Throughout my childhood there was a box of home-made gramophone records in my parents’ loft. The box had been in storage since the 1940s when my father, following demobilization from the army, earned extra cash during his first three post-war summers recording messages for families with relatives still committed to military duties abroad. He had built the recording equipment himself and undertook many phonographic experiments using primitive acetate discs before launching his short-lived entrepreneurial venture. By the end of the decade magnetic tape had become commercially available and my father’s project lost viability. The test recordings were stored away and forgotten. With my father's disintegrating acetates rehoused in my studio I have been able to examine the forms of personal remembrance forced upon me by a sound world now beyond recovery - the records are unplayable. Curiously, my attention is held precisely because my ability to listen has been eclipsed by the scope I now have to look. This discovery, an unexpected encounter with the synaesthetic, substantially extends my exploration of the creative interface between contemporary art practice and museums - the area of practice I have specialised in throughout my career as an artist-curator.
Opening paragraph of the conference paper Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sound objects (2012). See ‘Speaking’.
Dorsett & Nair preparing for events associated with Contemporary British and Indian responses to the 'seductiveness' of Tantric museum objects (2016). See 'Speaking'.
In 1971 London’s Hayward Gallery hosted a unique museological experiment in which a major venue for ‘contemporary art’ (the term was only just beginning to have currency) presented a large-scale exhibition of historical Indian artefacts as a primer for a radical reassessment of Western sexual values. The exhibition was called Tantra: the Indian cult of ecstasy and, looking back, one can only wonder at the project’s ambition and the breadth of its appeal. Given the prominence of the venue, the show was reviewed (always with enthusiasm) by the most influential art critics of the day. It was also roundly endorsed in periodicals associated with alternative approaches to health and lifestyle (burgeoning at the time). In addition, it was applauded by journalists writing for various adult magazines (proliferating in the post-60s period). Thus Tantra appears to be an exhibition irreversibly caught in its historical context.
Not so. This lecture explores how practice-research methods regularly used at Northumbria University can repeat the Tantra experiment as part of an ongoing critical ‘decreation’ (Ann Carson’s term) of contemporary art. As a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art I visited the Hayward Gallery to view Tantra’s labyrinth of strangely coloured rooms and utterly unfamiliar objects. The curator of the show, Philip Rawson, certainly anticipated the future sweep of installation techniques with sound environments and slide-tape projections, but he did this in such a way that the museal, with its gravitational pull towards the persistence of objects, deactivated the trope of avant-garde experimentation. A year later Rawson joined the Royal College staff and I became a committed student of the exchange of ideas between contemporary art and museum display. Four decades on I can return to his Tantra exhibition with extensive experience of collection-oriented work across an emphatically post-colonial world. As a result, my first public lecture at Northumbria since becoming a Professor of Fine Art is an opportunity to revisit Rawson’s early impact on my career. It is also a chance to uncover a local dimension to Tantra (Rawson was based at Durham’s Oriental Museum during the period in which the exhibition was planned and realised) and, finally, reconsider the problematic notion of Tantric ecstasy within current cross-disciplinary debates about sensual cultures and embodied meanings.
The lecture includes video material from my collaboration with Janaki Nair, a Kathakali dancer who is helping me explore the tensions between the Western fascination with Tantra and contemporary Indian attitudes to the ‘long 1960s’. I tell her my memories of viewing the multi-sensory environments Rawson created at the Hayward and she interprets my descriptions with body language shaped by a lifetime of training in Kathakali theatre. We develop events and video pieces together using the drawings and casts I have made as substitutes for the museum pieces Rawson selected from collections in the UK and India. We use our hands more than our eyes. Thanks to Janaki the scope I had in 1971 to view the Hayward exhibition has been transformed into an ability to 'handle' Tantra in the 21st century.
Synopsis of Tantric Ecstasy, Museum Culture, and Contemporary Art, Northumbria University Public Lecture Series (November 2015).
Archiving Mudra – Handling Tantra (2015), 'The Earth is Breaking Up' storyboard (detail), Contemporary British and Indian responses to the 'seductiveness' of Tantric museum objects. See 'Speaking'.
Despite the primeval idyll that humans associate with the kingdom of the animals, any creature that sleeps in the depths of a beautiful forest is likely to dream anxiously about the destruction of their precious environment. And so it came to pass that a hare, having fallen asleep under a huge banyan tree, awoke suddenly when he heard a loud, calamitous, crashing noise. “My dream is true,” the terrified creature thought, and taking no time to consider an escape route, he scarpered off at the kind of speed only hares can manage. As he dashed through the forest, every other hare he encountered was given the terrible news and, very soon, thousands were fleeing the forest shouting: “run, run, run – the earth is breaking up, the earth is breaking up, the earth is breaking up, we may all drown.”
On seeing an entire species running scared, other animals became frightened too. The news spread quickly and very soon every creature around the forest knew that the earth was breaking up. It didn’t take long before countless reptiles, birds, and even insects were racing to safety, and as they raced, their fearful cries created chaos around them.
Eventually, on hearing the commotion, a lion wondered what was going on. She positioned herself in the path of the panicking animals and, standing firm, halted the advance of the unruly crowd. When a parrot yelled “Quick, out the way, we must all flee, the earth is breaking up and we may drown,” the lion naturally wanted to know who had spread the rumour. “It was the monkeys,” the bird replied. But when the lion sought an explanation from from a group of over-excited chimpanzees, they were sure the news came from the tigers, not them. Despite this, the tigers, when quizzed, thought they heard it from the elephants. The elephants, in turn, said that the buffaloes were their source. And so it went on. When the chain of accusations finally led back to the first hare, the lion wanted to know why such a terrifying idea had been allowed to send shock waves through the animal kingdom. “Well, your majesty,” said the hare, “I heard the earth cracking apart with my very own ears.” And so the lion walked to the forest where she found a large coconut lying in a pile of rocks. Falling from its tree, it had caused a small, inconsequential landslide.
Adaption of a traditional jataka tale. Extract from Waving and Drowning: at the conjunction of contemporary British and Indian responses to a song by Rabindranath Tagore. See 'Speaking'.
Cafe Kathakali (forthcoming). Storyboard (detail) from Dorsett & Nair's curated conversation 'When Philip Rawson met Ajit Mookerjee'.