments in sanitising and controlling cultural practices. The remaining product of images shouldn’t be, and can’t be, simply the artwork market oriented print or a photograph documented efficiency.