Off Modern: A Conversation with Raqs
1. Moinak Biswas: Your recent show in Calcutta, ‘Premontions’, seems to speak of the fractures within the flow of time that we all inhabit. An internally anomalous time has engaged you as artists for some time now (‘The Imposter in the Waiting Room’, the clock project, the factory project at Bolzano). What makes it important for you to address this question now? What does an apprehension of ‘our time’ have to do with this inquiry? In ‘Premonitions’ I felt there was an attempt to inflict an arrhythmic pulse of sorts on the viewer. Is it possible to talk about the politics of this? Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi): Lets try responding to your question with a query of our own, a speculation. What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we could fold it into a boat or an airplane, what kind of voyage would we find ourselves embarking on? Would we realize that our sense of our time, the time(s) we live in today, are also amenable to being folded in a way that can make us sense other times in a way that is suddenly up close and personal even as they retain their chronological distances? Premonitions is one manifestation of our ongoing engagement with time and temporality. We are interested in how the present instant comes to us striated with other times (real and imagined pasts, possible alternatives to the present, anticipated futures, and loops that connect the three times) and other ways of thinking about time. What this does is to keep a window in our collective consciousness perpetually open. This helps us avoid the claustrophobia of thinking that just because things are the way they appear now all discussion and questions about how else things might be – how things might have been – and how things might yet become – are void. As you can see, this is not so much the question of introducing the viewer to an ‘arrhythmic’ pulse, of creating gaps (that is what happens when you have an arrhythmic heartbeat or arrhythmia in respiration) as it is of creating contrapuntal rhythms, of inserting a different pace and temporal signature alongside what you might call the countdown of the present. So that just before things are down to zero, somewhere else, some other count is beginning to pulse out a different sense of time. This can free us from the heaviness of inevitability, destiny, and the arrow of time that gets exhausted by travelling forever in one direction alone. MB: We see affinities with modernism here. Is it possible to say modernism lives within the imagination of contemporary art? This modernism incorporates a critique of historicism, the inevitability you mention. Your sense of the ‘contrapuntal’ echoes the principles of Soviet montage. I was thinking of how Lev Manovich looked at the New Media through Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera. Spatialization dominates the vision of much contemporary critical theory and aesthetic practice. But criticality often seems to return through what we can largely call montage, a typical modernist method, where the vertical and the synchronic continue to play a role. Would you like to talk about this? Raqs: Let’s think momentarily of modernism as a four lane highway, let’s say – a ‘national highway’ that claims to take you from A to B, and then let us imagine a few tracks off the high road – that meander alongside, and cross the highway, some-times in a disorderly, zigzag fashion. These tracks are always within hailing distance from the highway, but may not always be visible; sometimes they rise above and run below it. We see our journeys taking place sometimes on the high road, and often, when we need to get to destinations that the highway ignores, on the off-tracks. The off tracks, like most paths that come into existence because people have persistently walked them into being, have been built over peripatetic centuries. And they carry on their surface – the depth, the layers, of centuries of footprints. You could call this a layered, continuing archive of walking, extending itself into the future. Unlike the highway, where there is never any turning back, except at sanctioned u-turns, the off-tracks are meant for Janus-faced journeymen and journeywomen, (which is what we aspire to be) who know well the ruses of the archive and the contingencies of the present but have also equipped themselves with an open-endedness towards the dilemmas of the future. This means that we don’t necessarily have ‘role models’ to follow, even though we are aware of the velocity and the trajectory of passengers on the high-road. Our encounter with the dust of other times – modern, non-modern, off-modern – is laden with our sense of their out-of-joint presences. Faced with the complexity of these presences, the modernist celebration of unidirectional speed, fueled by the necessity of arousing everyone and herding them towards the future seems archaic and naïve at times. We are still coming to terms with the turn that compels us to undertake close readings of the peripatetic archive of the off-tracks. This seems to us to be a tendency that we see spreading across the last two decades in many practices, both artistic and otherwise, as a renewal of what it means to ‘sense’ the world, and to render it ‘sensate’ and ‘sensible’. These moves are not direct and unidirectional. They have ambivalences, they are equivocal, as befits the task of moving on a surface as jagged as that of the contemporary world. They resemble the crooked move of the knight in chess. Interestingly, the post-Soviet aesthetician and writer, Svetlana Boym, often speaks of “lateral move of the knight in a game of chess. A detour into some unexplored potentialities of the modern project” to explain what she means by her call to fully inhabit the “off-modern” condition. This search is not to obliterate the near past. On the