Histrionics – Nikhil Chopra Interview

Histrionics – Nikhil Chopra Interview

Interview

 

Rajesh Punj: When I consider your performative work I think of your desire to engage very directly with the viewer and draw them out of their comfort zone and into your theatrical world. Are you seeking to envelope people with your performances?

Nikhil Chopra: Yes, to surround them, to transport them, to discount them even but always to hold them capture, many things. Where at a theatre an audience would be seated; I intend in my work to suspend them, allowing them to sit, to stand and touch, to come as close to the performer and the objects in order that this distance between performer and audience can be broken down, in order that the audience can negotiate with the space to be in the performance. All performances are very different, tellingly for my Bombay and New York performances, the Bombay audience had to enter the space and leave the same way. It was a leaning, rubbing, tactile kind of space; a warehouse in central Bombay in which the audience were able to sit on the bed, to handle the chair as a prop and to enter and to leave at will. Where as in the New York space the objects were not to be touched, it quickly became a vitrine like space with a huge piece of glass; there the audience had to make a conscious decision to enter the space and hold themselves, creating something very distinctive.

My audience were making a clear choice of what kind of audience they wanted to be, a voyeuristic look, an audience on view, both examples encouraged different settings and very different situations.

The audience were invited to visit a space, a couple of spaces, where I had to think of a design and an idea. Performances are not always indoors, outside I can choose exactly where I would like to go. Outside I can define something else entirely. Obviously for each city I have to be conscious of the history of a space and of the landscape being occupied. In a very short space of time I need to understand a space and its historical significance and have a scene for its people. I am not engaging in a linear history, the histories are more experienced and about storytelling. In Brussels, you become aware of the architecture of space, of the original town planning, and all of that physical history enters into the work, without my being specific about what history it is. In New York, I chose to work from Ellis Island from where there was a whole history of identity politics and immigration attached to the location. The audience are there and take in the performance in the context of where we are. This is not just an examination of micro histories but of macro histories, personal histories. I willingly take reference from histories in order to evoke new histories and encourage many more possibilities.

RP: Who are your performative influences? Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle, Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein; were they significant? And who were your influences in India? Whose performative work do you consider as the underpinning for your own unique practice?

NC: Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys, others that have initiated this leap of faith were Serbian, American Marina Abramović and Eleanor Antin. I can recall a studio visit of Eleanor’s New York studio space, someone who heavily influenced my work; she asked why I wasn’t pushing particular ideas much further. That was influential, early video work, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Dan Graham, Victor Hannibal Acconci, Chris Burden, out of the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, I had a real interest in performance art history, which had a huge role in making me want to choose performance. Mario Mario, Japan, neo-dada, Europe, works by Hermann Nitsch, the actionist movement, epic in scale were also incredibly relevant for me. I wasn’t exposed enough to art history, I considered I was lagging behind, and I was very conscious of my own immaturity in terms of criticality, I didn’t have a gutsy spirit initially and it’s about confidence, as a painter, sculptor, the artist carries the burden of art history, a blank canvas can be utterly daunting.

Performing alone, opening a blank document is a leap of faith; it is about putting yourself out there. Performance is another medium in which I am allowing myself to be as successful as I am allowing for the possibility for failure. Failure really is built into the performance and there is of course a sense of exhibitionism about what I do.

RP: When given to looking at the strength and depth of contemporary Indian art, Kallat, Gupta, Kapoor, where do you fit? Have you consciously decided to stand well outside the more familiar codes of practice of painting and sculpture for something else entirely?

NC: I think it’s wonderful to be part of the mix, associated as an artist within the Indian context, because I live there, I belong there and because my involvement adds to the many shades of contemporary Indian art, and what I do gets read in relation to other Indian artists. But other than a shared nationality we have very different practices so it can prove problematic. So if we read the art world from this social and political context that is ‘India’, then yes we have a common ground. The meaning, of the Pompidou show, I wish it was not just that, I wish it could have been curated with a more developed, more specific idea, in relation to Bangladesh and Pakistan. How does curating diversify across nations and they needed to find a greater contemporaneity to the show? A lot of it has to do with countries like the UK, a great country to do business with, but let us begin by getting into the soul of this country and understand it from the place of contemporary art. The Pompidou, French-Indian relations appear very political; and it is about trade, about business, curators are required to look for something very specific, very quickly. The constraints of a curatorial team’s time and their budget requirements determine the basis for all of our new social and cultural ideas that are delivered back to us.

Curating, as a profession, have a schedule, timing; and if it does, how are you supposed to create a show, that best represents a show, that best represents contemporary Indian art? When given Contemporary culture, the problem with performance is to put yourself in a position that is completely undefined and unknown, to test and try things, to positively fail and succeed in equal measure. Certain situations will be unknown. For the Pompidou show I had to be at my best, for the performance that would prove interesting, forcing me to push myself even further, but curatorially it is not the most exciting situation, for us all to be side by side, working off of one another.

RP: How has human history and your occupation and recreation of an ancestral figure influenced what you are performing and re-performing? What are you doing exactly?

NC: How they are figures in their own right, is a discussion that has come up, characters, personas, figures, the idea of a character leaving me and the idea of persona entering my physical form interests me very much. The persona comes from a physical relationship to my ancestry. I think it works that way as very little criticality enters the work, it is about a treaty and the idea is to look at a balanced history as a micro history that adds to the allure of the situation, so I deliberately pick up strands of history for a story. Pick up notions of post-colonial and colonial history, as I dress up as a gentleman and a practicing draughtsman. It is very post-modern as all of these things, the ancestral tree, as all of the realities get mixed up, as they all get put into one pot and then performed. Significantly for me it is important to be this sadistic gentleman, to rub him into the ground, bring him to his knees, in a sense to consciously enter into this duality, to play master and servant, to be part of the past and of the present, hero and valiant, to play maharajah and coal-miner, to play a grandfather and son. To be naked and dressed up. This duality, the opposite poles in my performances is what interests me immensely, as I take the audience from highs to lows at any given time.

RP: Having witnessed one of your performances for the collected exhibition of contemporary Indian art, ‘Indian Highway’ in London in 2008, you appeared incredibly focused whilst dressed in a wardrobe of paraphernalia, what is the mantra or the central idea that has become engrained in your practice as you are in performance?

NC: The task of making a drawing, the rigour and practice of making a vast epic drawing, even if they are visual and practically very loud, they are so much about solitude and silence and the reason for that focus is having to make a drawing happen, to perform a drawing as an event; that repeated action of drawing leads to a point of knowing or deciding when the drawing is, quote, unquote, finished.

The drawing, as an extension of my performative action and also of the performative moment, the nature of this medium allows for a self awareness. The effect of the audiences glance in a mirror, as in New York, makes you suddenly very self aware of every action and every gesture you attempt. That self-awareness can become a mantra, which is enduring. I am interested to a degree in the idea of suffering, like climbing a mountain. There is a sense of exhilaration to climbing a mountain. The audience, upon entering the performance, are invited to feel that way because that is where the spectacle lies. I proposition an enduring invitation, of an on-going event and there is an exhalation to be had in that moment of realisation. I am convinced there is a mental strength that needs to be transmitted over the performance that has me in partnership with the audience if they stay for long enough.

RP: What did you make of the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and its extensive touring ambition? Is it planned for the Indian sub-continent? This collective survey of contemporary Indian works, does it prove effective or does it appear ill curated and more a reflection of market interests?

NC: Essentially the Indian Highway exhibition was fantastic in a critical sense for what it allowed to happen, interesting that it is still happening with relationships, ideas and shows within shows in new locations; allowing for travel, travel and highway, as this exhibition travelled I travelled to every institution and location. I had a car and a tent in the French countryside for a single audience member, which was utterly changing the dynamic of what I was doing without a number of people present in the French country. There I managed three large drawings, so for me it proved an incredible journey and the networks that have come out of the exhibition, it was Daniel Birnbaum who led to my performing at Venice and in Oslo. It has opened up many opportunities that I have now and many new people have been introduced to my work; it continues touring.

RP: You become utterly central to your work and exhaust yourself for your practice; dressing and undressing so meticulously that on occasion your audience fear for your well-being. For such effort are you worth much more than those who paint works of coloured canvases or deliver a bronze statue?

NC: I don’t think a painter going into his studio feels detached from his work, at the end of the day it’s a performance, it’s a show and all of your subsequent feelings are the result of a performance. You would feel the same kind of tragedy from a Greek pathos and a deep sense of melancholia comes from any performance, from the impossibility of the task, a sweet sadness in a sense to what I am about to do. A sadness, an image, a medium, but all of it is not me, it isn’t me there. Your meant to feel sad for the persona, after I’m done with the performance I might shout, ‘where is that beer?’, I want to allow myself to be bad again, almost as an affirmation of my being myself again. The performance is a show, it is real but it is an exhibition and it isn’t how I live myself and I have to confess, I am actually very comfortable in my many performances. I always dress warm; I dress well, super good food, goose pillows, blankets. I positively am a quiet diva.

RP: How have your performative works been received internationally? Is your sexuality discussed in light of your dressing as a female as often as a male character? What of your accomplished ability for draughtsmanship? Your costumes and wardrobe? Your will to interpret history?

NC: The audiences depend entirely on the space much more than where I am within it, and the audience experiences something very different at every single location. For example at the theatre festival in Brussels, the audience comes with the expectation to see something and want to watch a spectacle that they have settled into their seats for, whereas an art audience at a major art fair will not find necessarily that because they allow themselves one minute to stand and stare at you because of human traffic, circumstances etc. Public spaces do allow for something else entirely, the audience in a public space assume they can come up and ask me something during a performance as opposed to a museum space in which an audience encircle me as I become their animated exhibit. Audiences will be looking at it from a critical perspective, where as in a public space they are looking at it as entertainment.

RP: Given to regularly taking on the persona of someone else, an ancestral relative, do you ever feel that you are them and they are you? Are you more of the past than the present?

NC: I am fully aware of where my persona ends and I begin; with a performance I am seeking to do away with the self whilst wanting to awake an alternative persona, and the performance is always in the present and in the moment. Dealing with actual given circumstances, costumes, signs, that allure to the past, but it is not so much about embodying the past, I am interested in the tension of evoking the past. Me myself, I am more of the present than the past. I am more past-present than future-present. I live in present but do recall and consider the past immensely.

RP: Who initially took you on? Noticed your work and gave you a platform?

NC: Yes, I put to test my ideas, ideas that were on my own footing; I performed for the first time at graduation school, I was hugely excited by graduation school and I was desperate to put those ideas out there in the big wide world. I had met Chatterjee and Lal gallery, Bombay, but I did not approach them to put on a show. I borrowed money from my father and put on a show, photographs and a performance and the response from that first performance was critical, exciting, as a new way of thinking about my working ideas. On the basis of that performance, I was re-approached by Chatterjee and Lal, and it was at Khoj in New Delhi that I took on the performance residency and it was there that I managed my first major performance and from that I took on the idea of doing a gallery solo show. In 2007, Chatterjee and Lal took me on seriously and I was a performance artist. The world is full of confidence, on returning to India, going to the West and Japan which is obsessed with perfection and order. In my performances, people collectively respond to the notion of a lack of perfection, in a world incredibly obsessed with perfection, mechanical and mechanised, this kind of dirty, hairy, smelly, trained and dusted aesthetic is a sense of relief for them. I have allowed people to be a part of that dust and sweat, to be initially considered as well mannered while falling into a state of disarray.

RP: Can you talk of your 2011 work at the Pompidou, Paris, and the direction for your current practice? What and where have been the seminal performative works that have received the greatest recognition?

NC: It was an exciting year for me, the Pompidou centre, Paris, Berlin, another one of them, the Pompidou centre isn’t entirely gentlemanly; it is the second part of a performance I did last September in France. I like the idea of using the word white and whiteness, the performance was pared down, I made drawings in charcoal, and had the Pompidou centre constructing a temporary wall in front of the glass window onto the Paris skyline. With a window that allowed me to remake the Paris skyline in charcoal. That performance was very much about body and drawing and it was a three day drawing and performance. I do acquire objects, costumes, I have a new costume designer in Berlin that I use, but in Paris the show wasn’t prop heavy. Paring down, this is a slight departure of what I do but it is important to move away from what I am comfortable with.

In Berlin 2011-2012, I have turned a shop into a performance space, with a series of performances two, three times a week. I will use the space as a sort of box that is full of images, collected over the year that I am there. The Berlin and Paris performances coincided, but I always think of performances very separately.

(January 2013 – Since interviewing Nikhil Chopra in early 2011, he has toured and travelled extensively; completing a year-long residency at Frei University, Berlin, performed at University of Melbourne and Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia, whilst having his residual performative material exhibited in solo shows at Gallery Continua, San Gimignano, Italy, and group exhibitions in Frieze Art Fair, London, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai and the Palace Theatre, Ohio, North America.)