Manisha Parekh / Line of Light - Review

Review / Line of Light
Published in Art India, May 2017

Herscript

Manisha Parekh’s works has Anuj Daga reading between the lines.

Try to look hard and you will see the landscapes in Kanji typographic characters. Manisha Parekh’s Line of Light at the Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, from the 7th of February to the 4th of March, makes this translation quite obvious.

Linguistic studies demonstrate how the symbol for a mountain in the Kanji script is derived from three peaks, while that of a tree is visibly rooted in the ground with a free end in the air. Originally diagrammed from their actual visual counterparts, Parekh’s intervention overlaps these Japanese ideograms with images, pressing us to think of nature itself as a script. Five dark indigo-dipped papers explore this script using Braille-like formations pierced by a sharp stylus. The form and medium dissolve within each other in Parekh’s Gratitude giving rise to a productive ambiguity that emphasizes multiple readings. She suggests we look closely at how in forms animated and static, nature leaves behind a communicative trail to be deciphered and decoded.

These works presented by Parekh were originally produced as part of a residency in 2013 at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan, built by architect Tadao Ando, whose buildings, as many may know, bring individuals in very emphatic confrontation with nature.

The installation Shadow Garden draws closely from the architecture of fuki leaves – those that stand on a singular stem upright on the surface they grow on. Competing with each other for light, these leaves form a shaded canopy that creates an environment where new microcosms can flourish. Tracing the paths of worms that feed on these leaves, Parekh attempts to map the conversation between different forms of life. Further, the veins of the leaves are suggested by the grain of the cypress wood in the artist’s reconstruction, bringing us to think about the contrasting attributes of young and old, soft and hard, life and death – as thought of in eastern philosophy –simultaneously. Life merely occurs in between these extremes as seen in the punched worm trails on the abstracted substrate.

Within the framework of nature and script, Parekh’s paintings attempt to formulate new ideograms that can expand the limits of experience. Tangled Foot works through three amorphous shapes in indigo, gold and a stippled swatch freely moving in space and frozen into different configurations. If the conceivable world is limited by language, can Parekh’s drawing project open up new environments that can be inhabited though experiments in abstraction? Can their interpretations hint at multiple meanings similar to the manner in which pitch accents change words in kanji pronunciation? Invisible Notes furthers this attempt by presenting to us a hundred possible contemporary Japanese hieroglyphs drawn in a sparkling silver watercolour on handmade paper. The artist’s endeavour to collapse art and the medium of art into each other challenges the distance between the human world and the natural world created and mediated by language.



Manisha Parekh. Shadow Garden. Japanese cypress wood and Indian silk. 100 units. Variable dimensions. 2013. 

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Shanghai - I

First things first.

When visiting Shanghai, be prepared to work with the restrictions that come to be imposed upon you within the framework of a communist government. At the personal front, you will not be allowed to access gmail and facebook directly. So if you think you will keep updating your status on either of these platforms regularly and smoothly, it's not going to work. You will need what is called a VPN - Virtual Private Network - a facility that will allow you to fake your real location and access information on your google or facebook account. This may rather be tedious for the speeds of internet may drop and all VPN sites may not allow you to access every virtual place you may like to reach to.

At the larger level, you will be subject to the Chinese land - which means all sorts of written and oral communication is non-English. There are many perspectives to this aspect, and I am still unable to resolve the pros and cons in my head. It may almost be impossible to communicate in China if you don't know their language. (something similar to visiting Kerala)! The tones, rhetorics, script, gestures - all may be different, including the way we count 1 to 10 on fingers. Thanks to an offline app from google translate, we could convey our everyday basics to shopkeepers and public around. Government officials, police and staff at metro stations etc. will be able to speak to you in English. But thats about it. You won't be able to read menu cards at restaurants, street signage, maps on phone, street iconography, shop names - everything is in Chinese. At once, you realize how incapacitated you are just because of the virtue of language. Think a step further, and you will understand the hegemony of English in the global scene. China clearly slaps the world with its secure and sound operations in mandarin.

I loved looking at the Chinese characters - they looked beautiful to my architectural eye. I particularly liked how contained they are into invisible squares - together forming a neat consistent outline. Their geometric construct appealed to me. Further, the fact that each character could be interpreted in multiple ways in the given context deepened my interest in the way their script must have been conceived. In a brief conversation with a Chinese student about how the script is written and understood, I learnt each stroke of character in Chinese guides the way in which it will be pronounced and spoken. At the same time, these are often derived from its visual counterpart in the real world. That means that the character for a tree would look like the diagram of a real tree. The script is inherently etymological, constantly hinting at the contextual specificity of the written word. Loosely, for example, mist will be written as "water in the air", or a particular fish will be written as "an animal from fresh water lake". Understanding the real world in this manner makes Chinese conceptually sharper.

It's not as if the Chinese don't know English. They use mobile phones, tablets and computers that are wired in English - to type Chinese characters and words. They are fairly fast at it, as one observes on metro trains while they type on WeChat or make a search on Baidu. WeChat is a fairly advanced version of Whatsapp in China which is used for a range of activities beyond chatting. You may hear people sending across snippets of voice messages all the time, as you walk along the streets. Further, the app can be used for announcements, payments, bookings, updating your own status, and so on. It's their mini version of Facebook. Baidu is the Google counterpart in China. It's primarily in Chinese and fairly limited in terms of its search outputs. A few Chinese colleagues informed me how scholarship is so difficult and gets limited through Baidu searches, how commercial it is to be filled with numerous advertisements, and how constrained its reach is. On some occasions, they remained curious about the references I kept mentioning in my conversations, for they had not come across them in their Baidu searches.

China does not support Google maps, so you have to use Baidu maps - where everything is in Chinese. They may not make any sense to you as an outsider unaware of their script! In present times, as a traveler, you can not move around a city without internet connection. If you have to be on your own, you should be equipped with your maps, apps and chaps. For this, you need a smart phone with a reasonable data and calling connection. Data and calling plans in China can be very expensive. However, it is possible to bargain your priorities for mobile plans in China. After being sold a fake SIM card along the street-side shop, I went to a registered mobile store to purchase a new one with the help of a local friend. He was able to negotiate for me a customised deal with more data, compensating on the amount of talk time! It is there that I thought what a brilliant idea it would be for buyers to be able to customise their mobile plans...something like buying vegetables as per your need. What it opened up for me is the lucidity and arbitrariness with which telecommunication companies actually fix prices for its consumers. Wouldn't it be useful to pay only for what and how you use - won't that also manage the burden on telecom lines more efficiently instead of making a population more consumerist?

Having spoken about the limitations, I must point out on the other hand that Shanghai is an extremely organized city. The metro lines make a web while intersecting with each other to connecting different neighbourhoods in the city.  Neighbourhoods in Shanghai are almost analogous to those in Mumbai. Unlike my entry to Manhattan, New York, which was marked by a distinct starkness of the sky scraping buildings almost perspectivally covering up the sky, Shanghai's landscape wasn't really alienating. The scale of buildings and the street life in Shanghai are immediately relatable to an Indian city. One is not funneled between the tunneled sky scraping streets like in New York. Instead, streets are wider, buildings are fairly spaced out, optimally high, and further, the drying laundry & its  infrastructure on building skins remind you of the lives that inhabit them.

Most parts of Shanghai have lanes dedicated for bicyclers. Bicycles have become popular in the city with the coming of rental companies like Ofo and Mobike that lend users the vehicle for as low as 1 RMB for an hour. You can pick and park the cycle in most parts of the city. Motorcycles and bikes on the other hand are electric and they do not make any noise on the roads. In narrower streets, they move effortlessly with pin drop silence. Sometimes, your footsteps are louder than the quietly moving vehicles. Cars don't honk unnecessarily, and roads are rather lively but quiet. Traffic rules seemed confusing to me because vehicles kept turning and passing by even when signals were red. Perhaps there were intermediate rules between slow movers like pedestrians and bikes which I could not investigate into.

Much built landscape of Shanghai that we see today is gentrified. Gentrification is a repeating narrative for its emerging urbanity, bringing a more consumerist dimension to the city. Gated communities and commercial-recreational zones are replacing older communal housing settlements. People who are moved from the inner city to rehabilitation spots are often compensated with money or property. Often, they do not have any right to protest against eviction. Thus, many end up accepting and moving to an apartment away from the city as allocated by the Government. Another dimension to this movement is the cultural fact that owning a house, for men, is a precondition for marriage. Many young Chinese men living in older fabrics await for renewal schemes to be able to own a property and move on with their personal lives. I understand that my explanation above has certainly flattened the complexity of such issues. It is a subject to investigate deeper. It is therefore, that the organizers of Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society were so eager to have my talk on our project "What is a Home?" wherein we had documented the stories of ten sites of rehabilitation and resettlement in the city of Mumbai.

Several young men came for the talk, including a philosophers, engineers, architects and artists. Most of them were interested in the question of "What is a home?" They shared their own stories and contemplations on the idea of a home - intellectual and physical. Some raised questions of existence and what it means to exist. One of them brought to light the etymological understand of the word - he elaborated how "ex" refers to "outside" and "ist" refers to the "inside" - and thus existence is about the movement between the inside and outside. Another young guy spoke about the pressure of owning a house after his marriage, which he contests with the idea of home as a shared social space, not necessarily physical. Several stories and ideas about the home came to light over the discussion, which almost collapsed in the helplessness of the political ideology that Shanghai, as opposed to Mumbai, operates within.

Between Books & Buildings

Contemplations

The text starts behaving in a particular way when it is bound in the form of a book. The book has its own agency. The environment in which the book provokes the reader to be read and the manner in which the body engages with it talks about the body-space dynamic embedded in its form.The reception of text in a given environment - static or mobile - is a function of time. The body space rubric is thus also coupled with time, eventually describing time into the reading of the content. Text of the content has its own time (of reading and of its own place) the way text paces thought, which creates a certain environment. What happens when this transmission clashes or collapses with the time which the absorbing physical body is suspended in? Can the format of the book mediate time?

The table of books 

On books: Discussing with Poonam Jain

Participants making their own books

Participants working on their book projects

Artist Poonam Jain opens up ways of imagining books through her works.

Participants listening to Poonam

The team

Structuralism and Structuralists

Says Foucault:

"Imagine a photograph representing a face. If you make this image go from positive to negative, in a way all the dots of the picture are going to be modified. That is to say that all the points that were white will become black and that all the points that were black will become white. None of the points, none of the elements therefore remain identical. And yet you can recognize the face. And yet the face remains the same even though it has gone from positive to negative, and you can say that it stays the same; you recognize it because the relations between all these different elements have remained the same. Relations between the points have stayed the same, or relations of contrast and of opposition between white and black have remained the same, even though each of the dot that was white has become black, and each point that was black has become white.

Deep down in a very broad sense of what structuralism is , we can say that structuralism is the method of analysis that consists of drawing constant relations from elements that in themselves, in their own character, in their substance, can change.

Structuralists are people for whom what counts in essence, are systems of relations and thus not all the lived individual experience of people... what I do belongs at heart like structuralism to this great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject..."

Notes from the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016

India never evolves, it jumps. We have situations where one day there is no toilet and the other day, they are hundreds. We have situations where there is no electricity, but the person of the house has a mobile phone.
We are not going to ever have 240 museums - like London.

What we have to do is to open up locked up temporary infrastructure for arts and artists. Second is to open up / find patrons who will have something worthwhile to offer.

India is not necessarily an educated race, but we are highly intelligent.

Feroze Gujral

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What is the History of memory? How do we utilize memory?
The struggle of the archive is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
A shared history means a shared experience.

The phenomenon of Europe and America coming and "helping" us to discover our destiny.
Rise of extreme nationalism in our countries.

What kind of crisis emerge, what are the violent implications when a country wants to expand its economic might in its surrounding areas? The first 1857 nationalism movement was against the economic exploitation.  What are the ethics of working in a particular kind of political economy?

War has forced a lot of people to migrate. Migration to America and Europe have not yet been a big political question. But these questions are going to come up. Nepal is stuck between two world superpowers - India and China.

We have to learn to be silent and listen to our neighbour.

When you have no power to talk to the big, powerful people, the only way to probably talk to them is humour and satire. It completely undermines the political process and art can bring about some subtlty. You can be standing opposite to a very highly intelligent person who is opposing you and still not be bale to be do anything about it. It is here that art can intervene as a mediator. Art has influenced and shaped narratives in every culture - and it happens over a longer duration of time. Subtleties of political debate can be conducted only through art.

To be sure,  nation/states can't understand humour.

Amrith Lal

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If you are true to yourself, you are true to your political time. So this question will be inevitably there in your work. So you don't have to question consciously.

Riyas Komu

Notes from Marshall McLuhan

The people of the west developed their visual point of view and their acuity of vision along with Euclidean geometry. No other country in the world had Euclidean geometry except the country of the phonetic alphabet. without phonetic alphabet you don’t have euclidean space. there is no euclid in the orient. There's neither any individual identity, private identity in the orient. But the kinds of left and right hemisphere things coordinate quite well since the lineal nature of the left hemisphere is very visual - visual space is the only space that is lineal and connected. Acoustic space is not lineal or connected. The acoustic space is a sphere who we hear from all directions at once. Acoustic space is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose margin is no where. That is a simultaneous sound which creates that kind of space. It is the space of the sound bubble in rock space. But right hemisphere is simultaneous acoustic and this is very favourable to the corporate identity of oriental man. People who 'play it by the ear'. As opposed to those people who have a strong bias of 'point of view' and who play it by the eye and by logical connected estimate bottomline quantity and so on. This is all left hemisphere. But the right hemisphere has no bottom line and is interested only in quality, not in quantity. And so the other wordless, the non-worldly orient with its interest in the way of life rather than in the amount of product…you might say, polynesia, our various attempts have been made to organise the polynesian into the dynamic produces of this and that and they remain completely indifferent. They are very acoustically oriented people. Very right hemisphere. But the right and left hemispheres affect both of us to some degree. There, its not an plain either or. We use both the hemispheres to some degree. But in some cultures, the one or the other gets much stress, much play.

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To Read means to guess.

Reading is an activity of rapid guessing.

Old English rǣdan, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch raden and German raten ‘advise, guess’. Early senses included ‘advise’ and ‘interpret (a riddle or dream’)

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...paradoxically, the clown was a person with a grievance. his role in medieval society was to be the voice of grievance. The clown's job was to tell the emperor or tell the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society. He often lost his head in this process. but the clown, the international , motley of our times, the clown is trying to tell us his grievance. the beards, the hairdos and the costumes of the young are  manifestations of grievance and anger. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_383842&feature=iv&src_vid=ImaH51F4HBw&v=a11DEFm0WCw

Playing to the Politics of Pedagogy

We are in the review season for architectural schools. I was appointed to assess the works of two schools of architecture in Mumbai by the University: Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and the Indian Education Society's (IES) College of Architecture. Both very different in their pedagogical approach, but tied by the syllabus and codes of Mumbai University.

At KRVIA, students are trained to look at design interventions (located in any place) through a predominantly urban focus. KRVIA's outlook to design; as the Director Aneeruddha Paul had once explained me long ago; does not treat architecture separate from urban design. It doesnot draw a line between the two disciplines, rather, thinks of architecture to be inherently inscribed within a larger set of urban forces. (Ofcourse, this comes from the school's own situated ness in the city of Mumbai). Thus, architectural responses articulated in the studios are necessarily thought and set within a theoretical trajectory of understanding cities. Rightfully so, and pedagogically innovative. For a long time, "city" had become a buzz word for the school. All projects were informed by a direct or pressed reading of urban conditions and urban studies. There was a moment in the life of KRVIA, aligned with the interest of the West, to generate tremendous studies on the city of Mumbai - that they are situated in - through their architectural design studio and research projects. Other schools were oblivious to the idea of the city until then. 

Other colleges, like the IES have been influenced by the loud and bold projects of KRVIA, only marginally. KRVIA, in my opinion, managed to draw attention to architecture as an urban function for many colleges of architecture around the city, as well as the country (?). As some of its faculty disintegrated or shared their knowledge with/in other schools, or made productive exchanges with other local colleges, thinking of architecture through the urban method became available to them. Colleges like Academy benefitted directly with professors like Prasad Shetty taking studios that anchored the experiences of students within the urbanity they grew up in. A few fresh graduates of KRVIA who taught at Academy of Architecture were able to inject methodical ways of working in their otherwise staling design studios. They were also able to expand the teachings of a particular 'urban' method to these colleges.

Over the years, KRVIA has become critical of its own 'urban' mode, although it has not completely given it away. The students often end up imagining programs and their architectural formulations thinking compulsively through this urban - as if it had become a universal standard, or sometimes, even as default. While they do get sensitive over the years, the confidence in the city and an architecture overtly situated in its dynamic, shapes an architecture that is obsessively ambitious. The evolution, if I may say, as been located in diagrammatizing the building, often a one-liner, with little emphasis to its architectural resolution. Some may say, that to think of buildings through diagrams of architectural intent is a virtue in itself, and that it must be to the credit of the college. That a building is an argument, that it has a larger urban function, that it is a cultural object - are all accepted. But I find it hard if these are not logically carried forward into a rigorous architectural resolution. To expect this in a system of mass education, and at the third year level is unfair. Further, I am more concerned about what kind of diagrams and what kinds of building types do come out of such approach, and how do we assert them as relevant?

On the other hand, colleges like IES seem to have missed the bus completely. Today, we saw students dealing with a making an institution catering to the city inside the artificially created forest of Maharashtra Nature Park. While the brief aimed to achieve the objectives of generating an appropriate urban response, as well as tackling the issue of sensitivity to the natural surroundings of the site, the students seemed to have addressed neither. This, produced through an absolute lack of method, and through the guidance of faculty that has neither a focused 'urban', nor 'environmental' orientation of any sort made the student interventions miserable. Firstly, we failed to see architectural intent in any of the buildings. None of the projects established in what way would they like to respond to the nature around them. Certainly thus, there was no study whatsoever of the ecology of the place, or an understanding of the ways in which nature has been dealt with through built projects across the globe. Secondly, there was no clarity on what makes the building "urban"? What are forms of "urban" in a natural setting? How do we understand the "urban" within the rubric of environment? These questions don't seem to be even vaguely thought of through the studio mentors. The only idea to respond to "nature" was that of the "organic" - quickly resolved into a swirling shape - say a leave, or curve, or spiral or circle - purely in plan. Further, differently scaled outlines of these shapes were subdivided without any structural understanding into smaller "rooms".

The indifferent resolution of any shape or diagram into vacuumised rooms was common to both - IES and KRIVA. In KRVIA, students had invariably provided regular rooms - with one metre doors, even for cattle, goats, and other animals - reached through steps and ventilated by typical windows. In IES, all kinds of activities happened in rooms of more or less same size and shapes - a pottery workshop happens in a classroom with 40 seats and a teacher, as much as a bamboo workshop. Both have same facilities. Further, all rooms are 3 to 3.5 metres high. There is no volumetric sensitivity to room proportions with respect to their programs. The idea of architecture as volume is understood only by a few, since the volume is always dissected into the X & Y axis - the plan and the section. When dissociated, they hardly are perceived together, and fail to come together until the end. But what I primarily want to draw out here, is the generality and banality of form achieved through the urban method, in one case, or the uninformed urban mind on the other.

Over the span of three to four months, how can students merely expose themselves to merely two or three other architectural references, sometimes, none? To be sure, students certainly take on to the internet these days, but can't there be ways where digging out books and looking at building plans and photographs are integrated within the subject of design? Indeed, one can not deny that students today don't even know what to look at in a visual. Gone are the days when one could look at a Vitruvian Man and think of the proportions of one's own body and further the mathematical inscription of nature. It would take a lecture of 45 minutes to merely go over what the diagram means - even if it was so visually evident and obvious! The centrality of visual studies and ways of seeing to architecture can not be denied, and inevitably need to be drawn into understanding architecture. Values of composition, scale, proportion, aesthetics - those embedded in visual methods have to be made explicit, with critical and conscious knowledge of problematics of historical pedagogical modes of organization of forms (bauhaus / constructivism / structuralism / deconstructivism, etc.). The visual method has lost its importance for two reasons - the failed determinism of schools like the Bauhaus on one hand (as identified by colleges like KRVIA), and the failure to upgrade the very traditional workings of the same Bauhaus to the present (as apparent in colleges like IES).

Dilemmas occur when you have to grade students within the problematics of such pedagogical issues. One college suffers over-identification, while the other suffers indifference. Within the politics (of the failure thereof) of pedagogies, how do you evaluate the product? Evaluation here becomes so banal - for the student's project is merely the function of the pedagogical imperative.

The School of Environment & Architecture meanwhile attempts to wrestle between the urban and the environmental - constantly pulled between the ideologies garnered inevitably by its founders. Between excessive expectation and ambition to meet both, the school either tears down students or produces serendipitous conceptual innovations. The lack of architectural resolution or the ill representation of a well conceived project keeps me unsatisfied - not just at SEA, but at every place I go for an review. The studio I participate in at SEA has a heavy (unnecessary) urban focus - something that I do not particularly enjoy, or resonate with. With almost no space to experiment my own architectural questions - those which I once initiated at Academy - the last three years have left me academically frustrated between the urban and the environmental. After all, these are not the questions that excite me, neither are these my areas of expertise. These are not my inquiries. I am interested in exploring the absolute-ness of architecture and throwing it back in the space of the real, eventually learning how the ideal can find place in the practical.

The political play of pedagogies prevents such exploration - where does one find space to explore ideas? How does one deploy them outside these mega constructs controlled by those in the hands of whom institutional power vests? Hopefully, I will find my space. For while I was once in search of an academic space, today, it has completely trapped me within its own constraining ideology, expecting me to play to it. A day will come, and I'll snap!