Analysis of Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 2 (from AGNSW collection) & the implications of Ghandi’s identity in the trans-national art world today using Neil Brown’s intentional net framework.
Neil Brown interrogates the “practical reasoning between artefacts and practice that explains innovation in design” (n.d). To manifest this practical reason an ‘intentional net’ was developed to trace the innovative causes of practice within design. Brown states that the schema is “not tailored to the analysis of design practice specifically” endowing us the liberty to cast this net on the practice of contemporary art. While brown is liberal in his application of the ‘net’, he is dismissive in his definitions of innovative practice. Effort is made however, to contrast the definitions of ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ practices, yet Brown assumes that the net be applied to those purely innovative practices that substitute “new types and constraints within traditional performances” (Elster, 1993). By “reassembling relevant fragments [of] triangulating evidence” of Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 2, the viewer (or reader here) indulges in a performance performing a performance, supporting Brown’s assumptions that innovation arises in practice, only with the “emergence of new conventions” (Brown, n.d).
Geeta Kapur (2011) questions that, in our age of realism how Kallat’s literal subject matter and form of address, positions his work with regard to the crucial categories of population, populace, and the people “with agency”. Aligning with Boyd’s (1988) ideas that “it is not necessary for a realist to return to a first cause [or] historical beginning” and emphasizing Searle’s (1995) theories that state artwork is “dependent upon opinion or ideology in order to exist”, the intentional net manifested. With the grounding belief that it is necessary to advance and uncover evidence of reasoned links regarding the relation between Kallat’s work and his practice, we are able to use the network of 6 interrelating functions to expose the ‘truth’ of the relation between the ‘Socio-cultural designer’ and the ‘artefact’, the ‘methodology’ and the ‘artefact’ and the ‘object’ and the ‘artefact. While the net does not explicitly involve the ‘user’ or ‘audience’ within its functions, by imputing the user into the relational power of the net, we can situate Kallat’s work in both local and global milieus.
Using Brown’s hypothesis to posit ‘the socio-cultural designer -> to -> artefact’ relation, we can begin to uncover potential causes of Kallat’s innovation. Kallat’s identity here is represented, and in question within this relation as both an ‘Indian’ and ‘transnational’ artist. The hypothesis now becomes ‘the socio-cultural designer -> local/global identity -> artefact’. Kallat (2011) explains that labeling himself as an ‘indian’ artist “binds [his] work of art as if one were GPS-coding its meaning to just one isolated location”, yet refutes the idea of being labeled a ‘global’ artist despite aspects of his practice being rooted in conditions specific to his home subcontinent. We are faced here with a contradiction that problematizes practice, and one that Schön (1983) acknowledges as Kallat’s individual system of knowing in practice in order to keep his “art of practice mysterious”. Professor Homi K. Bhabha criticizes Kallat for blurring his stance on a labeled identity and states that “to see the nation-space as quintessentially defined – either politically or culturally – by the nation-state is to substantially narrow both its cunning capillary power and, at the same time to radically reduce spaces of creative intervention and strategies of transgression / transformation”. Homi suggests that a national identity in its entirety is an appropriate concept for Kallat’s practice, one that is big enough to encompass both his work and practice, without detrimental effects. Kallat’s views that labeling his work ‘Indian’ contradict Homi’s suggesting its appropriateness distract us in a superficial debate from finding those innovative causes with Kallat’s practice. Geeta Kapur (2011) overcomes this problem by explaining that labels of identity are so “irreversibly relativized” that we must step beyond their thresholds. This conceptual space between local and global identities allows Kallat to occupy an interstitial space and practice, one that confuses categories and classifications.
The ambivalent process of Kallat’s identity-questioning practice is one that allows “affiliation and alienation as the active, on going condition of concerned, committed citizenship” (Homi, 2011). We can adjust the net equation here to ‘the socio-cultural designer -> citizen artist -> artefact’ to both understand the relationship between designer, artwork and Kallat’s ambiguous identity as ‘citizen artist’. It is here, where Brown’s net starts to fray. The premise of his article Paradox and Imputation in the Explanation of Practical Innovation in Design is to find those causes (and their explanations) of the root of innovation in design practice, but concludes, through his hypothesis and equations of the net functions that their relations embody only those “causal links” that “impute intention”. While I argue that the major difference between ‘causes’ and ‘causal links’ are paramount, we will continue assuming, as Brown does, that they are one in the same. Whether we read this relationship, imputing a local, Indian identity, a Global, transnational identity or a conceptual citizen artist identity, we are able to understand those causal links between the socio-cultural designer and the artefact, one that, in its individual function, highlight an array of complex and contested reasonings to those possible, original points of innovation within Kallat’s practice. To further understand these causal links between the artefact and the place, period and time under which Kallat’s practice transpired, we must look to another relation within the net, one that includes methodology and materiality.
Looking to the relation between ‘the artefact -> to -> the methodology’, we can understand the emergence of new conventions that may render Kallat’s practice innovative, both symbolically and materially. Kallat’s work Public Notice 2 takes the form of imitation skeletal remains, cast from fiberglass, reproducing the speech given by Mahandas Karamchand Gandhi on the eve of the Dandi Salt march (Sambrani, 2015). We could argue that Kallat employs the conventions of language, typography or semiotics as part of a creative practice, but as Brown assumes the work innovative, we shall address the materiality of these letters as the causal link between the artefact and the methodology. The equation becomes ‘the artefact -> fiberglass lettering (bones) -> the methodology’. Using bones as a new convention of language, we can understand this carefully planned choice to “to decipher meanings, which, not unlike bones, lie beneath the surface” (Mirza, 2015). The primary outcome of the monumental 4,479 sculptural units in relation to the materials and conventions used allow us to question; if Kallat’s premise was to make Gandhi’s words live again, to make them relevant again after three quarters of a century, why use bones? Although Kallat uses the new convention of a boney language, he confides in the convention of a public notice. A convention that he knows, historically “considers the public at large”, and by increasing the size of the notice to monumental scale, he “simultaneously places the text within its particular historical moment and reinvigorates it for present purposes” (Sambrani, 2015). While the bones act as both “remainders and reminders”, Kallat is ambiguously able to recall of the past while also “project[ing] a trajectory toward the future, in the sense that it is meant to endure and remind future generations of its legacy” (Hi, 2009). It is here, through the creating of a monument, or, the practice of creating monuments, are we able to expose Kallat’s innovation. The particular use of materials, despite being situated within traditional conventions of language and notice, we can see a clear innovative cause within Kallat’s practice that strategically allows “letters to assume their own sacredness: beyond their lineage back to the rhetoric of the salt march and beyond the value of words” (Mirza, 2015).
We can assert this point of identified innovation by substituting the material in ‘the artefact -> to -> methodology” equation. For instance, as seen in the Art Gallery of New South Wales installation video, the same primary outcome arises using different methodology, in this case, printed, a3 sheets of paper, in plain sanserif font (figure 1). The equation ‘the artefact -> printed text -> methodology’ highlights the conventional use of typed language that would not only render the work ‘un-innovative’, but fail to increase the aesthetic agency, power and value of a word by voiding the individual letters of material presence. (Raffel, 2015). Sambrani (2015) also questions Kallat’s use of materials within his methodology, probing the concept and use of salt considering the historical and political connection to India’s salt production and taxation under colonial rule. While she doesn’t suggest Kallat use salt to create the letters, stimulating this thought and in turn the equation ‘the artefact -> salt letters -> methodology’ we can understand what the monument may be like with a temporal quality to the work that would still invite recalibration, but with an aspect of deterioration, undermine the premise of the work and fail to “make the historical record live again, literally and figuratively”. It is obvious here, although Kallat has chosen to participate in historical conventions of public notices, monuments and language, his subversions of, and introduction of specific, new materials, these conventions blur on account of his “proclivity to melodrama” that allow the political and historical nature of his work to “live on from their many pasts into the present” (Cherry, 2013). In this instance, employing Browns functional relations between artefact and methodology truly expose a realist case of innovation within the practice of contemporary art.
Looking to the relational power between ‘the object -> to -> the artefact we are able to reveal insight into “what the artefact is about” in realtion to the actual primary outcome (Brown, n.d). Gayatri Sinha (2013), in her article The Afterlives of Images: The Contested Legacies of Gandhi in Art and Popular Culture raises concern with “the sublimation of Gandhi into an apotheosized role [that] is not without contradictions”. While she acknowledges Gandhi’s roles as both the father of a nation and the son of India, she highlights that despite his progressive and radical approach to a “hindi worldview of a universal humanism with great tolerance” Gandhi contradicts his own views on worldwide progress. Gandhi himself states that he believed that “it almost seems as though god in his wisdom had prevented India from progressing along those lines [of western progress] so that it might fulfill its special mission of resisting the onrush of materialism” (Sinha 2013). A dream that didn’t and is yet to transpire in India. Here we are confronted with two Gandhi’s, and if Kallat’s work references a homage to Gandhi, which one? The net function between the object and the artefact result in yet another equation of ‘the object -> Gandhi’s identity -> the artefact’. Neru explains that Gandhi’s ideology created a deficit effect in intellectually and culturally backward environments where no progress could be made. This notion could reference Kallat’s choice to use bones when he could have, for instance, used radical technology within his lettering like we can see in his later work Public Notice 3. However, more appropriately Gandhi’s identity, whether held in high or low regard, could relate as a direct innovative cause between what the object is about and the aftefact itself. Does Kallats work represent the first Gandhi identity, father of a nation and son of India, advocate of civil rights, peace and the official image bearer of justice or represent his second identity, one that is “perpetually immanent and in a state of reinvention, [that] is invoked to interrogate the nation that he fathered”? Whether the viewer, in their individual and specific readings of the identity of Gandhi have stance on the position or not, Kallat “develops a new genre of political and social portraiture that reveals the complex viciousness, inequity and compromise of the present by placing it in stark contrast with the idealism of different moments in the past” (Elliot, 2015). By revealing the deep ironies central to the practice of Kallat’s work that perform historical performances, we can understand the roots of the innovation within his practice, that, in a sense, acts as a forum of new convention where all ideas, interpretations and readings of the past can be projected into the present on a trajectory into the future.
While exposing some assumptions regarding the stance of the intentional net, and the omission of only ‘creative practices’, we are able to uncover some of those innovative causes within the practice of contemporary Artist, Jitish Kallat. Although we have used a specific work, Public Notice 2, the enormity of the analysis using all 6 individual functions of the net is one that’s realist relations could continue on in a never ending knotting of the net. Using specific examples, like the agencies of the artefact, the methodology, the object and the socio-cultural designer, we were able to trace and reassemble possible reasoning for innovation within Kallat’s practice, without the catatrophic consequence of being wrong (Brown, n.d.). Material choice, the identity of the practitioner and the identity of the subject all play integral roles in the construction of Kallat’s artistic practice, and while Kallat may keep “the art of his practice mysterious” the causal links between agencies expose and explain the origination of innovation within it. Using this innovation, Kallat has been successful in allowing the complexities of Gandhi’s ideals to be “remembered in the forgetting” to be “revived in the subversion” in which the “contemporary Gandhi assumes many afterlives” (Sinha, 2013).
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Brown, N. (n.d.) Paradox & Imputation In Explanation Of Practical Innovation In Design, Conference Proceedings: Speculation and Innovation (Kelvin Grove: Queensland University of Technology, 2005)
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Sambrani, Mirza, Elliot & Raffel. (2015). Jitish Kallat: Public Notice 2. Sydney: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.
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Sinha, G. (2013). The Afterlives of Images: The Contested Legacies of Gandhi in Art and Popular Culture. South Asian Studies, 29(1), 111-129