artlifeandlove

[artlifeandlove]

Shilpa Gupta: Sun at Night. Installation view. The Curve, Barbican Centre. © Tim Whitby / Getty Images

The Mumbai-based artist, Shilpa Gupta, likes to play with the idea of the location in her work. In her exhibition at the Barbican, Sun at Night, installed in the prison-like environment of the Curve - long and narrow and somewhat cavernous - as a site for display. In the show, she renders the experience of imprisoned poets relegated to solitary confinement, so that their perceptions of time and space were profoundly impacted. She composes type-written notes from dissidents that activists that speak to their x. “Time passed by, but it was hard to tell it was day or night,” reads a quote from Anonymous.

We can all relate. While the world seems to get more and more connected, we have seen a rise of new surveillance mechanisms and multiple and varied kinds of lockdowns meant to confine us is our homes. Gupta’s interest in sound, language and the power of speech does x.

The exhibition is unconventionally analogue: terse and analogue pencil drawings and type-written notes depict a milieu of control and resistance for the featured poets. In For, In Your Tongue, I cannot Fit, figures hovered unsettlingly across my field of vision with their faces and bodies erased, framed behind wooded bars that recall a prison cell. A few feet away, twenty-one tips of pencil leads, stacked high in a precarious Tower of Babel, pay homage to poets behind bars who effectively broke their pencil points and destroyed their potential use as writing instruments, who wrote messages on bars of soap, memorized verses, and scrolled words on cigarette papers or toiler toll scraps, finding alternative methods to express themselves.

There are two exceptions to this. The first comes at the entrance to the exhibition, where two angled flapboards move in sequence to produce fragments of text, with often misspelled, mangled words, like “truth” and “lies.” “Prove my love via hate,” they spell out at one point, before they whir and clack manically with a faint, crackly sound, a kind of cry for help in a world bent on oppression and darkness. I stood doing x. In front of the flapboards was a bench where a teenage girl sat transfixed. A tiny frown drew her x eyebrows together, then she got up and stepped aside for a doctor, who stood behind my chair, a distinguished-looking man I hadn’t met before.

The final room of the Curve is home to a reconfiguration of, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18). Suspended above the 100 metal spikes are 100 microphones, each speared with a page inscribed with a fragmented verse of poetry by a poet incarcerated for their work. A gloomy silence fills the dark room, and then a female voice keens out from the microphones. It intones, declaims, whispers a poetic phrase which is repeated by several other voices, so that a chorus gathers strength, as if at a funeral mass for fallen heroes. I ambled around, feeling a throb of history in their sufferings, then returned upward to read one of the skewered passages. Inside the belly of the beast, the pendulous lighting seemed to obscure more than it illuminated. 

In the show, Gupta attempts to draw a parallel between the poet’s experience of solitary confinement and Covid lockdowns systematically imposed by government action. Here she fails. Maybe she didn’t need verses from coveted poets but quotations from ordinary citizens and journalists to explore questions more relevant to a London audience. And though it helps that she calls attention to the fragility of one’s right to free expression, the perpetrators of oppression remain in the shadows.

There is a Philip K. Dick short story, “The Hanging Stranger,” where the protagonist Ed Loyce (a television salesman, a purveyor of mass perception) sees a dead body hanging from a street lamp that nobody else seems to notice. It’s a dystopic tale set in the town of Pikesville, in which Loyce realizes the people around him have had their consciousness taken over by invading aliens. In the story, Dick uses science fiction, horror, and mystery elements as an allegory for a self-centered society. The story came to my mind, as it asks what this exhibition doesn’t. If government exits the role of oppressor, who fills that void? And what role do social norms play in influencing the personal experience of reality?

The question is real, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which the thought police are citizens themselves based on their ideological leanings. Self-censorship is increasingly the norm. So then, What is real? Because unceasingly, in the age of Twitter and Instagram, we are bombarded with words of x, with images of x, with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

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The rules governing reality were a major concern of the prolific American science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. In his works, the cohesion of the constructed world was not a constant. It could suddenly or imperceptibly dissolve, leaving the protagonists of the novel wondering, whether what they were experiencing was illusory or real. Dick speculated that every person might perceive the world differently, and as a result live in a singular, separate world of his or her own.

What is more, Dick prided himself on being able to construct fictitious worlds which would stand the test of time, yet he admitted that he found enjoyment in their falling apart. Consequently, his characters would have to face an unusual threat—that of the invasion of the mind. The worlds Dick destroyed were the small, private universes of his characters, invaded by an external, often malicious force or agent that would ensure their decomposition. Dick’s heroes saw their intimate, inner worlds constantly invaded, and the boundaries of what they considered reality breached. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between characters in Philip K. Dick’s fiction, whose interactions lead to a change in their sense of reality or identity.

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Perhaps Gupta could have done more justice to her theme by doing x; she says she wrote the lyrics to this extended version back when she was first recording Red <casting an inward eye>. Self-censorship, the Twitter-verse, innovations in thought and expression are not always a function of the state, administered by corrupt officials. They become social norms, and often the artist is implicit in these rules. Can a show about political freedoms be considered complete without any mention of political censorship in India under Modi’s government? It is an anomyally why the artist chooses to ignore the human rights abuses in her own country. I’d be interested in Shilpa Gupta addressing this debate in future exhibitions.

When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.

“But the greatest of his fictional works fall within the SF genre, which allowed Dick a conceptual and imaginative freedom that was severely crimped by the strictures of consensual reality favored by the mainstream.”

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.”

“The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.3”