Have any questions?
(614) 292-3535
Contact Us
Read
Erica Levin, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Ohio State College of Arts & Sciences
Apr 12, 2021
Above: Still image from Raqs Media Collective’s Provisions for Everybody, on view in Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions and the Social Environment.
[Image description: A white horse stands alone, just to the right of center, in a grassy field with long weeds growing in the background and a single wind turbine in the distance at the center of the frame. The sky above is a misty blue-gray and a single bird can be seen out of focus, flying high above the horse. Far off to the right side, the top of a cellular tower appears on the horizon.]
Erica Levin is a member of the advisory committee for Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment. In December 2020, Levin began corresponding with members of Raqs Media Collective about their contribution to the exhibition, a video installation entitled Provisions for Everybody (2018). This is the second half of their exchange, which begins with a question from Levin; you can read the first half here.
How do you think about the relationship between recounting history and the work of making art?
A work of art, of making art, can be seen as a specific rendering of the way we think about time. It is of course, always one amongst many other possible renderings. It is one option among many options. In making a work of art, we neither look for, nor consolidate a unity of ways of looking at time and its passage, or of ways of telling a story about its passage. Instead, we look a for plurality of complexities, with different strands drawing from each other and yet diverging from each other.
These strands make thickets. These are contingent formations—but they are also historically perforated, and therefore open to various drifts and forces—entanglements of material, technical, and social forces, often with an uncertain compass, generally incomprehensible, sometimes intelligible. Crucially, a heterogeneity of time horizons nests within them – each of which are contending and contesting each other, playing truant or violent games with each other. As we all now understand, these are in small measure human-engendered, but in large measure escape human agency.
They could constitute a contagion; febrile not lethal, affirmative and life giving, setting up critical zones of collision and confrontation between expectations, readings and realities. This work of art acts as an index of these changes and transformation, altering canonical narratives, or displacing the canon altogether to rethink what it means to remember and tell a history. The possibilities for making history a “hot zone” are ripe for the taking when we make art.
Now you would ask, "How is this to be done?"
Once we made a work called Rules to Be Invented. And we would tell you about this work as an attempt to answer this hypothetical question.
Rules to be Invented is a chess board that scales peaks. Except that in this game, the knights have multiplied and overrun one side of the board to the detriment of all the other chess pieces. Dice dominate the other half. The knights and dice face each other, climbing up and down a terrain as uneven as history. The “game” proposes an eccentric variation on chess, where the knights’ calculated, “two steps forward-one step sideways” moves must try their luck against aleatoric twists and turns of fate. Nothing is certain. New rules wait to be invented.
Raqs Media Collective, Rules to be Invented, 2010. Three-dimensional aleatoric chess game, 61 cm cubes with variations. Image courtesy of the artists and Frith Street Gallery, London.
[Image description: A number of small black and clear rectilinear cubes of different heights. On top of some there are clear squares with milky white squares floating within that resemble dice. There are other clear figures atop some of these black bases, that form is unclear from this vantage point. The group of works is tightly installed in a grid on a white pedestal in front of a white wall.]
Here, we are interested in exploring moves that do not necessarily explore time’s arrow. Every position on the board carries latencies. Any move in any direction can change the course of the game. Nothing can be taken for granted. This is a sense of time quite contrary to the one validated by (official) modernism. And we think it allows us to examine the fullness of the present moment with a greater intensity than it would be possible if we were only interested in moving ahead.
The arts remain of significance because they help keep our faculties of imagining how else things might be alive. If we are interested in doing this, we must also learn to step aside, in order to see how else we might live today.
Doing this includes cultivating a nuanced imagination about how we live with time, and how time courses through us. Without that, there would be no question of thinking about a politics that can respond to the world, and our time. Everything would appear only inevitable. The point is to make sure that things never appear inevitable.
Two wonderful time-images come up in your previous response to my questions, the first, the paper airplane, and the idea of the fold, and the second, the thicket. Though one is tidy and sleek, while the other remains potentially tangled and disorderly, both are highly combustible, subject to rapid shifts or transformations under the right (or wrong) circumstances. This makes me wonder more about how art creates the conditions for us to be carried along or caught in the currents of history, to feel (as one feels a burn or a breeze) rather than to simply know, the significance of one moment as it resonates with another.
When you were making Provisions for Everybody, were there moments where you were caught up in some sort of unexpected lightness (revelation, flashes of insight, relief) or others where you had to feel your way around in the dark? How did the work change as a result? How does this experience (of being caught up in something) continue even after the work is made? Have there been events, disorientations, wayward thoughts, that have since changed your sense of what the work is doing or might mean still? I ask these questions in the spirit of a show titled Climate Changing, which implies something that continues to change, and asks us to think about how we register these changes, or even catalyze them, burn what must burn, and go on retrieving what must be rescued and remade again. For me, as a viewer, Provisions for Everybody initiates a process of learning to move with and through these kinds of experiences differently, to pause when necessary, to react in unanticipated rather than scripted ways.
We like the way in which you echo our figures of the folded paper plane and the tangle of the thicket. One cuts through time, changing it, and the other twists and turns it, complicating it. We could use these modes to address the question of ‘change’ that you raise. To talk about two moments that have stayed with us, changing us.
First, a paper plane of a memory.
We were surprised by a party of pigs in the ruin of an opium storage godown in the town of Motihari, next to the house where George Orwell/Eric Blair was born. It was a moment laden with uncanniness, as if the protagonists of Animal Farm had come calling to pay homage to the derelict birthplace-memorial of their narrator in sync with our presence in the place. Many histories collided with the pigs of Motihari—a history of the extraction of opium and its global trade, an aftertaste of utopias gone sour, an accounting of calorific values, energy and consumption, the persistent smell of caste, and the fading of empire. All this and more condensed in that moment to mark our surprise at the wormhole in time that suddenly brought us face to face with Animal Farm in Motihari.
And now, a thicket, a tangle in time.
Another moment of serendipity which compelled us to consider transformation occurred while we were shooting by the bank of the river Yumuna for the video titled Sleepwalkers Caravan, in our city, Delhi, in 2008. Our companions that afternoon were a Yaksha and a Yakshi, mythic guardians of wealth, habitués of riverbanks and forest clearings—two figures that restage the vigil that two monumental sculptures by Ram Kinkar Baij keep at the gates of the central Reserve Bank in Delhi, and who have accompanied some of our thinking. That afternoon, it was as if they had taken leave of their duties at the bank and had ported themselves (and us) to the banks of the river. Between themselves, this spirit couple—whether frozen by the gates of the treasury, or fluid on the face of a river – embody our understanding of the central conundrum to do with the congealing of value. How does capital accumulate interest by sitting idle and doing nothing? What does it mean to guard time so that it leads to an increase in wealth?
As the two figures floated on the river, they set up a conversation with a bridge that spanned the water, and the metro trains that crossed its length, with the power station on the far side, with the setting sun, and with a sand bank that punctuated the river’s course. Each of these represented different intensities of an occupation of time: the sand-bank’s ephemera, the many millennia old chunks of coal burning in the furnace of the power station, the to-ing and fro-ing of a boat on the river, and the diurnal rhythm of the sun in the sky. All of these elements contributed to a floating sense of untethered time—of an afternoon where nothing much happened, but anything was possible.
For us, the question of change has to do with both surprise and continuity. The sudden turn which alters perception, or the accumulation of the imperceptible that leads to the eventual crossing of a threshold. In Motihari, and by the Yamuna, the pigs and the Yaksha-Yakshi embodied both these realities to leave us with lessons in the understanding of change, and time.
Thank you for these opportunities to think further with the work, it shows us that the works keep changing, even as we think with them.
Back to blog home
