IN CONVERSATION
City stories
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KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH walks the fuzzy borderline between the real and the unreal with designer Avinash Veeraraghavan.
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MURALI KUMAR K.
Compelling images: Avinash Veeraraghavan with his book.
YOU can "read" Avinash Veeraraghavan's I Love My India — Tara Publishing's latest in their series on design — at several levels. At its simplest, it can be read as a "picture book for adults", whose images you view like fish in an innocuous tank, looking to single out colours, shapes, sizes and other such markings in order to extend and deepen the image.
At another level, you can view these same images with the artist-designer's gloss on their "real" and "virtual" significance, and thus see that, parallel to the real fish in the real tank, there are virtual fish in virtual waters and that all of this lives in the mind.
And at the last level — possibly also the most complex because for this you have to buy the book — you can read out of it your own "generic city".
Fuzzy borders
The "generic" city. Avinash brings it into the conversation right at the start when asked about the idea behind I Love My India.
"The idea was to explore the fuzzy borderline between the `real' and the `unreal', as if I had documented the city I see in my dreams. The Bangalore I know and the Bangalore you know are different. And these differences come from the differences in how we see the images around us. So the idea was also to make a `generic' city, out of the images reproduced here, images of the three things that all cities have — billboards, TV, weak architecture."
Avinash places the appropriate signifiers to suggest the generic over the specific, through "cut and paste" by which common cityscapes are first divested of familiarity, then pasted over with surreal possibilities.
Cut and paste, anyone?
Towards this end, the reader-viewer-reviewer is expected to engage in a bit of real time cut and paste by following the book's instructions to snip along mid-page perforations (in Remote City) or join dotted lines (in Weak Architecture) to annotate images.
Will readers actually be able to do that? I wonder.
Avinash says: "Well, I've used my copy, I've used it completely. That first sheet which says `Cut along the dotted line' on one side and `Get this free' on the other, I tore that out and gave it to the people I was staying with on one trip. It's up to the reader whether they want to or not."
I sat with I Love My India trying to see if I wanted to, and could.
And found that it wasn't as easy as it reads, even after making that imaginative leap — as with translation — into a total other place. Because, as Steve Rigley points out in a review for Eye, "... this seems unnecessary and suggests the designer is trying too hard". Besides, one doesn't simply just cut; one doesn't even drop a useless page without touching it to one's forehead in penitence.
Compelling images
Though this cut and paste may not do much, the images on the page are often compelling in themselves; funny, sad, acerbic, surreal, annotated, plain, pretty, they blend and separate into so many combinations and permutations that there are endless layers of meaning and changing points of view on every page.
Images like that of a poor man walking beside a building front which proclaims in huge Kannada and English letters "COROMANDEL KING" are powerful both visually as well as on the level of comment. And there are several of these.
The cover image is compelling and sets off a complex sequence of associations. The old storybook type illustration of a snake pit and a mythical hooded and bejewelled snake rising up above and over the modern cityscape with real-time black roads and white markings draws us into the stories of the snake city. This is perhaps the best example of the designer's stated intent to mix real-time photographs with their surreal representations.
But it doesn't always work so felicitously, sometimes images are over specified, as for instance, the obviously Omar Khayyam man togged out with Khayyamy clothes, Khayyamy woman and Khayyamy wine, holding a placard showing a typical middle class restaurant dining arrangement, with the message "Fast food interior (before renovation)".
One wonders if this is what Steve Rigley meant when he wrote "... we have seen all this (many times) before. It is uneven, at times witty and incisive but all too easily drawn into the predictable and derivative."
What does Avinash make of this comment?
"I think that Rigley was looking at the pictures like they were words, looking at the graphic as a flat surface... but then graphic design in the west has a long history; they've been doing these things for so long that it seems to them that It's all been done before."
Ay, therein lies the rub.
For the West — with its several generations of experimentation in graphic design, all hanging placidly from that venerable family tree whose roots are in the word-pictures of Lascaux's caves, branching out through Gutenberg's movable type and flowering into the 20th and 21st Century's post-modern adventures in design — much of what is happening in the non-West may indeed be quite passé.
On the other hand, for the very same reasons, books like this, as Avinash himself pointed out, do better in the West and one does look to the West for a conceptualised evaluation of such work.
The idea of "design" as an end in itself, abstracted away from design as function (the design of sacred art, the designs of street commerce, the designs of weaving, matting, kolams), may still largely be an alien concept in India. And since this kind of design remains functional and local, its elements are constantly muting into new meanings, stopping short of becoming stereotyped. When these elements are transplanted into a pre-fixed other space, slotted between frozen axes, they tend to appear stereotypical.
So when the promotional material for Avinash's book talks of large scale images from I Love My India being displayed on billboards and other public sites in Ireland and Sweden in order to break the "stereotypical images of Asian visual cultures", we are back to the "take it to the West though there we won't be best" situation.
A sense of the philosophical
Having studied in a school following J. Krishnamurthy's philosophy seems to have given Avinash a particularly strong sense of the philosophical.
"The thread connecting all my work is the philosophical study of impermanence, I am fascinated by the opposition between `real' and `unreal' and between the fusion of opposites. I decided that I would do my searching and explaining in this area through art, which is one of the few things that does actually offer great scope and space for such exploration."
All of Avinash's shows have had the nature of philosophical questing; "For this preoccupation with philosophy, one does pay the price in terms of money, but then one also has other work, which brings in money."
Avinash runs his design studio Beetroot from home in Bangalore, and as he says "the work is good". Apart from that he works as assistant to a famous Italian designer and does decorative finishes on walls. And of course he continues his philosophical questing.
I Love My India is not an uninteresting adventure, and the inherent ironies add just that little bit of whimsy to the whole project. And as Avinash points out, "India is `peculiar'; the more you look outside, the more you see what a crazy place you live in."
The book's Cliff Notes-like Introduction talks of how Veeraragahvan "... plunges into a play of revealing and yet concealing, of showing, yet letting the narrative remain hidden for further explorers."
We, the "further explorers", are meant to study the clues, read the signs and by discovering the narrative, begin to build the generic city, the city that could be any city, the city that could be all cities; the city that could be the snake's city.
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