Architectural Diagrams - 1

 

Thoughts on the Archive

 'Archival remembering can never be separated from forgetting'

Do we archive to remember or forget? Do we write to remember or forget? There are things we write to remember, and there are things we write to forget. But what about the permanence of writing or the archive? What do we read off permanence? Does permanence tell us whether it means to remember or forget itself?

The escape / release of a trapped thought contained within the mind is no longer a part of the body once it is archived. The archive thus is a way of forgetting, created only in order for a provisional remembering when the body wishes to reoccupy that old time-space. A certain time can be reinvigorated back through the archive, or its consumption.

The archive simultaneously reveals and buries certain pasts.

'Art archives do not just construct, they also bury colonial pasts'

For everything archived, there is so much that is overlooked. The archive blinds us to many things behind its face.

Word Cloud

Patronizing

adjective

(used of behavior or attitude) characteristic of those who treat others with condescension
Synonyms: arch, condescending, patronising

Sentence:

No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak.

adjective 

कृपा करते हुए विनीत

Patriarchal

adjective
characteristic of a form of social organization in which the male is the family head and title is traced through the male line
relating to or characteristic of a man who is older or higher in rank

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.

adjective

पितृसत्तात्मक
पुरुष-प्रधान
कुलपति का
आदरणीय वृद्ध पुरुष का

Feudal

adjective 

Feudalism was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs that flourished in Medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Although it is derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), which was used during the Medieval period, the term feudalism and the system which it describes were not conceived of as a formal political system by the people who lived during the Middle Ages. The classic definition, by François-Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations which existed among the warrior nobility and revolved around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.

adjective
सामंती
सामन्तवादी
सामन्ती
जागीर संबंधी

SOURCE:

https://www.shabdkosh.com/

The Dancing Spider

This morning as I chose to listen Shivranjani over Bhoop,
I saw a tiny spider dancing in front of my eyes
First I thought it was flying
But as I transfixed my gaze upon the floating creature
I realized it was holding on to a strand of invisible web
perhaps one that he himself spit
under the fan, as I looked up to him
his body appeared and disappeared to the blades in the background
only as I got closer to being anxious if he would fall 

on me
I decided to trust him

that he will reach where he wants to

Thus redirecting my gaze

Into the screen
I began to write
this poem, 

which I meant to be prose
changed tone just like with the shift of a single key

the sharp 'ga' of milan into the flat 'ga of virah

bhoop transformed into shivranjani

and that was the music I decided to play.

Times, Lines, 1989s

Exhibition at Khoj International Artists Association. Delhi
February 2020

IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

Madan Mahatta Archives, Randhir Singh
IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

exhibited at Photoink, Delhi

Jan-Feb 2020

This photographic exhibition brings together a contemporary study of the campus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - designed by architect J K Chowdhary and engineer Gulzar Singh. IITs were the key spaces to produce engineers for building modern India. These were state education campuses of science that got built during the period of Nehru government during the 1960s when the spirit of scientific temper was fresh and the mood for a modernizing nation. The exhibition "IIT Delhi - A Modernist Case Study" brings together photographs by Madan Mahatta and Randhir Singh in a dialogue with each other. 

Mahatta's photographs are mostly black and white, taken during the time the campus was freshly inaugurated. The photographs take us back to a time period when it was till not fully inhabited, the trees wait to grow, and signs of life wait to adapt to a modern institutional space. Randhir Singh's photographs, mostly in colour bring to us the life of the campus in its humanised reality today. In Mahatta's photographic documentation, the campus emerges as an edifice of scientific ambition and achievement - architectonically as well as spatially. Here we see the emphasis on its stark forms, empty corridors with sharp shadows or the craft of be-jeweling the architectural object. Singh's photographs bring to us a softened landscape of the campus, in its diffusions produced by humans, greenery or even light forms. 

Looking at the photographers who document the same space through eyes distanced by more than 60 years, one is constantly caught up in the then & now of both, the life of the campus, as well as the way in which one would like to make sense of its historical projection. What does one make of an institution today? How secular does the space remain? What political forces lie embedded in the disposition of this space? These are question, I am certain, the contemporary artist grapples with while framing the building for the present generation. Where does one place the values through which the campus was once conceived, and how does it become a photographic inquiry? Randhir Singh's photographs balance the dilemmas of modernism today quite artfully. 

The strategic display of photographs within the gallery space work with the sharp sightlines that the campus's modern vocabulary embues. Viewers are forced to readjust perspectives while aligning their sights within the gallery space. The curation constantly creates different levels of intimacy through the sizing and placement of the photographs on the wall. The couplings of photographs are not literal (before after), rather, each try to extend their time into one another, producing an intermediate haze / blur within which the question of then and now doesnot resolve into a moral position, rather offers a considered empathy. Thus, changes, adaptations or appropriations of the campus as sometimes seen in Singh's photographs donot necessarily put us in comparison, rather, bring us in a continuum.

It is this aspect, that was finely achieved in the photographic case study of the IIT Delhi.

Dreaming

On what we call "classical"

Its wonderful to open a day with some beautiful music. The last month has been has been heated up on the debate of nepotism after the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput - a young Indian actor with a short career in the Hindi film industry. Subsequently, the entire film industry has begun to reflect, reorient and rethink their relationship and terms of engagement with the industry as well as its production and consumption. One of the most interesting moves I observed was by a very young Delhi-based vocalist Maithili Thakur who runs a YouTube channel of her own, where she sings for her audiences rendering classical, folk and sometimes Bollywood song covers. In support of the debate, she announced on her channel her decision to not sing any Bollywood songs henceforth. Her action was soft, generous and compelling, giving way to so much folk, and classical music that often doesnot reach the audiences in the opacity of Bollywood. Moreso, Bollywood has begun to claim its territory in laying claim to their production and disallowing people to make it their own by any means of reproducing and making their own versions. Such acts infringe, today, copyright laws and are subject to legal action. Smaller, competent artists who often draw ideas from these large institutions (like music companies and production houses) for their everyday survival feel threatened today. Maithili - the young singer (who has earlier participated in a TV singing show) found her way out taking pleasure and solace in limiting her self to classical and folk songs from around. It is here that I began to think of the how a classic liberates itself from authorship and gets assimilated within the everyday.

There are clearly two attitudes to the "classical". The first always tries to fight the classical, which has consolidated itself into a tradition, and becomes the benchmark and yardstick for evaluating aesthetic taste within a culture. Newer productions are often judged in the background of these, and often such basis of comparisons are dismissed and denied in order to make place for the "new". The second attitude is to reach towards this classical, to become as perfect as the work of art that has been set in history. To be sure, the "classic" here is a certain state of pleasure that everyone ought to become sensitive to, or rather experience. It is a function of high taste, and connoisseurship to be able to even appreciate and enjoy these forms. Two problems arise here. First, the presumed intellectual inaccess to this "craft" and second, its association subsequently with "class" (hence classic) that becomes an easy critique of the classical. In any civilization, the "classical" work of art is assumed to have been produced through a an act of patronage by the upper class - one that also enjoys its own place in history because of its economic privilege and the one that sustains culture through economic support. The "classical" is assumed to be desirable for it could become a symbolic means for appropriation of class through adoption of taste. However, when seen as a pursuit of the individual who want to transcend the earlier boundaries of any craft, the dimension of class doesnot necessarily stand legitimate. What I mean to say is that a fine artist would still produce something far more sophisticated even if the patronage was not available. Ghalib, the poet, who for a very long time did not receive any audience because of the profound intellectual depth and craft of his work. (One could still say that the institutionalization of their histories do bring them cultural privilege through discourse, which works towards their validation). But in addition, since these works require a heightened engagement of the intellect - those which may be enjoyed in the luxury of absence of survival exigencies - they are often relegated from direct assimilation in everyday life, and distanced from the popular or folk. In other words, to understand these would require some effort to get into the knack of the artistic innovation in them. This is necessarily a disciplinary aspect. The everyday consumers, whom we often call the "laymen" find themselves drifting faraway from the classic because they often do not have the same luxuries to afford the investment in these arts. Often thus, they turn to create something of another order for pleasure in their cultural life.

The bigger point however regarding any "classic" is the fact that it now belongs to no one. Classical songs, for example do not necessarily claim any territory through copyright laws. Classics attain the status of a theorem in a society, available to all. Most classic songs emerge from folk traditions - which have been sustained through patronage. Would this not be important to recognize before labelling them to belong to a class. What I am essentially proposing is this: that classics do not necessarily belong to a class, but must also be considered i within the private domain of its creators, where they are building up a way of appreciation irrespective of class patronage. Such a personal engagement makes us realise the unique potential of art that takes shape through the medium of the artist. Much of these classics were produced in an environment of healthy exchange of cultural ideas, where the notion of authorship was submitted towards pushing the limits of craft itself. However, in the absence of the modern day legal framework, these never bounded themselves to be not reproduced. Today, as Maithili decided only to sing classical tunes from the past, there is no way she can reproduce the original, rather, render in her own way. The classical, thus reduced to certain principles, becomes a much sustainable framework. This dissolution of authorship in the formulation of the classical must be recognized. On the other hand, in order for something to become classic, its access must not be limited, rather widened. In our cultural practice, the generosity of exchange and reproduction must be valued. Modern modes of art making privilege the rejection of the past, and avoid reproduction. The act of copying is considered profane.

In eastern cultures, for example, copying and reproduction has remained the principal way of passing knowledge. We can not say these have not evolved, or have not been critical. Rather, the evolution of these crafts have been so subtle that it becomes extremely difficult to trace the moment of shift. Chinese paintings, for example are taught through the tenet of rigorous reproduction. Indian miniatures were a well oiled guild system where there were specialists to make each stage of painting. Similarly, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music depended on a tradition of riyaz, where repetition was a means for sustained meditation - a process through which one could forget, and even forego authorship to the discipline itself. These aspects of one's engagement with one's art are often completely overshadowed in their evaluation as feudal. The modern society dubs these practices of the past as those that are patriarchal, shaping under a clear hierarchy of the master. What was relevant however, in this hierarchy was the privileging of the craft rather than its consumption. To be sure, have hierarchies not existed even today, those which have merely translated into the economic order? To critique the past in this light of its feudal hierarchies seems shallow. Yet, this is not to say that access to the guru, and therefore the art was not an issue. (It certainly ways, seen in the fables of Eklavya or even the recent filmic adaptation of Katyar Kaljyat Ghusli.) However, what these tales tell us, essentially, is that perhaps that unacknowledged learning was a threat, for the guru may not be aware of the critical orientation of the silent learner. The criticality of passing of art was embedded in the practice of copying itself - one that needs to be recognized and unpacked. Copying, in the logic of capitalism has reduced itself merely to reproduce pleasure at first sight, whereas, perhaps, in the past, the mode of copying carried with it, its own critical component, enmeshed in the diversified instructions and observations of the teacher.

The pressure of the original and anxiety of reproduction in the cultural sphere has kept me disturbed for a very long time. The poet and literary critic Harold Bloom has a sharp analysis called 'The Anxiety of Influence' that articulates these ideas within the context of some renaissance works of literature. It opens up a discussion on the moral foundations of cultural production, and makes worthwhile arguments. It is only imperative that we do not outrightly reject "classics" as productions of class societies, rather acknowledge their cultural values. However, there may be several more dimension to the production of value towards the making of a classic that must be investigated with more time and patience. What I do appreciate is the ease with which classics are able to lend us the means for contemporary cultural production. And for now, I will leave it at that. 

In Praise of Copying

From: In praise of Copying, by Marcus Boon

Balconies

The other morning I was thinking of the cultural and social role of balconies in urban space, especially in these times of the COVID pandemic, when most of us are quarantined within our homes. In such a confined situation, the balcony has been the closest release into the "outside". In its ambiguously integrated physical character, the balcony appears to be a wart-like extension from the primary body of the building. Physically suspended in space from all other dimensions except its connection to the building, the balcony occupies the liminal space between the interior and the exterior.  The balcony must have been a soft replacement for the tropical inhabitant's seamless weave into the outdoor of the ancestral horizontally laid out home, that is now hewn into the vertical assemblage of the urban apartments. However, in the urban space, the balcony assumes many more meanings than just remaining a place to linger, loiter or merely gaze into the happening or nothingness of life. In the limited carpet areas of urban living, the balcony extends the house into a spectrum of activities.

Within the scheme of the home, the balcony could be an architectural metaphor for alienation. It is the anonymous, unclaimed, "public" counterpart of the demarcated, claimed "private" interior of an apartment in a multi-storied construction. The larger inner livable domestic space scaling down its containment to allow often, merely a single body perhaps prefaces its association with a sense of solitude. In addition, balconies are a release from the often cacophonous constrained interiority of the home. Sometimes, on the other hand, the loneliness and silence of the home is erased by melting into the bustle of the street, or even the busy road. The balcony allows one to be semi-anonymous to the world through its part hiding architecture. When in the balcony, we are semi exposed - partly in partly out, neither grounded nor absolutely floating. This in-between-ness lends the body and the mind a distinct disposition to float itself into the space of dream and desire. The balcony thus remains to be read phenomenologically in its lived reality.

If window is the two dimensional invisible screen that connects the inside and outside within a house, the balcony is the volumetric space of the window that can be inhabited by the body. It projects the body into a panoramic view of the outside that the window merely peeks into. Figuratively and metaphorically, the balcony more often that not, has been imagined as space of escape. To be sure, in several modern vertical buildings where safety norms have necessitated for the construction of exclusive emergency exits, the balconies are often strung into such open fire escape staircases. In older structures, such escape infrastructures are added as step-child extensions separately, also evident in their distinctly different construction systems. Social and moral ambiguities that cannot be contained within the domesticity of the home, tend to leak into such spaces. Acts of stolen love, self-pleasure, assumed socially immoral indulgence have often been staged in this space. Balconies thus become a site of behavioural and moral transgression.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

In its outstretched disposition, a semiotic reading of the balcony alludes to Michelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam' where God's arm is outstretched from the body in order to impart a spark of life into the man (Adam, who is imagined in the image of God himself). Much as Adam compliments the figure of God in the artist's rendering, the cantilevered fragment of the balcony reaches out into the space, off a building probably to reflect upon its own inner incompleteness. Is the physically incomplete balcony the mirror of the fractured space of home - one that attempts to dissolve the individual it contains within the outer world? Such tendencies become vivid as we begin to consider various works of art across histories and cultures that feed into the imagination of the balcony as a site of union and the expression of love. Many popular adaptations of folk tales by Disney have consolidated the balcony into such a trope. The most impressionistic one is demonstrated in the animated Arabic fable of Aladdin, where his lover Jasmine is often found lost in longing and hope leaning against the parapet of her palace's balcony. In the absence of one's partner, balconies are seen as an outwardly setting to depict the inner solitariness.

Jasmine in the adaptation of Aladdin animation by Disney

The gendering of the balcony is a unique phenomenon. In urban multi-storied apartments, the balcony appears to be the primary domain of the female - one who is associated primarily with shaping domestic life. In many instances, the balcony is gendered as the space of female hope. The balcony is the social and environmental laboratory of the home that holds extra-domestic conversations, activities. It is a space of care and concern, a place where the body expectantly relaxes and retires. For the male, it could quickly become a space of performance, a space where the body asserts and stages itself firmly. The balcony's transparency may be quickly hijacked by the assertion of the male body. Whereas, ironically for the female, the balcony is often a space to disappear into. Its seeming queer existence in the architectural  scheme of the building (one that is liminal, in-between and purposely incomplete) immediately crushes it under the patriarchal hegemony. In such a reading the balcony's character is most productively exploited by the queer body. The tectonics of gender as explained above may be elaborated through the consideration of three artworks, primarily considered from India.

Snapshots from a Family Album by Sudhir Patwardhan

Artist Sudhir Patwardhan’s distinct representations of people in the space of the balcony set the home and the city in a unique contemplative relationship. In his collection Snapshots from a family album, a painting uses the site of the balcony to position the viewer on multiple thresholds at once: the home and the city, the inside and outside, the covered and uncovered, the private and the public. What holds our eyes in this painting are the figures of two women, probably related to each other as mother and daughter. The manner in which the women occupy the space is rather submissive, finding comfort within each other, as much as the release into the outside.  The mother holds her daughter in a manner of restraining her, at the same time drawing support. The daughter on the other hand is fairly poised, and confrontational. The view on the right is that of a city under development. What does the juxtaposition of the figures with an incomplete city under construction mean? Could the parapet of the balcony be that invisible mirror which reflects the inner landscape of the women contained within its semi naked space? In their reliance and incompleteness, the two bodies begin to dialogue in themselves a soft tale of patriarchy. In the semi lit space of the half-covered balcony, their inner beings begin to resonate. For the women, the balcony is a site to enjoy their reluctant freedoms.

Sudhir Patwardhan

In contrast to being inside the threshold, in another of his earlier works, Patwardhan posits the viewer outside the space of the balcony. The foreground of the painting, blinded by a stone wall and a city bus, immediately draw the viewer's attention to the space of the common corridor: the elevated balcony of the chawl across the street. A middle aged man and a woman are seen to be leaning along the wooden railing, perhaps at the end of the day. The busy street being overlooked is left behind in time in the eyes of the man whereas the woman besides the post seems to rather pick on the energy of the chawl and the city. Both the bodies draw very different energies at the same time. The balcony ties the entire chawl together stringing together the different rooms as well as the social lives of the people. In the ecosystem of the chawl, the balcony is a diurnal map – with traces of laundry, water storage, shoe racks and flower pots that become infrastructures of communication in this conduit of  multidimensional exchange.

You Can't Please All, by Bhupen Khakkar

Indian visual artist Bhupen Khakkar’s body in the balcony stands in a distinct ambiguity in his seminal work You Can’t Please All (1981), that begins to explore his own gay sexuality. A Tate entry on the painting reads:

You Can’t Please All (1981) was named Khakhar’s ‘coming out painting’, by his contemporary Timothy Hyman. The painting depicts Khakkar on his balcony, naked, watching an ancient fable be re-enacted before his eyes. The fable tells of a father and son taking their donkey to market. As they take turns riding the donkey, passers by comment on who is riding. ‘The father is old so he should ride’, say some, whilst others complain the father is heavy and will overload the donkey. The story is concluded with the fathers refrain “Please all, and you will please none!” For Khakkar this tale reflected his own desire to accept his identity.

It is clear that unlike the realism of Patwardhan's city outside the balcony, Khakkar's sight from the balcony is an imagined one. It is a place from where he is able to introspect into the personal dilemmas of his sexual identity and future. As apparent in the painting, the balcony is also the bedroom, the world outside is the playground of desire. The viewer situates oneself somewhere between the pink and blue grounds of the balcony and the outside respectively, flowing into each other. The fully naked body of the artist is only visible to the viewer, securely hidden from the outside by the semi-wall of the parapet. The balcony thus demonstrates the dualities of identity, hiding and concealment, private and public, in other words - it becomes a queer space for life to unfold itself. At once, the balcony's own existence echoes in the desires of the portrayed body, here, of the artist himself.

In the above instances, the balcony is literally the space from where the inner lives and landscapes of bodies get lived. The balcony view is indeed theatrical, and no longer appears metaphorical within the scheme of the architectural vocabulary of the cinema hall. It is indeed the space from where the the physical launches into the virtual. But in real life too, balconies are spaces where humans willingly wait to interact with other species. They feed the birds, hop with the butterflies, and ofcourse, nurture a garden of their own. The balcony is one's own tamed wilderness, a forest of one's own. It is a space where one steps into the other-world of nature. The plants bring insects, flowers, fruits - thus they add new colour and demonstrate the transitory nature of life. Through its delicate structure of grills and bars, the balconies allow plants to creep, dissolving the hard boundaries of building structure. The balcony is a space of effervescence, and offers the infrastructure of dissolution.

Balconies thus support and allow the flourishing of a parallel life-cycle. In capitalistic societies where every inch of an owned urban property must be put into use, such aspects are often exploited towards maximising utility. In its semi-occupancy dimension, the balcony space could dubbed as an essential unproductive space of the house. The balcony - often excused as the lesser space of the home, and assumes a hierarchy. Therefore in the urban vein, it is constantly attempted to be co-opted into the productive logic of the home. Through physical or infrastructural extensions, the scope of a balcony space is extended beyond its limits. With homes that have permanent maids or servants, the balcony is transformed into their make-shift room/home. In small houses with kids, the balconies in their detachment offer the silence and isolation for study, and manifest as reading and learning coves. In other instances, limitations of living space compel inhabitants to use their balconies as a space to store infrequent goods. Balconies are often installed with lofts and hanging closets that can double them up as stores as well as spaces of recluse. Other adaptations convert balconies into laundry spaces or puja rooms; for they are enabled with its own source of inlet as well as outlet for water.

Only until a few years ago, urban building bye-laws in a city like Mumbai allowed the free construction of 10% of the built up space of apartments as balconies. Over time, shrinking floor spaces of apartments, extending families and the desire for larger apartments led to the perverse practices of subsuming balconies into the "carpet" space of the house. The addition of a projecting grill, installation of fans or lights, creation of decks or closing off with sliding windows are all means through which the balcony is  brought into the productive ambit of the home. The introduction of the sliding window changed the character of the balcony and made it feel more a part of the room instead of it being separate from the room. Due to this, it began to be made into a part of the room. It was also installed for having privacy, reducing sound decibels and avoiding dust within the house. Introduction of air-conditioning necessitated sealed interior spaces to avoid leakage of cooled air. It is thence that people also started closing off the balconies and amalgamating them within their rooms. All in all, the semi-open balcony was now completely interiorised. The recognition of such practices has led the planning commission to dissolve the balcony as free space in building codes.

Finally, Aditya Potluri, Saurabh Vaidya and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar's "Boy in a Balcony" ties together the poetry and politics of being suspended in a balcony. Vaidya, perhaps aptly calls it a "no man's land", showing a view that is neither framed from the street, nor the interior of the home. Several perspectives merge into the frame together and hit the eye simultaneously. Surrounded by a range of realities and imaginations, desires and negotiations, claims and contestations, the balcony becomes a safe haven to perform and peek privately into the everyday - of the other and the self. In this in between ness, the balcony finds and becomes a whole world of its own. No longer does it need its host, it assumes the character of the flying carpet that floats into, across and away into the pasts, presents and futures simultaneously. It could be a site of unison - seen even in the recent chauvinistic thali-banging acts orchestrated across several countries in the spectacular appreciation of the "COVID warriors" that brings these separate pixelated pocket-volumes together; but at the same time, becomes the perfect place to hide, or even contemplate into the future that we wait to enter and inhabit.

Boy in the Balcony by Aditya Potluri, Saurabh Vaidya and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar