Place-ing for experience and location in Art education.
Govt colleges are places which provide affordable education to a huge number of students coming from varying social strata in the Indian society and it makes education affordable for a large number of students for whom otherwise education would have been an impossibility. As G Arunima observes in her essay Thought,Policies and Politics, that the idea of university itself is paradoxical at once intimate and embattled, because teaching is hierarchical. Government universities achieved a democratic possibility through constant protests and struggles by its students.
Most of the students who end up in fine arts institutions in Kerala are from middle class families and subaltern backgrounds. With big dreams and expectations students come to these colleges after passing rigorous entrance examinations and numerous coaching center experiences. But what is it, for them the institution is to offer? I don’t mean that good students or artists have not come out of these Fine art institutions. But it was always the rigor of the student or one or two teachers who operated in seclusion and isolation that has shaped these singularities. These exceptional pedagogic moments have never affected the institutional structures, but have started and ended as closed phenomena or happenings. There can be a good time for an institution depending on the batch. It is high time these institutions actually rethink or look back at the students and ideas that it has set. Institutions should have a vision as such to what it stands for the time to be and the people to arrive.
“Pedagogy evolved from an auto-cratic, linear form of knowledge, power, and a system of control through the Victorian era to a participatory model of collective learning in the last one hundred years. It was used as a tool to control its colonial subjects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all around the Global South. Academicism in art institutes became a process to homogenize and transform local knowledge into practices and systems of technical information. Since the early twentieth century, different models emerged to reconstitute pedagogy as an interdisciplinary critical framework of practice that situates process as an interdependent framework for multiple disciplines.”
Velivadas of education:
We at RLV college of music and fine arts come from a place where caste is performed on a daily basis, Our college has a unique blend of music, performing arts and fine arts in one campus under one category of music colleges, which makes RLV college an odd out amidst other fine arts colleges in Kerala, The category of “pure” and “impure” dominates the discourse.
A.S. Ajith Kumar asks a significant question in terms of music colleges in Kerala, that why it is called “music colleges“ rather the more apt name would be ”carnatic music colleges“, through this paradox of naming he further explores how in Kerala’s “normalised” understanding of ”music” as Carnatic music stems from a Brahminical order propagated through media, cinema, and academic institutions. By framing Carnatic music as the sole “pure” form, this exclusionary consciousness dismisses other genres as impure. He further explains this idea in his essay “ shareeravum shariravum” saying that in carnatic music body is “tamed“ whereas in other popular genres body becomes a site of exploration, This same logic works in the institutional structuring of music colleges in kerala.
From Know how to some how:
“What do you do when there are no options?”
“You invent!”
If I borrow the term “Cultural slum” from the work of “kąrî’kạchä seid’ou” An influential Art teacher from Ghana, Kerala’s fine arts curriculum has remained a “cultural slum” Under the Brahminical Structural Exclusion of university structures and curriculum building. Could you elaborate this? Is it unique to rlv, is it unique to fine arts?
It was in the year 2018, that in RLV which functioned majorly with guest faculties had an assembly of dedicated teachers, does this mean guest faculties were not dedicated? Under the guidance of Vibin George and Arjun Panayal we conducted reading groups, tried to organise and systematise the classes in a way to make/with a focus on making disciplinary boundaries like sculpture and painting to disappear.
We imagined workshops with whatever means we could inventing new ways to navigate through these colonial – brahminical curriculum structures of fine arts. Which structures?, Students were encouraged to look beyond the borders of discipline to invent new forms of making and thinking. We were working from literally nothing.
Nothing in the sense no presidence or history and nothing to
Nothing means scratches? Why?
One of the works produced during these exercises was a work imagined by one of our MFA students who used to work as a part time Gig worker in food delivery systems. In his experience of working as a delivery boy/in his delivery work, he was using google maps as a means to record his navigations through the landscape., One of his striking observations was the fact that none of the caste colonies in Ernakulam had the roads of their locations visible in the google map. Elaborate caste colony. He went on to develop a drawing in the google map using GPS to track his travel through the displaced memories of the people throughout the city, who ended up in these caste ghettos which were reminiscent of the land reformation movement in Kerala. Elaborate this connection to land reformation movement. Do you mean land reformation by communist part, or the land movement by dalit adivasi communities?
There was another instance during the semester submission of the same batch, where students used black cheap plastic sheets as walls to partition the gallery spaces and the class rooms in to big display space. , Using a material like cheap plastic sheets has a cultural reference in Kerala’s visual culture which is associated with dalit ghettos and laksham veedu colonies. What is laksham veedu colony? The blue trampoline became an identifier with of these marginal spaces, Tarpaulin and plastic was as a material was reinvented in these locations as materials of reimaginations. Which locations, do you mean the two instances you mention or you mean the exhibition or in the colonies?
The emancipatory possibility of these anamorphic stains in the cultural slums of Kerala’s art education are an invitation to the possibility of human intellect to exercise an ethical way of life and to presuppose or reimagine equality through these small acts.
(To be continued)