‘
But if the site is considered as a laboratory for Schrödinger’s urbanism, the possibilities are probably infinite.
‘
spoke very passionately about his sculptures and what he was trying to express through the medium. The passion he displayed was distinct and we made more specific enquiries in our keenness to know more about what drove him. When asked why he chose to become a sculptor, (the school offered other disciplines like applied art, graphics and painting) he replied saying “Sir, mera rank nahi tha” (“Sir, my rank was too low for other disciplines”). This was a rather startling answer and a few more questions established the scene for us. Students wishing to join the college had to take a mandatory common entrance exam. Students could then choose their disciplines based on their rank order from the exam. What was most baffling though was the implicit hierarchy in choice of discipline- applied arts got filled up first, graphics was second, painting was third and sculpture was last! This was a fresh encounter for us and we persisted, trying to understand how this hierarchy of disciplines fell into place. The sculpture students were quick to establish that “smart ladke apna haath gandha nahi karna chahate” (“Smart students don’t want to get their hands dirty”). It became obvious that willingness to physically immerse oneself in the malleability of a material was a necessary pre-requisite to become a sculptor. As we pressed on more to understand the willingness of the sculpture students to sculpt and why sculpture was last in the hierarchy, one of the students exclaimed in a moment of epiphany saying, “Sir, Chandigarh mein mitti kahaan hai?” (“Where is mud in Chandigarh?”)
This exclamation presented a moment of conditional syzygy on how the materiality of a city could influence the culture of arts within an art school. Mud, earth and any material that can express its malleability is never the choice to articulate any surface within the urban context. (Any material that portrays signs of wilful malleability is otherwise termed as ‘vandalised’?) Mud or earth is seen as a residue and not as a material existing naturally and worthy of inhabitation; something that has a temporary existence until another material is picked from a catalogue and is laid upon it to render a more “utilitarian surface”. If this perspective is inverted, large scale excavations for basements, double basements and infrastructure in cities could be viewed as latent sites of archaeology of unbuilt cities of mud (or invisible cities). The JCB land digger could be re-imagined as analogous to a ‘reverse-3D-printer’ and soil testing agencies as the city’s teleological architects. One could easily make an argument that Chandigarh is a city that was designed, but not planned. Corbusier with his modernist obsessions of designing a house as a machine has designed Chandigarh as a city. It presents an interesting thought experiment to wonder what the hierarchy of art disciplines (or the lack of it) in the city would be if the city was designed by Laurie Baker. “Chandigarh mein miTTi kahaan hai?” is now the topic of a curatorial investigation.
June 2016 | CITY OBSERVER
41