Prototype:
Whoever thought it was possible to laugh at a collapsing building anymore?

Shift, of course, is not a building (or two as the case may be). Not yet, and perhaps never to be a physical structure in our everyday environment. But it shares space with us in a gallery. It models itself, collapses with a musical grace, falling onto itself, turning into something else. The enigmatic empty shells fall down, stairs fold in on themselves and a giant structural footprint emerges, covered over with innumerable, tiny tiles bearing logo-like representations of everyday objects. At the push of a button, one crosses from the one to the other, exchanging volume for platform area. The spectator then gazes down at the debris of congealed symbols, remembering crowded pavement bazaars and weekend flea markets, inundated by the memory and the abundance of things themselves.

And once the surprise is overcome, an inevitable sense of play draws the spectator to push the button once again to see what happens. But the model isn’t a simple thing to comprehend, even though it exercises the fascination of a mechanical toy. From the beginning it is not one but two. It is both, an interface and a legible surface. And in our state of distraction induced by its mechanics, by its graceful motion, we already begin to ‘read’ a story into it. One might fantasize, for instance, about the enigma of emptiness, about the two intertwined structures, about the bridges that connect them and that divide the supine structure, about the absence of the human figure/the user but the insistent presence of nature and culture. The sleeping forms and the logos – congealed signs of things – worked out on their surfaces are already like reversible clothes, concealing the promise of another surface, another order of legibility like the phantasmagoric tricks played by the commodities in early industrial societies. Upright, the structures evoke something else – buildings under construction or perhaps buildings abandoned mid-way, never to be completed. See-through clothes, in fact, which reveal and conceal the intent of the assemblage, its “program”, to use the language of architecture.

It is evident that Sudarshan has not lost his penchant for jokes and toys – something that objects cross the lines between artifice and everyday meaning effortlessly, carrying the viewer to a space beyond either of these, which is often pervaded by a dark but festive, carnivalesque atmosphere. But in taking on the objects of architecture, the world beyond becomes, for his artworks, the world itself for it is an object whose frame spills irreducibly into the everyday world of the metropolis. The challenge that shift sets itself demands an expert knowledge whose expertise extends far beyond the space of a gallery and yet must be made to speak in the space of the gallery. So the medium the collaborators choose is a set of representational techniques for addressing possibilities of molding space – the drawing, the prototype and its digital rendering on a screen – an assemblage that might easily occupy the intimate spaces of the storefront gallery. A canonic language of techniques is deployed to create a proximate distance between the thing itself and its proxies, all the while exploiting the potential for doubt about the program’s potential to exist in our world, to move in and occupy a spot in our environment, as it were.

Shift is Janus-faced from the beginning – two authors – an artist and architect, two structures, two programs but haunted by many possibilities. How, then, does the intended program of shift come to the fore? In the space of a gallery, we consider the possibility of its being a work of art. We realize quickly enough that the object of this particular experience of art is space – the architectural possibility of giving form to an environment, of constituting a world through a technological intervention upon space. But in the environment of absence, thus constituted, the artwork remains a haunt, an absent presence. And it is in this way that the first program of shift comes to the fore – a program for a space that serves as container for the artwork as haunt. Its scale in turn is the intimate but non-descript scale of a prototype in a gallery.

Absence haunts the prototype in many ways for there is neither a collection nor a spectator in view. But on the other hand, the logo-space of the outside is abandoned to the play of objects in their congealed forms, as their own symbols. These flood our sensory experience of the surface in a manner analogous to our experience of the marketplace, which is routinely of sensory overload and the hallucinatory powers of things, properly displayed.

Between this play of presence and absence – of things at particular points of their circulation, at particular points of their “social lives”, shift questions the easy assignment of things into categories of value, the either/or of ‘artworks’ vs. ‘commodities’. The ‘fallen’ structures then do not signal demise but the very possibility of forming new environments, of raising new questions about the cultural values of space and about the space of value.

Program:

“Thinking is about the invisible.” – Hannah Arendt

This architecture of collapse demands the reversal of inside and outside as far as the function of displaying objects is concerned. So the site is crowded, almost untraversable, while the building itself remains empty. The unavoidable emptiness mounts an excessive challenge to the institutional power of the museum. The collaborators cunningly invite the audience to imagine the empty space as the scene of display, of exhibition. But if the container can be crushed at the push of a button, what sorts of things can it contain? The obvious response is of course things that have no enduring value or significance (nor, of course, viewers who might be casually crushed at the push of a button). But isn’t it precisely the museum’s function to collect and house such objects?

The act of erecting and deliberately collapsing this program is then an act of thinking aloud, wondering about the essential arbitrariness of the collection of objects within the museum’s fold of time and space. Its see-through emptiness, its ruin-like quality, eloquently urges its would-be spectators to think about the transitoriness of cultural objects. This program, framed as a comment upon the museum’s ability to arbitrate the recognition of art as such, is finally de-realized by its collapse. A recursive relationship between institution, object, program and architecture is brought into play but that of course, is not the end.

Turned out on its skin, another surface reveals itself, mask-like. Like all masks, it brings into play the element of deception, duplicitousness – a hint of that dark, carnivalesque world sketched by Sudarshan’s work. Here the logo-like signs of things that one might find in a marketplace are juxtaposed in forms of display reminiscent of the sorts of insecure, temporary markets that today survive only on pavements and reserved flea market spaces or as occasional occurrences at fairs and other celebrations. Their presence crowds the senses as much as the emptiness of the structure haunts them. The experience of crowding, of overload that constitutes this scene is meant to be extraordinary, a gesture toward the dream-like, magical and hallucinatory quality that commodities invoked for the theorists of early industrial society. Swept up in these dreamworlds, one is exposed through this mask, to the quintessential metropolitan experience – of a subjectivity conditioned by calculation, abstraction and the abundance and hollowness of things.

“The metropolitan type”, writes Georg Simmel, “creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it”. He/She seeks relief, as it were, from these symptoms by moving into the orbit of arrested value, in the eternal and endlessly accumulated sense of cultural patrimony or the unique irreplaceably work of art. Only, when the structure is reprogrammed the museum is empty…

shift, then, does not so much question the institution itself as it does its constitution. It is an evocative and arresting statement coming from an artist whose objects deploy scale powerfully to make their point. To properly grasp its influence, he scales down the institution itself, miniaturizes it to the scale of the gallery – itself the interface between the museum and the market. It is impossible to tell recto and verso of the program. These endless recursive jokes work themselves out across multiple representational forms. The robust seriousness and confidence of the drawings, with their calculations and omniscient views become a second front of masquerade as if the architect were really hard at work. The detachment of architectural representations from the actual process of making buildings is itself a contemporary phenomenon serious enough to call into being the spilt between the ‘real’ and its representation. The drawing is the merest hint of possibility while it also serves a powerful ‘germ’ of realities to come and simultaneously a means of producing doubt about reality, at least in architectural form.

Performance:

shift is a vehicle – one that moves through alternative states if reality but also across the street as it were, to settle in like a nomadic observer seeking the best vantage from which to take in the city. In the animated renderings – the third medium that collaborators use – shift literally appears to interact with the city in the manner of Baudlaire’s flaneur. The perambulations of the flaneur can be indulged in, writes Benjamin, “only if as such he is already out of place”. The tension inherent in the possibility that one program might mutate into another as a result of a playful gesture on the part of a willful subject, gives way to an almost comical relief at the possibility of an itinerant structure. Errancy – at the etymological root of both wandering and erring – is finally an interesting metaphor to evoke in the description of how this program functions as a work of art. Clothed in a series of masks/masquerades, this work is an investigation of the limits of erring, structurally enacted on two different planes at any given time – always concrete and abstract simultaneously.

The city, seen from the point of view of architecture, is an essentially stable entity. Place-making, domestication and the deployment of style and form to fulfill the city’s institutional needs come together seamlessly in a fabric woven from static forms. The story of the city and its aspirations can be rendered more vividly by checking out this fabric of forms, by including, in an ever expanding archive, lists of forms and their classifications by age, material, style and habitational form. What happens, however, when architecture is seen from the point of view of the city? The city, on the reading of cultural theorists, stands in for the subjective experience of constant disorientation in a field of fragmentary and perhaps, ultimately, cinematic visions. Mobile gaze meets motionless space.

In the animated renderings of shift, the architect sets up a thought-experiment. At iconic city intersections, shift is inserted into the existing architectural framework, the urban fabric at that particular intersection. shift is a rupture, both because it exists out of place and out of turn, as it were, but as it mutates and is reprogrammed it sets up a dialogue between itself and the structures around. Indifferent to and independent of any particular subject, shift encourages, in a recursive fashion, a spatial view of space. shift’s experimental stance reminds one of Octavio Paz’s observation about Duchamp’s work – in his works, Paz writes, “space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony”. Like the drawings, the animations germinate doubt and especially doubt about the exact locus of rupture and fragmentation that characterize the subjective experience of the city.

The radical, structural inversions of the program set up a dialectical tension between objects and their lack, between values and their fungibility, between art and architecture, between program and its subversion. The possibility that the one program might mutate into another, that there might be ‘leaks’ through cracks, fissures or better yet, through deliberate decision is made even more complex by this third masquerade of errancy. The idea that a dialogue could be set up between art, architecture and the city in this highly performative fashion is astonishing in itself. For street theatre is often performed with few or no props at all. What happens when the prop itself turns into actor? shift’s mutation performs a radical operation upon the skin of the city by making possible a view and an experience normally available only in time of destruction and compaction – whether natural (like an earthquake) or otherwise.

The seriousness of subtraction, the attendant emotions of seeing a structure collapse today are those conditioned by falling towers, imploded modernist follies, vandalized monuments, decaying, rain-soaked tenements, tattered urban relics, monuments of dereliction. But if we thought it was no longer possible to laugh at collapse, shift marks a subversive turn. An architectural device calculated to provoke self-consciousness about it own conditions of possibility – whether about the institutions that frame its duplicitous programming or about the possibility of performing surgery upon space, shift finally calls us up to enjoy its ironic self-deprecations and its playful tearing into the possibility of the city as the backdrop of our dreams and nightmares.

Vyjayanthi Rao