How to outwit a mosquito

By Estee Oarsed

7th October – 11th November, 2007, GALLERYSKE, Bangalore

Rather than being a compilation of works of art as objects on display, How to outwit a mosquito frames the making of an exhibition as a work in itself. How to outwit a mosquito invites the public to question and to test the claims of art and its boundaries in current cultural contexts, while bringing into focus links with non-art cultural issues, imagery and notions that are constantly being contested in today’s changing times.

Visual art does not explain itself in the way sentences are read, to create sense (or nonsense). But then what are the sentences actually explaining here?

How to outwit a mosquito is set up in four interlinked parts. The viewer has to switch between being a beholder of images and being a reader of texts.

Part I:

Part I comprises a wall and floor installation with kadapa stones (commonly used to make kitchen shelves) that retain the incidental traces of the slab-cutting process. Hand written texts on the wall are framed within rectangular shapes left unpainted on the wall. These shapes correspond with the shapes of the kadapa slabs on the floor. What catches the eye from a distance by its physicality ends up as ‘pedestal’ or frame–work for the faint phrases, legible only from a short distance.

The 15 ‘How to’ – imperatives (or questions) bring to mind the titles of the little booklets popularly sold on footpaths in urban India in the ‘90s to the ‘upwardly mobile’. The most popular booklet then was probably: How to become a millionaire.

Part II:

The Hindu, 8th November 1995 is a collage made of those parts of a newspaper which show neither writing nor pictures.

“The Morleys should say sorry”, comprises a wall collage of newspaper clippings about the Miss World beauty pageant that took place in Bangalore in 1996. This event, organized by Amitabh Bachchan’s ABC Limited, brought turmoil to the city: it was front-page news for more than a month. It engaged the fantasies of the citizens and enraged a vocal and diverse spectrum of society. Bangalore witnessed peaceful and violent demonstrations, destruction of the offices of the sponsors, a bomb blast outside the Chinnaswamy stadium (staged by a group that called themselves ‘the Indian Tigers’) and many severe threats. This led to a huge security problem, costs of hosting the event skyrocketed and Bangalore was in an almost emergency-like situation: schools were closed on the election day of the Miss World 1996 as the tension mounted. The title went to Greece.

Opposite the “The Morleys should say sorry”, are two small text based wall drawings musing over a Miss India election in the ‘90s and the possible problems those who have mastered the art of ‘How to’ could run into.

Take away – a worldview is a collage for 56kTV – bastard channel, an international web art project by www.Xcult.org, made in 2005/6. Take away – a worldview shows the megastar Amitabh Bachchan in video clips, alternating as icon of Indian contemporary cinema, as a brand in himself and as a brand ambassador for ‘New India’. Rumours are that the financial fiasco of the Miss World event in Bangalore forced him to lend his image to advertising. In his earliest ads for BPL he explains this step to his fans.

Part III:

A printed line picture on an A4 paper shows a friendly image of Babasaheb Ambedkar in a western suit with the caption: Inappropriate use of an image may injure your health.

A window of the same shape and size, placed in axial symmetry on the same wall looks into a showcase-like room with a large glass window.

A not-quite-serious text written on the glass (Your nose sticks into my picture…) reflects on a Duchampian dictum that brings into focus the involvement of the beholder with the act of finishing a work of art. The text ends with a reference to the ‘finishing-off of a work of art’ by a mob.

A white cotton shirt with black silk-screened Rangoli-like patterns hangs on the right. Its endless left sleeve is draped and piled up on the floor.

Part IV:

This part of the work comprises of a letter from a so-called ‘Institute for Local Anaesthesia and Global Aesthetics’, warning the artists (in a slightly condescending manner) about the possible consequences of mistaking the art market for the art system.

Appendix: Within a milky blue rectangle, an A4 sized handwritten text image questions the relationship of art to ‘demand and supply’.

The works of Estee Oarsed often explore the play of the intriguing (non-) parallelism of word- and image- language as seen for instance in commemorative hero stones, the works of Magritte and in advertisements.

Estee Oarsed does not work exclusively with texts. In May 2005, in an exhibition in GALLERYSKE along with Christoph Storz (titled: Earlier, you know, the big ate the small. Today the fast eats the slow), he probed the walls of the gallery, stroking and marking them with his fingerprints. He also presented Take away – a Worldview with xcult.org at the University of Rome in 2005 and at the CeC & CaC in Delhi in 2006.

In the late ‘80s Estee Oarsed took a course in Indian Culture Studies with Pushpamala N., Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Rasna Bhushan, Alex Mathew and Sheela Gowda, who were then teaching at CAVA in Mysore or were indirectly affiliated to it. These were the times before the economic opening of India; Oarsed’s thinking is therefore not an outcome of the later cultural changes, challenges and problems alone.

He has also studied art in Rome with L. Montanarini and in Vienna with Bazon Brock and Oswald Oberhuber.

In 1992, he moved to Bangalore, which is where he is living now.

How to outwit a mosquito By Estee Oarsed 7th October – 11th November, 2007, GALLERYSKE, Bangalore