Trashopolitan Supertornado: Vivan Sundaram's Trash

[This is a reposted review of the show as installed last year at PhotoInk in Delhi. The show opens at Walsh Gallery in Chicago on September 11th.]



The mountain of trash seemed to stretch very far, then gradually without perceptible demarcation or boundary it became something else. But what? A jumbled and pathless collection of structures. Cardboard cartons, plywood and rotting boards, the rusting and glassless shells of cars, had been thrown together to form habitation.
Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come, 1980

It was late and I was in a hotel, that's all I remember about how I stumbled across the F5 supertornado. The tv screen seemed too small and flimsy to contain this thing--ripping across some featureless eight-lane megahighway outside of Dallas. SUVs flew off into the spiraling death-cloud. There it was again: ravaging a packed baseball stadium in a scene of such urgent cartoonish brutality that it made me think of the Tasmanian Devil trapped in a toilet bowl. Finally, darkness at the break of noon downtown and the office buildings' windows all fly off to become "like shrapnel" "slicing through" the soft bodies of terrified office workers. The dead giveaway that this was all a digital simulacrum--and I'm not going to lie, they had me going there for a while--were the pandering crosscuts to the reactions on the faces of the emergency personnel at their "headquarters" in a bunker somewhere on the edge of the city. I suppose the actors' instructions included words like "stupefaction" and "existential horror," but it doesn't come off well (I know because I found it on youtube and double-checked). This is precisely the same manipulative spectators-within-the scene strategy that they use in saas-bahu serials: first you show the central action--let's say it is a son apologizing to his father with stuttering words of obedience and love after a long disagreement--and then you cut to the faces of his much-relieved aunties, their lower lips quivering with emotion. Suddenly your lip is quivering with emotion, too, even (especially!) when you know it is all a coercive facade.

It was, of course, all a digital puppet show: the fake news reporters, the aerial footage shot from simulated helicopters, scientific talking heads and graphics, the buildings falling. There seems to be something in the zeitgeist that generates these apocalyptic jeremiads--mediated through peculiarly twenty-first century effets de reel--for our infotainment. Rehearsals in the guise of prophecy, I suppose, of the dirty truths in the counter-history of modernity: that "progress" hasn't led to an emancipation from "nature" but rather ever more intimate entanglements, ever more heterogeneous assemblies of actors and technologies of knowledge. Little wonder then that our pop imagination is so densely populated with spectacular nightmares of collision. It is appalling and fascinating to watch a digitally generated F5 supertornado turning Dallas's gleaming skyline into a bloody heap, affirming the fragility of our arrangements beneath their seeming solidity, the pathos of the always lurking victimhood that undercuts our attempts at heroism. There is a basic, teleological grammar at work here, and a concomitant production of ideal selves: order falls apart into trash. It is sad and somehow ennobling. Our means of knowing how it will all go down can do almost nothing to save us. Brave heros battle it anyway.

(For the flip side of this narrative coin, revisit the coverage of Beijing's Olympic weather manipulation--a fantastic body of modernist mythology with at least as many ambiguities as Livy left in his history of Rome's foundation.)

I fell into these dark reveries while watching the fourteen minutes of "Turning" (2008), a video included in Vivan Sundaram's Trash, on until September 27th at Delhi's Photoink gallery. The video was shot in the artist's studio, in Delhi's Aya Nagar, using as its set a vast urban diorama constructed entirely from garbage. In collaboration with Chintan, an NGO that works to organize and advocate for Delhi's trash collectors, Sundaram first cleaned and sorted thousands of pieces of refuse and then used them to build a trashopolis, which he then photographed from multiple angles, using digital means to create densely compressed, collaged images of astonishing detail, off-kilter violations of scale and provocatively skewed perspectives that reference aerial surveillance images, real estate photography, cinematic action angles and the modernist photographic preoccupation with urban landscapes.


Sundaram is an artist whose formal interests are never at a distant remove from the practices he uses to realize them, and this show is no exception. The political edge is inescapable: it is as though the artist is constructing a counter-narrative to the consumerist urban fantasizing that posits (and enacts) the city as a kind of engine of consumption and waste, a gargantuan body that eats and shits and moves on to the next clean piece of land. The artist's engagement with the city's "ragpickers"--the garbage collector who sorts the city's trash by hand, the kabadiwala on his bicycle collecting cardboard and paper--situates his artistic practice on the other side of the fantasy, the part where someone has to pick up the piece of crap you just threw out your car window. And then he patiently, with meticulous attention to detail and form, reconstructs the city. The presocratic philosopher Thales held that the originating principle of the universe, the arche, the element from which it arises and to which it returns, is water. Anaximenes said it was air, and Heraclitus said it was aetherial fire. Vivan, to borrow Aristotle's pithy description of Thales' theory, "says the arche of the city is trash." The vilified ragpicker is recast as the alchemical demiurge, the world-creator, the hidden reconstructive force that saves the city from its own sick dream--and is paid for it with police roundups, beatings and invisibility. (On a related note, it was ragpickers and "street urchins" who discovered bombs left yesterday evening at Regal Cinema in CP and at India Gate. By alerting the police they saved many lives.)


The show consists of large digital photographs and a video. In "Reef (with tower)," an antediluvian-looking honeycombed tower rises like a crumbling, chambered skyscraper from a frozen whirlpool of Bisleri disposable cups, their wrinkled tin lids crumpled as though by strong currents. In one corner of the image anemones made of clear plastic capsules reinforce the image's submarine suggestion--but this is no sleight of hand meant to impress you with its clever simulation--there's never any pretense that this is anything other than a playground, a trashopolitan diorama. The arrangement of objects is done at an obsessive level of detail, here as elsewhere, with the strange effect of making the tropes and cliches of metropolitan modernity visible as they play themselves out at the microscopic level, at the explicitly disposable, crushable, expendable level--the design of a throw-away mineral water cup, the architecture of the cheap plastic brush, the futurism of the flimsy temporary vial--transformed by the artist into the building blocks for a poignant reconstruction of the dystopian urbanizing mess that produced them: flyovers and metro rails, highways lined with shantytown seas breaking against megamall reefs. We can see in the city built of trash the fecund image of the city as built to be trashed, built to be rebuilt and trashed again. "Vivan says it is trash"--the Heraclitean principle--the arche through which things somehow both change and remain.

At times, in both the video and the photos, the artist uses his set as a stage. There is a puppet show theatricality evident in "Fly": a small, slightly battered plastic spiderman is seen in flight, fingers locked in his web-slinging devil-horns, launching off of a precipitous kabadi tower of compressed cartons, cardboard and paper and suspended in the air above a tangled, pickup-sticks jumble of Brasso can and duct tape girders, PVC tubing and rough concrete brick. Tight coils of barbed wire run along a perimeter wall; a recurring theme in the show is the barricade, the secure zone, the defensible space. The same sense of playhouse puppet drama is seen in "Two Towers," a tin can and toy plane recreating of September 11th, seen from a digitally skewed vantage point above the action, against a bleak landscape of gray metal and dirt. We see a toy plane flying between the two towers, banking a hard right, looking like he just might make it through.

Two of the show's most striking, and large, images are "Master Plan" and "Prospect." The former is an untrustworthy overhead view of the entire installation, a map whose indexical promises don't come through. The latter is the lone vertically oriented image on display, shot from a slightly elevated angle, just above street level, looking back at the city as it recedes into the distance: the red beam metro line, the jhuggi slum cluster with its roof ripped off to reveal tiny rooms crammed with images and furniture, a forest of dirty toothbrushes and a junkyard clutter of plumbing castoffs. We are looking up a sandstone brick highway crowded with motley traffic--a toy tractor driven by an insane-looking clown, a plastic jet fighter, a battered lorry made from tin, and tiny styrofoam pedestrians with pasted-on faces stuck to pop cans--all leading towards the megapolitan skyline, the towers of kabadi, pyramids of ghee tins, the hollow and smooth and empty plastic jug apartment blocks in the popeyed digital distance, at the edge of town.

If you've made it this far, then there is no way you could possibly want to: