Bombay has grime, grit, spit, shit, and runs
to the writ of the Marathi Manoos brigade. And at one time the city had the Brit
lording over. The Brit is gone, but chose not to take the grime, grit, spit,
and shit along to some museum in the isle to display alongside what many say
are loot gathered in the time it took to ensure the Sun never sets on the British
Empire.
But it’s another matter, a story
for another time that someone, and it’s said it was a Sri Lankan, responded
with, “That's because God does not trust the British in the dark.”
But on the Saturday before last there
was light, there was dark even if in unequal measure, and a museum to display
them both, a museum I rarely tire of visiting irrespective of whether the art
on display enthuses me or not.
In these two shades that’re
central to the cinema Bombay produced, until now that is, artists, people I no
longer know how to distinguish outside of their ‘work’ expect from their
stereotypes, came together to create Project Cinema City in the National
Gallery Of Modern Art, or NGMA, the acronym it’s better known by.
Bombay
as Cinema City is a cliché even though it being a
cliché does not constrain or limit the artist determined to find a ‘new’ way to
express the city’s association with cinema, Indian cinema.
Bombay is about Hindi Cinema. Hindi is Indian
Cinema if visibility is the factor to consider. So Bombay is Indian Cinema. I can sense a few
faces cringe at my attempt to equate A with C just because A = B, and B = C.
It’s too simplistic.
But then, at its best Hindi
Cinema has been about A = C in its plots where the protagonist is rarely the
cause and reason for the ending, instead the city, i.e. Bombay, its character,
its characterisation as a metaphor for life’s struggles, it’s own genesis drawn
as a parallel for rags to riches stories, holding up its capacity to level
playing fields as backdrop to create drama and play it out in a mix of
sentimentality, morality, viciousness, sacrifice is often the catalyst for
moral and ethical dilemmas the script confronts the characters with before
turning into a plot deconstructed in steps by twists and turns.
If you were looking to see the
twists and turns articulated in the air conditioned environs of the NGMA,
expecting each floor you ascended to reveal the next level of drama as opposed
to a mere turn, before turning into a full fledged climax, you would be in for
a disappointment.
Instead what the artists put
together at the NGMA on the saturday before last, and it should not come as a surprise because among
NGMA’s stated aims is to function as “a repository of the cultural ethos of the
country and showcase the changing art forms through the passage of the last
hundred and fifty years starting from about 1857 in the field of Visual and
Plastic arts.”
And Project Cinema City: Research Art & Documentary Practices, a
Majilis initiative with KRVIA in collaboration with NGMA and the Ministry Of
Culture, Govt. Of India, is described as a
set of enquiries into the labour, imagination, desire, access, spaces,
locations, iconisation, materiality, languages, migrant peoples, viewing
conventions, and hidden processes that create the cinemas the city makes, and
also the cities its cinema produces. The enquiries are then processed into
productions of text, film, art, cartography. The multi-disciplinary research
work, produced output and all the residuals together form a cinema city archive
that is transient and open-ended – to facilitate further readings, more works.
Elaborating further in the
context of the city, Bombay/Mumbai, it reads
This show, a part of Project Cinema City, focuses on the cinema of the
city of Bombay/Mumbai: its production processes and ancillary cultures; its
stations of reception and recognition that run through a complex set of
networks; the bazaars and streets of the city that hawk the footprints of
cinema; and the city-zens’ memory of the contemporary that revolves around
cinema.
The problem I find with creative
descriptions is it engenders a certain sensory expectation from the viewer
compatible with their own take on cinema that derives its metaphors and more
from the city (Bombay) they negotiate on a daily basis; in order to survive, continually
adapting to its very vicissitudes the city’s cinema includes as elements in its
telling of stories.
A city resident, in part, lives
the portrayal of the city in its cinema.
Juxtaposed with their own
impressions of cinema through the years, the reading of the description Project Cinema City
put out will have constructed a very different expectation of presentation to
the one they eventually got to see at the NGMA yesterday. Not that any of it
was entirely off the mark, far from it it forced the viewer to make
associations with their own residual remembrances of city’s character that’s
changed from the one the city’s cinema painted over the years.
And 100 years of Indian Cinema as
this project seeks to commemorate is too wide a timeline to capture
metaphorically. To compound it, the use of visual imagery as a driver to cement
portrayals of the city of Mumbai
and the cinema it engendered meant there’s gaps to fill where the city’s
landscape has changed, where its excesses have changed direction, where its
ethos has shown a marked change with the going of its original keepers.
It’s in these gaps in
remembrances the viewer, at least those like yours truly, expected Project Cinema City
to step in and fill it for them.
They tried but more as a
construction of elements abstracted at sensory levels the viewer steps around
and off the street on their way about Mumbai. The installations were not the
metaphors they could be but were instead representations in another form. It
was here the viewer was challenged, irrespective of whether it was a good thing
in this context, into relating to the exhibits. It was an interesting way to
represent to say the least. Creative, certainly.
This was evident on the third
floor, Phantasmagoria aka Chamatkar, where Anant Joshi’s settlement of moving wooden objects, painted with industrial paint and
radium stickers sought to replicate the
imagination of the city of dizzying speed and escalating desire in an
installation of moving wooden objects that are shaped in the form of
firecrackers and painted/printed in the idiom of matchbox labels.
The objects also resemble threaded spindles, the base for production in
the textile industry – the erstwhile nerve centre of the city. The high speed
of movement makes the objects ephemeral and yet desirable, much like matinee
idols who are often referred to as patakas – firecrackers.
The objects spun at high speeds
drawing passing attention though not quite communicating their intent, at least
not in the way Bombayites see their spinning city. They could identify with the
speed even if not with the spindle.
Desire, when spun, turns into a
blur. Its shades merge, shedding nuances, and acquiring invisibility. In this
city of Mumbai,
invisibility is a state of being.
If you’re about Mumbai and wish
to see life twirling madly before being whisked away, you only need to step
into the nearest suburban railway station at rush hour.
It’s on those platforms that the
spinning objects of Anant Joshi’s creation would find their closest context, a
realistic scenario, one that’s easily identifiable, and more importantly,
relatable.
While the artists at the NGMA sought
to gather Mumbai suburban railway stations into the ambit of their vision for Cinema City,
they did it differently.
Instead of associating with the
installation of painted spinning objects on third floor that simultaneously
sought to project a city of dizzying speed and threaded spindles of erstwhile
city mills, its workers travelling to and fro from shifts by suburban train
lines, the paintings of Fourteen Stations
by Atul Dodiya, rendered in oil, acrylic with marble dust and crackle medium on
canvas and displayed on the second floor of the NGMA gallery, depicted suburban
railway station signboards painted with portraits of popular Bollywood villains!
I struggled to make the
connection in light of the connection that could’ve been made.
By itself, Atul Dodiya’s
depiction juxtaposing a Bollywood villain with station signboards on the
Central Line was an association too tenuous to make sense in the context of the
expectation Project Cinema City generated
with respect to the city’s lifeline (suburban rail network) integrated into
many a memorable Bollywood plot.
Mumbai’s railway stations have
figured in high drama ranging from chases, escapes, romances, and runaways to
captures, and happy endings, all in the thronging milieu of the spinning
objects.
It was time to move on to other
exhibits. The Calendar Project on the
ground floor and continued on the first floor.
Even before K and I stepped into
the NGMA on its opening night of Project
Cinema City, it was the Calendar
Project I was looking forward to. Space reserved in the spacious ground
floor setting, intriguingly designated Gallery
Temporal, hosted portions of the Calendar Project alongside Table Of Miscellany and Bioscope.
It doesn’t take much persuasion
to become a fan of bollywood posters of yore and no show on Indian Cinema is
deemed complete without those posters that’ve gone on to acquire iconic status though
it must be said while I expected Bollywood to figure in the calendars on display,
reminiscent of old Bollywood posters, the displays turned out to be different.
I had expected a re-run of the
below imagery from Bacchan's time, old hindi film posters that etched the grit, the grime, the intensity in
strokes of colour driven by an unseen hand, the artist a mere intermediary
unleashing the complex reality the script sought to project.
No one who saw those posters
outside cinema halls in the years gone by could realistically resist queuing up
at the ticket counters. In those posters is an era gone by that compulsively
draws people into wanting to experience it yet again, one more time.
I was no different. Except the
calendars on display, retro all the same, displayed iconography (as is the
fancy categorisation given by those who only make sense of things if slotted in
mechanical contexts) and had little or no relation to the posters I thought I’d
be seeing displayed.
Calendars displayed on the walls drew attention of a disproportionate number of visitors. Everyone grew up with them back then. Now, almost no one does. The pamphlet note The Calendar Project thus:
A collaborative project to re-negotiate the process of iconization of
contemporary images in the public domain through the 20th century.
The works are mostly based on found images or on earlier works of the artists
themselves, which are then hybridized with contemporary readings and
speculations on the public and the popular.
The inconspicuous-looking individual works gain temporality and attain
a special kind of exuberance when collated and placed together.
Then there was the Bioscope.
Created by Kausik Mukhopadhay
with Amruta Sakalkar, the Bioscope was projected as A game of Cinema – City – Modernity Timeline, and described as
below:
Snippets of information, gossip, lore and tales swivel around the
cityscape and images of urban icons. The game is to create a tangible narrative
by arranging appropriate series of data through an interactive device.
I stepped up to each of its six view
ports and partook of the city in its imagery.
Adjacent to the Bioscope, on the Table Of Miscellany, a Collaborative
compilation of photographs, texts, maps installed by Shikha Pandey and
Paroma Sadhana, vied for attention of visitors drawn moth-like to the calendars
displayed on the wall across the floor.
But those who did stop by the
Table of Miscellany attempted to absorb the assertion of the artists thus: Books that are not written, magazines that
are fossilized, maps that are constantly being altered, texts that are fluid,
photos that capture the ephemeral – all collated within a structure that is a
library-cum-laboratory look-alike. The monochromatic formality of the structure
and the fleeting characteristics of the objects represent the inherent
frictions in the proclamation of archiving the contemporary.
Men, and women in frocks and skirts sat at
the Table of Miscellany, elbows resting on
the table-top, sifting through the miscellany.
Of the First Floor exhibits,
collectively titled with the intriguing WWW@FF,
the series Return of the Phantom Lady or
Sinful City, a Photo-Romance by the artist Pushpamala narrated the second adventure of the Phantom Lady or
Kismet (1996-98), a black-and-white thriller shot in the film noir style.
This time the Phantom Lady gets caught in a dark web of murder,
intrigue and foul play in contemporary Mumbai. While rescuing an orphaned
schoolgirl, she encounters the land mafia and their land-grab operations that
unfold through the sites.
While there were no known faces
to fit into frames on display, each frame capturing a key moment in a Bollywood
plot, it was the setting and the farce encountered in the exaggerated imagery
that drove home the recurring theme in Bollywood dramas, among the ones set in
the Cinema City – Mumbai.
The context of a land-grab in the
Phantom Lady sequence was eminently relatable by many struggling to hold on to
their piece of land (in the sky or otherwise) in Mumbai.
Visitors flocked in the open spaces
fronting exhibits, talking, catching up. Soon NGMA galleries from ground up,
through its floors – first, second, third, and the Dome, turned into an
occasion for a quick tête-à-tête.
Dressed for the evening, attire
ranging from the casual ‘take-it-or-leave-it-this-is-me’ to formals, it was
time to renew associations, catch up from where some had left off the evening
before at another place at another occasion, the crowd, prominently South
Mumbai or so it seemed had responded in sufficient numbers to the call of the Cinema City.
Staircases hummed to life, in
contrast to the quiet from earlier shows at the NGMA I’ve made my way to over
the years. It was a welcome change. And this is how Mumbai should respond to
its artists I thought. But no two occasions engender their representation in
art equally, and no two artists are equally endowed with creativity people can
relate to.
Among faces that floated around
from exhibit to exhibit, many seemed familiar. Had I seen them on Page 3 supplements? I
wasn’t sure. Had I seen them on T.V.? Maybe. Had I seen them in T.V. Serials?
Probably.
Of Sushmita Mukherjee, the loquacious
Kitty of the 1980s T.V. show Karamchand, I was certain of. I passed her on my
way down from the Dome.
Clad in a saree and clutching a
purse she waited on the landing for visitors to file down before taking the
stairs up to the Dome where Museum Shop
of Fetish Objects (drawings and sculptures by Shreyas Karle), The Western Suburb (Video installation
on Sweatshops of Cinema with 13 monitors and a projection on acrylic sheets), Of Panorama: A Riding Exercise (Video
animation and interactive installation), and Cinema City Lived (Map of
the city made of a network of PVC pipes with graphics, models, objects and
moving images.
The 360 degree view of the Dome
is among my favourite galleries in the NGMA. It’s impossible for any art
displayed in the Dome to slip up.
Under the aegis of How Films Are Prepared: Remembering Phalke,
the Dome, among other exhibits, had on display The Museum Shop of Fetish Objects - A speculative museum of cinema at the time of post-cinema.
On display were various fetishes foregrounded by Bollywood –
the human anatomy, garments, props, home décor, spoken words – are made into
sculptural objects cast in brass, copper
and aluminium. These objects, along
with sketches, scribbles, diaries and found images are displayed in a
museum-like setting.
And who can forget the bandook of Bollywood, two-fingered or
single-fingered, the iconic symbol that dispatches karma to do its dharma in
Bollywood plots is best remembered by Hands’
Up.
You are Under Arrest is peripheral given that few arrests if any
take place until the climax is well and truly done if not underway. That’s the
reality a cine goer will tell you, adding for your benefit, “Even in real life,
as opposed to reel life, cops arrive on the scene after all is over.”
The label read: This simple movement of both the palms
establishes a deep relation between Mumbai’s goons and Cinema. The object
underlines the power of mundane actions establishing their universality as a
constant ‘k’. The k, or the constant here is the city’s viewer who has been
witness to the on screen and off screen/drama. Made in brass the object carries
an external natural shine, which glorifies the two occupations mentioned above.
And the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh,
Isahi needs no further enumeration, certainly not in the context of Bollwood
themes.
I wonder if Amar, Akbar, Anthony will be remade into Amar, Akbar, Arvinder, Anthony. Anything is possible in these days of
script drought in Bollywood. Moreover it might not be a bad idea after all.
Across from the ‘museum’ exhibits
was Cinema City Lived (Map of the city made from a network of PVC
pipes with graphics, models, objects and moving images).
Conceptualised by Rohan Shivkumar
and Apurva Parikh, with structure and objects constructed by Apurva Talpade,
Elizabeth Mathew and Shivani Shedde, with Waterfront Image provided by Apoorva
Iyengar and Chetan Kulkarni, the description of the installation (in darkness)
read:
A compilation of the marks of cinema on the body of the city. The
pipeline network is conceived as the stitching pattern that holds the map of
the cinema city together – tracing production units, shooting studios,
exhibition theatres, locations of desires and utility and their interfaces.
At regular intervals, the viewing
ports carved in the PVC pipes glowed, drawing curious visitors into stepping
gingerly among pipes laid out for a dekho.
If the artists actually managed
to locate the viewing ports (and the exhibits viewed through them) at their
exact locations on the map of Mumbai city as represented by the network of PVC
pipes then I’ve no qualms in clapping my approval for their creative
representation.
My only concern was if visitors,
after having negotiated successive floors of exhibits, would’ve tired of the
theme to retain their enthusiasm until the moment they ascended the stairs to
emerge as if from a trap door on the best stage of all, the Dome.
I hoped they could for, if as I
said earlier, the network of PVC pipes with its view ports glowing with
elements central, and integral, to producing a Bollywood film in Mumbai, were
accurately represented by location of the PVC map, the installation deserved
applause.
Curious visitors stepped gingerly
among the glowing pipes the same colour as the setting, dark, before bending down or
stretching up as the requirement be to peer into the viewing port for a glimpse
of the marks of cinema on the body of the
city, the same ‘body’ each visitor to the Project Cinema City at the NGMA negotiated to visit the exhibition,
the same ‘body’ they continue to negotiate on a daily basis to survive the
city, their circumstances, sometimes ending up in darkened theatres to escape
all of it for the three hours or thereabouts.
The refreshments hosted on the
small terrace was crowded out by visitors stepping through the exit for a quick
bite before sauntering back to continue with their exertions from floor to
floor. Among other offerings I was surprised to find Appam figuring in the
menu.
The night outside the NGMA
Gallery hummed to life while the distinctive building itself glowed ethereally.
Note: Project Cinema
City was in commemoration
of 100 years of Indian Cinema.
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