In the world we live in, the term ‘barrier’ bears a negative connotation: it is understood as something undesirable, a situation that needs to be resolved, an obstacle that must be overcome. But what if one conceptualizes the barrier as an asset rather than a hindrance? In this paper, I propose two provocations to reconstruct the notion of the ‘barrier’. In the first provocation, I use the idea of a ‘threshing floor’/ ‘threshold’ to reconfigure the structural aspect of how we imagine a ‘barrier’ to be: from a solid, vertical object to a flat ground of intense laborious activity. The second provocation probes the possibility of exploring the notion of the barrier in terms of temporality by understanding it as an act of waiting- an active delay in time. Here, I flesh out the idea of ‘delay’ by building an opposition between the ‘chronic’ mode of time and the act of ‘waiting’. The ‘chronic’ as the new time of the current capitalistic regime, is an idea proposed by Eric Cazdyn[i], where he explains how crisis becomes a perpetual state of being, imposed from the outside. Against such a mode of being in time, I take the act of ‘waiting’ as a performative gesture[ii], an active, meditative temporal threshold “in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.” (Schweizer 2). It is through such a conceptual reconstruction of the term ‘barrier’ that I analyze the life and works of artist Nasreen Mohamedi, an eminent post-independence abstract artist known best for her line-drawings.

BARRIER AS A THRESHING FLOOR/THRESHOLD

In her book, Elsewhere, Within Here, feminist theorist Trinh T Minh-ha writes:

“How to negotiate, for example, the line that allows one to commit oneself entirely to a cause and yet not quite belong to it? To fare both as a foreigner on foreign land and as a stranger at home? Be a crossroads. Amazed by the collapse that is perpetually taking place in oneself…one sees oneself in constant metamorphosis, as if driven by the motion of change to places so profoundly hybrid as to exceed one’s own imagination. Here, the space of representation is necessarily what also becomes a “content” in the emergence of “form.” (Mihn-ha 55)

Later in her book, Trinh T. Minh-ha uses the term ‘boundary event’ to transform the idea of a ‘boundary’ from a thing to a practice or a state of being, from a noun to a verb. By opening up the concept of ‘boundary’ in this way, Minh-ha is able to discursively blur the binary between form and content, suggesting the possibility that things that are presumed to be solid objects might actually be highly ambivalent spaces that one needs to inhabit, be engulfed by it in order for it to transform into a space of relationships. Taking cue from such an exercise, I propose to expand the concept of ‘barrier’ from being a mere solid object to something like a threshold.  (Here, I see a conceptual resonance between the terms ‘barrier’ and ‘boundary’ as both are presumed to be limiting, static objects that create spatial demarcations).

Originally, the word ‘threshold’ was used to denote the space where the threshing of the grain from the chaff could take place. It often required either a large room or a floor as it could not be undertaken on an ordinary beam of wood. In our times, its usage has been limited to mean the strip of stone or wood at the entrance of a doorway. The word that once stood for a place of laborious activity has now come to mean a physical object that we step over, such that its status remains somewhere between a noun and a verb. If one were to conceptualize ‘barrier’ in terms of a threshing floor, it becomes less of a blockage and more of an ‘opening’ into a zone of intense activity. If one is willing to inhabit its tension instead of trying to overcome it, I suggest that the ‘barrier’ can transform into a space where privilege can be unsettled and power can be questioned. In other words, reconfiguring the notion of ‘barrier’ becomes a productive as well as a political act from a discursive point of view, especially in a world where borders that have been imposed arbitrarily, create complex socio-political divisions. A cosmopolitan artist, as was Mohamedi, becomes an important starting point to dwell on these reconfigurations.

Nasreen Mohamedi was born in Karachi in 1937 and has been most well-known for her abstract line-drawings. During her lifetime, she travelled extensively to places such as Japan, America, Bahrain, Kuwait, Turkey and Iran. She was drawn to the writings of Sufism and Buddhism. Her travels to different locations and cultures across the world majorly informed her aesthetics and philosophy of life. In one of her diary entries[iii], she writes about the deserts of Arabia and charm they bore for her work: “In the midst of these arid silences, one picks up a few threads of texture and form.” (Mohamedi 93). In another place, she writes with equal enthusiasm about the sea: “That light on the beach. Those zig zag designs that waves leave on the sands.” (Mohamedi 85). Curator and writer, Susette Min notes that she was “deeply and intensely aware…of herself and her body moving in time.” (Min 21). Although, there are critics who try to understand Mohamedi’s works through frameworks such as nation[iv] or ethnicity, her art practice gives way to a migratory aesthetic[v], which has not been adequately theorized. In this regard, art writer Emilia Terracciano makes a keen observation about Mohamedi’s aesthetics:

Deprived of the ability to locate a particular site within a geographic or national field, Mohamedi’s compositions offer an experience of disorientation, which confounds the critic like a desert mirage. No longer identifiable, the artist’s discrete structures sever the connection between nationality and territory. (Terracciano 57)

A reconfiguration of ‘barrier’ as threshold can also work as a catalyst to explore the relationship between the self and the other- is it possible to imagine an idea of ‘self’ based on ambivalence rather than difference from the ‘other’? Here, I use the term ‘other’ as proposed by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism, where he defines the ‘self’ as the colonial power/Europe and the ‘other’ as the colonized/the Orient; the ‘self’ as familiar versus the ‘other’ as strange. In other words, he proposes that ‘self’ is defined in an external relation to the ‘other’ such that all that lies outside the ‘self’ can be called the ‘other’. But what if one chooses to assert hesitancy, instead of opting for an oppositional stance? Mohamedi leaves almost all her artworks untitled and her diary entries undated, implying an attitude of indifference/ambivalence towards gestures of meaning-making in discourse and history, such that to capture her subjectivity in terms of historical time requires, to some extent, a going against the grain of her art and thought. This ambivalence/indifference becomes a condition of her artistic practice. Her body of work lacks obvious referents and therefore makes itself easily available to a wider, more international audience. Moreover, her work contrasts sharply with figurative style of painting that was dominant in India at the time Mohamedi was active. For example, artists like Gulammohamed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakkar, who were her contemporaries, were invested in expressing a more subjective perspective in their practice, by use of intense colors and brushstrokes. On the other hand, Mohamedi’s practice involved a more objectified depiction of space in terms of monochromatic lines, marked by an absence of a well-defined spatial focus. Her lines are not ruled in a strict manner, they hover within the space of the paper, illustrating movement rather than stasis. And yet, her drawings, though constrained in their visual vocabulary, cannot be classified as purely formalistic. Drawing from both Sufism and Zen Buddhism, they do reflect a certain engagement with the idea of subjectivity and the belief that its actualization can happen through practice, thereby imbuing the idea of subjectivity itself with labor (intense activity) and movement.

‘BARRIER’ AND THE ACT OF WAITING

Mohamedi faced a gradual deterioration of motor functions as she suffered from a degenerative neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease. Nevertheless, she continued to draw until her death in 1990, at 53. This takes me to my second provocation: ‘barrier’ as temporal threshold.

Eric Cazdyn, in his book The Already Dead, analyses how under the current economic regime, our notion of ‘crisis’ has changed – from being “defined by its short-termness—requiring a decision on the spot, with no possibility of deferral, evasion, or repression”, to a crisis that has now become the very state of being, that which is “always at work.” (Cazdyn 3). He calls this state of being as the ‘chronic’ mode of time and aptly relates it to the field of modern medicine where a terminal disease is indefinitely ‘managed’, thereby deferring the possibility of death while patient remains in a state of perpetual crisis. While Mohamedi suffered from worsening motor skills, she, at the same time, lived with the consciousness of death for a very long time. For her, death was ‘an experience, like a line drawn and moving from inside the body out.’[vi] One can say that Mohamedi had actively resisted entering the ‘chronic’ mode of time, by not denying to herself the consciousness of death. And the intense labor of her artistic practice became a way to enact such a consciousness.

To enact a consciousness of death in artistic expression is, at some level, an attempt to capture the formless because death remains a probability in time. And evidently, form is the central issue not only in all her line drawings but also in her writings. The preoccupation with the question of form also becomes evident, as one observes the way Mohamedi writes in her diaries. In some of her entries, the contrariness between the sensible and non-sensible is somewhat broken:

“Thought+ geometry -geometry + thought

Layers + depths

Vast space through complexity of thought.”[sic](Mohamedi 96)

Nevertheless, her artistic efforts weren’t directed towards arriving at a singular form, but it was to bring art itself into a dialectical relationship with form. As such, form itself becomes a temporal category, understood as a continuous struggle in time rather than as a singular vision of ultimate clarity. Consequently, Mohamedi’s life and artistic practice becomes, for me, a contemplation on a specific way of being in time. I call this state of being in time the act of waiting. Just like the term ‘barrier’, waiting as an activity is almost invariably disparaged. Here, I do not use the term ‘waiting’ in the sense of a passive way to ‘waste time’ where a sense of powerlessness is implied. I use the term in a phenomenological sense: waiting, not with a purpose but waiting as such minus the preposition ‘for’ – when the act of waiting becomes a type of experience of time, a ‘form of attention’ (Weil 63), when we become ‘awake to the repressed rhythms of duration and thus also to the deeper dimensions of our being.’ (Schweizer 778). Writer and poet, Harold Schweizer notes: “those who are distracted wait superficially in the dimensions of space, whereas the ill and the suffering wait deeply in the dimensions of duration”. (Schweizer 23). Mohamedi, for me, becomes the embodiment of such a gesture of waiting.

Taking cue from J.L. Austin’s definition of the term ‘performative’[vii], this act of waiting, while being phenomenological, is also at the same time, performative, in the sense it can give rise to a certain type of subject formation, as happens in the case of Mohamedi. The role of waiting as a mode of being is very evident through Mohamedi’s diary entries:

“Waiting is a part of intense living” (Mohamedi, 93)

“To arrest tensions by understanding patience and staring starkly” (94)

“Complete concentration and awareness on waiting and patience- resulting in thoughts and action.” (95)

If one redefines the idea of ‘barrier’ from being an object to being a method of doing something or a relation to time, Mohamedi, for me, becomes a personification of this redefinition: what, in spatial terms, becomes a ‘threshold’, in temporal terms, becomes the act of ‘waiting’. Just like the threshold’s ambiguous grammatical status between the noun and the verb, so is it with ‘waiting’. For example, in the sentence- Waiting is what Sam expects us to do – ‘Waiting’ is used as a gerund – it is more like a noun here. On the other hand, in the sentence – Paul is waiting – ‘waiting’ is used as a participle – it is an ongoing action – a verb. This grammatical ambiguity bleeds into the semantic construction of the act of waiting – is it an activity that we do? Does it involve movement? Or is it a state of inaction? Like the threshold, waiting suggests both “a spatial arrest of form and the temporal flow of performance.” (Calderwood 366).

Perhaps waiting is a meta-activity; perhaps in all activities we do, as creatures living in time, there is a certain amount of waiting. And becoming conscious of this experience of waiting not for something or someone but simply waiting is part of an existential understanding of life.  So, what is being ‘done’ when we wait? What is the gesture of waiting? Can one separate the gesture from the activity being done? Samuel Beckett perhaps explores these very questions in his two-act play Waiting for Godot. Calderwood aptly notes in his essay on Beckett’s play that:

“…when things go on and on, when there is no defining outcome, no end, then it’s not what is said or done that counts but the style in which it is said or done.” (Calderwood 373). This again points towards the element of performance inherent in the act of waiting- the noun-verb coalescence with which I began.

Unlike other activities that we undertake in our day-to-day life, waiting does not manifest itself very clearly; one can never define the act of waiting as it is difficult to represent it through a specific gesture. Consequently, it is often visualized as a state of inactivity, even though it is a verb just like any other doing words like ‘playing’, ‘sleeping’ or ‘walking’. Yet, waiting is never an absence of activity. In fact, oftentimes, when we wait, we perform certain physical activities almost to the point of them becoming repetitive and ritual-like. This excess of activity (or an excess of time?) is something that one would not have experienced otherwise. In waiting, it’s almost as if a certain kind of living is being performed.

Mohamedi, too, followed a ritual-like behavior, in which the same task was executed over and over again in the minutest of detail; where some everyday tasks like, cleaning of the studio or wearing of a particular color of cloth were adhered to, repetitively. This ritual like attitude in her life bleeds into her art practice, evident from her line-drawings. The intensity of her focus and labor is visible in the intricacy of her line drawings, which bears the mark both of a certain eloquence as well as a certain uncanniness, as if it is something other worldly, almost to the point of being spectral.

In fleshing out the term ‘barrier’ from being a thing to both a space of intense movement and its experience in time, I have tried to, as Mohamedi does, wrestle with the very challenging task of bringing the act of representation and the experience of pure duration together. Nasreen Mohamedi, for me, becomes a way to deconstruct the objecthood of ‘barrier’ and reimagine it in terms of motion and change. Perhaps, that is the one thing that is common between objects and people: both are essentially embodiments of time. The space of the threshold and the experience of waiting makes us realize that.