Image Vs. Text: Aesthetical Operations and Ethical–Political Spectatorial Production in Amar Kanwar’S a Season Outside (1997) and the Lightning Testimonies (2007)
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Image vs. text: Aesthetical operations and ethical–political spectatorial production in Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside (1997) and The Lightning Testimonies (2007) Torunn Liven Master’s Thesis in History of Art Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art, and Ideas Supervisor: Ina Blom Supervisor CULCOM: Elisabeth Eide UNIVERSITETET I OSLO Høst 2012 For Tyra and her beloved grandparents Abstract The thesis puts forward close readings of Amar Kanwar’s essay film A Season Outside (1997) and the multiscreen installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007) to explore how an ethical- political spectatorial mode is produced in the two documentary-based artworks. The applied understanding of an ethical-political mode is derived from what Okwui Enwezor claims is a new articulation of the ethical-political in contemporary art, located in the encounter between the artwork and the spectator as an increased sensitivity to the other, related to human rights, biopolitics and the consequences of globalization. The readings of the two artworks suggest that a particular “community of sense” is produced by means of an allegorical layering of polysemic narrative structures that interlace different texts of communalism, colonialism and nationalism from the Indian subcontinent. As evoked by Jacques Rancière, a “community of sense” designates the sensory fabric that binds human beings together, thinking politics as a sharing of the sensible. The narrative techniques also draw on features of Indian narrative traditions incorporated into new art history in India, and aspects of storytelling, as viewed by Walter Benjamin. The readings propose that the image-word operations at play and a heterogeneous exchange of media approaches the allegorical qualities and paratactic logics in what Rancière terms “the great parataxis” as an organizing principle with renewed political force within the aesthetical regime. The result is a kind of community of sense where the spectator as a site of meaning-making is woven into the composition of the work to create emancipation and a politics of plurals. The textual perspective offers a different approach than previous research history regarding the artist, suggesting that a narrative approach opens the image-word relations onto another political function. The textual optics enables an understanding of how the sense community of the artwork is construed, but does not access questions of embodied perception and affect in screen spectatorship. The thesis was a part of the master’s program of the research program CULCOM (Cultural complexity in the new Norway), University of Oslo. iii Acknowledgments If the world is a book of words and images, it comes with an ethics of transnational reading, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The book is also a vast network of signs, and as we go along we produce text even as we are written in text not of our own making. In this fabric we are together building sense communities, attesting to the political importance of being sensed. This text of course would not have been possible without the articulations of the others. My deep gratitude goes to all those who have helped me on the way: To Amar Kanwar who shared his time and most generously let me sit watching for days in a studio in Saket, New Delhi; to Sanjay, who came by with a smile and a cup of tea; to Shomo, Ravi and Dorothea, Gargi, Julie and all the others who enlightened my restricted competence in India, as anywhere else; to Levin, who provided the shelter; to Ragnhild and Finn, who helped to keep befuddlement at bay; to dear family and friends in extended family; to Tom, who always believed in me; and to those who tried to talk me out of the venture—we all belong to the same universe of learning. The faults, however, are mine alone and, as always, serve to provide yet another possibility of understanding. CULCOM provided the grant and the abundant interdisciplinary support to set off, and IFIKK also kindly contributed to the travels of this text, between Oslo, Paris and New Delhi. Gallery Marian Goodman shared essential research material, and the images. Holly T. Monteith helped with proofreading. At the Humboldt, the late David Craven taught me a lesson or two about Hans Haacke with a most generous intellectual spirit that lives on. As a lecturer and supervisor, Ina Blom’s sharp eye and thinking have been a strong presence in my attempts to access the field of art history from the present. Elisabeth Eide, as in a previous passage to Delhi, reminded me to keep the necessary grounding in political realities. Thank you for your poetic minds in the academic world. My profound thanks go to my parents, who, with unwavering support, took care of my daughter Tyra in the best of ways, which made it possible to navigate the work through its final stage. iv Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iv 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Research question: Aesthetical operations and their effects .............................................................. 1 1.2. Theoretical approach: A textual perspective ...................................................................................... 4 1.3. Research history ................................................................................................................................. 9 1.4. The research material ....................................................................................................................... 11 2. Amar Kanwar: Artist and activist......................................................................................... 12 2.1. A new criticality in Indian art .......................................................................................................... 18 2.2. Human rights and contemporary art ................................................................................................. 20 3. A Season Outside: The allegorical impulse ........................................................................... 24 3.1. Paratactic ordering and episodic serialization .................................................................................. 28 3.2. Imbrications of colonialism, communalism, and nationalism in India ............................................. 34 3.3. The Sikh festival: Runes of history .................................................................................................. 36 3.4. The border coolies: A politics of metonymy .................................................................................... 39 3.5. The military border ceremony: Temporal pensiveness .................................................................... 43 3.6. Emancipated subjectivities ............................................................................................................... 45 4. The Lightning Testimonies: Retelling the intolerable .......................................................... 49 4.1. Silenced, resonating narratives ......................................................................................................... 50 4.2. Strategies of storytelling ................................................................................................................... 57 4.3. Displacing the intolerable ................................................................................................................. 65 4.4. The politics of metonymy ................................................................................................................. 67 4.5. Heterogeneous media and their effects............................................................................................. 69 4.6. Witnessing trauma ............................................................................................................................ 75 5. Conclusion: A politics of plurals ............................................................................................ 78 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 82 Illustrations .................................................................................................................................. 89 v 1. Introduction Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 1.1. Research question: Aesthetical operations and their effects This text takes its initial cue from this reader’s first encounter with the essay film A Season Outside at Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo on February 4, 2006.1 Amar Kanwar’s personal travelogue exploring Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence across past and present conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, expressed an unexpected force that, from within the walls of an old art institution, spelled out new possibilities for a “different politics of the sensible,”2 as Jacques Rancière puts it. A joyous sense of coexistence on the film’s imaginative level, or a rare belonging within the readerly experience the film induced, emerged. Evoking compassion, it also