Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on making sense of trash with art

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Charles Baudelaire, a French poet and philosopher, wrote: “Here we have a man whose job it is to collect the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything that it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects… he sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of industry.”

Landfills, garbage heaps and dustbins, which greet us after a wedding, a carnival, a hip party, a religious celebration, even the daily bin in domestic spaces, all tell a story of excess and waste through the accumulated detritus. What people eat, what they drink, what they buy, what they dispose of, the clues are found in the garbage can. No, this is not an article on the ‘cleanliness drive’, it is about how an artist transforms and recycles the residues of waste through an alchemy of intention and imagination.

Baudelaire’s description of the ragpicker is an extended metaphor that underlines the strange truth that the artist and ragpicker are both scavengers who dig deep into what is considered garbage and find something useful. To create images, metaphors and analogies by excavating stories from items that lie dismissed, forgotten, abandoned. We all love rummaging through locked trunks, dusty family albums, forgotten cupboards, ferreting out memories that are fuzzy and nebulous, reminding us of the days gone by.

Found items or disposed objects contain personal memory and history. To use refuse in art subverts the existing aesthetic norms and reassembles it. A rag-bag of discarded commodities evokes memories of consumption, which an artist transforms into powerful comments on the ecosystem that surrounds it.

This subversion in art-making brings to mind the formidable Nek Chand, the creator of Rock Garden. A government employee with no training in the arts, he found the city’s dumping ground as the perfect fodder for his whimsical and capricious creations. For me, he represented a radical artist, a revolutionary and even an anarchist who inadvertently mocked the ordered regularity of the city of Chandigarh. I am sure if he was alive, he would be bewildered by this description as he never saw himself as a revolutionary. Nek Chand was unaware of his own genius.

I saw the creation of the Rock Garden as a subversive act — made possible by an underground agent, in the middle of the night — far away from the precincts of society, defying the law and order machinery to create a magical kingdom. Devoid of any template, he created through his unique imagination a world peopled by dancing women, cement monkeys, gorges, artificial waterfalls, coquettish women, animals, birds, flora and fauna, all animated by his imagination.

Going to the Rock Garden is not only a physical journey, but a pilgrimage. As you walk through the undulating landscape, you are surprised and overwhelmed by the unexpectedness and luminosity of the sights that greet you. A tree with its aerials pointing towards the sky, miniature villages, amphitheatre, a wall made of cement bags, colonnades with swings, an endless array of ramps, slides and steps — an exhilarating world of movement. When you leave this wonderland, you have a sensation of having been temporarily transported into another world, a sort of meta journey — a journey that unclogs the dust of the everyday.

Nek Chand’s artistic material were broken bottles, crockery and sanitaryware, fused tubes and bulbs, stuff generally considered useless. From this gaggle of trash that swirled in this dumping ground emerged images of birds and figurines made out of broken bangles and shards of glass. This made one relook at trash and how it can be eco-friendly and retrieved and transformed into an image.

Another extraordinary experience of recycled trash as a conceptual idea, as also as a powerful comment on the environment, brings to mind Vivan Sundaram, a pioneering artist whose works span a variety of mediums that pushed the boundaries of art into a vertiginous edginess. His exhibition titled ‘Trash’, which I saw at an art gallery in New Delhi, was a fantastical landscape that included a relook at waste material and second-hand objects sold on the pavement. I recall worn-out soles of shoes laid out in rows on multiple rusty bedsteads in one part of the gallery, evoking a feeling of a desolate dormitory, a prison cell, a penitentiary. In another, I saw piles of old newspapers waiting to be made into bags or pulped. On the walls of the gallery, a two-channel video installation called ‘Tracking’ gave a glimpse of a man and a woman, traversing the city of garbage at night. Lovers or predators, sleuths or inhabitants? They walked over this amorphous heap of discarded canisters, tangled wires, broken toys, plastic and tetra packs — the flotsam and jetsam of urban discard. Seeing this video on a loop startled one into recognising that this mountain of rubbish is home to some. Life existing in the middle of squalor, in the midst of extreme dereliction!

This made me recall my visit to the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, nestled in an old three-storey building, perhaps the first museum dedicated to a novel. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, in his novel by the same name, started collecting artefacts and objects as his creative process and source of inspiration. The museum and the book were created in tandem, which centred around two families of Istanbul. It is also whispered that it is based on an affair of the heart, and the cigarette butts, toothbrushes, cinema tickets, dresses, trinkets were part of the memorabilia of a love affair between the author and his beloved. The carefully-assembled installations describe the memories of their clandestine meetings in the heart of Istanbul. The lovers felt the need to commemorate and celebrate the objects that they shared in their secret home against the probing eyes of a disapproving society. Objects that would ideally belong to a trash can get a powerful meaning through this context. The collected objects are catalogued in a chronological way, which, as Pamuk states, documents the life in Istanbul from the 1950s to 2000.

Closer home, a play written by Surjit Patar, ‘Sibo in Supermarket’, comes to mind. The supermarket becomes an allegory to explore the multiple contradictions about consumption and consumerism. Products that the earth has produced seem like effigies wrapped in plastic in the supermarket. Each product that Sibo picks up releases memories of similar produces in her village — plucking tomatoes from the field in contrast to cling-film packed tomatoes purchased in the sanitised environs of the supermarket. The eggs lined in precise order make her think of the chickens running in the courtyard. The endless display of cleaning detergents in the supermarket makes Sibo remark, “Safai karan waaste aina sara gand” (To keep our places clean, what a lot of refuse we collect). While pushing her trolley in the aisles of the supermarket, Sibo has a premonition of being wrapped in plastic and becoming a product. The fear of the living body and inorganic matter conjoined in an unholy alliance of consumption terrifies her.