Work house

It is not only the eye, which can experience an artwork; other senses too can be part of perceiving an artwork. An existing hut was transformed to make this work. One had to walk into the work bare foot. The entrance was right below the original entrance, underground. Each person entering the work was provided with an oil lamp on a mud plate for light. While entering the work one realised that, the plate under the lamp cast shadow and one had to rely on the sense of touch to guide themselves into the house. This work was highly textured and the audience felt the work by sense of touch, apart from vision of course. They were led out by a ramp on the other side of the house.

Srinivasa Prasad

There is a starting point to this work, or say, a particular frontality is evident in B.H. Srinivasa Prasad’s ‘Work-House’. The onlooker wanders for a while around this house that encloses the ‘unknown’, before entering and unveiling a ‘personal awareness/knowledge/experience’ about it.

The video-play at the entrance displays a trailer, to what might be inside, only to be playfully proved wrong, always. For there is no ‘absolute’ version of it as such. Or it is just a half-truth: The artist himself as a performer, using the interior of this house as the set, for the performance, is what the video displays. It is like as though the artist is suggesting one (of the many) ways in which the interior can be experienced by the audience.

However as a journey into the house can prove, rather maliciously, most of the audience, when inside this work of art, carry the burden of the ‘memory’ of a picture of the ‘artist-as-performance’, when they physically browse the interior site. Those who have missed watching the video or the news about it have a totally different package in store inside. Otherwise, it is like recalling what has happened (i.e., in the near past) in a location when one actually is standing on that, at a ‘post-incident’ period!

The inside and the outside of a work of art are projected on to the audience’s psyche, together, though from varying levels/degrees of realities.

‘You enter this work at your own risk’ is what the notice on the board tells you and this, added with the uncertainty of the looks of this construction doubly triggers one’s imagination. However, the process of watching the video would have already considerably conditioned the viewer’s mind, to go in. In such a case the video acts like the billboards and photographs displays inside a cinema hall. It promises you a possible, unforeseen drama in which the audience himself/herself, inevitable plays the role of the performer, while inside, without an audience, no matter how very dull a role (s)he plays…

Inside the construction, the audience realizes that (s)he has mistaken the sojourn’s intention. It was (but no more) thought to be a religious walk unlike mountaineering with a competitive spirit, often for the heck of it. The participant, now, will be intuitively trailing behind the probable routes traveled by the original performer (always it is the artist).

The risky walk with nothing being even inside—as against the ones that are technologically-aided works in the adjacent hall by other artists—disturbs the set notion of ‘an art work as a readymade’ wherein everything is in a (culturally accepted) order: well finished, well lit, smooth, plain ground as it would be in an art gallery. It is an aftermath journed to Goliath mountain, in the route suffered/traveled by Christ initially. Going down and climbing up the steps and the further movements is a pilgrim’s risk (like, say the Shabarimalai Yatra). The journey rather than the end of it is what becomes relevant here aided with a kind of ‘faith’ that compels each and every one to assign a meaning to his travel. And one can always revisit it, again and again…The audience/onlooker/viewer ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ this construction have different experience. It is an inside-out kind of a happening wherein every movement inside becomes a co-traveler to the next walk, metaphorically speaking…

To make a long story short, this structure recalls a few real ones that formed the daily experiences of thousands, a couple of decades ago, in and around Bangalore/Karnataka. They might have been the tile factories or the new drama theatre that was born in an anti-Brechtian wave. The work can help to recall the deterioration of the former and the development of the latter, as examples, and hence (it) becomes an objective-vision. This is a peculiarly ‘realistic’ experience because reality (both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘the live’) is turned inside out, that too in a location ‘within’ an area. ‘inside’ a construction, which in turn is created ‘in’ the very place/city, whose history is being contemplated. It demands a participation, in turn, from the viewer’s angle, because, be it a Bangalorean or not, the audience’s cultural association with the city, in the past or present (or even the future for that matter) is bound to dictate the way in which this ‘Work-House’ can be experienced, if one would care to “enter this structure at one’s own risk”.

H.A. Anil Kumar