A Conceptual Dance

By
Kurchi Dasgupta

The Kathmandu Contemporary Arts Centre (KCAC) has just played host to two American
contemporary artists, Io Palmer and Adam Davis, who travelled to Kathmandu to realize a
long-cherished dream of collaborating on an art project. Old friends, they both trained as
ceramicists at the University of Arizona in Tucson and hold MFA degrees from the same
institute.
Interestingly, over the years their artistic practice has gradually moved away from their
initial fascination with clay and now embraces multiple media including sculpture,
installations, video, sound and photography. The month-long stay at KCAC has enriched
their practice in more ways than one. Responding to, exploring and negotiating a totally
new culture were simultaneously challenging and invigorating so much so that they both
seem to be reeling from the impact despite the many residencies and projects they have
done across the world. Their art-school training in ceramics makes obvious an early interest
in the crafts and the materiality of things and Patan was an exceptionally suited venue for
both purposes. The resultant artwork is yet untitled, and in process of manifesting itself
through an amazing conceptual dance between the two artists.
Untitled (2014) is a composite artwork. Adam Davis began collecting mopping towels/cloths
or napkins that we use every day for cleaning our floors and kitchens from Patans shops. He
folded, coordinated and stitched these together to form a bigger patchwork piece that looks
now more like a floor rug or a wall tapestry. Though machine-made, the rough texture and
muted tones of the mopping cloths assume a pseudo loom-crafted look and somehow
retain a tangible memory of labour both at the point of creation and use.
Davis has successfully used the nuances inherent in the material and
transformed the lowly mopping cloth into a spectacular piece of art, bringing
into play our received notions on high and low in art as well as daily life.
Palmer responded to this piece with what looks like a pile of fabric scraps put
together in Art Povera style shreds from the same mopping cloths and
random cut-outs from lustrous gold and copper tinted fabrics. The shimmering,
plastic finish of the gold and copper strips perform in perfect counterpoint to
the rough, woven mopping cloths. Lying strewn across the studio floor, they
swirl around the coarse, laden mopping material and catch the sun -- the
gleaming detritus of a mechanized and fast-paced, consumerist way of life,
much like the shimmering froth cresting oil-slick waves. An imagery perhaps
not irrelevant given Palmers earlier work on environmental disasters, the
politics of labour (both industrial and domestic) etc.
And so the dance continues, as each artist responds to the others journey
through a particular material and mirrors it with his/her own art piece. As
each piece was found, fashioned and placed, the other immediately jumped in
with a visual and material response almost as if each piece triggered
moments of self-recognition and mis-recognition in the piece that followed.
For example, Davis responded to the fabric pile with a long-handled broom he
fashioned out of readymade things easily available on the citys streets. Poised
right next to the pile, it looks ready to sweep it away or better still, reconfigure
it any second! One of the most exciting aspects of this residency has been the
way we have had to use readymade and found objects and use them with
minimal, and often zero, alteration. The constraints of time and tools were the
main contributing factors behind this, shares Davis. The relatively short term
of the residency period in way forced them to stretch the limits of their
imagination to innovate and improvise where they would otherwise have
created painstakingly hand-crafted and concept-driven pieces. This is indeed
exciting as it opens us up to re-cognizing or seeing objects of daily use in a new
light and derive new meanings from them. For example, the simple
juxtaposition of a traditional broom and a simple mop-head displayed on a
table eloquently speaks of the presence of tradition and our divergence from it
in our everyday lives here.
The intensity of labour involved in any act of luxury production for example
in haute couture pieces and the limited access allowed to such pieces weaves
together Palmers art practice. In other words, how the people who create
such items have absolutely no access to them. Or, who actually does the hard
work that goes into maintaining upper crust lifestyles of individuals as well as
nations? Daviss practice intersects these concerns with those of high versus
low, art versus craft, privileged intellectualism versus physical production.
These are issues and concerns which most of us, at least those who call
ourselves contemporary artists, have to grapple with in our art and artistic
philosophy no matter where our cultural location is. The artists have
responded to their environment through the form of ready-made and found
materials, always intent on not essentializing Nepali culture. They have
followed a trajectory of hesitant questioning and exploration trying to
unearth resonances through unlikely pairings that often come across as
downright hilarious when Davis picked up an aluminium bucket of daily use
from a vendor, Palmer immediately sandwiched it between two gleaming
golden but obviously cheap, faux-leather bucket-bags! Resonances dis-covered
and inverted at one go!
The contemporary via post-modern in art has been as much about
postcolonial, cultural relativism as about a fascination with fractured but often
irresponsible, glittering perfection. As the worlds art economy gets more and
more obsessed with gallery/museum friendly, seamlessly finished and
investment heavy (both at production and collection ends!) artworks, open-
ended pieces like these come as a much needed fresh breath of air and
reminds us of the inherent democratizing responsibility of both art and artists
in society. Palmer and Davis are currently are associate professors of art at
Washington State University and Scripps College in USA respectively. They
have done numerous solo and group shows, as well as residencies and won
awards. We look forward to a return of the Untitled in a finished state, and
with a title, to Nepal in the near future. It will be interesting to see how the
material reality of Nepal, as they have captured in their work here, responds to
American cultural stimulation and gets reconfigured.