Elevating the lowly

Auroville Today: The media release for your exhibition mentioned the four different roles you’ve taken up in Auroville during the making of these art works: visitor, passerby, occasional participant, observer, friend. Can you elaborate on the intersection of those, and how it plays into your work?

David Blamey: I’d visited Auroville twice before and found the project super interesting – almost idyllic – and so the civil war arising from the current situation caught me completely off-guard. This is the reason why I felt it important to be candid about my position as an outsider during this unprecedented period of turbulence and change. I don’t have any skin in the game and I certainly don't have any propaganda that could be imparted in the work I’ve made. What I have done is try to make a show that dissolves some boundaries as I saw them: physical, cultural and international. As a neutral observer all I can do is remix and represent elements of the world as I see them. The objective was to seduce you into slowing down to tune into what I see, while being honest about my transient point of view.

How did the environment and atmosphere of Auroville influence your creative process and the concepts explored in the exhibition?

I can give you a direct environmental example. I've been observing the troupe of ladies employed to clean our building every day. They are a powerful presence, believe me. One morning I noticed that they have a habit of laying out wet towels to dry in the sun. A green cloth had been left on the floor of my hallway and a leaf had fallen next to it. Their colours were similar, but not identical. The acid green of the rag was in some kind of correspondence with the new shoot green of the leaf and the charge of energy vibrating between them sparked feelings of the joy of life. I thought to myself, “Oh my god, I’ve never seen green this way before”. This set me on the path of trying to juxtapose painted coloured cloth with similar colours found in nature to harness that same energy. Maybe this process of working could be described as probing the difference between ‘looking' and ‘seeing'. All the work in this show is of subjects that you have looked at already, but maybe never seen before.

One artwork consists of many cheap necklaces strung together on the floor. Is this an effort to give a different context to mundane items?

Yes, absolutely. Materiality is really important, and art, to me, resides in the possibility of transforming something materially inferior into an idea that we can begin to consider as significant.

All the beads were bought from a seller who approached me on a beach. They are displayed in a circuitous line which is similar to trails made in the sand by sea snails, as were evident on the same beach. These kinds of necklaces are worn by many in Auroville and by countless travellers that I've met in India over the years. As a simple statement about identity, ‘love beads’ carry a great deal of transcultural meaning and signify some sort of tenuous meeting point between east and west. I really wanted to make a piece of work that speaks about the presence of Europeans in Auroville and our attempt to assimilate the Indian context that we’ve impressed ourselves upon.

You’ve spent a lot of time in India and you use ethnographic methods – which is not so common in conceptual art. Can you talk about how you use those methods in the work you create in India?

I did an ethnographic research methods course at SOAS University London recently and you know what: you could have replaced every appearance of the word ‘anthropology’ with the word ‘art’ and the texts would have remained instructive to art students. We have so much in common and yet so much to learn from one another.

The most obvious method that I use stemming from anthropology is fieldwork. What this conventionally means is that you turn up somewhere you believe holds the capacity to generate good data and you observe your subject. Some researchers do this in a very disciplined way by conducting surveys or asking the same questions over and over, but the most innovative anthropology always seems to come from the rule-breakers. I don’t have any ‘informants’ as such, since I study subjects such as faded flags, mosquito coils, tide lines, the sky and stationary shop windows. It has been a revelation that my work has found an audience in the world of visual anthropology. My film Rice has been screened at as many ethnographic movie festivals as art galleries.

You mentioned that you consider the ‘takeaway’ for viewers. What do you think they will take away from The Long Now?

Clearly the exhibition has posed a challenge in some quarters. I feel that a proportion of people have interpreted my work as a threat to the way that things are usually done, while others have embraced it as an opportunity to change. That’s OK. I accept that I’m on a narrow path – all things considered.

I’ve been conducting research in recent years into what I’ve framed as the 'perfect moment' in art. Not making it, but viewing it – I hasten to add. Artists hardly ever talk about how they hope their audience will feel looking at their work, but this has become something of a preoccupation for me. I always gauge the success of an exhibited work by the measure of its capacity to induce feeling, but I don’t mind if my work takes your mind somewhere else completely, like music can do. If you consider the act of looking at art as something like the ritual of darshan, for example, then a triangle of unity emerges that makes obvious the interconnection between the moment of creative inspiration, the act of making, and experience of beholding. Understanding that this circuit exists has enabled me to work much more freely. I no longer feel any responsibility to communicate in graphic terms.

You incorporated Sri Aurobindo’s quote “All Life is Yoga” into your exhibition description. How does this connect to the exhibition’s title ‘The Long Now’ and its emphasis on living in the present moment?

Many of the starting points for works in this show were fleeting moments of clarity that I’ve learned to recognise by lowering my desire; so the title borrows an idea from mindfulness, of being in the moment and trying to sustain it. I’ve just equated that to the process of making art. Maybe The Mother’s quote, “Work done in the true spirit is meditation.” would have been equally apt. Most artists will tell you that the ‘zone’ I identified just now is a meditative space. You have to let go of your ambition before the proper work can start.

You’ve read and incorporated Zen Buddhism and Vedanta notions into your work in the past. And since being here, I believe you’ve considered Sri Aurobindo’s conceptions of yoga?

From what I’ve read [of Sri Aurobindo] so far, I’m beginning to understand something of his theory of spiritual evolution and it seems exactly like the sign of hope that the planet needs right now. Parts of this philosophy could actually be the magic bullet for so many of the problems that humanity is facing today. But I do wonder how much discussion takes place between environmentalists, biologists, physicists, economists, artists and philosophers from the rest of the world and those at the helm of the Aurovilian project currently? There would surely be huge potential in testing the wisdom you’ve generated here in partnership with other esoteric knowledge producers from different cultural spheres.

How can your exhibition, and art in Auroville more generally, connect to, or have impact, globally?

My exhibition? Very little, I’d have thought, as the situation stands. Some aspects of Auroville’s impact ‘globally', as you put it, seem open to accusations of elitism and introspection. The optics aren’t so good currently.

But Auroville does seem uniquely situated to take a position at the forefront of spirituality explored through art. I can’t immediately think of any contemporary gallery, research initiative, or museum doing this kind of work. You could have such a centre of excellence right here.

A more ambitious idea of art in Auroville could generate a new sense of relevance and purpose. Imagine an ongoing programme of exhibitions at the heart of the Visitors’ Centre that presented a seriously curated enquiry into the spiritual in art globally – from paganism, through outsider and tribal art to mysticism, abstraction and trance. I think this would galvanise your mission, not undermine it.