The New Clothes Review

Such incisive critique. Thought it died in Delhi, possibly due to some germ infection in its raw food experimenta festival. Stumbled upon NCR on a nasty day of Delhi...well, atrabiliousness, and shook my head in relief. There's still some left; do you guys have an email address?

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:31:17 -0400

Glad we could be of comfort. Do write to us: sir.ian.mcquillan@gmail.com

Your face is my screen

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:15:00 -0500

We at NCR do not buy into the zero-sum cultural theory of Mumbai and Delhi — that if one becomes more attractive, the other becomes less, and so on. It’s perfectly obvious to us that a person can afflict both cities at the same time.

It helps if that person never sleeps. Recently, rolling his hungering wide insomniac eyes over “the chaos that is Bombay”, a young Delhi impresario managed, in just under six and a half minutes, to reduce a city other than our own into an identical mess of inanities, visual cliches, and no-shit? audio samples. The production is sponsored by Cobra beer and hosted by www.guardian.co.uk as part of its new Mumbai City Guide. A number of good-looking Delhi hipsters host video tours of Mumbai here; in all of them, the city is much less the focus than the hipsters, and altogether the hosts have been more carefully “curated” than the tours. In this case, the impresario, who is also a VJ and other things (more on this later), makes a music video with his DJ partner, while a documentary is made of them at work.

The doc is meant to be supplemental to the video, but of course it’s the other way around. The video is a hash of “Spirit of Mumbai” visual cliches in spinny stop-motion, backed by a soundtrack of !ncredible India audio cliches with a bass track laid on top. Perhaps they played a game: “Name as many Bombay locations as you can that are so over-exposed they already have movies named after them”. Answers: Dhobi Ghat, Chor Bazar, Gateway of India, Marine Drive. It’s kind of appropriate for fresh-off-the-plane Dilliwalas leafing through Lonely Planet, because there’s literally nothing new here. It’s the documentary that ends up being interesting, but only as a comment on the conditions of its production.

Early on in the doc, at the dhobi ghat, the impresario offers an explanation of what he’s doing. Here it is, transcribed the way it sounds: “We’re trying to sample, like video and audio… and try to make like a… audio-video [he’s splashed by a dhobi, whose face he is in; he laughs]… audio-visual piece that expresses the chaos of Bombay, through the sounds and [splash; laugh] … through the sounds and sights. And this is just an amazing place for that. I’m getting wet. But it’s quite amazing.”

In the background, the labouring dhobi shows no agreement that any of it is amazing: not the chaos, nor the sound of himself slapping heavy, soaked clothes onto a stone, nor the fact that an impresario from Delhi is being paid dollaz to stand in his face and be splashed. The dhobi’s doleful expression is glimpsed in the corner of the frame in the documentary, but it disappears from the final glazed and groovy audio-visual piece, leaving only a memory for the viewer, a ghost reminding her that something has gone missing.

In the move from documentary to audio-visual piece, there’s a kind of spiralling play-within-play effect : the impresario and DJ eventually appear within their own music video and, contrary-wise, the doc about them shooting the video has the same vibe, and is backed by the same samples, as the video they shoot. In short, the subject of the whole exercise is not “Mumbai”. The subject is “impresario in Mumbai” and “Mumbai according to impresario”. Or, to put things simply, the subject is: “impresario”.

This is crystal-clear again in the closing sequence of the doc. Using a jerry-rigged taxi, the impresario and DJ literally “project the stuff we’ve been shooting back onto the walls in Bombay”. As the soundtrack picks up, a window of searing white solipsism is projected over the darkened city from the window of a moving taxi, onto walls that are intentionally blank, onto faces of working-class men who live there and who are temporarily dazzled and confused by the light. Then your eye adjusts, and the real city falls back, invisible, and you see only the projection, only the impresario’s images. And then you know that that was all you were ever watching.
***

To understand how this came to be — and I mean to be “hosted on www.guardian.co.uk and paid for by Cobra beer” — we need to bring the impresario back to Delhi and unpack the process through which he became successful. Of course, we also need to unpack the commercial decisions of the Guardian and Cobra, but those may be less interesting than the man in/with the camera. Back in Delhi, the impresario never sleeps. He is, simultaneously, a video jockey, a video artist, a restaurant proprietor, an “art cafe” curator, a creative-lab space manager, and a hydra-headed festival organiser. Wait. He’s also a chief at a design firm that does corporate graphics AND advises international NGOs on innovative public sanitation. Yes, he’s a whirlwind of entrepreneurship and creative opportunism, and this is generally known and admired about him, though he’s typically judged by intent rather than outcomes.

Withholding judgement about these outcomes — or rather, letting the Mumbai video say everything — what interests us is the system of waterworks that pipes non-commercial funding into such undertakings. In recent years, many such projects, including his, have been funded by the Goethe Institut, the cultural wing of the German embassy. How come? In part because young Delhi cultural producers, including this one, are eloquent in a post-millenial verbal mimicry that’s capable of legitimising harmless, repetitive ideas as urgent and cutting-edge social-cultural interventions. One example arrived in the publicity for a tour of British visual jockeys (whom the impresario would, obviously, be accompanying). One of their events was described thus: “Through the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, the project seeks to uncover who we are as human beings and how our complex identities are connected to our every day environments through a multitude of diﬀerent rituals.”

It’s no accident that this pile of jargon sounds like it dropped from a meme. It’s a very savvy treatment of words that are hard currency in our cultural circuit, quite separate from what they mean (help yourself: collaborative multidisciplinary juxtaposition curated multimedia spectrum bricolage). To improve the metaphor, these are words treated as audio samples, looped and mixed into recursive sequences — and Western embassy funders can’t resist the beat.

Thirty years ago, the largest form of cultural embassy in India was the Soviet Union’s. Through vernacular publishing, mobile libraries, grants to workers’ movements and so on, it reached out to the middle and working classes (there were also sufficient ballet performances in Delhi for the rest of us). At the time, cultural diplomacy was political and its goal was to build constituencies for bilateral ties. Today, when cultural diplomacy is commercial, and its goal is tourism revenue or investment, its audience has shrunk to the people most likely to supply these: the metropolitan elite. A survey of recent years’ event-funding by the Goethe Institut or the British Council makes it quite clear that their emphasis is on high arts and avant-garde entertainment, whether or not an audience exists for it. Or rather, an audience does exist, but it seems not to concern the embassy that that audience is minuscule and already satiated with its own state-subsidised cultural menu.

Is there anything tinier than the audience that’s interested in celebrating “interdisciplinary processes and experiences that shape contemporary thought and action”? There is — and that’s the community of intermediaries and impresarios ready to serve up this sculpted language-turd to funders, and serve down (though it doesn’t go far down) events to the very proximate audience, mostly their friends. There’s little competition for these grants, since the circles of producers and consumers are so vertically restricted, and the networks of non-elite cultural strugglers are too far below even to be rejectable. Result: anyone who grabs a teat can milk it till the EU goes bankrupt, and can do so while producing vainglorious nonsense and building a pile of projects beneath them that allows them to reach ever-higher, more lucrative teats.

If the only outcome of life in this stratosphere was under-attended light shows in Lutyens Delhi and wasted tax-payer Euros, that would be one thing. But India is a poor (and chaotic) country, and the conscience of foreign funders is acute if ineffective. Elite impresarios can’t show the mercy of simply leaving sub-elite society alone. Instead, every social problem ends up remade in their own image.

For example: In the least of their errors, they will pull the classical arts, already patronised by the middle class, into their dubstep-thundering echo chamber. This may require a German-funded multimedia collaboration with a Bharatanatyam dancer, overlaid with a Greatest Hits of fund-baiting — references to the environment and world peace, set to the synthetic faux-elevations of Goa psytrance. Afterwards (clicking back to the Guardian video) the impresario can make this comment: “We have such a huge and diverse tradition of classical arts, performing arts, it’s just amazing to be able to dip into that, and not solely be urban and futuristic, but kind of mix everything that India stands for, and has stood for, and mix that with what we stand for.”

Oh, impresario. It breaks my heart, but you are futuristic. You will take the next grant and the next one, and be on the next Newsweak list of future faces of a techno-globalised India. And we are all way too close to what India stands for, and has stood for since time began. But that has nothing to do with Bharatanatyam or break-dancers, and everything to do with your own performance: the one that keeps what’s on top on top, what’s inside inside, and makes the rest of the country dance to its tune.

MISSING THE PARTY

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:19:00 -0400

No one knows the NCR, so no one ever invites us to their parties. It’s just as well, though, because we’re kind of awkward in crowds. Instead, we usually spend our Saturday nights in the Review’s dusty Malviya Nagar office. It’s not so bad, really. Some evenings we catch up on our reading. Sometimes we have long heart-to-hearts with friends. One Saturday night in December we sat around until three, cups of hot tea in our hands, singing Beatles songs. Good fun.

In a recent Mumbai Boss essay, Rosalyn D’Mello explained that she goes to many parties, with several famous people, and not only is she having a good time, but she’s having a better time than anyone: anyone in Mumbai and anyone anywhere else in the whole country. “The Delhi ‘house party’,” she says, “is a reflection of its buzzing cultural calendar. There’s more than one book waiting to be written about these BYOB treats.” She bums cigarettes off of Pablo Bartholomew, she schmoozes with Sarnath Banerjee, and she thinks Delhi is grand for letting her in.

No one invites us to those house parties, so we can’t judge that claim. But we know something about the cultural calendar which she says the parties reflect, and we don’t understand what she’s talking about. In a good week, she says, “almost every other day, there’s between three to five must-attend events happening across the city.” But the number of high profile events is no indicator of their quality, and we know that many of them are nothing but boring non-art and non-critical thought: William Dalrymple is a colonial apologist, Hari and Sukhmani put me to sleep, and the Bagel Café doesn’t actually sell good bagels. There’s certainly a great deal of cultural production taking place in Delhi (also true of Mumbai, also true of every city in the world), and a greater amount of that production in Delhi seems to fit into the various categories of “high culture” than in other Indian cities. But there’s also a huge amount of fluff, and a huge amount of back-patting and self-congratulation about this fluff.

***

We aren’t Delhi-haters. That tribe paints Delhi in too-broad strokes too, and hasn’t yet delivered the knock-out blow against the city — that it gets really too hot here and we should all go someplace else — so we won’t engage them. We like Delhi just fine. What really upsets us are Delhi’s apologists and promoters, the Delhi-lovers — of which D’Mello is a fine specimen.

The question isn’t whether Delhi is a good city or a bad city or a better city than or a worse city than – answers to those questions will always miss the mark of twenty million people’s lives and experiences. We want to know why there is so much boring high culture in this city, why so many D’Mellos feel compelled to defend Delhi’s worth, and why they cite this boring high culture as proof of its worth.

***

To appreciate high culture in this way — without any critical lens — is the logical converse of the Romantic injunction to create “art for art’s sake”: if the making of art has moral value regardless of its content or context, then it can’t be considered or criticised in those terms either, it must simply be loved. No politics or even displeasure here: we’re consuming Art.

And so we realise that D’Mello has provided us with the key to the conundrum of Delhi’s high cultural back-patting: “The Delhi ‘house party’ is a reflection of its buzzing cultural calendar. There’s more than one book waiting to be written about these BYOB treats.” Indeed there are. The cultural calendar has the same character as the house parties: both are bourgeois. The value of art openings and book launches, we’re told, is that they “feature open bars and facilitate networking with publishing bigwigs and art enthusiasts.” Both the cultural calendar and the house party are delicate games of Jenga, the goal of both to accumulate social capital while protecting the social status quo.

This much isn’t unique to Delhi: Bourdieu demonstrated that the bourgeoisie, everywhere and always, are condemned to appreciate only reactionary and anti-intellectual art, which provide for them both a means of self-assurance and useful symbolic capital — a demonstration of their good taste. But D’Mello’s piece indexes a tighter loop in Delhi between the world of high cultural production and high social reproduction — between the art gallery and the house party — than even Bourdieu would predict. The domain of cultural production, for him, has a limited autonomy that allows for class treason, for the production not only of new critical tools, but also of new forms of solidarity between bourgeois and proletarian. What’s wrong with Delhi, then?

Another clue in D’Mello’s piece: nearly all of the institutions she mentions as the sites of Delhi’s superior art scene are funded either by the Indian state (the universities) or by foreign states (the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institut) as instruments of state policy. Unlike in, say, Mumbai, in Delhi the terms of the high cultural conversation are being set by bureaucrats and by the exigencies of diplomacy, and the city’s bourgeoisie is reading the script. Through the deliberate undermining of the partial autonomy of high cultural production, we’ve ended up with a lavishly-funded but critically-bankrupt cultural world. Unless Delhi’s culture-consuming bourgeoisie learns to pay attention to the large mass of cultural production taking place outside of Chanakyapuri and outside the house party’s gate, they’ll have no idea what they’re missing.

Local is my favourite colour

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:35:00 -0400

Hauz Khas Village, the most rapidly gentrifying quarter of south Delhi, throws up a lot of uneasy juxtapositions. Such as a “pay-what-you-will” café whose walls are adorned with suitably wrinkly-and-wise local colour from the Himalayas, and has a large picture window providing an inviting view of the Village’s own brand of local colour – tiny children, dragging canisters of water up to their shacks down the lane.

But this unwelcome reversal, with the inhabitant unwittingly turning into the object of contemplation and worse, a marker of “authenticity”, for a whole other class about to destroy the very qualities they prize and celebrate as “edgy”, “real” or “colourful” is a sadly universal story.

There is another window down a lane in the Village, which also invites the spectator to contemplate the local colour. The kitsch artefacts in the window are the usual agglomeration of hallucinogenic-candy-coloured horn-OK-please, ideal boy, and Bollywood imagery, but at gringo-baiting prices. It’s a slice of the street, thoughtfully sanitised for those who think the street is seething, perilous chaos. Think that cutting chai tastes of dysentery? That the auto moves like a rampaging bull? That the cow – wait, you have to get a picture of that, or nobody will believe you’re actually in India. Anyway, just put all this on your cushions – chai cups, autos, cows – and voila, you can congratulate yourself on being so giddily foreign that you may well have been reincarnated as a Hindoo.

While kitsch is so well entrenched as a failsafe business strategy in high-class consumer goods, it makes most of this rant just sound like high-minded churlishness, there is something different about this window. It’s clearly the product of a uniquely foreign, neo-colonial gaze – with a post-modern twist, as one of the (albeit better-produced) lines dramatises. Aside from a “gaai mata” cushion or two, the line includes coasters and mugs made out of what appear to be “found” studio photographs of south Indian men, posing with touching sincerity, in pastel shirts, lustrous moustaches, and flamboyantly 70s hairdos.

The founder of the product line is a French lady with an enthusiastic sense of humour – who, earlier this year, posted a picture of pink-shirted youths with mullets and moustaches on her product label’s Facebook group, wishing its members a joyous 2011, “filled with lovely moustaches”. Admiring members return the enthusiasm, professing they “love” these men, and occasionally, that they want to marry them.

This light-hearted chatter rings a bit hollow and hypocritical, amplifying the chasm between classes and nationalities that’s increasingly making the Village more disquieting than delightful. Quite clearly, these products showcase the charmingly naïve vanity of the local third-world relic, who sports a moustache unironically, qualifying him to be a quaint Other, served up against an equally comically unfashionable starred-or-striped-or-leopard-printed backdrop for the amusement and pleasure of the first-world sophisticate.

As the critic Catherine McDermott puts it, “Kitsch is a sensitive area because enjoyment of it relies on a sense of knowing superiority, which is not far removed from condescension or arrogance. To put it simply, objects that enjoy the status of kitsch in a smart city drawing room may at the same time be on display as an object of reverence in another home.” Like the original studio portraits, which might resonate with personal sentiment for their subjects, and those close to them.

“If you like Kitsch and India, you’ll love us,” goes the catchphrase of the product line. You will, especially if you think kitschy India is best admired from afar, safely behind picture windows and screen-printed images.