The Becoming of an RA
An Introduction to Type-A Soul Searching
I’ve always hated group projects. Hated them with a seething vengeance. Right from school through college and well into supposedly mature adulthood. One might therefore conclude that I perform poorly on such projects. The reality, however, is quite the contrary.
Projects that involve multiple people, perspectives and agendas fail for a very fundamental reason. There are simply too many gaps that exist between the various entities that make up such projects — gaps between the wise and the naïve, the lazy and the industrious, the virtuous and the opportunistic, the articulate and the incoherent, the means and the ends, the mundane and the exhilarating. These gaps are alive — like a game of whac-a-mole — they relentlessly emerge and re-emerge and widen and mutate, and solving them once doesn’t prevent them from reappearing again. So when left untended, these gaps render the structure unstable and it collapses. It is the reason behind the collapse of groups, teams, organisations, cities — because too many moles were left unwhacked. It doesn’t matter what personalities, points of view, strengths, weaknesses or agendas make up a project — the entities themselves are irrelevant; if the gaps between them are filled, the group can sustain itself. I’ve always recognised this reality. I’ve also always known that said gap-management is a job in itself, and a spectacularly difficult one at that (thus explaining my desire to stay as far away from group projects as I can manage).
However, when the fates insert me into such an environment, so averse am I to the idea of failure, that I become the person who fills in these gaps. My motives aren’t entirely altruistic — I find the mole-whacking exhilarating. So whether that gap is as mundane as a floor that needs mopping or as momentous as an investor that needs cajoling, I try to fill it. I’m rather militant in my efforts too; I don’t quite care whose toes I step on or whose job I hijack to do it. Because the alternative is utter debilitating egg-on-your-face failure — and I’m a sore loser.
Such were the psychological undercurrents that preluded my role as a Research Assistant at Art in Transit (AIT, henceforth).
The Neurotic Administrator
Finding one’s voice as a creative practitioner is a process that goes beyond any particular piece of art, media form, project, job or industry. These are outward manifestations of a much deeper and more wholesome existential pursuit, one that presents itself both in terms of what you do as well as how you do it. However, perceptions are often skewed in favour of the former, with practitioners fixating on the content that makes up their practice and allowing it to wholly define their creative identity. Within that framework of thought, I have no way to explain why I was even at AIT to begin with.
I joined AIT as a student in the year of its inception, and I took to its administrative duties like a moth to a flame.
Here were 30 students who had to take over the newly constructed Peenya Metro Station and fill it with individual art projects that engaged with the space in some meaningful way. Here were 30 students who hailed from different creative backgrounds and had different creative agendas to execute. It was like an orchestra of people, each with a different tune in mind. To add to it, about half of us (including myself) were executing thesis projects — our undergraduate magnum opus — which meant our projects had to be an assertion of our individual creative identities; we had to be heard. This had all the potential for complete cacophony and, being your garden variety Type-A personality, I promptly made a beeline for the logistical epicentre of it all: the class mailing list. I’m pretty certain the majority of that class remembers me (fondly, I hope) for the neurotic emails (see Fig.1.) they received from me during my time at AIT. That, for all practical purposes, is where my true calling at AIT began.
Bathrooms (metaphoric and otherwise) need cleaning. Large complex systems built on ideological foundations have the potential to break down when something as mundane as a bathroom is left unattended. I saw two sides to AIT. On the one hand, it presented itself as a space for wide-ranging creative exploration: students had the freedom to define the scope of their engagement with the station, whether that meant painting on its walls or hiding miniature figurines in its nooks and crannies. And AIT was the progressive parent that was determined to give each student that space and privilege. On the other hand, it was still a project that was enmeshed within a more traditional matrix of bureaucracy, corporate sponsorship, educational assessment rubrics and timelines. This matrix demanded that a significant amount of AIT’s energy was expended on pop-up exhibitions, investor pitches, jury panels, structural permissions, prototyping, vendor coordination and more. It was not enough to just embark on individual creative expeditions; we had to make these journeys legible to our existing and potential sponsors & promoters. It required some degree of efficiency, frugality, articulation and sales acumen from every student. And since these weren’t necessarily in everyone’s wheelhouse, it demanded a more centralised approach to fill those gaps and run AIT as an entity in itself, with its own voice and brand, one that wasn’t just a happenstance amalgam of its students.
This administrative kernel was where the real action was, for me anyway, and this was where I chose to volunteer my efforts. It carried such immense vitality for me because I knew that my individual project (or anyone else’s for that matter), no matter how potentially brilliant, would be rendered entirely irrelevant if the foundation it stood on was perforated with holes. There was literally no point in a good project if a commuter was to come and look at it and then turn his nose up at a poorly translated concept note. (True story.) That example is still fairly advanced; things could go wrong even if something as simple as a storeroom was left unlocked. The thought of weeks of effort being deflated by something so mundane was absurd to me; I couldn’t wrap my head around the thought of such avoidable failure. Such issues may not have seemed momentous on their own, but I saw in them the potential to mutate and contaminate other functions of the project, and so I plugged those holes wherever I saw them. A city can’t enjoy the luxury of conceptual freedom if its government is unable to provide water or electricity. Momentous ideas can only realise themselves when the mundane has sorted itself out, and the administrative aspect of this project could not be downplayed because it was only on the basis of this that AIT could truly deliver on the promise of creative freedom to its students. Helping out here was not a choice for me, it was a deeper compulsion I couldn’t ignore.
I often struggle to explain how AIT fit into the overall trajectory of my practice. I had signed up for AIT with purely opportunistic motives — we had to complete our thesis projects under thematic “clusters” and AIT was the only cluster that looked like it’d let me do what I wanted. Ideologically, it was at odds with my practice because it was public art. I was in no shape or form a public artist, nor did I want to be. The idea of public art seemed much too entrenched in the values of social activism to appeal to my sensibilities, and I leaned pretty heavily on the bourgeois side of the spectrum. And after joining it, not only did I spend comparatively little time on my own project (see Fig.2.), I also ended up spending 12 months longer than the 6 months I was supposed to be there.
It’s seemingly difficult to rationalise those set of choices, but that’s only because we tend to look for that rationalisation in the wrong place. Those of us in the creative community are very intrinsically aware of our privilege — we’re hyper-aware of the fact that we work for “passion” over sustenance unlike most other professions in the world. And as empowering as this can be, it can also be our undoing — we frequently fall into the trap of thinking that that’s the only kind of work we can and should do. There’s a universal scorn we unthinkingly carry for the everyday “job”. And as such it becomes increasingly tricky for us to reconcile our conception of what work should be to what it actually is. (See Fig.3.)
A job rarely summons the “portrait” version of yourself — the one you paint well-lit pictures of in your head. However you choose to identify yourself, jobs have real-world stakes and they tend to cut right through the frilly photogenic conceptions of career and ambition that you might attach to it. They’re designed to extract your baser, instinctual, underground self and bring it bubbling to the surface — a self that you’re not always on great terms with. And AIT had acquainted me intimately with this version of myself: I was quite clearly the tyrannical administrator at heart.
The Art of Rhetoric
Separate from the nail-biting thrill of logistics, AIT had also made me cognisant of a different inclination of mine, one that satiated my baser desires more than I knew it would — that of design education.*
*Learning to embrace your tyrannical self, you also realise that it comes with other complimentary features — such as the desire to fix and straighten out the lives of people besides yourself, an irresistible desire to advise and counsel — and design education played right into that.
In 2015, when I graduated and then joined AIT as an RA and we welcomed the new batch of graduating students, (having been in that position myself no more than a month prior), I had sensed another gap that needed filling. This one was not as obvious, but it did exist. There was a near invisible space that existed between student, class and practice. Creative practice situates itself somewhere along the spectrum of what you can do versus what you should do. As you progress and advance, you move steadily from one end to the other. The more you become familiar with your own enquiries, the more you advance into the space of “should”, the more you build on your skill, the less you’re limited and defined by what you “can” do.
Students come into a project with an agenda largely informed by what they can do and it’s within this framework that they often define their creative briefs and settle on their forms of execution. Seasoned practitioners, such as faculty, are closer to the “should” side of things, where one’s work is defined by deeper conceptual thrusts (social, economic, political, philosophical) that are informed by the self and its relationship to the world.
This gap between student and faculty often manifests itself as a mismatch in rhetoric: a student who’s justifying his creative choices based on circumstantial factors versus a faculty who demands a justification that is indicative of deeper reflection and intentionality. A lot of what makes up a student’s rhetoric is based on trial and error — of groping around in the dark, trying to attach meaning and rationalisations for why you do the work that you do. The more you read, the more you watch, the more you interact with other practitioners and their work, the better you’re able to carve your own practice out of the amorphous material you started with. However this is a slow process, and when you put a student in the same room as faculty, there’s a chasm that’s still some ways away from being bridged, with the student not quite comprehending how to frame his/her own agenda within that of the class and unable to fully absorb feedback that comes from a higher level of abstraction. Trying to tackle this gap proved an immensely fulfilling activity for me.
A creative education greatly emphasises on free exploration, without enough effort to transition into focused exploration, and such focus comes in large part from the ability to articulate. Students couldn’t get very far without a highly refined rhetoric; they had to know exactly what they were saying, why they were saying it and why it was important to say. And AIT had given me the opportunity to interact with the students as they wrote their proposals, presented to their juries and compiled their documentation books, to help them refine their own rhetoric, provide them with new angles to pursue their enquiries from and make sense of their own creative trajectories.
My particular inclination towards this aspect of the classroom experience was because of how thoroughly it could define the world’s relationship to the creative community. Creativity has a double-edged quality — it has the capacity to be entirely useless and trite, or it can be immensely valuable. And this is entirely regulated by the ability to articulate — poor articulation can mask creative brilliance as easily as good articulation can feign it. It is the link that distinguishes student from practitioner and further distinguishes a good practitioner from a bad one. This, as I saw it, was the primary goal of a creative education, more than honing skills or incubating ideas: it was to refine rhetoric, to give form and legibility to one’s existing creativity. It’s what helps make the creative community and its output legible to the world outside and infuses the work with value. And without this legibility, the transformative power of art can remain entirely unrealised.
Which brings me to the definition of my own practice.
The Necessity of a Creative Identity Crisis
I’m an artist, designer & writer.
(For now, anyway.)
I was always creatively inclined as a child. I used to like making things; it made me feel wizard-like, because no one else seemed to have the ability to see something in their head and then bring it into existence.
I joined Srishti with the intention of becoming a graphic designer. I graduated four years later with a major in Visual Communication Design while simultaneously branding myself a Narrative Artist as well as developing a deep interest for academics and research in the humanities. I spent a year as a Research Assistant at Srishti, helping coordinate a public art project (i.e. AIT), after which I freelanced as a graphic designer for around six months before settling down at a very corporate job in the UX industry for the next three years. And finally, I left that too to begin an independent practice that could hopefully integrate my various inclinations more successfully. That might seem like a lot of different non-intersecting things, but they do in fact bind together to serve a deeper, singular goal.
Over many countless rewrites of my bio, I had started extracting a common thread that managed to bring together the seemingly disparate strands of my practice across art, design & academia. My practice, at its very core is concerned with the space that exists between experience and the representation of experience: to understand what gets lost in translation and how to bring it back into the fold. There’s always a gap between living an experience and then translating such experiences into concepts upon which we structure our world. The more far-removed our representations are from experience itself, the more distorted and flawed the world we build on top of those representations. My practice, no matter what form it takes, has always been concerned with how to close that gap. To be understood, and to help other people make themselves understood; to create a more accurate language for experience. As I began to extract this deeper motive, I could see the ways in which it manifested itself across the various things I did, in both obvious and obscure ways.
My art practice uses narrative as a tool for persuasion, inserting my audience into a more playful state of mind where they’re more receptive and empathetic to characters, situations and choices that are otherwise alien to them.
My research and writing deals with how our cognition processes our experience. How does our cognition translate experiences into concepts, and how do these conceptual frameworks in turn hinder our ability to navigate our own experience? Furthermore, how can we develop a new vocabulary to visualise and study the structure of experiences?
Design on the other hand helps me take my work beyond the abstracted intellectualised spaces of art & academia. Art & writing on their own can be intimidating, weighty formats that alienate the majority of common audiences, and good design can make them more accessible, can lubricate the road to comprehension and help make a better sale, whether in the form of a book, website, video, comic strip, diorama or tweet. Design is the business-end of my practice.
Different forms of expression, different media, different jobs and designations can present themselves in multiple different strains, and identifying the right ones keep you from force-fitting your work into patterns of functioning that don’t truly resonate with you. Being a designer didn’t mean I needed to enjoy design as an end in itself. Academic writing didn’t have to be bone-dry, informal writing didn’t have to be glib. As these pieces began to fit together, a more wholesome conception of “practice” started to emerge, one that was able to retroactively justify my eclectic body of work and give it a foundation upon which to rest.
Practice is a two-fold conception, a constant interplay between the “what” and the “how”. The “what” defines itself as you evolve, as you intersect with new concepts, ideas and themes and decide which ideological spaces you choose to occupy. It defines the content of your work, the concepts you generate and the justifications you provide for them. It is the self you create above-ground and it is largely a product of cognitive choices. But it’s a mistake to situate one’s creative identity wholly in this space. The mere content of your practice doesn’t determine the way in which your practice is disseminated, it doesn’t determine the way the world interacts with your body of work. Because it is our underground self that dictates the “how” of our practice.
Beyond mere form & medium, it determines the difference between the tyrant, the activist, the social recluse, the tortured genius. It defines the way we interact, collaborate, sell our work, run our business, manage our finances or curate our social media. It determines the difference between someone who displays their work in a gallery versus in public space, someone who chooses to work for someone else versus themselves, someone who chooses to write for newspapers versus academic journals. It makes about half our choices for us and dictates the formats through which we extend outward beyond ourselves and interact with the world around us.
A true existential enquiry — one that really keeps you up at night or has you trying to finish long-forgotten arguments in the shower — manifests itself in as many ways as it can manage. It is looking for as many forms of expression as it can latch onto and it’ll manifest itself in the form of the books you read, the movies you watch, the conversations you have and the things you create. The more varied and haphazard your practice seems, the more it is indicative of a deeper, pressing enquiry that is worth identifying and pursuing. And in that sense, an identity crisis is rather crucial to the evolution of one’s practice because it gives you the greatest chance of discovering the various domains in which you could satisfy your enquiry — whether that domain is artistic, academic, corporate, social, political — and whittle your practice down from there. Because without it, you risk trapping yourself within the first ideological pigeonhole you come across, one that will limit you to producing work that propagates its own agenda and nothing else.
