Delhi-based artist Vivan Sundaram is among the most famous figures in Indian modern and contemporary art. His installation titled, Black Gold, thematises the ancient port city known as Muziris which disappeared after a massive flood in the Periyar river in 1341. The artist seeks to rekindle the memory of the city as an “imaginary habitation”. His imagination took the shape of an art installation in Aspinwall House, Kochi in 2012. The site offers an understanding of the deep-seated contradictions in the new-media practices of art in India. The work spreads across an area of around 10 × 5m with a height of 1½ ft.; it is made of around 20,000 small terracotta shards and broken pieces of red and grey bricks. Though nothing is conspicuously identifiable, there are slight suggestions of rocks, hillocks, man-made but broken structures of dubious nature, meandering pavements and so on. Their meticulous rendering in miniature is really admirable and visually engaging. But how far the visual text of this “imaginary habitation” helps us imagine the historical city ravaged by flood is the point to be probed.
The artist takes immeasurable creative freedom to transport the port-city from the historically real to the “imaginary habitation”. However, his installation fails to unfold a world in which an ancient city breathed its life. No memory is recalled and no history is re-told either of the glory of an ancient port washed away in floods or about the ancient civilization that is believed to have flourished in and around the city.
Vivan’s “imaginary habitation”, on the contrary, is characterised by the profound absence of habitation. We can look at what the artist himself says of his work: “What interested me was the relationship between growth and development. I was also interested in the idea of the fragment because the fragment is the accumulation of material” (The Hindu, 21-12-2016). However, these views do not offer an insight into the given work; they appear to be oblivious to the work as much as his words themselves.
The Black Gold on Muziris also includes a three-minute digital video projection. The projection falls from the ceiling vertically on the floor close to the viewer. During the filming, a camera was held far above the eye-level to capture the pottery shards ‘flooding ‘city’ to leave it under water. And later, 15 kg of peppercorns were spread over the water to create “a strange, mysterious landscape like, maybe, the moon”, says Vivan. The video image shows the floating black gold strewn over the water flowing in slow-motion. What is paradoxical here is that through the magic wand of imagination, the history or the memory of a city submerged in water, unfortunately, falls into the illusion of a “strange, mysterious landscape”. It is here, nowhere else, that his words and acts converge into a rare musical harmony but against his own volition. Consequently, the reconstructable historicity of Muziris has been completely wiped off in favour of visual pleasure that stems out of a disoriented imagination, which may aptly be termed as “memory against history”, to borrow Andrea Huysans’ phrase.
As one of the leading artists who in the early 90s introduced installation to the Indian art scene, Vivan Sundaram does not believe in the cult of the artist. It can be perceived how his earlier installations de-materialise the art object (painting, sculpture) forcefully to resist the commodification of art within the institutional framework of art practice. In that sense, the sites of production, presentation and dissemination of the work are expected to have converted into sites of critical intervention expanding the spatial or temporal boundary of the work. It is this specificity of the site that makes the site-specific art ‘specifically’ meaningful. As Miwon Kwon observes, “the work no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers’ critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing”.
Vivan seems to have disregarded or blindfolded himself against these conceptual premises that constitute profound meaning to a site-oriented work. Instead, it was for him no more a critique of the institutional practice of art; no more ‘a structural reorganization of aesthetic experience’ (Miwon Kwon), but a simple matter of stylistic preference. The Black Gold thus turns out to be a chic of the day and trick of the trade.
Art critic & author. Teaches art history at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram