No art is possible without a dance with death
-Kurt Vonnegut
Viewing art, like making it, is a private act, an intimate one. Particularly when it is about death. Viewing death, in life and in art, is again intensely personal, mostly individual. Or is it? Don’t we seem to give death- in life and in art-a public face? We place obituaries in newspapers, we mount shows in galleries. We view death, collectively. It is at these intersections of the private and the public, the individual and the collective, that we produce a performance of death, and the existential drama around it. We produce it, in its acutest aching form. So it Goes is an instance of such a death performance.
Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five or alternatively titled as The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death in which Vonnegut uses the refrain “So it goes” every time there is a death, Yardena’s work absorbs us. In playing with death, engaging with it, waltzing with it, her oeuvre is deeply meditative, delicately detailed. Each of the eight exhibits compel us to face the stretched starkness of death. Unlike Vonnegut, Yardena does not use dark humour to displace the grief of death and the pain of the dying body. In her play, she offers no relief. Relentlessly, she pulls us towards a complete surrender to the oneness of life and death rather than to a looping of the two, much like Vonnegut does. Even if the method is different, the end is the same. Yardena dwells on body parts. She meditates on spaces of dying. She mourns the loss of a whole. She grieves the parting of a dear one. She laments, as the womb on strike. And she produces that profound mood which never allows transcendence, which only allows a dark confrontation. Like an ascetic master, she fixes you into that mood. A mood pouring out of the remembered forgotten funeral song of the Bene Israelis in Earworm, in the still act of changing hospital sheets perhaps after a death in A Prelude to Sleep, in the sutures of the clay flesh in A Premature Burial, in the frozen womb cuts in So It Goes, in the swirling rhythm of Synonym. As we walk in the gallery, our viewing, like our grieving, curls up into these little window sills that Yardena carves, crafts and curates for us, for herself. From the sense of loss, the burden of death, the weight of the body and from an archive of collective memory, she draws out delicate kernels of consciousness and places them as objects in the public domain of the art gallery. Unsettling, like all art must be, So It Goes touches the rawest chords of our spirits, so tightly held in our bodies - that must only do one thing, die.
Dr. Gita Chadha
(October, 2018)
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Death and Life: Sculpted, Performed, Photographed by Yardena Kurulkar
“Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.
- Susan Sontag
One might think Sontag was speaking of memory as a way to stay connected with the dead alone, but memory could also be the bedrock of the self, the self that has lost a place, a time, a person, a history. Memory, in a sense, is a means to an end - of being in a relationship with our self and the world around us. Memory is the repository of history. But is memory desirable? Is dwelling on the past desirable? Or is letting go necessary? Sontag places more importance on thinking, than on memory. I recollect here the reflections of the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, an interlocutor of our times, someone important for my younger self. I remember the Mumbai of the 80’s, when as a 20 year old I would sit silently in a congregation on the grounds of the JJ School of Art, listening to Krishnamurti reflect on life, it’s purpose, its meaning. I was seeped in the existentialist angst typical of my age at the time. While most of what he said was waters that I did not want to swim in, listening to him was an interesting absorption. He spoke like he was rendering an alaap in words. On memory, Krishnamurti says,
“We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young - not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age - and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.”
In another context, Krishnamurti also reflects upon the possibility that the ego-self itself is a product of memory, probably to mean that the ego-self is something we are told about. Who we are, who we think we are is a memory of what we have been told we are.
Interestingly, around her fiftieth birthday Yardena Kurulkar shared, on social media a picture of herself as a young child of five, holding a little lamb close to her. She says,
“These pictures of me as a child were taken several years ago by my father. I saw them again after a gap of many years and I couldn't help but notice the wonder, the curiosity, and love in this child's eyes... approximately 45 years later, as I saw these images again, I think I felt what that child felt then...it's the immense joy you feel when you are in the presence of something divine...it can't be explained, and I won't even try...”
She too cites Jiddu Krishnamurti who said, she says,
“Try it. Live for one day, one hour, as though you were going to die, actually going to die the next hour. If you knew you were about to die, what would you do? You would say-I am going to live in this hour completely. If you can live one hour completely, you can live completely for the rest of your life.”
Yardena says,
“I thought about it deeply and realised another purpose of my life, besides art. And that was looking out for animals, spending time with them, enjoying their company, healing them and learning from them. When one turns fifty, such breakthroughs matter... Jiddu Krishnamurti's quote was the pinch, the reminder, the nudge that you don't have all the time in the world, so do the things that really really matter...”
As we see, death looms large in Yardena’s consciousness and so does life, both with equal urgency and equal measure. These cluster of reflections help me in interpreting Yardena Kurulkar’s show So It Goes. I see it as the dual attempt to memorialize death and loss - through objects and events- in art. And also to inhabit Krishnamurti’s ‘innocent’ mind – even if for just one last day of living- with her love for animals. I think an important way to understand any work on death and heartbreaking loss is to comprehend how light is found through the brokenness. For as Leonard Cohen, building on ideas of Hemingway, Rumi and several others says,
“Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Interestingly, and not surprisingly, some of Cohen’s ideas appear in Yardena’s later work, Abysm.
In So It Goes, memory is a verb. To my audience self, the show is a demonstration of how memorializing death and loss is organic to human survival. Memorializing loss becomes a method of staying connected to that which is lost but more significantly to the self that is threatened of dissolution through the loss. In a sense then, memorializing becomes a method of self-objectification, of marking one’s pain and healing. Marking one’s loss, more than one’s grief, as Yardena says. In fact, in Yardena’s oeuvre, the process of memorializing involves erasing the memory, by attempting to cover it, shroud it. She does this because she cannot forget it.
Most cultures construct memorials and museums. Memorabilia is made and consumed as history, as heritage. We live in a world of daily obituaries and carefully crafted graveyard engravings. We participate in elaborate ceremonies at death anniversaries. We witness ritualized ancestor worship. In these processes and acts we memorialize the dead, we objectify our loss. Joan Didion, another interlocutor of our contemporary times, says,
“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
Yet, we dedicate so much of ourselves doing just that. Through art, through literature, through academic work. So much of cultural production is about feeling loss, processing loss, coping with loss, managing loss. Yardena Kurulkar’s show, So It Goes, to my mind can be read and seen within this context. Each work memorializes something, each work produces something. Each work is about death, about loss. Each work is about living that death, it is about living that loss. Further, So It Goes is about the mind and the body as sites of this play between death and life, between brokenness and being stitched, between quiet despair and quiet hope.
In Cache, probably the least spectacular sculpture installation of the show, Yardena pulls out actual objects from her childhood. And she hides them in moulds. You and I see the shape of the object and can probably guess what it is, but Yardena gives us no clue. Like in a playful game of hide and seek, we seek to find the lost object or that which might have been consigned to redundancy, cached away. Stripped of colour and texture, the objects of childhood that we never give away, we never discard are presented here, almost as palimpsests. They have been written over in time by the artist. They have been covered. In Cache Yardena deploys the psychological need to cover rather than uncover objects in memory. In a somber gesture, she creates a pile, the detritus of objects that never left her consciousness that she could never abandon, nor give away. One sees Yardena’s self-objectification through these objects that both hide and reveal. If one breaks into the mould, will one find the object or not. I am uncertain. I turn to the maker, and she says yes, there is an actual object underneath. As I struggle with this information, I am reminded of several objects from many childhoods that have remained in boxes, discarded reluctantly every year. Toys, letters, bags, ornaments, autograph books, music cassettes, diaries, curios, videos. In the context of a rising global capitalism, the world of personal objects is ever-growing and can become overwhelming to the consuming self. These sit silently in our own, personal Cache, struggling to retain some symbolic meaning. Yardena’s hide and seek memorialization of these objects might not count as conventional memorabilia but they stand testimony to memory of the ordinary, and in that sense they feel like memorabilia of the daily world.
Around the time I was introduced to So It Goes, opening at Chemould, I had lost a dear friend tragically and suddenly. My world was filled with my own grief, the grief of his partner, his young child. The death was confounding, the loss immense. Since then, I have been struggling with comprehending the contours of grief languages. While there are grief manuals and lists of what to do and what not to do, the actual process is challenging and difficult, to say the least. There are objective cultural norms for grief and subjective expectations of those in grief. These are often in conflict. There are traditional technes and modern ones. In the present image-driven postmodern world, there are postmodern ones too. But I was struggling to find a rhythm. Almost serendipitously, So It Goes came my way. I persuaded myself to engage with it. As I entered the space of So It Goes, I found myself building various conversations with Yardena, her work on loss, grief, memory and body. Yardena was clear: So It Goes, she said, is not about grief at having lost her father at the age of eight. It is about loss, and memory. I saw what she meant. And yet, for me the show was a container for my grief, as much as it was about loss.
In The Invisible Father, object takes new form, as do the events of the artist’s life. While the objects give us limited clues to the events, they work simply as assemblages that contain registers of meaning-making connected through objects. While the snow ball, cast in kitsch, is a common decorative object in many middle class households, in The Invisible Father it becomes an austere container of the artist’s memory. In multiple strokes, the familiar kitsch associated with the snow globe is removed, objects clumsily merge into each other in the way they do in life. The rabbit nail cutter becomes one with the comb, the comb with the hanger, the hanger with the bottles, the bottle with the broken nails of her father; fascinating to note how Yardena has mathematically calculated how long her father’s nails would have become in his life to make these nails which are scattered in the snow globe. They are parts of a whole. Hence, each object stands by itself, fighting for its space, and open to our gaze. Simultaneously, everything becomes one rattling whole open to our interpretation. As I watched The Invisible Father, I began to decode each snow ball back to its ordinariness, each object back to a possible origin story. I found myself clinging to the familiar to make sense of the unfamiliar. In this exercise, each of the thirteen snow balls became a site, a canvas of meaning making for my own loss, my own grief. The snow balls began to acquire a deeply conceptual aesthetic, of imagined fluid and cold white plaster, set in a universe of imagined, reimagined memory. I asked myself: would I take one of these home? To decorate my mantle? I would, in order to honor the art. I need not, because I had made one of my own, in my head. And isn’t that the power of art?
In Earworm, the vessel for containing the memories and sounds of a Jewish funeral is the artist’s skull, digitally manufactured, skillfully imagined. The skull that contains the brain. The brain that registers through a network of neurons. The neurons that make memory. As I put on the earphones to connect to the sonic, I encounter my own memories of a lost time, a lost place, a lost history, a lost person. The funeral music of the Benni Israelis that Yardena recollects has the power to move anyone who has lost something, someone. The song played on a cello, an organ that one has to hold close to the heart and hear the vibrations while playing it, an instrument closest in sound and expression to the human voice. Earworm is a piece that brings the sharp melancholia of saying a farewell to the dead, to the departed. In the artist’s case it was her father, in mine it was my friend. Earworm connects us with our deepest suffering, buried in our sub conscious, excavated in the conscious. With a fine combination of the organic and the digital, this work brings forth the cyborg that we have all become. The event of the funeral is transformed on a digital field, in a sonic landscape.
In contrast and in some ways an extension of The Invisible Father is the lyrical quality of That Quiet Corner. The artist lays herself in the cemetery to look at the sky, almost as if simulating – or imagining- how the dead might look at it from where they lie buried. The grove-like freshness of the cemetery is captured in the photographs. The bed that lies at the center, holding the work together is both evocative of sleep, of rest and of death. Just as you begin to trust the organic image of the cemetery, you are forced to take cognizance of the digital image of the artist’s skull that is superimposed, like thin gauze, on the photograph of the sky, reminding us that the sky is only and through the skull and the image of it. What I see here is the completion of the artist’s cyborgian imagiary. As Donna Haraway says,
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.”
This sense of fragmentation, brokenness is present in A Premature Burial too where lumps of clay denoting flesh are placed in surgical trays. They lie exposed to our gaze as if in a butcher’s market, silently waiting to be consumed. Or in a laboratory, passively waiting to be tested for a disease, a condition, a syndrome. Or in a dolma, waiting to devoured by the grand vultures. The thread holds the pieces together tightly, waiting to be set free. The body is presented here as being flesh mass, an assemblage connected through an act of suturing, both mechanically and organically. The pieces which are pulled out of a larger clay whole measured to match the weight of Yardena’s body immediately evoke in us an image of our own body as mass of flesh-ness. How would it look? How would it show up? As I imagine my body, disassembled and reassembled, I think of my favorite Rembrandts. The Renaissance nude that we grew up with as modernists lies here dismembered, fragmented, and ill. In a premature burial.
In the centerpiece installation of the show, which also goes by the name of the show, the uterus becomes the object under scrutiny. Kept in as many containers as the number of menstrual cycles that Yardena has gone through from menarche to menopause, the uterus is firmly shrouded. The symmetry in this carefully detailed work is like the diary of ‘the period’ that many women keep, and forget. Drawn from a journal entry of the artist’s mother giving dates of the menarche of her three daughters, So It Goes evokes the reproductive female body, menstruating at regular periodicity. Each of the 392 beakers containing the uterus is mounted on the wall, on display. Suddenly one notices a few empty beakers. This automatically prompts a question. Is it a missed period? Indicative of pregnancy? Is it a sign of PCOS? Indicative of infertility? Is it per-menopause? It could be any of these. A conversation with the artist might reveal another possibility for interpretation: it might be indicative of a full uterus that wishes to empty itself, that wishes to declare strike that refuses to reproduce on automaton. The choice to keep a few beakers empty speaks a lot, in a quietly dramatic manner. As risk societies progress, and in the face of an impending climatic apocalypse, why should I reproduce is the question Yardena, like many in her generation, ask. As someone who has raised a child out of choice as part of her meaning making work in the world, I might have found this a difficult proposition. But I don’t. The womb must work, only out of choice, and only with hope. The uterus is an organ that must not define what and who we are.
Yardena moves out of sculpting objects and events into video performance with Synonym. The philosophical culmination, and resolution, of the concerns of the show are represented in this performance. Yardena puts herself, as the artist protagonist, through all the elements of clay pottery in the show. And finally walks out with a shroud around her, almost in a saint-like fashion. Yardena demonstrates how like clay, our bodies-vessels for minds, souls, memories- are fired to form well and firm, watered to stay well formed, and finally to dissolve into ashes. Synonym brings the clay metaphor, present also in A Premature Burial, to perform the journey of the body through various phases and stages of life and living. The artist as the human protagonist goes through it all, making a simple and resolute statement: there is no turning away from the cycle. Synonym expresses and communicates situatedness and transcendence, where death and life meet, almost in a circular fashion. The video loops, like all video loops succeeds in giving as a sense of a karmic cycle. Though it stands alone, Synonym ties up the themes of the show. It is the dark epiphany of the show, So It Goes - that produces neither sadness at death, nor joy of life. It simply stands testimony to the process. Where death and life become each other, like synonyms. As I let the video end within me, I could retrieve from within me the stillness it evokes, most mightily. And leave with joy, and wonder at what art can achieve.
But what stayed, for long after I left the gallery is the set of photographs of a hospital room in A Prelude to Sleep. Like Cache, A Prelude to Sleep is understated, slightly underplayed too in the way it gets displayed. Probably even less dramatic than the sculpted pieces of Cache is this set of photographs that speak gently of the rhythms of life, death and the in-between that we experience and witness in hospital rooms. Yardena, captures the routine actions of preparing a room after someone has left or before someone is to come. This ‘someone’, the patient, is present in the room by their absence. They are absent- present in the wheelchair, on the bed. Suspended in midair, the sheets give us a sense of the transient moment of when we slip into death or when we take birth. In modern societies hospitals are an important site for dying or birthing. Those of us who have closely encountered the hospital, especially during the pandemic, will testify how the site produces both hope and despair, how it is probably the most important institution which contains our existential fears.
The pandemic has left indelible marks of death and survival on our collective psyche. Having participated in this dance of death, many of us have survived. Once again, I cite Kurt Vonnegut as I did in the wall text. He says,
“No art is possible without a dance with death.”
I’d simply add a post script here: No art is possible without a dance with death, but also with life. They dance together, like synonyms. As Rumi would say,
You will only see me
Descending into a grave
Now watch me rise
How can there be an end
When the sun sets
Or the moon goes down.