On the Border: Shilpa Gupta’s Camouflash
Shilpa Gupta, an international contemporary Indian artist, based in Mumbai, uses unconventional objects, many of the found objects, to create works of art. Gupta uses several different mediums also including video, computer based installation and peformance art, and other more traditional and tangible materials to convey the usually political messages in her artwork. Gupta’s interests include politics which fascinate her. Born and educated in Mumbai, her art is themed with the politics of India and one of its next door neighbors, Pakistan. She has included excursions to the border area between the two countries in several of her works. She explores human perception and the way one can understand a work of art in layers of varying perceptions based on the varying experiences that different people have. One way that she conveys the message of the variances of human perception is to use methods of delivery that use both internal and external forms of transmission. For instance, in the work Camouflash, discussed later, she uses performance art that could be enacted anywhere, but also films it so there is a recording of a performance that serves as a work of art also. At the same time Gupta’s work is inclusive of many different perspectives, it is also is contradictory because it also questions the place where the work is exhibited, the experience that people will have when they encounter her work, and the experience people who may come into contact with her work may have when they do encounter it. When people do encounter Gupta’s art work they understand why she is a world renowned artist even if they do not agree with her message or her methods. Her work at the India-Pakistan border represents the abstract borders she sees in society between power and weakness, wealth and poverty, and art and pretense. These borders inform her art work.
Gupta’s upbringing in India and its political issues influence her work in many ways. One influence is a concerted effort in her art work to surprise people, to be unconventional. Gupra also tries to be inclusive by staging her work at places where anyone who is interested can observe, participate or protest. She sees boundaries and borders in many aspects of life, but one place where she likes to stage installation and performance art works is at the India-Pakistan border. One of Gupta’s recent works includes a huge ball of thread titled “1:14.9.” Gupta wound the yarn into a ball herself and it symbolizes the 1,907 kilometers or 1,185 miles of along the border between India and Pakistan that had been fenced. The title of the art work represents the ration of the length of thread, 79.5 miles, to the length of the fence. In other words, it would take 14.9 huge balls of yarn the same size as the one that she created to equal the length of the border fence. This piece demonstrates her fascination with the border which is near where she grew up in Mumbai. This border story interests Gupta because she has been to the India-Pakistan border many times and sees the demarcation as arbitrary because before Pakistan suddenly became a country in 1947, many people did not know the demarcation was going to happen. They were cut off from their families and friends by an international border seemingly over night. Gupta uses her art work performed there as protest of the border even existing. Of course that is not the way the Indian and Pakistani border guards see it and she has caused some trouble with her staging of border installation and performance art. From out of those staged episodes, came the artwork she calls Camouflash.
Staging performance art at a border populated with soldiers trained to not allow any kind of funny business may not be the most rational way to proceed, yet Gupta managed to get away with it. She believes that the India-Pakistan border is a perfect place to stage art because such a charged place gives the art that much more depth and symbolism. Not only that, people who probably do not normally see performance art get to experience it. Staging art works in a remote place fraught with danger is exactly what Gupta envisions as a perfect location. Nakita Jain of India Today explains by quoting Gupta: “A people's artist, Gupta does not want art to remain confined to galleries. By organising group shows on video art, she tries to educate the masses about the language of art. ‘My work has no boundaries. It can be understood by a four-year-old as well as a 60-year-old,’ she says.”[1] Not only can Gupta’s work be understood by a wide variety of age groups, but also by many different cultures. While much of her work is framed by the border issues, her work has been exhibited all over the world to great acclaim.
Besides focusing on political messages and playing with perception in her work, Gupta also tries to vary her approach to art. She has studied art, so she knows what the conventional modes of presentation are, but she prefers to create new modes and take people out of their comfort zone when it comes to viewing art. Gupta draws on life experiences, beliefs, memories and imagination to create art rather than a conventional notion of what should be.[2] Many of these are based on her homeland of India. Because she uses unconventional methods of delivery and focuses on the politics of art, she is not considered a Eurocentric artist, which is as it should be since she is Indian, from the Southern hemisphere, even though she has spent a great deal of time in the Western world too. Because she has an unconventional style and modes of delivery, she has reached many more viewers than other more conventional artists have, making Gupta an artist of the people and for the people.
One of the most unconventional ways Gupta uses to present her art is through technology. Her website says, “While Shilpa Gupta’s works are visibly technological, they use technology to throw light not on technology but on ordinary experiences. The most important insights into technology developed in her work concern the ways by which technology becomes ‘natural,’ something that we take for granted in the same way as the natural world around us.”[3] Gupta was an adult before the communications and information technology became the norm. She was a young adult, so the technology was new and exciting to her. Yet there are many people in the world who still feel adverse to the information revolution that changed the world so dramatically, but there are far more who see this technology as normal. For them it is normal because it has always been in existence as far as their experiences go. For those who lived in a time before computers, smart phones and the like were considered normal parts of life information technology is not normal and perhaps quite worrisome for many reasons.
However, so is nature. Whether Gupta is decrying the loss of the natural in favor of the contrived and useful “natural” with her art is hard to say, but that uncanny feeling of something that is not natural being considered normal must inform it in some way. The website, Invisible Culture or IVC says that Gupta wants to make people aware that they use their preconceptions of the environment rather than allowing themselves to experience it as it is. She attempts to take people out of that mode “Many of her works confront essentialist and nationalist notions of identity in the context of the violence that predates intercommunity and family life in the Sub-continent. Her work is particularly concerned with the estrangement between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which is cultivated by nationalist governments.”[4] Gupta wants those who engage with her art to understand that identities can be multilayered and complex and do not have to fit into a prescriptive box to be legitimate. In a society that is at one end of the spectrum becoming more and more includsive, this makes her work very appealing.
Part of what makes Gupta’s work so appealing to so many different types of people is that she offers people the capacity to identify with the characters she or some other performance artist play in the art. Sometimes the identities that she creates oppose one another; other times Gupta uses mutiple and oppsing identities to mediate between the art and the spectators; [5]Along with the offer of multiple ways to identify with her work, Gupta invites “interaction that is not based on manipulation and control, but more on invitation, suggestion, and critical participation.”[6] Participanats can be anyone who has memories and makes a genuine effort to engage with the art. The memories help to inform the viewer about the art, and the interaction they have with it is the experience of the art.
Gupta finds the Indian sub-continent a place of many layers. Her interest in it stems all the way back to its history of trade with other regions of the world such as the Far East—China and Japan, the Middle East—Afghanistan and Iran, and along the border of India and Bangladesh and the border of India and Pakistan. The fact that these places have often been considered second class, or Third World, nations because the First World people designated them so holds a special fascination for Gupta. The religious fundamentalism that has grown up in Afghanistan, Iran, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is an understandable reaction to the designation even if it is not acceptable. Gupta tries to demonstrate the types of frustrations of people relegated to second class status because their cultures differ from that of the most powerful nations in her methods of representing multiple perceptions in her art. One part of the identities that Gupta creates in her work is the resistance to the controlling forces of poverty and world dominance. Another is resistance to capitalism because the examples that exist are not inclusive or fair to all people. Even in the face of such oppression and adversity, Gupta sees beauty and art in the form of individual agency even though the coercion imposed through economic, social and political forces may be overwhelming.[7]
Gupta was born and raised, and centers her work in Mumbai partly because she recognizes it, but also because it is a city bordering Pakistan of 22 million people with slums existing in the shadows of some of the most advanced and wealthiest corporations in India. The many different types of perceptions that can be formed in the city of poverty and wealth, traditional family values and postmodern society, and the intersection of these perceptions help to inform Gupta’s art. She is also concerned that rapid globalization in India may have affected the ancient ways of life in India. These factors may have also contributed to the rise of the racist Bharatiya Janata Party that promotes India as a Hindu nation and shatters the spirit of tolerance and secularity that Nehru engendered. When Gupta was growing up, there were many violent episodes by religious fundamentalists including the riots in Mumbai in 1993.[8] These influenced her and she created works that invited people from Pakistan to exhibit their work along with her work and the work of other artists from India in a region along the border itself. This, she thought, helped people to see the perspective of Pakistanis as well as the view of Indians. However, Gupta was warned verbally by the government of India about preventing acts of terrorism and many people protested her work.[9] These episodes also influenced the 2008 work, Camouflash.
Camouflash is a combination of the words, camouflage and flash. These two concepts can be seen as opposites. Camouflage invokes images of hiding or disguising one’s self. Flash is a spark that shines light, or a moment of insight. The hidden and the moment of insight compete with each other. Gupta’s work stages moments of hiding and moments of insight. The work alludes to the old adage of the three monkeys with one who covers his eyes to see no evil, another who covers his ears to hear not evil and one that covers his mouth to speak no evil is. In Camouflash children and adults cover each other’s eyes, ears, and mouths suggesting that even advanced societies have fears and myths about other members of the society even if they have intermingled for years without issue. The message may be that instead of trying to tadvance peace and interconnectedness among the members of advanced societies, often the opposite is true and people begin to fear each other and sling accusations of terrorism and fears of war. Anja Tabitha Rudolph of Art Facts addresses the title of the 2008 collection of which Camouflash is a part, “Disappearing in Artwork.” She cites philosophers who say that contemporary art should not be just an unconscious creation of representations of postmodern concepts. Instead, in the work of artists like Gupta, the art is consciously trying to get viewers to reflect and act on the concepts presented. One such concept is that art is not just for the wealthy to enjoy and lock away in their ivory towers for protection and preservation. Art is also for the masses of people who understand the concepts of multiple layers of perception better than the wealthy do because the latter do not have to navigate a world where others’ perceptions matter. Randolph says:
Art itself is now called upon to create the unknown, to create the gaps and to apply this as the necessary principle which can generate new worlds. Disappearance in Art thus actively takes on seemingly paradoxical attitudes that nevertheless are reunited in one and the same phrasing. . . . Disappearance should by all means be understood as a strength, as a skillful aesthetic strategy, as a withdrawal which allows something else to emerge more clearly.[10]
The disappearing aspects of Camouflash are not the only criticism and interpretations that can be made about the work.
Bernd Huppauf, who wrote a chapter in the book, Camouflage Cultures, says any work that include camouflage must be linked to the concept of mimesis. Mimesis is an ambiguous term that means both perception and appraisal. Huppauf says the term camouflage and mimesis are related to one another linguistically.[11] Both words include connotations that can oppose one another. Camouflage is deception. It is a way to blend into scenery that is not natural to the entity trying to blend in and make them appear as part of the natural. “While designating oppositions, they also refer to identical techniques of relating to the world, resulting in repetition and creativity.”[12] Mimesis is imitation that is acknowledged as imitation. For instance, a wax figurine can look like the person it represents, but it is not the person and no one really believes it is. Yet, the person is evoked in the figurine. If the wax figurine could be made to be like the person it represents entirely, then it would not longer be a representation and would instead be the person it represents. Just like art cannot be considered the thing it represents or it would cease being art and become the thing it represents also. Camouflage is not the jungle that its multicolored splashes of color and random patterns represent, and no one thinks it is or should be. If it were more realistic and truly looked like the jungle, then it would be the jungle and no longer a representation of the jungle. [13]
Mimesis can be defined as representation or imitation of the real world in art. It exists then on the border of being the real thing and being an imitation of the real thing, between the reality of an object or person and an imitation that may seem realistic. In that way, mimesis is related to camouflage. Other related pairings can be created along these linguistic lines also such as the real and the imagined, evidence and value, fact and culturally constructed fiction, and description and value judgment. Mimesis can create a persuasive deception, but it can never replace fully that which it seeks to imitate. Camouflage transcends mimesis and can be seen as anti-mimetic because it is the end of imitation: it seeks to hide the object from the reality and danger that is real. It does not admit that it is imitation, but seeks to deceive so that others do not know that it is not the reality. The truth is a common and popular philosophic concept, but camouflage is, by nature and purpose, deceptive. It pretends to be what it is not, but does not want anyone to know that it is not what it purports to be. Camouflage designates transformation and shifting boundaries, but mimesis designates the thing it is like and how it differs from the thing it imitates. Camouflage can indicate freedom and creativity, but it also exploits the perception of reality in the viewer. It can be seen as a combination of the imitation and the deception of nature because it is animals who are fooled by camouflage and that includes human animals as well.[14]
Camouflash embodies these opposing concepts of both camouflage and mimesis because it openly imitates the three monkeys idea with no apologies, but also because it seeks to hide hearing, speech and sight and to look like nature even though it not nature. Camouflage is most often concerned with war. Soldiers wear camouflage and Huppauf says that camouflage is concerned with power and domination, not harmony.[15] This fits with Gupta’s interest in the border of India and Pakistan where there has been conflict, where solidiers, most likely some of them in camouflage, live. This is also the space where wealthy and powerful people wage war while the poor and unempowered struggle to survive daily. It is the latter who are most affected by war, and it is they to whom Gupta directs her work. She wants them to see each other from a different perspective. She wants them to get past the camouflage that makes them appear as if they are naturally the way they may seem to others on the outside and look for the mimesis—that which is cleary contrived, but not real enough to fool anyone. By looking at each other from a new perspective, Gupta believes that even in war, people can have more compassion for one another.
Gupta understands what the consequences of power are. She has been engaged with those consequences and the perception that commonly goes along with them. In an interactive video installation for 2004-2005 called simply, Untitled, a young female dressed in several different sets of clothing changes roles from a young person from Mumbai, to a bimbo, and to a soldier in army fatigues. All these characters have different positions in society and serve different functions, but they are all Gupta herself. In another work, a girl in camouflage clothes and hat moves about holding a gun made with her hands and figures. In each position she makes a gesture as if she is shooting the imaginery gun. Gupta is pointing out that violence is everywhere in society and people are fascinated with it and want to see it. She is the figure holding the imaginery gun and she imitates the actions of killing with it. However, it is not real and she and the viewer know it, but the instinct to kill is still there whether the gun is real or not as she demonstrates by moving about through all the different gestures. Just as in society the potential to kill is present everywhere in society. This untitled artwork preceded Camouflash, but the concepts are similar: the hiding under camouflage so no one can see the real person acting in violent ways that are now programmed into society.
Violence is definitely a common theme in Gupta’s work but it is not the only critique of society that she offers. She also sees capitalism as fair game for criticism since she believes it it is one of the main reasons for the inequality that is suffered around the world, which generates violent reactions. Yet people participate in capitalism fully aware that they are participating but perhaps without realizing the limitations to their freedom that capitalism represents. People just tyring to get by wake every morning, drink their coffee, take the train or drive their cars to work and submit to being humiliated, degradated and exploited all day long, every day at their jobs where they work to make a wealthy capitalist even more wealthy and to survive themselves. Even when a person uses the capitalist characteristic of consumption to try to change their lives say through purchasing a new wardrobe, it is just an exercise in futility. We can purchase clothes that are just like thousands of other people’s clothing because there are only so many choices offered. Choices are not change; they are just alternatives and those are limited. The media is responsible for some of the mundanities of life caused by repetition, but humans have come to accept it. It is part of the power of capitalist culture that controls its participants. Gupta calls it “"Dumb-ed in capitalist society, we enjoy being programmed.”[16] People believe they have the power of choice when they are shopping, but regardless of how many items are offered, choice is limited to what is on hand and the consumer must passively choose between the options offered. So while shopping is participating in culture, in society, in life it is doing so in a dichotomy of only having limited selections and no capacity left to produce when we are consuming. Yet people in a capitalist culture go on consuming because they must for the economy to be successful. Capitalism imprisons people in that mode of few choices but requiring that choices be made. Gupta sees the constraints of capitalism as political
Critiquing society as a mass consumption machine makes art political. Electronic media represents modern society, society as it is now. It too is a matter of limited usages of power: we can operate a computer, but it only offers so many option in its operation. There is a limit to the amount of software one can load onto a computer, and the software itself has a limit to its capacity even if the limitations do not pose as big a threat to one’s activity as say playing a physical game of football might. For example, not everyone has the same capacity to run with a ball or throw a ball. That lack of ability limits them in a football game in the same way that not everyone has access to computers and information technology. Because capitalist society is built on stratification, some are more able than others to access the instruments of power. Some may have access limited by what they can afford or the limits may come in what can be accessed at any given time. These types of limitations create the politics of power, which Gupta attempts to demonstrate through her performance and installation art.
People must camouflage themselves to be able to gain media attention, access and power in modern society. Gupta’s art has depicted several versions of this phenomenon. The camouflage is necessary to obtain an education, healthcare and to be a part of a civil society because to do these things, one must put on a façade that may not represent themselves but is necessary to have when approaching these elements of power. Each of these things provides a person with a little more power than if he or she were to attempt to gain them without the camouflage of one’s true self. An example of a person camouflaging themselves to gain access to the things he or she needs occurs everyday at the border between Pakistan and India, and at the border between the United States and Mexico. People camouflage themselves as citizens, as lumps under blankets, as cargo in semi trucks and in many other ways just to get across the border where they hope to find more access to the opportunities for which they are searching. In the United States people who cross the border in an attempt to access a better life are designated “illegal.” It is as if their search for a better life for themselves against the constraints of the society that seeks to limit their numbers should somehow not be allowed. It is at the border, where there is differences on both sides that Gupta believes the opportunity to view a person from another perspective is best represented. One can view the immigrant, documented or undocumented, as an “other” seeking to come into the country and share the provisions that are offered. That person can be seen as either someone deserving of a share or as a person trying to limit the shares that each citizen has by spreading those shares a little thinner in order to accommodate the new person. If we choose to hold the latter perspective then the interaction is negative and perhaps violent. The person trying to camouflage their true selves or their true purpose may react violently whereas if he or she were allowed to come in, allowed to share in the prosperity as well as the work that creates prosperity, there would only be positive feelings. They would participate in society and produce more than their share of prosperity. One must consider the perspective of those who want what others have because they have so little of their own.
This type of perspective in the viewer is what Gupta’s art attempts to provide. She wants the world to see how borders, especially restrictive borders that separate people, affect the lives of those who must try to cross them. While states and nations may be defined by the lines drawn on maps, people are not. One cannot got to a border and find a line that tells a person not to cross it for if they do they will be considered criminals for entering a country illegally. In the case of some borders, such as that which divides India and Pakistan, they are created in a heartbeat arbitrarily separating families, friends and fellow citizens making them suddenly citizens of different groups that now must seek permission to cross the border to interact with each other. For those who want to cross and are denied the right, they must find ways to defy the law, so they camouflage themselves both literally and figuratively. This is where art lies at the border for Gupta.
Bibliography
Gupta, Shilpa. 2006. "Shilpa Gupta - Global Crossings Award Runner-Up." Leonardo Electronic Almana.
Huppauf, Bernd. 2015. "Camouflage and mimesis – deception,evolutionary biology and imitation." Chap. 2 in Camouflage Cultures, edited by Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, 17-32. Sydney: Sydney UP. Accessed December 9, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j....
IVC. 2017. "Shilpa Gupta: Art Beyond Borders." Invisible Culture. May 6. Accessed December 9, 2019. https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/....
Jain, Nikita. 2009. "Eclectic Leanings." India Today, March 23. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://www.indiatoday.in/maga....
Roch, Axel, and Shilpa Gupta. 2006. "Crtique of Mediation through Art as Polycontexturality." Shilpa Gupta.com. Accessed December 8, 2019. http://shilpagupta.com/web/abo....
Rudolph, Anja Tabitha. 2008. "Camouflash: Disappearing in Artwork." Art Facts. August 29. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://artfacts.net/exhibitio....
[1] Jain, Nikita. 2009. "Eclectic Leanings." India Today, March 23. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/supplement/story/20090323-eclectic-leanings-739252-2009-03-13
[2] Gupta, Shilpa. 2006. "Shilpa Gupta - Global Crossings Award Runner-Up." Leonardo Electronic Almana
[3] Ibid
[4] IVC. 2017. "Shilpa Gupta: Art Beyond Borders." Invisible Culture. May 6. Accessed December 9, 2019. https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/shilpa-gupta-art-beyond-borders/.
[5] Roch, Axel, and Shilpa Gupta. 2006. "Crtique of Mediation through Art as Polycontexturality." Shilpa Gupta.com. Accessed December 8, 2019. http://shilpagupta.com/web/about/bibio/2006/axel.htm.
[6] Ibid
[7] IVC. 2017. "Shilpa Gupta: Art Beyond Borders."
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Rudolph, Anja Tabitha. 2008. "Camouflash: Disappearing in Artwork." Art Facts. August 29. Accessed December 8, 2019. https://artfacts.net/exhibitio....
[11] Huppauf, Bernd. 2015. "Camouflage and mimesis – deception,evolutionary biology and imitation." Chap. 2 in Camouflage Cultures, edited by Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, 17-32. Sydney: Sydney UP. Accessed December 9, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bh4b60.6. 17.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid. 18.
[15] Ibid. 19-20
[16] Roch, Axel, and Shilpa Gupta. 2006. "Crtique of Mediation through Art as Polycontexturality."
