Sweating For Art

American artist Waswo X Waswo's well choreographed tantrum and destruction of his artwork (now a video installation on Youtube) for the lack of cheap labour in Kerala to transport his work at the culmination of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Kochi has touched over 50,000 views: 

Waswo signs off his testament stating: "The unions are destroying business in Kerala." The artist's anger stems not from his concern of Kerala's poor business landscape but more from his confrontation with the labour unions and their demand of Rs 10,000 from him to move six of his boxes a distance of 10 feet. It is common knowledge that the wage demand of the labour unions in Kerala are exorbitant but this western expectation of cheap labour/sweat shops to be readily available in the Asian markets as exhibited by Waswo in his video comes across as strangely ludicrous. Perhaps, Waswo has always enjoyed hiring cheap labour in the northern states of Rajasthan, Bihar or West Bengal by paying as little as Rs 50 per day or completely wiggling it out. Does this prompt him to share with us over phone?: "Many people don't make Rs 10,000 in a month in this country." (The minimum wage back home in the US is $ 7.25/Rs 451.16 per hour and he is not complaining!)

Waswo was exhibiting as a collateral artist listed by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that concluded on March 29. Officials of the Biennale Foundation say there were 25 collateral projects and Waswo had not sought the Foundation's help to sort the labour issues he faced. Bose Krishnamachari, president of the Foundation, says that initially when the biennale was launched in 2012 they did encounter problems with the labour unions. "But we sat down with the unions and arrived at a fixed rate for the biennale. We take care of the artists we invite." The major unions operating in the area both INTUC and the CITU deny any knowledge of this incident. "We hear Waswo did not want to pay anything at all and probably it was the local unions that tried to extort him," says a head load worker."

The loading and unloading labourers, in their blue and red shirts, are usually invisible in Kerala's art world or beyond. However, there was a conscious effort to co-opt them in few of the installations at this biennale. Unlike Waswo's video installation (which is telling in the absence of any union workers) many of the installations celebrated the sweat and labour and explored the violence of slave labour of the colonial past. 

Berlin based artist Sissel Tolaas's installation "Sweat Fear/Fear Sweat" was based on her research as a chemist of collecting the sweat of people who have phobias of other people. The smells were then reproduced in a laboratory and she painted them on a few ballast stones found in the waters around Kochi. By painting on the ballast stones that were used to balance ships in the ancient days she reinforced the violence of the labour of our colonial past. Her work encouraged you to touch the stones and encounter the smell of fear and sweat and that can be quiet discomforting. Says Tolaas, "We have been conditioned to judge by sight and hearing, and even in schools we do not use our sense of smell. If we did, then our tolerance levels to another human being would be much higher. We have deodorised our environment." 

Delhi based artist Gigi Scaria's installation "Chronicles of the Shores Foretold" elevated labour to a performing art. He brought in nine Mappila Khalasis, the traditional dockyard workers of Beypore and recorded their art of hoisting his installation, a 2500 kilo perforated steel bell titled." Says Scaria, "The Khalasis have a special method of using pulleys and chains, and with choreographed movement and rhythmic singing they can lift gigantic structures. The performance by the Khalasis tells the coastal story of transportation, trade, the cultural exchange between the Arabs and the local fishing community who are now the Khalasis.”" Today Khalasis are very expensive for that matter any form labour in Kerala has become a luxury. A car driver or skilled worker can make upto Rs 30,000 per month almost on par with or a little more than arts graduate or a post graduate. Social scientists are of the view that the communist party and socialist ideas worked towards high wages in the state and now without any grudge Keralites share their income with the workers too.

Interestingly the unloading and loading of art, at the successive biennales has had a quiet impact on the union workers of Fort Kochi. Says A M Ayoob, 52, the president of the labour union INTUC at Fort Kochi, "We are not very educated to understand art but we have become curious to know about the contents of boxes that we are unloading so carefully and how it gets transformed. Anish Kapoor's " Descension" was fascinating." Often the work of the production teams and the labourers are disregarded or downplayed in major installations. They are not acknowledged in the wall texts or catalogues, and are unknown to the audiences. Says art critic Ranjit Hoskote, "In the art world, the focus is generally on the stars or the artists. But there is an invisible army of people who work behind the scenes. Any artist or curator knows about the work of the many anonymous people that go into creating an exhibition. This absence of knowledge reflects on the audience and the media who are obsessed with the stars. The mechanism of acknowledgement has to be worked in."

Waswo's sweating video as he destroys his artwork has an ironical ring. In another installation 24-year-old Singaporean Ho Rui An's performative lecture investigates the colonial project in the horribly hot weather of the tropics. In his discourse An claims most of the Hollywood films or western literature depicting the colonial era do not have any trace of sweat – they had been cleansed of sweat. Even the newsreel of the queen showed her in perfect poise with her white gloves as she waves to her colonial subjects. An concludes, "We need to reclaim the affective capacities of sweat as a way of getting out of ourselves and in touch with the solar." Perhaps, Waswo's video displays just that.