Making Sense of Tamil Threshold Designs
This chapter explores the question of how to interpret the Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs that has long been considered a folk art hovering on the brink of cultural extinction. The tradition constitutes a pan-Indian affair with disparate and often representational regional design styles. The practice is called alpana in Bengal, aripana in Bihar, madana in Rajasthan, jhoti or chita in Orissa, chowkpurana in Uttar Pradesh, kolam in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, muggu in Andhra Pradesh, and is referred to as rangoli in Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The present discussion will focus on the specificities of the Tamil version of this tradition and its everyday execution on the streets and thoroughfares of Tamil Nadu (see Figures 6.1–6.4).
The practice has not attracted a great deal of interest in the art world, nor among anthropologists and other scholars who make the study of India their raison d’être. Recently, however, the designs have acquired a new degree of cultural traction in India and abroad, and enjoy a newfound popularity among Indian communities. A few more scholarly articles on the subject have also appeared. The designs have in the last few decades also acquired an internet presence and a plethora of design suggestions now is readily available at the click of a mouse.1 Their wide appeal is also manifest in the decorative display of threshold designs on greetings cards on sale online,2 as well as handbags, other leatherware3 and T-shirts.4 Furthermore the internet bristles with step-by-step guides on how to draw the designs5 and workshops to practise the designs are laid on worldwide.6 In addition, the laboriousness of drawing the designs is alleviated by the ready availability of stencils,7 designs on plastic stickers that can be permanently affixed,8 perforated tin templates and even robots.9
This revival, however, does not mitigate the quandary posed by the practice’s failure to register in cultural debate and the post-colonial predicament this signals. It rather adds a level of urgency to understanding the conditions of the designs’ oversight and to identify the prevalent modes of thought that led to its neglect. To grasp these histories, it is paramount to be able to non-pejoratively situate the practice in the visual world that constitutes the global contemporary. This, however, raises the central question of what might be an appropriate language in which to speak about the designs, one able to positively frame the practice in a manner that does justice to its cultural moorings while also allowing it to register in a global visual arena. As part of this enquiry, this chapter considers what an expanded conception of relational aesthetics could offer that engages with cultural difference and draws on a more encompassing spectrum of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics than Bourriaud’s original framing.
Kolams are an affair of the street, a permanence in flux, an ever-changing presence on the streets of Tamil Nadu. They constitute a daily, domestic, female routine in which the whole community participates. The women draw the designs twice daily and the community witnesses their presence, but also erases the drawings as part of the ebb and flow of everyday activities (see Figures 6.1–6.3). The designs’ creation and deletion are everyday motions that are perfunctorily performed. Traditional kolams are abstract compositions created by looping continuous lines around a structure of grids that determine the design (see Figure 6.4).
The nature of the practice’s visual presence in India and beyond has changed immensely in the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.10 The designs’ current popularity, however, is a far cry from the days of rangoli enthusiast and art teacher B. P. Bayiri (1912–96) who was so concerned about the rapid decline of the tradition he witnessed in the late 1960s that he initiated the publication of a small magazine called Rangavalli, now referred to as the ‘bible’ of all rangoli lovers, with the explicit aim to revive the practice. His small publication circulated designs he collected travelling from village to village as well as patterns sent in by his readers. It also presented ‘how-to-guides’ and information about the history and meaning of the practice. The designs’ internet presence demonstrates that his efforts have paid off. Scholarly attention has also increased on this previously under-researched subject, even if more engaged discussions remain few and far between. In 1994 the cultural anthropologist Stephen Huyler noted that ‘Indian women’s decorative art has received almost no recognition’11 and attested a peculiar kind of invisibility to women’s art, pointing out that often ‘the paintings adorn houses on primary routes to major tourist sites; yet, when asked, few travellers appear to have seen them’,12 adding that no ‘specific books and very few articles have been written about them’.13 Huyler is perplexed by this state of affairs, especially since women’s decorative designs are not just a regional, but also a pan-Indian phenomenon. He declares that ‘considering India in its entirety, the breadth of this art is overwhelming’.14 Thus even though India’s temples and palaces have been documented and described in minute detail, and anthropologists have explored India’s remote societies and traditional customs with determined dedication, threshold designs and their rich regional variations have largely slipped through the net.
The information available on the subject is thus scarce, scattered and disparate. In 1919 the tradition was the subject of a small publication by Abanindranath Tagore as part of the effort by the Bengali Renaissance15 to claim Indian artistic and folk traditions for a national Indian art language.16 Tagore presented the designs as a decorative practice born of a feminine imagination representative of Hindu art. Then there are brief references in the journal Man 17 in the 1930s18 that lament the dearth of information on the subject and invite its readership to take the matter in hand. The idiosyncratic anthropologist John Layard,19 who comments on the practice in the 1940s, by contrast is mostly interested in theories of labyrinthine rituals and proposes the tradition as an off-shoot of such ancient rites. In 1968 the Bengali practitioner Mrs Bardhan published a small booklet on the practice presenting it as a female decorative art based on long-since-abandoned ancient primitive roots.20 A book-length study by E. M. Gupta based on fieldwork in 1976–77 and 1979–80 in Bengal gives some background to the Bengali history of the designs and refers to its roots in women’s rites. The author reproduces a number of designs, provides an explanation of the symbolism of the alpana designs21 and invokes the stereotype of Bengali women as compelled by an irrepressible, innate ‘urge to decorate’. A study by the Crafts Council of India in 198922 is focused on collecting designs and associated rituals. And the scholarly discussion of kolams by the Swiss Indologist Ralph Steinmann of the same year23 gathered valuable information and discussed the then current state of the tradition in terms of a symbolic decline. Furthermore V. R. Nagarajan explored the kolam tradition in 1993 and kolam competitions in 2001.24 Huyler published a mainly photographic homage to the tradition in 1994 and I have analysed the framing of the tradition in view of constructions of art, craft, women and the national in 2001, and developed its performative dimensions in 2004.25 Moreover the anthropologist Anna Laine examined the kolam tradition in her PhD thesis in 2009,26 and the artist and writer Aurogeeta Das explored the tradition in relation to the dichotomy between metropolitan and traditional arts in India for her PhD in 2011.27 And more recently, in 2012 June McDaniel has explored the ritual aspects of the Bengali version of the tradition.28 But there is also a mathematical strand to the discussion. In 2002 Ascher, building on the work of Gift Siromoney from Madras, explored kolams from the point of view of ethno-mathematics and computer science.29
While this is only a cursory review of the literature and does not reference newspaper articles in the Indian press or publications in local vernaculars, it does demonstrate that discussions on the subject are far from plentiful. I have argued elsewhere that this oversight is indicative of the lack of a suitable conceptual framework for the tradition and explored the chameleonesque shifts in the tradition’s framings offered in 12 editions of the small, popular magazine Rangavalli published between 1967 and 1988,30 in view of the paradigms available to frame the practice.31 I discuss how its editor Bayiri drew on an eclectic mix of information ranging from anecdotal evidence of the auspicious effects of daily engagement in the practice, to snippets of folklore, mythology and local customs in his magazine. He also offered symbolic references for the designs and highlighted religious and ritual elements. He explained that during religious festivals respective deities are indicated with the help of special weapons or vehicles, which act as symbols and may well appear in threshold designs drawn on this day.
He, not only collected information about the designs, but also sought to reason why the tradition is important. Over the years, adopting a ‘kitchen sink’ approach, he explored different registers to shore up their cultural credentials. He presented the tradition as art based on ‘symbols and dots’, and argued that in spite of the dots ‘the artist has the opportunity to express himself to maintain and develop his freedom, creativity and individuality’,32 thus disavowing that the practice is an exclusively female domestic affair. He highlighted abstraction as another qualifying element, and, drawing on a modernist aesthetic, presents rangoli’s decorative aspects and use of colour as expressive of emotion. He also invoked an Indus Valley connection for the designs and declared the practice as a form of Tantric design, that is, ‘symbols of secret philosophical religious meanings’,33 as well as a ‘highly communicative’34 folk art. And he referred to the Divine, stating, in summary, that the tradition ‘is capable of encompassing abstraction, symbolism, and all other isms, visually pleasant and ritually auspicious’.35
One might be forgiven for dismissing Bayiri’s rather too all-encompassing claims as misguided. But rather than interpreting this seeming medley of paradigms as indicative of a muddled mind, I would argue that Bayiri performs the difficulty of framing the designs, and in the end comes up with an ‘all-in’ definition that is as broad as it is ambiguous. He probes every aesthetic register available to him, and when he realizes none of them is quite right, he adopts a DIY mode and crowds traditionally contradictory qualifications into the same conceptual arena, creating a ‘both-fine-and-folk-art’ category that is also decorative and ritualistic.36 The latter, however, tellingly excludes the crucial domestic, female context, which he obviously deemed irreconcilably beyond the pale of a successful claim for the practice’s fine-art status.
I have furthermore argued that Bayiri’s struggle with the available conceptual terrain is marked by the colonial experience, and have interpreted his veering between anthropology and art history, the modern–traditional binary, the divisions between art, craft and folk art as indicative of ill-suited aesthetic concepts derived from Western cultural contexts. This conclusion, however, begs the question whether more constructive approaches can be envisaged, and what role an expanded notion of relational aesthetics could play in allowing the practice to figure co-equally and coevally in the contemporary visual field. This necessarily entails the sidestepping of established frameworks that associate the practice with ‘time immemorial’, mourn its decline and nostalgically celebrate its idealized past of imaginary wholeness; perceptions therefore that exile the tradition from the present and designate it as creatively inferior.
Bayiri’s overall sentiment about the tradition remained one of loss and decline. He stated that this ‘precious heritage is now being gradually lost’,37 and that in ‘the countryside of today only a few old women have still some knowledge of and skill in the art of Rangavalli or Rangoli. But the younger generation are almost totally ignorant of it.’38 The Indologist Steinmann echoes Bayiri’s view. He reports on the designs’ link to auspiciousness and presents Tamil notions of beauty as order. He highlights the designs’ rootedness in the domestic and relates that a house without a drawing is seen to be an unhappy affair. He also holds that ‘as so many other customs, kolam art has become a convention detached from its original meaning and function’.39 For him the practice, certainly in the 1980s when he wrote his article, had become ‘decadent’, even if the tradition was still widely practised. It is assumed to be an empty form without meaning, as the women who create the designs can only explain their practice in generic terms such as ‘it is our tradition’. Similar to the Shipibo-Conibo scenario, we therefore encounter a presumption that the designs had a meaning that can no longer be communicated, and that they once possessed a ritual fullness that is now lost. And as the tradition, in this case, assuredly is ancient, and may even date as far back as the Indus Valley civilization, it is surmised that such a meaning, which may well have formed a language of symbols that could be iconically decoded, once existed, but has since been lost. The question this discussion poses, however, is whether this judgement represents a cultural mistranslation based on dominant Eurocentric expectations about how a visual practice is to signify, and whether it overlooks other dimensions that give meaning to the practice. A further point to consider is the colonial construction of Indian culture as eternally set in the past, and the prevalence of narratives of decline which justify the colonial presence as civilizing influence that salvages the historic monuments to the former greatness of Indian civilization. Such an outlook is necessarily blind to the notion that rituals do evolve and adapt to changing times, and may well have ritual affectivity even if they come along on a different and more modern guise.
The anthropologist Edward Schieffelin for example, critiques what he sees as an over-emphasis on the symbolic mode and advocates a move away from studying cultural performances as systems of representation. He points out that discussions of rituals ‘seem to be curiously robbed of life and power when distanced in discussions concerned largely with meaning’.40 He argues that a processual approach to cultural performance is needed which places greater emphasis on the bodily rather ‘than structures of symbols’ and allows for a ‘social construction of reality rather than its representation’.41
The anthropologist Victor Turner likewise advocates a notion of society as ‘process rather than an abstract system, whether of social structural relations or of symbols or meanings’.42 He emphasizes the role of liminal spaces in culture ‘to live, to breathe, and to generate novelty’,43 arguing that ritual should be understood primarily as performed processual and transformative activity. In other words, for Turner the study of ritual activity means exploring what ritual does, and how symbols are handled during such enactments. Turner also observes that multivalent meanings accorded to ritual objects are located in the objects themselves, rather than in their relations, as structuralists would argue, and emphasizes that the affective potential of ritual needs to be added to the dimension of meaning. For him it is the ‘in-betweenness’ of performed actions, that is, their negotiation of differing states of more or less settled cultural activity as part of everyday life, that needs to be acknowledged.44 Turner advocates that creativity be introduced to anthropology, arguing that ‘play is more serious than we, the inheritors of Western Puritanism, have thought’.45
A performative perspective thus enables a shift in focus. Now the act of drawing, rather than the designs produced, is taking pride of place. This change in emphasis from final product to process allows for different questions to be asked. Rather than aiming to ‘decipher’ the designs, the objective now is to establish how the acts of drawing feature in the wider cultural context of Tamil Nadu, and what they ‘do’. This shift also brings the local community and their essential participation into view, a factor that is overlooked by iconographic approaches. It now becomes evident that the local residents are integral to the practice and act as witness to the designs’ appearance and erasure on the streets. Their observance is based on the anticipated presence of designs and translates into a sense of disquiet if they fail to appear, as the absence of designs signals that all is not well in the home. But the community at large also contributes to the progressive effacing of the designs as they walk or drive over them as part of their everyday routines (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). A performative perspective thus reveals acts of erasure as integral to the practice.
But apart from bringing the local community into view, a performative approach also engages with the specificity of the sociocultural reality and spatiality these acts generate. Tamil culture, for example, is deeply concerned with the perceived quality of a space, and ritual acts are part of a range of balancing measures required to change or maintain a space’s flavour. The anthropologist Daniel informs us that in Tamil culture, spatial relations are characterized by fluidity and variance. At the heart of this view lies what he calls a preoccupation with ‘substance’,46 and the belief that substance needs to be kept in equilibrium if a sense of well-being, and, ultimately, the continuity of life is to be secured. This understanding is expressed in a concern with perceived ‘substantial’ compatibilities on an everyday level, and asks questions such as ‘will this food be compatible with my body?’47 It also generates an engagement with notions of temporal compatibility between a specific moment in time and the quality it expresses in view of planned activities such as a new business venture.48
In a traditional Tamil context, the underlying tenet of an inherent substantial fluidity at the heart of manifest creation suffuses everyday life. The possibility of life slipping into chaos is considered a constant risk that needs to be mediated. Unceasing vigilance and the safeguarding of boundaries by regular equilibrating actions are thus needed to maintain the everyday, as daily routines of establishing inter-substantial compatibility can only be momentarily successful and need to be regularly and repeatedly performed.49 This notion of flux also applies to spatial relations and translates as a perceived necessity to create congenial relationships between people, geographical locations and places of residence, with the threshold as a crucial marker of substantial exchanges. A house from a traditional Tamil point of view therefore is ‘more than just a structure built to the specification of the owner. It is, like all other forms of substance, in constant flux, mixing with and changing according to the substances that come into contact with it’.50 And he adds that ‘people are as concerned with controlling the substances that combine with their bodily substance’51 as they are with the substances that cross the ‘vulnerable threshold of their houses and combine not only with their bodily substance but with the substance of their houses’.52 Houses are thus seen to be affected by the substantial fluidity of their geographical environment as well as the substantial make-up of the human traffic that mixes with its elements by entering its domain.
This ‘substantial’ preoccupation is, however, also linked to the temporal. In Tamil culture ‘the gazes of the planets’53 are to be reckoned with. They not only mark the individual character at birth, but also impact events in daily life, such as lucky or unlucky times to start a journey. Furthermore, ritual control of potentially dangerous forces is required for interstitial temporal moments such as solstices or equinoxes, and the beginnings and ends of the month and the year. But while such transitional points in time harbour the danger of destabilization and chaos, they are also believed to be exceptionally potent, as the divine is thought to be more accessible at such junctures. In Tamil culture, points of transition are thus marked by ambivalence, and it is the task of ritual to draw out their potential positivity.
In Tamil culture, women are traditionally considered best suited to negotiate these dangerous points of transition, because of the special power they share through their biological link with creative and destructive forces evident in childbirth and menstruation. Historically, special and exclusively female rites or vratas were performed widely at the time of major temporal transitions, and it is considered the task of women to harness the forces they harbour to ensure they manifest in a benign rather than destructive fashion. The ambivalent powers of the cosmos are therefore seen to be intimately linked to the conflicting powers harboured by women. By performing female rites, the women are believed to shape not just the cosmic forces at large but also their own powers. Women are thus considered prime mediators between states of danger, chaos and death, as well as states of well-being, order and life. They are seen to be privileged to walk the fine line between these modes, and ensure the overall continuity and well-being of the community by keeping the forces of chaos at bay.
Female rites also reveal ritual aspects to threshold designs. The anthropologist Holly Baker Reynolds reports that such rites involve the drawing of ritual designs formally similar and at times identical to the everyday kolams encountered on the street.54 The designs are employed in the initial stages of such rites to mark and prepare the space for the ensuing invocation and transform a previously profane location into a ritual space. This power, however, does not reside in the designs per se. It is their ritual embeddedness that allows for this transformative power to unfold and the same design used every day on the street would not effect this transformation.
Yet everyday kolams also participate in this world of flux, and negotiate spatial and temporal ambiguity. On important festival days, particularly those marking the transition of the old to the new year, the everyday designs on the streets are, for example, required to be more elaborate. But contrary to their use in vratas executed in a secluded space by a select group of women, the everyday designs are drawn in the street and constitute a public and collective affair. But since everyday designs are drawn at the thresholds of dwellings and other architectural structures – shrines, schools, shops and municipal buildings – they also engage with points of transition, albeit primarily spatial ones. The drawing of the designs, however, is predominantly associated with residential dwellings, and the women perceive their creative acts as a domestic duty and reference the quality of the work in terms of housewifely excellence and good womanhood. The presence of the designs furthermore signals ‘home’, ‘woman’ and ‘well-being’ to the wider community. Notions of ‘homeliness’ and eudaemonia are therefore linked to a larger context of collectivity, which comprises the local community, but also a larger world of force. This suggests that everyday designs also harbour a ritual connection.
As I have argued elsewhere, the drawing of threshold designs transforms a house into a ‘home’ by performatively situating it in a ‘world at large’ or ‘cosmos’ that is constituted by astronomical markers and dangerous events such as the transition of the old to the new year. Seen from this perspective, the drawing of kolams can be understood as an act of qualitative space making, which in the Tamil imagination involves temporal aspects, and declares Tamil women to be powerful ‘space-time interventionists’.55 This is a far cry from the interpretations encountered earlier in this discussion which revolved around notions of decline and loss. Seen from a performative perspective, the designs are now no longer seen to be devoid of meaning. Rather they are argued to fashion a space of belonging for the community in accordance with notions of ‘at-homeness’ specific to the traditional cultural context mapped. The performed daily acts of drawing and erasing threshold designs thus involve the community in a daily exercise of creating a place in the world articulated via the ‘home’.
The framework of Indian folk art was, however, not able to make these aspects available. This reflects, as I have argued, the historic and cultural conditions of post-independence India, where folk art entailed an ambivalent stance towards ritual performances since the colonial charge of the irrationality of Indian culture still touched a nerve. Traditional rituals were hence ‘tamed’ and artistic frameworks displaced ritual elements, resulting in a cultural flattening and ‘sanitizing’ of ritual practices. In India the very concept of folk art was therefore premised on the disavowal of ritual, and suppressed associated aspects of, for example, the tradition of drawing threshold designs. And as art history was mainly interested in temples, sculpture and paintings, it relegated the designs to the realm of anthropology. Anthropology in turn largely saw the designs as art and engaged with them only peripherally. And when it did, it relied on paradigms borrowed from Western art history, laden with limiting preconceptions about non-Western aesthetic traditions and ‘primitive’ visual cultures. The design tradition thus fell through the disciplinary net and became quasi invisible. As film critic Robert Stam, cultural theorist Ella Shohat, sociologist Laymert Garcia dos Santos and others point out, this mix of prevalent attitudes and approaches perpetuates the marginalization and continued misrepresentation of such practices around the globe.56
Another question one may want to ask is why did Bayiri revert to Eurocentric conceptions in the first place, especially as they were clearly failing the practice? Were there no better-suited Indian aesthetic concepts he might have used? This question brings the colonial period to the fore and the era of nationalist struggle, when concepts of Indianicity were formed. As I have argued elsewhere, notions of Indian art and national culture that developed in the formative phase of Indian nationalism57 were fundamentally informed by gendered Europe-derived notions of art and creativity58 and sought to distance themselves from ‘traditions’ which invited charges of superstition and primitivity.59 This issue bears directly on the tradition of drawing threshold designs, as female domestic rites were open to such incriminations.60 The following presentation of the tradition by Mrs Bardhan, a Bengali practitioner of the craft (published in 1968) illustrates the point. She explains the drawing of threshold designs as a specifically female decorative art form distilled from earlier and, importantly, long-since-abandoned primitive roots that invokes a dichotomy between modernity and sophistication, and the primitive and magic. She states that ‘modern researches have shown that alpana-painting61 is related to those queer magic practices of the primitives that have left traces even in our present sophisticated life’.62 She also links the practice to the ‘religious acts of devotion and austerity observed in different seasons by the women of India’,63 and goes on to describe these ‘popular rites’ as ‘reflections of the old socio-magical practices of the primitive rites’.64 But while acknowledging the ‘primitive’ link, she also re-images the tradition by pointing out that the designs, even though originally associated with this sphere, have in the meantime moved on. According to her, they now are no longer rooted in ritual but exist solely in the realm of art. She thus argues that the designs’ ‘main purpose is decorative’65 and proposes that they represent a unique expression of ‘the artistic mind of the women community’66 and the ‘Bengali genius’.67 In this instance, however, the decorative, rather than denoting symbolic lack as proposed by Steinmann, becomes a positive category and translates ‘primitive ritual’ into aesthetic value, positioning the practice within a civilized modernity. The manoeuvre, however, has its price: the associated female ritual context is left at the ‘other’, primitive side of the disciplinary divide. Indian visual traditions or aspects thereof considered too close to ‘uncivilized magic practices’ were thus frequently edited out, not only by Western researchers who were likely to romanticize such practices as primordial traditions along Orientalist and primitivist lines, but by Indian players as well who were eager to position themselves in the international and inevitably European sphere of art.
A further point to be considered here is the splitting of the ritual field along a high–low axis. Ritual invocations of the Divine, for example, figure positively in established high-cultural contexts such as Sanskrit philosophy, proclamations on art, or Tantric practices, and it is therefore not surprising that Bayiri drew on them in his efforts to talk up the tradition of drawing threshold designs. In contrast, the rangoli enthusiast scrupulously avoids ‘primitive’ religious contexts not sanctioned by scriptural traditions. The examination of the history and prevalent framings of the kolam tradition thus reveals categorical predicaments on multiple fronts that are conditioned by the gendered legacies of colonial discourse and the specificity of their articulation in India. Notions of the primitive had a particularly complex legacy in India as charges of primitivity levied by the colonial power skewed, as we have seen, the perception of traditional practices that were subsumed under the folklore bracket. Another aspect here is the adoption of modern modes of painting by Indian artists which entailed an endorsement of its primitivist strand. As Partha Mitter delineates, modern art represented a visual language of revolt against the colonial order in early twentieth-century British India, where the colonial regime had pushed academic art as the dominant aesthetic mode.68 Indian artists therefore adopted the modern idiom as a visual referent for their struggle for independence. With this adoption came indigenous primitivist appropriations largely from traditional Indian arts, including threshold designs. For example, Abanindranath Tagore, the leader of the Bengal School of Art considered a key stepping stone to the development of modern Indian art, wrote in 1919 a richly illustrated book about the practice. And Nandalal Bose, a pupil of Tagore who in 1922 became the principal of Kala Bhavan (Institute of Fine Arts), in Santiniketan, had students draw threshold designs as part of their art school training.69 Bose also sought to develop a specifically Oriental mode of abstraction which, laced with Orientalist assumptions about the East, was based in part on the linear rhythmicality and dynamism of threshold drawings.
Indian internal indigenous appropriations were modelled on European primitivism and relegated the practices that were sampled to the primitive, and hence minor, league even if they were re-valorized to an extent as ‘authentic’ modes of Indian expression that gave rise to modern Indian art. Moreover, none of these attempts at aesthetic self-definition and at forging a syncretic modern Indian visual practice entered the canons of modern art or registered on an international level until recently, as all questions of art were, and largely continue to be, adjudicated in the centres of cultural power in the West. Indian art thus shared the condition of invisibility with works of modern art developed in other non-Western centres and thus, inadvertently, also of the indigenous visual traditions they in part drew on.
A marked West–Rest divide thus characterizes the global condition of modern art that has only relatively recently begun to be challenged, and the history of modern art continues to be considered a Western phenomenon. There is also an inequity of appropriation to be noted. Whereas the ‘borrowing’ of ‘foreign’ cultural codes by Western artists such as in Picasso’s Demoiselles is not considered derivative or a sign of aesthetic weakness but is celebrated as a stroke of genius, the adoption of modern aesthetic idioms by artists with, for example, an Indian background was considered inauthentic, and was thought to result in a loss of cultural identity and inferior art. This double standard continues to haunt Indian and other non-Western artists who adopt modern and other visual languages that originate in the West and pushes these artists towards visual references to indigeneity. Citations of traditional Indian idioms in the work of modern Indian artists were thus considered and continue to be seen as markers of authenticity that alleviate charges of derivativeness. In a global arena, references to Indian folk traditions in the work of Indian artists thus invite complex and overdetermined associations that tie, legitimate and limit the art to assumed authentic cultural origins.
Primitivist appropriations by modern Indian artists who drew on Indian traditions therefore need to be recognized as a special chapter of the problematic legacy of primitivism in modern art. Such questions are gradually being addressed as part of efforts to decentre modern art.70 Mitter, for example, has offered a revisionist reading of primitivism as an empowering anti-colonial strategy in India.71 He cites the work of Jamini Roy and his adoption of Indian folk idioms as an example of a ‘politicized “ruralism” that emerged in the 1920s in India’.72 Mitter thus argues in favour of differentiating two kinds of primitivisms. He writes that ‘one must recognize the important differences between the primitivism of the centre and the periphery’ and that ‘Western primitivists were chiefly concerned with the predicament of urban existence, whereas Indian artists used primitivism as an effective weapon against colonial culture’.73
This view, however, does not address the compounded complexities of indigenous primitivist appropriations in India. As the example of kolam designs demonstrates, the links of primitivism to colonial discourse which, as Araeen points out,74 continue to have purchase in their neo-colonial guise of ‘ethnic arts’, need to be closely scrutinized with regard to hierarchies of power and issues of gender. The fact that the artist Jamini Roy’s appropriation of Indian folk art harboured an anti-colonial, nationalist message does not absolve art historians from questioning the power differentials at play in such appropriations. Much like Western primitivists who adopted idioms from European folk art and non-Western visual traditions, these ‘inspirations’ more often than not were appropriations rather than any recognition of the artistic significance of the work and its makers. An art history that declares the global a central and serious concern needs to redress the disavowal of the ‘other visual traditions’ that inhere modern art’s ‘primitive’ visual idiom, regardless of whether Western or native artists raided indigenous visual archives. Simon Gikandi refers to this neglect as an ‘anxiety of influence’ and wonders, what threat does ‘the acknowledgement of correlativity between the modern and its Others pose’?75 For him this constitutes ‘a hauntology that has come to define the moment of modernism’, which he sees as characterized by ‘a dialectic of love and loathing’.76 Key here is the denigration of such visual modes as artistic practices of little value in their own right.
The continuing pertinence of such questions is evident in what Araeen has called multiculturalism’s primitivist inheritance and what he sees as a continued primitivization and ‘ethnicization of non-European cultures globally as well as within Western societies’.77 The import of these concerns is also brought home by the conception of the Musée du Quai Branly, France’s new showcase ethnographic museum that opened in 2006 and has been characterized as a neo-primitivist, commodified multiculturalist and touristic conception.78 In the year 2000 Stéphane Martin, the chairman and manager of the museum, blatantly asserted that the most interesting aspects of the objects held in the museum were the stimulation of the history of Western art, and the fact that these objects ‘speak to us very directly’ as they are ‘universal in nature’.79 This statement denies the rich and culturally specific history of the objects displayed. The mode of display adopted by the museum exemplifies this outlook: the arrangement of the exhibits lacks demarcation between geographical areas, there are hardly any labels or information panels in evidence, and the few that exist are hard to find. Critics have condemned this curatorial conception as ‘jungle fever’ characterized by ‘Tarzan décor’ and as ‘dangerously close to a fantasy of pre-contact worlds’.80
The very fact that such statements and modes of display are still possible in the twenty-first century demonstrates the continuing difficulty with framing non-Western art within an international, if not global setting. It yet again highlights the problematic and unresolved legacy of modern art and the nature of its ‘interest’ in ethnic arts. And it brings us back to the importance and impact of interpretative frameworks and the need to develop conceptual arenas that can bridge such worlds, can extricate overdetermined ethnic arts from the limiting paradigms they are entangled in, and can diversify and change the direction of artistic and intellectual flows. But could the proposed expanded version of relational aesthetics offer such a bridging moment and extract the practice of drawing threshold designs from art world marginality? And how could this ‘bastardization’ of Bourriaudean thought be justified?
Relational aesthetics ironically is a product of just such a seemingly incongruous transfer of ideas. Bourriaud stretched Guattari’s notions of aesthetics, which emphatically excluded professional art and inserted them into the realm of contemporary art anyway. He defended this grafting of Guattari’s thinking onto the domain of present-day art in terms of ‘thinking about art with Guattari, and with the toolbox he has bequeathed us’.81 O’Sullivan and Zepke also extended Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics by transposing it into the realm of contemporary art. They readily concede that Deleuze and Guattari do not go beyond modern art in their writing and like Bourriaud feel the need to defend their move. Their main justification is a statement by Guattari to the effect that his conception of aesthetics includes all forms of artistic activity, which they argue, by implication, includes contemporary art.82 The present proposed expansion of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetic frameworks that has been given a cultural turn, however, constitutes an even more radical departure since Deleuze–Guattarean notions of art draw exclusively on ‘painters, writers, musicians and filmmakers who lie squarely within the Western canon’,83 in other words white, Western males.84 The rationale here is that this expansion into radically alterior cultural terrains represents an experiment in the spirit of their work: it picks up a line of flight and creates new assemblages in response to contemporary challenges, thereby countering the risk of ossification of Deleuze–Guattarean thought and of creating a new academy.
Moreover, this experiment, as I hope to demonstrate, harbours more than a potential framework for redeeming threshold designs. It offers an important corrective and conceptual expansion of relational aesthetics, as articulated by Bourriaud, that foregrounds the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics seen as key to opening up new terrains of aesthetic encounter and extending the relational beyond the gallery.
Arguably there are significant resonances between Tamil modes of establishing ‘the home in the world’, the concern of relational aesthetics with collectivity and the convivial, and Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics that warrant the validity of the experiment. For example, Tiravanija’s recreation of his private apartment in a gallery in New York – that is, the translocation of his domestic space to a public arena – offers suggestive correlations with the public–private dimensions of the drawing of threshold designs in Tamil Nadu. Relational aesthetics, furthermore, emphasizes the invention of new life possibilities, and declares aesthetic practice a privileged terrain for ‘providing potential models for human existence in general’.85 According to Bourriaud, the gallery goers that share a meal at Tiravanija’s or have a sleep-over at his re-created apartment momentarily suspend their established identities, enter a space of self-experimentation and open themselves to the possibility of becoming ‘other’. This outlook can be said to resonate with the performance of rites by Tamil women who step outside the everyday and reorient their identities towards a larger realm of cosmic force they reference as ‘Divine’ in the process. They chant and perform ritual observances, become ‘other’, harness the forces of chaos and return to the everyday recharged and empowered.86
There are also resonances with regard to Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics and kolams. As stated the Tamil world of energetic flux requires participation, and the drawing of the designs constitutes a re-establishing of order, of holding the forces of chaos at bay – an act which, given the changeable nature of the cosmos, needs to be repeated time and time again, and entails a constant interaction between order and flux and the continual rebalancing of relations. In a similar vein, the Deleuze–Guattarean notion of ‘bending the line’ that establishes an ‘endurable zone in which to install ourselves’87 also needs to be perpetually redone, since the line is constantly ‘unfolding at crazy speeds’.88 But ‘folding the line’ also implies a ‘living on the edge’, and for Deleuze this line is ‘deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless regions. It destroys all thinking […] It’s nothing but délire and madness.’89 This is again reminiscent of Tamil women who encounter the forces of chaos in their ritual activity. According to Baker Reynolds, it is woman who ‘steps into the chaotic, dark world of death and learns its secrets’90 and who declares ‘We eat death’91 and considers it woman’s work.
Furthermore there is the notion of the refrain as part of the interplay of territorialization and deterritorialization, which Deleuze–Guattari delineate and link in their aesthetics. It foregrounds the sonorous, and represents a territory that is unmade in order to be remade creatively, to be traversed by becomings. This conception again evokes the ritual invocations of vratas and the associated drawing of kolams, as well as the repeated acts of creation and erasure of everyday threshold designs. Deleuze–Guattari also link their concept of the refrain to territoriality and the home, a further Tamil resonance. They hold that ‘home does not pre-exist’92 and that ‘it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space’.93 This creates an interiority and an exteriority where the ‘forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible’.94 For Deleuze–Guattari, this prevents the interior forces of the earth ‘from being submerged’, and enables them to ‘resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of space that has been drawn’.95 They also suggest that ‘sonorous or vocal components are very important’96 and refer to ‘a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks’97 such as when a ‘housewife sings to herself […] as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work’.98 These propositions conjure up Baker Reynolds who states that ‘in drawing a kolam woman becomes fashioner of the cosmos, for she calls into being the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world’.99 And while Tamil housewives do not sing when they draw everyday kolams, the performance of vratas involves repeated and prolonged incantations. Furthermore, kolams are inwardly and outwardly protective as the ‘outer lines form also a barrier which serves both to protect movement inward toward the centre made by untoward forces and outwards on the part of the deity’.100 Tamil women who perform vratas and draw kolams as part of their rites furthermore abandon their subjectivity and participate in a larger world of divine power, as the ‘drawing of kolams proceeds from a dissolution and assimilation of all forms back into the formless’.101 This understanding resonates with the Deleuzian delineation of the territory or the ‘house’ conceived as a passage or an in-between, which mediates the wider frame of the cosmos. Deleuze thus states that the ‘figure, is no longer the inhabitant of the place, of the house, but of the universe that supports the house (becoming). It is like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization.’102
So far we have explored resonances between the cultural terrains of relational aesthetics, Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics and the traditional ritual and visual practices of Tamil housewives to avoid an imposition of inappropriate conceptions on the design tradition. The synergies have proven to be numerous and compelling. Yet these practices also differ most markedly in terms of their cultural situatedness and the concerns they address: while Tiravanija’s work takes a stance against the alienation experienced in post-industrialized society, where individuals struggle against the ‘despotic regime of the signifier’, the traditional world of Tamil Nadu battles with flux, and seeks to establish a place of stability in its dynamic energetics. The challenge of the proposed conceptual encounter therefore is the bridging of these worlds in a meaningful way. The ensuing discussion will explore key aspects of these frameworks which are seen to offer a crucial connective potential for a transformative and co-equal bridging of worlds.
Social, Animal, Vegetable and Cosmic
The first concept to be explored in greater depth is the non-human aspect of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics that was skirted by Bourriaud but is central to the proposed expanded notion of relational aesthetics. According to Guattari, what is at stake in the current world and its struggle for ecological disequilibrium is the relationship between ‘subjectivity and its exteriority – be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic’.103 When Bourriaud drew on Guattari’s concepts in his framing of relational aesthetics, he honed in on the social aspect of this relationship, leaving the ‘animal, vegetable or Cosmic’ aside. We are encountering Latour’s ‘Internal Great Divide’104 again and the conception of nature as outside culture, and as universal and knowable by means of Western science alone. It is all the more important, therefore, to reflect on the inclusion of these realms in Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics as well as the potentiality these worlds hold for the envisaged translative encounter at he heart of this experiment. For Deleuze–Guattari, the aesthetic repositioning of the subject crucially goes beyond intersubjectivity and is grounded in the encounter with a collectivity which encompasses ‘elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all these’.105 They propose that flows of intensity, ‘their fluids, their fibres, their continuums and conjunction of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject’,106 that is, ‘becomings-animal, becoming molecular, have replaced history, individual or general’.107 Similar to the Bergson–Deleuze–Guattarean notion of subjective perception as a special instance of a larger, diffuse objective perception of molecularity, they thus redefine subjectivity by relating it to the wider field of force beyond the human domain. For them ‘subjectification has little to do with any subject. It’s to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic field, an individuation taking place through intensities […] it’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities’.108
But Deleuze–Guattari develop the non-human spectrum not only in relation to subjectivity, but also make it part of their conception of art, and, furthermore, see the two realms as interlinked. They link aesthetic practice with invisible forces and argue a ‘fold of force’ as representative of an artistic mode of living. They write about ‘establishing different ways of existing, depending on how you fold the line of forces’109 and refer to ‘existing not as a subject but as a work of art’.110 For Deleuze–Guattari the world of force, furthermore, is negotiated via the ‘house’.111 It is integral to the non-human aspects of art defined as ‘a being of sensation’112 and ‘the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos’113 also referred to as ‘man’s nonhuman becomings’.114 They link expression to territory and the non-human sphere, and report how the ‘brown stagemaker […] lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside stands out against the dirt’,115 pointing out that this ‘inversion produces a matter of expression’.116 Expressiveness is thus redefined in terms of taking possession and of environmentality rather than human articulation. It constitutes a specific response to a terrain or geographical location that ‘is not reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action’.117
Deleuze and Guattari furthermore refer to the territorial markings of the stagemaker as ‘readymades’ and as art brut. They pronounce that ‘what is called art brut is not at all pathological or primitive’,118 but constitutes a ‘matter of expression in the movement of territoriality’ which they declare ‘the base or ground of art’.119 Territory, furthermore, is linked to the terrestrial and transmutes the forces of chaos to the forces of the earth.120 Yet through the very regrouping of the forces of chaos territoriality entails, it ‘unleashes something that will surpass it’.121 For Deleuze–Guattari, territory is always a place of passage.122 The forces of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization are interconnected123 since ‘the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterritorialization’124 and the Cosmos is but an intense deterritorializing refrain125 which liberates forces previously ‘bundled together as forces of the earth’ that become ‘regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos’.126 Expression for Deleuze–Guattari is therefore not linked to an inner subjective core of experience; it is not an inside-out trajectory, or based on a consciousness model. It is rather defined as relational to an outside, an environs. This, however, has implications for the conception of the artist who is redefined as ‘the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark’.127 They further declare that ‘artists are stagemakers’.128 But for Deleuze–Guattari the bird holds pride of place as they decidedly foreground the non-human base of art and declare that ‘art is not the privilege of human beings’.129 They write, ‘Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated conditions.’130 The notions of territory and force are hence foundational for Deleuze–Guattarean conceptions of art and equally apply to non-human and human aesthetics actors.
They further focus on the central role of the ‘house or framework’131 in the creation of art. For them, art ‘begins with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house’,132 and it is through the ‘territory-house system’133 that pure sensory qualities of art emerge.134 They elaborate that ‘all that is needed to produce art is here: a house, some postures, colours, and songs – on condition that it all opens onto and launches itself on a mad vector as on a witch’s broom, a line of the universe, or of deterritorialization’.135 For them the ‘house takes part in an entire becoming. It is life, the “non-organic life of things”.’136 Key here is the movement ‘from House to universe. From endosensation to exosensation’,137 because the house not only isolates but ‘opens onto cosmic forces’.138 And they repeat that ‘if nature is like art, this is always because it combines these two living elements in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization’.139
Art is therefore characterized as a movement between the finite and infinite, and is grounded in the world of force and non-human becomings. It negotiates order and chaos and territory and cosmos, just like kolams. In fact Deleuze–Guattari refer to art as ‘chaosmos’, that is, a ‘composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation’.140
But for Deleuze–Guattari, the greater struggle of the artist is with opinion rather than chaos. Deleuze–Guattari conceive of opinion as an umbrella that shelters people from chaos ‘on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions’.141 They hold that it is the role of the artists to ‘make a slit in the umbrella’, in order to let in ‘a bit of free and windy chaos’.142 And they propose that the first action an artist has to engage in is erasure; since ‘the page or canvas is already so covered with pre-existing, pre-established clichés, the painter must confront the chaos and hasten the destruction so as to produce a sensation that defies every opinion’.143 This statement again resonates powerfully with the practice of drawing threshold designs, as erasure is integral to the designs. Kolams furthermore are not drawn to be admired, to become part of an aesthetic canon, or point to the genius of their creators. They are erased to be redrawn. They are seen to performatively harmonize material substance, cosmic forces and the local community and aim to be affective rather than present conceptual certainties.
The next point to be considered is how the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean notions of art are envisaged in view of gallery art and territoriality, that is, how are ‘force’ and the stagemaker reconciled? Deleuze–Guattari group art into three major movements: classicism, romanticism and the modern differentiated by their attitudes to the forces of the earth, to matter and the cosmos. For Deleuze–Guattari, modern art is ‘the age of the cosmic’144 and is characterized by ‘material forces’ since now a ‘material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly “harness” forces’.145 They endorse Klee who stated that art is to render visible rather than reproduce the visible,146 and hold that Cézanne’s rocks ‘exist uniquely through the forces of folding they harness’.147 Modern art for Deleuze–Guattari captures ‘nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible’.148 They also cite Klee who argues that ‘what is needed in order to “render visible” or harness the Cosmos is a pure and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object’.149 The implication here is that art needs to reference the world of visible objects, at least to some extent. But where does this leave abstract art and visual practices such as Tamil threshold designs that employ geometric shapes? And what about the art of the stagemaker that certainly does not engage with the world of objects?
Abstract art evidently occupies an ambivalent position in Deleuze–Guattarean thought. For example, a downright negative conception of the abstract in art can be found in Deleuze’s single authored book on Francis Bacon, where abstraction is associated with cliché,150 the cerebral and optical form.151 It is said to pass through the brain rather than act directly on the nervous system and hence does not attain sensation,152 and represents a digital rather than an expressive, analogue code.153 In What is Philosophy?, however, co-authored with Guattari and published ten years later, a shift in conception can be noted. Now abstract painting ‘like all painting’ is considered ‘sensation, nothing but sensation’.154 Yet when painting comes along in abstract form it is judged to lack the terrestrial and is considered ‘but a sensation of the concept of sea or concept of tree’155 and seen to dematerialize sensation.156 For Deleuze–Guattari, who uphold that philosophy is the realm of concepts and art the realm of sensation, this is an alarming assessment. The question, however, is, would kolams, despite their nonconcrete form, be classed as ‘abstract’ by Deleuze–Guattari? The designs, even though based on geometric shapes, are also constituted by a hand-drawn line that adds a tactile element to what Deleuze described as the optical space of abstract art.157 In Francis Bacon, Deleuze championed Bacon’s work as a third way between the purely optical abstraction of a Kandinsky or Mondrian, and the purely albeit excessively tactile nature of Abstract Expressionism. So how would Deleuze–Guattari have responded to kolam designs and their combination of abstract shapes with tactile, haptic elements? Would they have argued them as a fourth way that combines abstract shapes with tactility, creating a new assemblage engendered through the influence of a specific geographical and cultural terrain? After all Deleuze–Guattari do acknowledge the impact of territorial difference with regard to Romanticism. For them German Romanticism experiences territory as solitary ‘regardless of population density’,158 whereas in the Romanticism of Latin and Slavic countries the earth is never solitary even if ‘deserted or arid’.159
The issue of abstraction furthermore hinges on the question of sensation and affectivity. For Deleuze and Guattari, art is a block of sensation defined as a compound of ‘blocs of percepts and affects’160 created by the artist. The latter wrests ‘the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject’ and frees ‘the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another’.161 This process of extraction creates ‘a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations’,162 in other words, art. They quote Artaud who praises art works that render ‘not the resemblance but the pure sensation “of a tortured flower, of a landscape slashed, pressed, and plowed”’.163 Yet they also declare that the ‘area of plain uniform colour’ of ‘the great monochrome of modern painting’ is ‘the bearer of glimpsed forces’.164 For them this is what makes these paintings abstract: ‘making the invisible forces visible’165 and ‘drawing up figures with a geometrical appearance but that are no more than forces’.166
But for Deleuze–Guattari, rendering invisible forces visible defines modern art per se, not just monochromes, which they see exemplified in the work of Klee, Cézanne, van Gogh and so forth. They further say that ‘art begins not with the flesh but with the house’,167 and that the objective world, however rendered, is but ‘the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos’, that is, ‘man’s nonhuman becomings’.168 We are back with the stagemaker, the territory and the house, the foundational ground for Deleuze–Guattarean conceptions of art that ultimately, so it seems, also encompasses abstract art, even if ambiguously so. For Deleuze–Guattari, therefore, the notion of forces is more central to the modern artist’s aesthetic production than the question in what form it comes along. Approached from this perspective, the art of drawing threshold designs could therefore comfortably claim a space among the visual practices that qualify as ‘art’ in the global arena of the visual.
But for Deleuze–Guattari, the notion of force is not only paramount for the work of art but also for its reception. According to Deleuze–Guattari, ‘It is Mrs. Dalloway who perceives the town – but because she has passed into the town like “a knife through everything” and becomes imperceptible herself. Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man.’169 For Deleuze–Guattari, the perceiving subject becomes the affect, that is, enters the world of non-human becomings, exceeding human perceptions. This brings the issue of audience participation championed by relational art to mind, as well as – if not more so – the communal aspect of the tradition of threshold designs and the affectivity associated with drawing the designs. As has been developed, kolams function not through the perceptual – that is, the act of being seen – but through bodily, deterritorializing interaction with the designs. The act of traversing the designs creates a passage of force that references non-human becomings: in Tamil culture the person or animal that steps on the design and thereby erases it, at least in part, absorbs the cosmic forces captured in the designs, that is, the territory created through the act of drawing. Viewed from the point of view of an expanded Deleuze–Guattarean perspective, this returns us to the issue of art’s non-human dimension. For Deleuze–Guattari, the brown stagemaker creates art brut, and the hallmark of a true artist is that he has entered a ‘zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility’,170 in other words, a zone ‘in which we no longer know which is animal and which human’.171 But Deleuze–Guattari also warn us that this must not be seen as a ‘return to origins’ or as the uncovering of a ‘bestial or primitive humanity’172 beneath civilization. It is rather a question of the differences between ‘animal, vegetable, mineral or human’173 becoming indistinct.
When we apply this framework to Tamil designs and their affective dimension epitomized by the dual movements of erasure and of absorption, the aesthetic focus pivots to the everyday Tamil audience of threshold designs who complete the work of art and, arguably, become, for a brief moment, the artist as defined by Deleuze–Guattari, by entering the world of territory and force, of the house and the cosmos and of non-human becomings. Yet even though the perceiving subject, according to Deleuze–Guattari, potentially enters the zone of imperceptibility and therefore enters a zone attributed to the artist and the brown stagemaker, in their framework it remains foremost the artist who ‘goes beyond the perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived’,174 who is ‘a seer, a becomer’,175 and leads the way. It is thus unquestioningly the artists who present us with the affects they have created and invented: ‘they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound. Van Gogh’s sunflowers are becomings, like Dürer’s thistles, or Bonnard’s mimosas.’176 There is therefore an ambiguity at play between their declaration of the insignificance of the human creative factor, the notion of the brown stagemaker as artist, and the central role accorded to the artist as visionary leader, who, as the encounter with Tamil women’s art draws out, is exclusively drawn from the ranks of the privileged, male aesthetic arbiters of a genial persuasion who always trump nature and the bird. In contrast the tradition of drawing threshold designs is underwritten by a more co-equal paradigm.
But there is yet a further question to be considered. While Deleuze– Guattari’s framework comfortably connects with the aspect of force inherent in kolams, the practice of drawing threshold designs is performative and not primarily invested in formal aspects, nor in the designs’ preservation. So how do Deleuze–Guattari envisage duration in relation to the physicality of a work of art, that is, ‘How could the sensation be preserved without a material capable of lasting?’177 Their response is that ‘sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect’.178 They explain that even ‘if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration’.179 In other words, for Deleuze–Guattari the length of the material existence of a work of art is not relevant. As long as it has existed for however short a period of time it constitutes a fully fledged work of art. The erasure that is integral to kolams therefore poses no hurdle for the tradition’s claim to artistic value in this aesthetic framework and the practice presumably would have been accepted as a veritable art form by Deleuze–Guattari had they seen it, despite its abstract form.
This recognition, however, returns us to the question of how the proposed expanded concept of relational aesthetics resituates the tradition of drawing threshold designs and what it can make available to the practice in view of the global contemporary. The proposition is that the post-Bourriaudean relational framework allows for a rearticulation of the practice from a folk art considered to be in decline, or a popular visual practice that engages with quaint if not superstitious notions of the cosmos, deities and temporalities defined by astronomical markers, to a practice that can co-equally take its place in the sphere of contemporary visual practice. Approached from a revised relational perspective it now registers as an aesthetic mode of living that aims to generate conviviality in an inclusive, environmental manner, and connects subjectivity with an exteriority comprising the social, the animal, vegetal and cosmic. This reconceptualization importantly encompasses matter-force and the forces of the cosmos, that is, the non-human aspects of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics. It furthermore takes the relational beyond the gallery and situates the convivial in the local community while also expanding it beyond the sphere of human sociability. The proposed expanded conception of relational aesthetics therefore harbours the potential to liberate kolams from the expectations of readability exemplified by the notion that without a de-codable meaning the tradition must be in decline. And, importantly, it is Deleuze–Guattari’s grounding of art in the sphere of the non-human that offers crucial connectivities for encompassing the daily actions of Tamil housewives in the global contemporary. The Deleuze–Guattarean emphasis on the interplay of territorialization and deterritorialization and the notion of matter as continuous variation,180 furthermore, removes the stigma of superstition and primitivity from Tamil conceptions of fluidity at the heart of matter and hence the tradition of drawing threshold designs. It thus offers a conceptual connectivity that constitutes a meeting on neutral terrain and demands a rethinking of relations of the so-called ‘primitive’ to fine art.
The proposed expanded framing of relational aesthetics therefore unearths a potentiality that Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics neglected. By drawing out non-human becomings, it brings the full range of Guattari’s conception of subjectivity to the fore. It mitigates the disjuncture between Deleuze–Guattarean articulations of aesthetics and the circumscribed examples of visual art they draw on produced by male, white, middle-class masters, extending the Deleuze–Guattarean reach into the cultural terrain of Tamil housewives and threshold drawings. It allows the Tamil cultural context of the designs, their ritual performativity and the need to balance substances and forces to register, and paves the way to bringing the design practice and its cultural contexts into a global conversation in the fields of contemporary art and art theory.
This encounter, however, also constitutes the crossing of ‘a threshold enabling a conjunction’ that generates ‘a shared acceleration’.181 Tamil matrons thus offer a corrective to Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics as Deleuze–Guattari solely draw their aesthetic examples from the realm of painting, classical music and the cinema, neglecting the implications of their own propositions about the brown stagemaker. The kolams side with the bird, difference the map, create new intensities and produce new connections. These implications of Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics have, however, so far not been developed in the visual field. Despite the art world’s ethnographic and relational turn, despite post-modernism’s and post-colonialism’s momentous emphasis on alterity, despite the engaged interest in Deleuze–Guattari’s work, the reception of their aesthetic thought has largely remained within the cultural terrain of Euro-American conceptions of art. It is high time, therefore, for a vector of deterritorialization to form new assemblages.
Moreover, the encounter engendered operates in a specific, focused and intimate manner that avoids sweeping generalizations of the kind Bourriaud proposes in Altermodern, where he offers the figure of the artist as global flâneur in response to the challenges of the global. Bourriaud’s altermodern artist is conceived as a heroic cultural nomad who single-handedly samples and appropriates the world’s cultural codes in an overflight fashion to be reconstituted for his art intended for the gallery system. Agency hence remains with the itinerant artist who departs from and returns to the hegemonic centres of the world from a multiple destination trip around the globe. The present discussion proposes a different kind of encounter: one that is more patient, slower, more reflexive and, it is hoped, less arrogant. It envisages a meeting of worlds and regards the nomad artist’s semionautic global code surfing as just as appropriative as modern art’s primitivist ‘inspirations’ the altermodern claims it has reckoned with. It considers such voracious movements through geographical and cultural spaces as lacking in the openness and patience required for transformative encounters between equals. The discussion rather sides with Jonathan Harris who acknowledges that ‘including new voices from places other than those within the global art world’s European and North American heartlands is harder to do than it may initially sound’.182 It holds that a conceptual repositioning is crucial for such an inclusivity to be achieved, as mere physical additions of non-Western art work in the spaces of the global art market simply add exotic spice to existing modes of art practice without truly making a difference.
This exploration therefore is critical of Bourriaud’s altermodern homo viator’s mode of cultural translation that operates through the viatorization of objects and signs. It holds that this extractive procedure exonerates the nomadic artist who metaphorically owns the world, has the power to speak, the money to travel and the arrogance to impose his visions on the world from having his preconceptions challenged.183 A viatorized aesthetic procedure thus would not question the framing of threshold designs as a folk art, a conception that is premised on an inherent distance to contemporaneity, and would most likely continue to consider the practice to be in decline, to have lost its meaning and to be oriented towards the past. Furthermore, it would not be interested in liberating the tradition from charges of primitivity, or in disentangling it from the ambivalent, prejudiced and convoluted histories of primitivism in the spheres of art, while not being averse to appropriating aspects of its visual language in the name of international art.
In contrast, the proposed post-Bourriaudean relational aesthetics, much like Guattari’s patient who decided to take up driving lessons which allowed for ‘new fields of virtuality’184 to open up, potentially sets the practice free and allows it to figure in the contexts of art and philosophy. It entails a creative diagrammatic operation or abstract machine that ‘does not function to represent, […] but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’.185 It develops a map which does not reproduce but constructs,186 that is ‘open and connectable’,187 has ‘multiple entrance ways’188 and ‘has to do with performance’.189 Post-Bourriaudean relational aesthetics thus is about ‘what functions with, in conjunction with what other things’,190 and links the Thai meal and the house and Bourriaud and Tamil women and Deleuze–Guattari and ‘Rangoli brahma’191 and London and garden gnomes and, and, and.
This experimental exploration, however, should not be deemed more or less successful if more or less accurate shared concerns can be proven. It is rather about a productive mobilization based on proximities and resonances, a reading with and through which leads to new questions and departures. The issue at stake, furthermore, is not only what a relational Deleuze–Guattarean aesthetics can do for the tradition of drawing threshold designs, but also how the former will be transformed as the world of the male, white, middle-class European artists that Deleuze–Guattari draw on is transposed to the domestic sphere of unnamed females of colour from Tamil Nadu. This conceptual encounter constitutes an effort in cultural translation, with all the pitfalls and limitations such endeavours entail, including the recognition that there can never be a transparent passage from one culture to the other. As Maharaj reminds us, translation is a double-voicing concept’192 that cooks up a ‘third’, a hybrid in-between, as ‘the construction of meaning in one does not square with that of another’.193 Acts of cultural translation, including the present discussion, hence must be recognized as a creative fashioning that inevitably exemplifies translation’s successes as well as its failures.