As I started my second year of graduate school, a professor assigned Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit as mandatory reading for us, in the hopes that my colleagues and I would imbibe some of her practices in the course of our creative careers. Giving a detailed breakdown of the dancer-choreographer’s artistic process, the book emphasises the need to develop a sustained practice, to harness passion into a routine. I was struck by Tharp’s commitment to what she calls ‘ritual’, or automatic but decisive patterns of behaviour. Every morning, she wakes up at 5.30 am, walks out of her Manhattan apartment, hails a taxi, and asks the driver to take her to the gym. The ritual, she says, is not the stretching or the weight training; it is the act of telling the driver where to go. Once she finishes this act, it reduces the chances of her skipping her day’s workout. It is one less thing to think about.
Tharp’s process is a proclamation of the liberatory powers of ritual, that frees the mind from the burden of daily decision making as the body enacts a predetermined set of activities. Motorcycle mechanic and philosopher Matthew B. Crawford argues for the practice of repetition in a similar vein in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. He suggests that individual agency, or the ability to think and make decisions independently arises when one submits themselves to established skill based processes surrounding things, such as the construction of a complex musical instrument.
Implicit in both these arguments is the scope for growth that opens up when we submit our bodies to an externally determined set of constraints. Despite the language of “submission” implying otherwise, Tharp and Crawford uphold that independence of the mind is born out of subjecting the self to externally determined constraints. Repetition leads to growth. We announced the theme for Hakara’s 17th edition with these ideas about our repetition playing in the back of our minds.
Visual artist Kiran Mungekar approaches repetitive cycles with similar concerns about growth, change, and transformation. In “(De) Generation / (Re) Generation” she interrogates the role of transformation in repetitive cycles of creation and destruction that occur in the world of material objects in domestic spaces. She says that unlike palindromic words, which see a neat reflection of a string of letters, to form words that read the same backwards and forwards, repetition in the world of material objects is messy, unexpected, and seldom complete. Each object goes through several stages of transformation before (if at all) returning to where it started from.
For visual artist Arindam Manna, repetition serves as an inciter of and receptacle for experience, collected and honed over long periods of time. As he takes the same route along the Grand Trunk Road from his hometown of Suri in Bengal’s Birbhum district, to neighbouring villages over repeated visits, his perception of place, space, and location begin to shift over time. Intimate devices such as his cell phone, or a pencil, not only mediate his experience of the place, but also help structure perception by recording and recalling different facets of these experiences.
Similarly, photographer Srikar Hari centres his project on the recurring urban phenomenon of daily commute, and photographs passengers of public transport everyday for three months. Expressions of the commuters suspended in daily travel gives us a glimpse of their entangled relationships with the abstract notions of progress and development that draws them to city life. As Hari photographs the passengers at the same location over a period of three months, we are struck by the pervasive monotony of this experience that evokes a feeling of being stuck in an inescapable loop.
Koyal Raheja’s “Stand at Ease” zooms out of a specific location, to show the pervasiveness of modernity’s desire to regulate, control, and homogenise for the sake of governance using the unit of the human body. Here the governed body becomes part of a collective, formed through neat repetition of the human form, organised on a perfectly gridded plane. And yet, it is impossible to eliminate the human hand completely, which reveals itself in examining her drawings, fashioned by the hand.
In the neatly gridded world of Raheja’s artworks, we see the other extreme to Tharp and Crawford’s ideas of repetition; Raheja gives us a glimpse into a world in which blind submission to repetitive patterns, often externally enforced, curtails individuality as opposed to allowing it to flourish.
Together, the contributions in Hakara’s 17th edition raise the question: when does repetition act as an enforcer of homogeneity, confining the body to a specific mode of representation; and when can it serve as grounds for growth, liberating the mind from the burden of constant decision making? They help us reflect on the nuanced ways in which repetition informs our individual lives, and society at large.
