Art Practice as Pedagogy: Dialogues on Sanchayan Ghosh’s Institutional Art Practices

Affordances^[1] are a set of important paradigms which comprehend how our sensory systems process and react to information. Here, in Sanchayan Ghosh’s works, affordances take a format of visual discussions highlighting cognitive aspects of it to demystify the nuances of performative actions. Thus using this subtext to triangulate and expand upon cognitive affordances^[2] to comprehend the particular instructional scenarios in a performative setting of the visual discourse in the direction of a technique that is  eco-centric and perception oriented.

James J. Gibson, an ecopsychologist and expert in visual perception, distinguishes between the environment, and an animal’s sensorial awareness of the environment in which it lives. Gibson claims that the affording surface separates objects from the environment in which animals exist. Sanchayan Ghosh creates environments that are interactive and livable, laden with memory, history and information. But primarily those environments are navigable, or function to  situate the viewer/participant in rest in his artworks. Ghosh brings visual perspective and reverse perspective to a discursive context of visibility in his works. Performative space as a flexible and free environment is a key concept here; and this has a long standing history from the proscenium era to post independence ideas of theater.

There are circumstances in which one can critically read the term stagecraft especially in relation to the decolonising histories of theater practices in India. And this, in a colonized state, was addressed as problematic terminology by the artists who chose to break the rigid contours of the proscenium model, and replace them with disjointed elements and circular arrangements. Such a circular arrangement, even in seating under trees, was present in the country from the inception of an alternate education system. Anshuman Das Gupta identifies the circular pedagogical model of an active environment as rising into an architecture of knowledge, while talking about Shantiniketan campus aesthetics:

To create visually and physically an active environment which went on expanding till seventies, with murals being done in the seventies, also added to that great repertoire of forms, that was evolving architecture of knowledge; without musemising; an open air knowledge system they called an active environment. Or what K G Subramanyam had called a campus aesthetics— that is what was created— to which little children and adults of all layers: students and teachers and the public had open access unlike the museum^[3].

The aesthetic phenomenon directs the theatrical experience owing in this cultural context to the active environment where community learning and interactions are key.

Sanchayan Ghosh is a visual artist and pedagogue. Mr. Ghosh has created a distinctive visual language and a wide range of interdisciplinary works. He is currently an associate professor at the department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan. He has been doing a series of institutional creative interventions that support the development of subsequent cohorts of student practices at Shantiniketan’s Kala-Bhavana Faculty of Visual Arts. The perdurable Shantiniketan context is central to my discussion, that reveals the complexities of Ghosh’s pedagogical interventions, referred here (per his own words) as art practice as pedagogy. Sanchayan Ghosh’s works are highly experimental, and empirically challenge our understanding of artwork in general. This thick empiricism demands the application of cognitive affordances as a framework in interpreting and reflecting on his artwork.

Anudev Manoharan (AM): Sanchayan Da, what was the situation when you started your work in the praxis of Vriksharopan? How did you come up with the idea for the missing saplings project?    

Sanchayan Ghosh (SG):  From 1920s, Vriksharopan^[4], which involves planting saplings on a specific day during the rainy season, has been a part of the community-building process at Shantiniketan. There is an elaborate decoration along with this just to plant a couple of saplings; we work together with indigenous methods, rituals, etc. in a more collective framework through which we can address a movement between the ideas of the modern and the local. This is a very important activity that creates a certain dialogue with the campus life, viewed not merely as a site of production of knowledge, but from a lived association with its tools, elements and the nature that is around it. Pedagogy as art practice, in short,is the collective act of making and engaging with the landscape and its knowledge.

AM: Did we have any such activities in the past which also shows pedagogy as art practice? Or is it a very recently situated idea ?

SG: See the Black House Project^[5]. If you take, for example, what happened in the 1940s: it was a dialogue with the local mud house making. But it was also a re-engagement with that tradition and a collaboration between artists like Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, etc., who were the faculties of the fine arts institute, and their interaction with the local mud house makers from the Santal tribal villages. The students would join in and together they would create this construction which is basically a very unique structure almost like three rectangles placed together, one overlapping the other, in a very futuristic sense. If I understand this well, university education has always been seen as a really interwoven movement between the institutional space and the practices that are present around it. Like the murals on the external walls of Black House, the mud building is a very local indigenously built construction that re-engages with imagery of wider and newer concepts of an Asian background and culture integrated from various time periods. As a result, Shantiniketan, which has been working in this area for the past hundred years, has changed and expanded the conceptualization over time.

I was very inspired by the idea of bringing forth the process, which is an integral part of making. And in that process, my whole intention of engaging with institutions is looking at institutional spaces as the future of community spaces and as dynamic community spaces which change; having in mind the institutional spaces where its inherent restrictions also have a distinctive function. Pedagogy derives its inspirations from the new developments of art, technologies, and public configurations of multiple circles. These overlapping and converging or diverging communities explore art practices which directly engage to the local realities.

AM : How do you relate these very blurry interdisciplinary ideas of community based knowledge and their overlapping circles of cognitive affordances to concrete works such as মোনোgobbet (monogobbet) society? It seems it has a lot of spatial strategies like active cultural mapping built into it.

SG : মোনোgobbet Society is a group of conscious, logical fools who have come together to form a unique group in Shantiniketan. The main motto of this society is to conduct a series of meaningless মোনোgobbet adventures in and around Shantiniketan from time to time. In this respect we have declared the 1st of August as the মোনোgobbet day. We conduct informal activities on campus. Once we researched the number of trees planted in the last one hundred years on the Shantiniketan premises, based on the data published by the university publication. It was an elaborate research. Sometimes when you look at public spaces, it’s not always important to bring in serious methodologies into question, but to engage with it in very informal spaces and try to find those gaps in the public spaces where you can and develop certain dialogues and conversation. We generated a map of the university, and then located the trees based on where they were planted. On মোনোgobbet day, the group displayed the map all around the campus. We joined together in the center of the university, and made an effort to name all the trees and look for them. We asked: Where are those trees? How have the living trees survived? We asked faculty members from different disciplines, like botany, and social sciences, and together we moved inside the campus to look for the trees’ missing saplings. This is a kind of revisiting of the tradition of tree planting inside the landscape of Shantiniketan. We found them in some places and we couldn’t in some other places. In the cases where saplings were absent, we wrote slips with the text “missing”, and pinned and mapped those placards.

AM: What was the institution doing in response to anything that could be perceived as ironically going against its own administrative restraints?

SG: It was a really informal interaction with the place. We were unable to enter certain places because the university campus has been changing and there are currently too many new walls being built. The context and the entire campus has changed. The three-day event evolved into a technique for re-engaging with the “landscape transformation” (Ahmed, 190) of the location, which is meant to be an active component of the environmental dialogue Tagore constituted. As a result, after two to three days of মোনোgobbets searching, some trees were discovered while others remained undiscovered. As the project progressed, the group placed “tree missing” placards, wherever the saplings were missing. The placards were promptly taken down after two days since the institution did not take it lightly. But the question remains: “where have those trees gone?”; this reverberated throughout, even among the university administrators’ conversations. (…smiles)

AM: I have gone through your writing in one of the editions responding to Bauhaus Imaginsita; in that report, you talk about your experience of working with Badal Sarkar’s workshops, and with other theater personas. Can you share in detail some of your experiences and learnings from those workshops?

SG: In 1994, Badal da’s workshop was located in Shantiniketan. During those days I was a studio practitioner in the Department of Painting; and this workshop inspired me because it gave me access to a new realm of community learning and making together. His concept of working to create a democratic circle, workshop as a democratic space of sharing, listening, learning, and creating together, and the idea of the circle as a democratic space of equally positioning yourself, also facing each other, looking at each other, and making eye contact, as well as having a kind of ownership of space and moving in a certain way that is not linear, these ideas started to influence my thought process. It was contrasting to the colonial model of education.

This also revealed the possibility of learning and sharing through making. Many of his classes, in which you collaborate with other participants, are about the body through sound or through the rhythm relationship of space and body. What you communicate is not just what you are feeling; it is also what another person has noticed. It’s interesting that he never let visitors into his workshop. It was intriguing to me how community interaction might develop in the future and how the manufacturing and viewing processes would shape the entire activity.

Therefore, I believe Badal da’s approach to the workshop is the pedagogical model of learning and unlearning concurrently, in addition to concurrent observation and listening. These are two significant tools that later evolved into significant methods in my practice as I sought to take my work outside the studio and into a more public setting. I was also interested in finding ways to inspire group interactions where the relationship between the individual and the collective is more reciprocal than linear.

AM: In your works, utterances and rhyming play a significant role, similar to what we experience in Incomplete Circles: Invisible Voices (2012). This question was in my mind; while visiting a part of that workshop, but when you took out those architectural resonances to the public space, and installed it… it felt different.

SG: Workshops for me turn into a crucial hub for collaboration and group learning, and Kochi represents a conversation with a more diversified community. For me, the way that this kind of tool operates and how specific dialogues are produced is open-ended. I don’t really use a particular process when I engage with the community. It is via conversations with the locals of a particular location that I learn about the practises of the community and also expose myself as a practitioner. This project was initiated as part of the Kochi Muziris Biennial, which has been taking place since 2012 in Kerala. Through my work I wanted to demonstrate how, as a fort city, Kochi has historically been home to a variety of groups dating back to the sixth century AD. And while there is a dominant public language, which is Malayalam, many languages are spoken in the city as private languages.

Kochi has a long history of religious ethnological transitions and cohabitation. Therefore, I was extremely curious to know how the two different modes of knowledge—one being the mother tongue and the other being the private languages that people speak in their homes—transacted with one another. It’s a discussion about self-determination in the same way that people from different regions of the nation and the world may converge and coexist while maintaining their own identities and preconceived notions of the general public. I then began observing these various communities in Kochi and shared with them a particular kind of game that I had acquired from Badal Sarkar— a theater game using sound movements. Through the use of a sound game sound may be used to travel between various words with various origins. I explained this strategy to the community members, who then used it to choose words from their private mother tongue and look up equivalents in Malayalam, which is the language they use in public, or in English, which is also widely spoken. On a personal level, a process of moving from one word to the next would be investigated.

I conducted workshops in formal and informal settings with various religious and ethnographic groupings. Both locations were designed to convey the groups’ informality and how they would now discuss various words and things that are a part of their daily lives. The sound recordings from the workshop were then compiled and presented in a public space.

Therefore, choosing the type of area for this to be shared in was crucial in determining the style of sharing. So these are on the sea shore at Fort Kochi. These public structures are also underutilized; but I considered them to be very significant and intriguing locations where I could include many voices– the sound improvisations and sound game contributed by the various community members– into a particular discourse.

AM: However the kind of sonic experience one gets while visiting the work- Incomplete Circles: Invisible Voices, finally installed in public, is not what one experiences while visiting it in its initial stage. A very cognisant sonic experience previously recorded inside a workshop environment moves into public for listening. How should one read this work?

SG: I thought these are very important and interesting spaces where I can bring in the voices of different people… their sound improvisations and sound games. Contributed by the different members of the community together into a certain conversation, it was created as a form of sound choreography and installed in the space and there were some boxes (Figure 4: Incomplete Circles: Invisible Voices). Provisions were made so that attendees may participate in the sound games at the public viewing as well as sit back and take in the various levels and improvisations of the public sound installed, attempting to attract a broader audience to a particular community engagement. So the work was done on two levels: there were private community dialogues around sound improvisations which were very internal, then it was shared into a public space as a larger viewing and participatory process.

AM: In your works, one can see a repeating imagery of public address equipment (PAE), various social addressing systems and elements like audio video kiosks, and advertising canopies. In contrast, your institution based artworks substitute the above mentioned elements with tactile, detailed and diagrammatic calligrams that evoke the edges of art history and referentiality within that realm, where the students participate in an exciting ritual you create to make the teaching more active. Can you elaborate on this?

SG: While integrating with Shantiniketan’s educational tradition, I was observing many visual elements: those which were active participants in the event, but did not necessarily take on an independent identity during the experience. Even when conducting a class room study, the body, the material, and the light are all used, but when they are presented in a specific way, they take on the characteristics of that medium. However, each of these elements has its own development, history, and evolution.

Shadow-casting became very interesting and important in this way: it is about how different lights, bodies, and materials respond differently; what is exposed and what remains hidden; the space acts as a memory of that tool of light that falls directly on the material. How do you create this kind of possibility of the different disciplinary tools as active components in the final experience, instead of becoming the passive methods which leads to a certain kind of outcome which is not necessarily carrying all those memories in a direct way? That way for me all theatrical tools are actively part of any representational form; I engage with the question of how you retain it as part of the communication system and not make it only an  element of the system.

AM: You bring up the subject of reverse perspective in the artwork created with silk screens and other means. You also utilize an architectural corner as a projector screen (Figure 5: Reversed Perspective (2013)) or to metaphorically symbolize specific characteristics of reverse perspective…

SG: Architectural settings have their own potential semiotic meanings. They are not merely a chamber or a niche. Every one of the areas, whether it be a roof, corner, or meeting place, can have a particular type of composition. It has a language which can accommodate certain kinds of conversations, whether through light or body or whatever. It is also important what you are incorporating in that geometrical situation and how the geometry is not just form but an active space to inhabit a certain kind of physicality, be it through the body, the light, or another method.

It is also crucial to include an active area to inhabit a particular kind of physicality in the geometric situation, rather than just form. The active area finds methods to coexist in a particular performative memory; participating in multidisciplinary dialogues that examine the unique cinematic potential of different disciplines. Therefore, finding ways to coexist in a particular performative memory becomes the goal of the entire idea of Reversed Perspective. Active area is what opens up the discourse into a kind of engagement with multidisciplinary dialogues and looking at individual semiotic possibilities of individual disciplines.

AM: You stated this during the exhibition of the work Reversed Perspective in the red landscape series, that the process of direct interaction with a specificity of location and site has replaced the territory of representational style generated from colonial hegemony as the means of engaging with landscape. So how does that Birbhum landscape series fit in as we transition from colonial to a transdisciplinary paradigm that we are experiencing?

SG: Because I think of landscape as a practice– W J T Mitchell thinks of landscape as war– my work with landscapes inhabits different ways of human engagement. It is not just the presentational form, it is also a cultivational form, it is also a terrain, it is also a discourse around control of geopolitics. Landscape itself is a transforming space. So when we say landscapes as representation; then it is not complete through one tool or one methodology. It has to also be incorporated in such a way that the visibility of these independent tools is there. It determines landscape into a configuration and not just a cynic content so that configuration has a lot of possibility in a sense different disciplinary tools whether it is through soil testing or whether it is through mapping or whether it is through history writing or whether it is sociological mapping of different economic Census reports. So the possibility of the individual tools can create multiple ways of engaging with the landscape. I am basically following a Binod Bihari methodology, but then taking it further into certain disciplinary interpretations as an active component of space. I like it when Ramkinkar says that “I’m not painting time, but painting space”^[6]. For me that speciality of landscape has evolved into a very multidisciplinary discourse that the notion of space of landscape is being interpreted through so many tools nowadays and how the body becomes an active component that it is not just abstraction, it is a physical entity how to create a bodily engagement as an experience of the landscape. In that way I often fail because representation of landscape is always incomplete if it is approached in a singular disciplinary method.