I AM IN AWE OF EZRA

POUND, BEATING THE INGOTS

OF LANGUAGE INTO THE

GOLD LEAF OF POETRY

HE WAS WRONG IN EVERY

THING EXCEPT HE KNEW THAT

HOW WE GET OUR FOOD, OUR

CLOTHES, OUR SHELTER SELECTS

OUR SINGERS & THE SONGS THEY SING

-Carl Andre¹

Carl Andre's awe of Ezra Pound was clearly measured across vast political differences. The artist with Marxist beliefs finds common cause with a poet whose towering achievements are sometimes denigrated by his association with Italian Fascism: 'HE WAS WRONG IN EVERY / THING EXCEPT…' It is Andre's exception that interests us here, his suggestion that labour and the culture of labour, how we go about taking care of our basic needs, is intimately connected not only to who makes art but the very character and quality of that art. It is an idea of artwork embedded in quotidian specifics, in the extraordinary gravity of overlooked details and unacknowledged labour. His vivid evocation of Pound '…BEATING THE INGOTS / OF LANGUAGE INTO THE / GOLD LEAF OF POETRY' not only makes palpable the hidden toil of the poet, it also establishes an empathetic link to other forms of artisanal labour. Sheela Gowda has invoked these connections since the early 1990s, when she began making objects and installations employing locally specific materials. More importantly, these materials - cow dung, ash, tar barrels and human hair among them - carry strong associations with the body and forms of labour that are ever more economically and culturally marginal in contemporary India. Drawn to this vernacular matter that is rich in cultural implications, Gowda also extracts formal clues and process techniques from what may seem the most rough or insignificant of undertakings.

Film-maker and artist Ayisha Abraham has observed that both she and Gowda look on 'with horror at a kind of rampant development, on one hand, and with a fascination at this other, this invisible labour'.² Gowda's embodiment of disappearing forms of manual labour in her works can indeed be seen as a response to the accumulation and abstraction of labour driving India's rapidly growing and globalising economy, but her focus on the process of art-making also connects her to a history of artistic practice involving and reflecting not merely the socio-political implications of labour but its aesthetically generative capacities.

Gowda's large-scale works are often triggered by the transformations she observes in her daily life in Bangalore, and she seeks to transform, or abstract, them further: 'I see a familiar object in an unusual context or have a conversation or argument with someone, hear somebody's woes or read the newspaper. I am not interested in illustrating a story. My "woes" begin when I try to find a language and a form in which the references and connections are there, but not in a way that a viewer gets bogged down by the need to know all of it for the work to be accessible.'³

Her sculpture Behold (2009), on view in 'Fare Mondi/Making Worlds', the International Exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), exemplifies this effort to bring together 'specificity of place, form and materials into a language of abstraction'.⁴ Consisting of four-thousand metres of slim black rope and some twenty steel car bumpers, Behold is one of Gowda's largest and most powerful installations to date. The rope arcs in strands and tangles, and falls in enormous weighty clumps throughout a vast room in the exhibition space of the Arsenale, where, in centuries past, ropes for the Venetian navy were manufactured. Painstakingly woven by Gowda from short lengths of human hair, the black rope holds the car bumpers aloft in a precarious pas de deux, inverting the conventional casting of the human body as the fragile partner to its metal machine cohort.

Gowda's play with human vulnerability and strength, and the woven rope's suggestion of such enormous labour, makes a strong immediate impression. But it is also possible to trace Behold back to the streets of Bangalore, where shorter lengths of woven hair are tied around the bumpers of private cars and public transportation vehicles as talismans to ward off accidents and ill fortune.⁵ The superstition figures the human body as simultaneously physically fragile (in need of protection) and spiritually powerful (capable of summoning such protection). For Gowda the use of the talisman connects the security of tradition with the uncertainty of contemporary existence - 'a coming together of fear, superstition, belief and a need for comforting action in the framework of modern life'.⁶

A similar tension between the sacred and the worldly can be observed at the very source of the talismanic hair, which is shaven from the heads of pilgrims arriving at temples in south India as a sacrifice in fulfilment of their vows. Despite its ritual origins, such hair is a highly sought after commodity in a secular economy. As the hair shorn by pilgrims is usually long, finely textured and dye-free, it is highly valued in the beauty industry for making premium hair extensions and wigs.⁷ The leftover scraps of shorter hair are woven into three-metre lengths and sold as the talismans Gowda observed tied onto car bumpers. To produce the rope for Beholdshe undertook the temple workers' laborious ritual in reverse, painstakingly unweaving each talisman in order to reweave it with others into longer and longer lengths.

Because of Gowda's intense interest in such specificity - whether of material, labour or site - her work tends to avoid a signature style, even if several works might emerge from one project or investigation. However, drawing has long served her as an important tool with which to work through the conceptual implications and formal possibilities of different resources and circumstances, and its influence is clearly seen in many of her installations. Her sketchbooks and preparatory drawings are filled not with the measured calculations of a designer but with saccadic leaps from hand to eye, registering in rapid gestures her evolving response to a space, material or situation.

In her installations and sculptures, the linear qualities of such sketches often evolve into what could be described as material drawings, as is the case in Behold, in which her black rope becomes a sculptural line in space. Although its labour-intensive fabrication is shared with other works, its scale is unprecedented. Its four-kilometre length far outstrips the size of previous large-scale material drawings, such as the snaking hundred-metre bundle of needles, thread and kumkum (a blood-red dye made from turmeric and lime and often used in ceremonies) in And Tell Him of My Pain (1998), which she installed at 'When Latitudes Become Form' (2001) at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and in another version (And…) at documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel. In that work she strings individual threads through hundreds of needles, binding them with kumkumto create striking red cords that arch and coil through the exhibition space.

Gowda's is not the only large-scale sculpture in the Venice Biennale that could be described as a material drawing. For Weaving, Unsung (2009), Pae White drew on a technique used in 1970s string art in which thread was woven back and forth between arrays of precisely spaced nails, creating geometric images and patterns. In the Arsenale, White created a kind of ceiling partition made up of swooping curves, weaving different coloured yarns between architectural support beams. Tomas Saraceno's vast installation Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web(2008), composed of spheres made of elastic ropes held in web-like suspension, appeared as a kind of bio-architecture, a conflation of the meta-structural and the atomic. And the architect and urbanist Yona Friedman's The Ville Spatiale - Visualisation of an Idea(2009) poised ramshackle cardboard building models on a network of wire and string high over the passage of visitors, evoking a network of independent structures floating above our teeming cities.

In these works both Saraceno and White explored the aftermath of late-1960s and 70s ideals in art and design - such as the utopian architectural propositions of Buckminster Fuller or even those of Friedman himself. In contrast, Gowda's 'drawing' conjured rather more dystopian anxieties and privileged chaotic, even baroque gesture. Accumulations of black cord disappeared in chiaroscuro shadow even as their disorderly tangle stood out in direct light. Freighted with sculptural gravity, her black rope suspended the car bumpers at random heights, playing off the dead weight of hair accumulated on the floor in unruly piles.

If one were to seek a historical counterpoint from which to take the measure of Gowda's sculpture, the issues of labour and embodiment that surface in the work of Eva Hesse are instructive - as much in their differences as in their similarities. Though dramatically larger, Gowda's Behold formally shares a great deal with Hesse's last major sculpture, Untitled (Rope Piece)(1970), a tangle of latex-coated rope and string suspended from the ceiling and walls by wires. Both works use ropes to create drawings suspended in architectural space and summon aleatoric, gravitational and even corporeal qualities. Despite the powerful appearance of these sculptures, both artists are keen to distance themselves from impressions based on mere form. Hesse stated: 'I don't value the totality of the image on these abstract or aesthetic points. For me it's a total image that has to do with me and my life.'⁸ Now Gowda: 'If my work gets read as beautiful alone it would be inadequate. It would be a reading of the surface markers alone because the underlying layers are dark.'⁹ Instead, much of what matters in the work of these artists - to paraphrase Carl Andre's quip, that sculpture is 'matter mattering' - is not form but material.¹⁰ Hesse was interested in newly available modern materials such as latex, fibreglass and resin, the permanence of which was very much in question. Gowda, on the other hand, is often inspired not by modernity but by techniques and materials that are secondary and even endangered in the modern economy.

If Hesse saw her work as 'a total image that has to do with me and my life', Gowda breaks down the cultural and social implications of her material choices: 'I had been living in a village while I taught at the local art college after my return from London; yet I was making oil paintings in a habitual sort of a way. Something was wrong. Cow dung is used in India as a sacred material in religious rituals, as cow dung pats for fuel, as a cover for the floor and walls and as a material for making folk sculpture and toys. The cow is also a symbol of non-violence. I liked the range of its meanings.'¹¹ Gowda's use of dung does not so much signify abjection as it embodies a multivalent position in a local economy of ritual, labour and survival.

In distinction to so many contemporary artists who seem endlessly fascinated by the economy of consumption, Gowda has long burrowed deep into this culture of production. Several works, including Collateral (2007), which was also shown at documenta 12, were made by rolling, arranging and burning incense on mesh tables. Making incense (agarbatti ) is a cottage industry in India; she points out that women working in the industry 'make about four thousand of these incense sticks a day and they are paid forty rupees for that' (about fifty British pence at current rates).¹² Darkroom (2006) is inspired by the shelters that itinerant road workers create from flattened tar barrels. After the tar has been heated and poured out to repair the road, the ends of each barrel are removed and the remaining cylinder is cut lengthwise and flattened into a rectangle. These metal scraps are distributed, in an established protocol, to different members of the crew, who sell them to scrap dealers for extra income, or use them to build shelter. Applying mud to keep the metal sheets upright and prevent water and insects from getting in, the workers crawl into these rudimentary structures to sleep, placing their bundles of clothing and vessels on top.¹³ To make Darkroom Gowda developed a relationship with one such repair crew and began acquiring the metal, getting the workers to burn out the residual tar our of empty barrels and pressing the sheets flat with their heavy roller. She uses the sheets and tar barrels pretty much as they come from the crew, altering them as little as possible. The sculptures ultimately take a relatively simple box-like shape, and stand three barrels high with a fortified appearance. Tar barrels are stacked in the corners of the structure and on either side of the low entrance into the shelters, in a sly mockery of classical columns. While the form of Darkroomimplies a loftier architecture than that of the humble roadside shelter, the viewer still has to crawl on their hands and knees to enter the work. Once inside it is possible to stand up and be alone under the night sky, evoked by piercings in the metal roof above.

Cultures of manual and artisanal labour have been an historically important subject in art, and a particularly generative source of artistic innovations since World War II. Many artists' jobs in the construction, auto body, plastics and design industries provided them with not only the income to survive but often the insight and material familiarity to develop critical innovations in their 'artistic' work. Consider Frank Stella's day job as a house painter in relation to his use of commercial enamel paints and of a ten-centimetre house-painter's brush to produce his black paintings. Or the relationship between Ed Ruscha's work as a graphic designer and his deadpan deployment of commercial typography in his artworks. Or Carl Andre's work as a railway conductor and engineer in relation to the horizontality of his sculpture and his use of base metals and other raw materials.

As Andre once declared, 'ART THRIVES ON PRODUCTION / ART DIES OF CONSUMPTION'.¹⁴ It is clear that many artists do not just borrow techniques or ideas from artisans or labourers, they also understand artistic decision-making as analogous to distinctions and judgements that take place in those fields. Aesthetic and technical critiques are not unique to artistic practice. For over thirty years the artist Robert MacPherson has produced objects and installations in which he exploits the emotive tension between anonymous functional objects and the highly specific, visually allusive language with which they are named, often drawn from Australian working class slang. Many of his works evoke this working class culture and hard manual labour, from painting and docking to driving cattle. He once evocatively observed how he has met certain people who 'could use a shovel with the greatest economy of means. They could do it in such a neat way that to me they were intellectuals of the shovel…'¹⁵ Bruce Nauman makes a similar observation in his video Setting a Good Corner (Metaphor and Allegory) (1999), which documents him making the corner of a fence on his New Mexico ranch. A text appears on screen at the end of the video, in which a fellow rancher critiques Nauman's fence-building skills. Nauman commented in a later interview: 'Yeah. I mean if the fence is going to last it has to be done well. And so you want to do a good job. Other cowboys and ranchers are going to come around and they'll see it and they'll say, "Well, that... that's a good one." Or, "That's not a good one."'¹⁶

Unlike Nauman, who in fact works his ranch, or MacPherson, who, in his early years, worked as a manual labourer, Gowda does not think of herself as 'a worker', given her relative 'social and economic empowerment'. Yet she is utterly clear on how important physical work is to her practice: 'Handling a material makes me understand its limitations and its potential. So at the level of ideas I know what is feasible and what is not. Proximity to the material defines the formal aspects of the work and its tangibility. I therefore do not outsource the physical aspect of art-making.'¹⁷

Certainly the culturally generative, even aesthetic dimension of artisanal and manual labour is not a central subject today. Particularly in the United States, conversation about sculpture in recent years has focused on a kind of lyrical abjection whose components are sourced from the flotsam of global trade and the jetsam of consumer desire. As it is specifically drawn from the skills and material nuances embedded in marginal or overlooked local metiers, Gowda's work has little in common with this 'materially provisional and structurally precarious' sculpture that has fast become something of the current house style of the international art market, except for their shared ambivalence towards cultural changes ushered in by a modernising and globalising economy.¹⁸

Powerful images of alienated labour under the aegis of global capital have been produced by several contemporary video artists, particularly in East Asia, where the pace of industrial development over the last generation has been extraordinary. Liu Wei's Hopeless Lands (2008) documents a scene near his studio in Beijing where farmers displaced by a rubbish dump are reduced to scavenging for their living.¹⁹ In Whose Utopia (2006-07), Cao Fei explores the fantasy and aspirations of workers at a large Osram Factory in the Pearl River Delta, while Chen Chieh-jeh's Factory (2003) follows a group of women exploring the abandoned garment factory in Taiwan where they used to work. Of these, only Cao hints at the creative potential of the workers, bringing to the factory floor visions of their leisure time creativity and escapist fantasies. In contrast, the expanded field of sculpture seems to offer a unique vantage point from which to survey the aesthetically generative capacities of even the most modest labour. The fact that sculptors, unlike painters or video-makers, are physically engaged with their material suggests a kinship to labour that is more immediate and tactile. Perhaps their ongoing struggle to bend the stubborn resistance of those materials to their will creates the potential for common cause with the history of artisanal and manual labour?

So, might we understand Gowda as an artisan, both in the sense of someone who does skilled work, and also as Carl Andre describes it, in the Marxist sense, as 'a worker who employs himself essentially as his own tool'? ²⁰ Certainly, for all of her physical engagement, she does not theatricalise her toil or aestheticise her sweat, preferring to keep this intensity palpable but indiscernible. Gowda's art is not solely empathic, nor merely cultural, but emerges from the idea that truth in process, however invisible, and labour, however humble, lends a subtle charge to the finished object: 'Every needle in And Tell Him of My Pain has three hundred and sixty feet of thread pulled through it. If I encountered even one knot in the ball of thread, I would reject it: invisible truth in the process… The process of threading empowers every inch of it, giving it something that you might not at first be able to identify.' ²¹ Rather than fetishising process by declaring it to be more important than the finished work, Gowda uses the quality of labour intensiveness to explore different forms of cultural knowledge that inhere in the making of objects.

Much like the materially modest talisman that inspired Behold, the work's grand abstraction of tangled rope and steel bumpers, car bodies and human bodies, invokes invisible forces but does not explain them. But Gowda has pointed out how each talisman is an amalgam of the hair of pilgrims from different classes, genders and backgrounds, and as such Behold is made up of 'a collective of desires'.²² Weaving the talismans into longer and longer lengths might then be understood as a sacrifice that has gotten way out of hand - although the collective spirits she summons are not the gods of global consumerism but the disenchanted realm of outmoded marginal labour.

- Trevor Smith