No One is Seeing – Pragati Dalvi Paints a Day in Her Life LIVE

Frame: Kitchen; Portrait View

The kitchen with wooden cabinets, chimney, granite L-shaped platform, and off-white Spartex floor is the nucleus-orbit of Pragati’s home.

Dressed in a maroon top, black culotte, half-pinned hair, Pragati opens the upper kitchen-cabinet. She places a container, shuts the door, and heads towards the refrigerator. Gets a can, serves food and composes the variety on the plate. Another lady in a Punjabi suit continues with the chore. Pragati lifts the plate and leaves the frame.

Frame: Living room with a standard wooden dining table; Portrait View

Wooden dining table and four chairs are set in the frame. A traditional lamp above the series of family photos decorates the white-wall backdrop. Pragati enters the frame with her lunch-plate, comprising a bowl, folded rotis, and vegetable. She settles at the right corner of the table, eats, and at intervals gazes at the balcony-view, on her left. Simultaneously, she picks a book and flips pages. She lifts a morsel of roti dipped in a bowl, eats, and reads. She lifts a glass, drinks, and reads again. Having finished her food, she continues to read the book, leaning on the wall. It is a serene and quiet environment with the constant sound of a moving fan.

She leaves the frame with the empty plate. Returning to the table with a duster, she cleans the part where she had eaten, and again leaves. The frame is static yet mobile. It awaits Pragati’s return. Alas, she returns with two large peach-bowls. Arranging them in the same spot where she had lunch, she sits on the chair and segregates yellow grains from one bowl to the other…

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The frames keeps shifting from the living room (gallery, Van Gogh wall, facing dining table), kitchen, kids’ room to other spaces, depicting her as a mother, wife, housemaker, friend to her daughter, and a woman in search of balance and control, maybe. But today she identifies these interchangeable protagonists as a solitary performer, validating chores as a visual expression.

No One is Seeing (2020)

Pragati Dalvi went live on Facebook on 5th August 2020 from 9 am to 5 pm, particularly a business hour-slot. Performing chores, playing with kids, holding her son and ambling to make him sleep, strolling around with daughter’s dolls, overlooking a beautiful Van Gogh-mimicked wall painting and a sprawling home, which must have caught the urban-audience envy, were a few of many activities in her day-long performance art piece, No One is Seeing (2020). Re-installing cameras at various junctions of her home to video-graph domestic routine, she excluded a day from her life to purport an art form cultivated in prosaic drill. She exhibited the routine, conundrum and process!

“No One is Seeing is a performance that critically adheres to and is subjected to the constraints of the lockdown. It may even be just another normal day, uninterrupted by the outside world. The performance reflects the overlay of various emotions a woman goes through in her daily life in the privacy of her home. Unnoticed, unseen, while she makes a transition from one role to another. It becomes a schedule – primary, mundane, a repetitive pattern of her regular day, each day. Repetition turns into a habit, and eventually makes a natural adaptation to activity after activity. How does these movements affect the interludes, if there are any …? What happens in those intervals? How does a person evolve through osmosis of such variations?”

– Pragati Dalvi

The idea of No One is Seeing was not built in a day. Pragati Dalvi’s performances germinate from her beliefs, experiences and quotidian sequences. In Parallel World (2020), performed during the pandemic lockdown, standing with a large mirror on the streets of Bangalore for hours, allots a perturbed demeanor to the static object but urges and enquires into the pedestrian’s consciousness. When public is one of the crucial props of your work, you don’t have room to abstain from the political. And that is how as a citizen, herself too, she innocuously becomes a part of ‘personal is political’. But how?

Would you allow a buyer to enter the house while it is being refurbished? Will you ever step out of the bathroom, while showering to greet your guests? How do you like unbaked bread? What if your delivered product is not packaged or torn or naked or half-sealed? Our psyche is so conditioned that we take no time in displeasing ourselves for having received an unfinished product, whether it is common rice served instead of basmati or a waiter forgetting to add cheese in a burger. The value of the received product is dependent on ingredients involved in the process. Thus, we are tamed to not imagine the process as a product! The status of the product is highly well maintained. The product screeches appropriation, while maintenance lobbies in negligence and unworthiness. Nevertheless, a product depends on maintenance and preservation. The interchangeable relation, although necessitates equal prestige, the former wins the trophy. Is Pragati making an attempt to rate these torn, unbaked, and unpolished identities?

Conceptually, Pragati’s attempt of validating the daily routine resonates with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s approach, which involved social discrimination not only in terms of gendered roles but also against maintenance workers. The ‘personal is political’ is raised to a wholesome identity through the idea of maintenance art in Manifesto, written by Ukeles, establishing and supporting the hidden arrangements in Pragati’s day long performance.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art

A proponent of Institutional critique, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s artworks demand an unbridled empathy for workers, not technically but everyone who takes an effort of maintaining a product. After having conceived her child and juggling domestic errands as well as personal care, she posited the status of art to her routine maintenance work.

In Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973), Ukeles mopped the floors of the Wadsworth Atheneum, following each visitor to immediately clean their footprints. She performed for a whole business day, amusing overlookers. In Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), she interviewed the labor, maids, among other workers like watchmen, etc., collectively called ‘sanmen’ of NYC, clicking their photos and gathering their comments on art. Also, she shook hands with 8500 sanmen, thanking, appreciating, and congratulating them in keeping New York City tidy. She has been an unpaid employee of the Sanitation Department of New York (NYSD) since 1978. Yet in another installation, The Social Mirror (1983), with the support of NYSD, she installed hard tempered mirrors on the garbage truck that accumulated the city’s daily muck. It was first driven in the NYC Art parade in 1983, reflecting citizens on the walls of the garbage! Touche!

Ukeles practiced Maintenance art. She wrote a Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969. The manifesto highlights gender bias and the corresponding chronic discrimination between maintenance and development. The excerpt reads:

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife.

I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, up to now separately I ‘do’ Art.

Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e.‘floor paintings, dust works, soap- sculpture, wall-paintings’) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse.

The exhibition area might look ‘empty’ of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.”

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The indirect retelling of Pragati’s performance narrates the humdrum of any common house. Here, she is not  only an artist or a creator, but allows her family to be a part of it—the factor which supports the entitlement. On the lines of Ukeles, she is apolitically political. Subconsciously, she may have resisted blunt arguments but she desires to lend the lived moments a value that is not bereft of the importance, like the ‘process’ in making the product!

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