Overview

Constfabulations 

Kausik Mukhopadhyay doesn’t work in ‘Art’ and he doesn’t work in English. 

It feels wrong and inadequate to write about Kausik’s work in anything but Bangla, and that too street Bangla. And yet my Bengali isn’t good enough so it is English which has to provide the jugaad. 

Cancel that, turn it around: this very Bengali work could only have taken wing in a Bangla-mukta environment like Bombay; in Bengal and Calcutta this would have been subsumed, possibly buried in an eita art? eita sala ki jinish? – is this art? 

The things we throw away, the things we flush down the various toilets of our lives, even as we simultaneously hoard them in various nooks and crannies of storage. Moments that keep whirring and rotating inside us long after they have passed. Stubborn-joker switches embedded in our minds, pesky things that keep flipping back on, no matter how many times we switch them off.    

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Two plastic soldiers circle each other in a water tub and I think Spy Vs Spy from Mad Magazine; I think Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg shooting objects at each other across generations; I think Calcutta and Bombay in an unending dogfight. 

I look at the riffs Kausik does on the ideas of the video screen and other screens and I want to modify the old Bengali slogan ‘Amar naam, tomar naam Vietnam’ , (my name and your name is Vietnam), to ‘Amar naam, tomar naam, Nam June Paik!’. The intention being to say how different the work is from Nam June’s while being so connected to it.   

I look at the chairs Kausik has made and I’m reminded of a chair in the Stasi Museum in Berlin, the one on which they sat down the suspect so that the special seating pad could pick up their scent. The pad would be stored with the name and address and it would be given to tracker dogs to sniff if the suspect ever needed to be hunted down. Kausik’s chairs are the enemy of that Stasi chair, just as many of his contraptions are urban guerillas fighting to destabilize all well-behaved objects of oppression.  

But again, cancel that, for that is demanding too much duty from what is essentially a obligation-free body of work. Looking at Kausik’s pieces, I’m reminded of another very different artist working on a different scale with construction materials — Richard Serra, and his insistence that the very point of art is its utter pointlessness. Or indeed a story-teller like Paul Auster who says the same thing. Add to this the Berlin mayor who declared he was ‘gay, perverse and work-shy’. The thing about many of us who were forged in the megastasis called Calcutta, whether gay or not we are certainly perverse and shudderingly averse to standard notions of Work. 

But work-shy doesn’t add-up to being lazy. Kausik, for instance, puts in mammoth, obsessive labour into his 3-D odes to anti-work. Imagine a man sitting surrounded by what looks like mountains of junk. Instead of trash think of this resting tsunami of objects as actors in a repertory theatre with Kausik as the director. In the past Kausik would make pieces, exhibit them, bring them home, dismantle them and re-use the material to make new pieces; we can think of the flywheels, toys, loose screws and rusty turntables as actors or perhaps performance artists forming aleatory constellations in each new performance, different concertos of squeak, rattle and shake. 

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Covid comes and changes all sorts of things. Suddenly the heart desires a different sort of clutter; a different terpsichore of tin, wire, circuitboard and wood. The new work has to be made from scratch; brand new junk for a brand-new time. 

Vasai, where Kausik lives, is an industrial area with numerous small workshops and mini-factories. So, the walking into the small workshops to find the people who could execute his drawings; the initial awkward conversations with different karigars, at first mostly in Hindi and later also with detailed Auto-CAD drawings; the normal questions: ‘Achha, lekin tum karna kya chaahtey ho?‘  and ‘Yeh kiske liya hai?‘  What is this craziness you’re making? Every craftsman needs to understand the goal for his craft. Slowly, as things form, as the ships develop shapes, as the towers stand up, the karigars begin to get it. They stop asking ‘what for?’ and move to the ‘how to’. They become partners in the crime that is being constructed, coming up with suggestions, additions, alternatives. ‘Isko aisey kartey hai, na?‘ 

Post-Covid the craftsman who’s the best at doing one particular thing for you disappears, goes back home to UP for a season, and you have to find a new guy. This happens more than once and you just have to meet more and more people to get what you need. Watching these informal engineers working within their individual skill-sets you get new ideas for what is possible. 

As a result, each of Kausik’s works in this show is also a map and evidence of collaborations between different kinds of skilled labour. ‘I went to the industrial area and met a guy who works with lathe,’ he says, ‘then I met a guy who works with sheet metal and I thought I have to work with them.’ And there you have it – mad Shonku or Cuthbert Calculus is certainly one image that fits, but beyond that is an obsessive tinkerer being inspired by and working with other tinkerers. 

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In human history perhaps the last two hundred and fifty years will be seen as a period where we became obsessed with getting objects to obey our commands, a period towards the end of which we ended up being remote-controlled by the objects we had created, not only the working objects but also, centrally, all the toxic detritus with which we have filled the earth. 

As has been much discussed, perhaps this is the hinge moment in our history where the very definition of the object changes forever, where begins the exchange-mutation between what we’ve till now understood as human and what we’ve understood as inanimate thing. 

Kausik’s precision-crafted pointlessnesses — if one can coin a word, his constfabulations —  patrol the shifting LOC of these mutations. 

If the works carry a language, then perhaps the earlier ones spoke more Bangla and these new pieces one of Greater Bombay’s many argots. Maybe this new work is less Bengali, more Navi Mumbai, which is anything but Mumbai, more Bambai and Vasai. Or maybe it is that local jugaad has melded with Bengali jugaad, with the Bengali tradition of broken, patched up things that still somehow work, like a refrigerator or a relationship. 

Among the ‘inspirations’ often mentioned for Kausik we get Duchamp and Dada, Ritwik Ghatak and Ram Kinkar, Jean Tinguely and Fluxus and so on. Looking up Fluxus on Wikipedia one comes across a poem American artist Carolee Schneeman wrote in reaction to the rejection women artists faced from their phallocrat counterparts in the movement:  

He said we are fond of you
You are charming
But don’t ask us
To look at your films
We cannot
There are certain films
We cannot look at
The personal clutter
The persistence of feeling
The hand-touch sensibility

Without over-connecting Kausik to American feminist film-makers of the 1960s, the last three lines magnet to his work – the personal clutter, the persistence of feeling, the hand-touch sensibility. Just as those pioneering women didn’t fit the prevalent male definition of what constituted art, Kausik too, doesn’t address the art world or its currently recognised pigeon holes.  

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Looking at Kausik’s work I immediately want to do with language what he does with objects, with levers and wiring, but it’s not that easy, just as it’s not easy to achieve the throwaway, verge-of-collapse giddiness of his earlier pieces or the sonorous, accidental-seeming thairaav of his new work.

In Avijit Mukul Kishore’s film Squeeze Lime in your Eye, Kausik says what many Bengalis and Calcuttans in the artsphere would hesitate to say about watching Ghatak’s films: ‘You can’t see his movies more than once. Once is enough.’ Meaning the films have such an impact the first time that it’s difficult to put yourself through that a second time. I myself have made the comparison that watching a Ghatak film is like drinking highly proofed country liquor in the morning. In that sense, Kausik Mukhopadhyay is one good kind of anti-Ghatak: you want to go back to his pieces again and again, to keep looking at them, even though they always leave you hanging between laughter and unease. 

Ruchir Joshi, January 2025