Fulbright-Nehru Research on Art & Performance
- Dr. Les Joynes (US)
Exploring Contemporary Art and Performance in India
“Through collaboration, improvisation and interdisciplinary experimentation, we can encounter “intense proximities” (Enwezor 2012) between ourselves, our environments and our conceptions of culture.”
As a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, I am an artist invited by the US and Indian governments to explore India’s contemporary art as indexed by its diverse regional identities and cultural traditions including folk art, classical performance and contemporary styles.
For my nine-month research I travel from Delhi to Rajasthan then Maharasthra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Santiniketan in West Bengal then to the Northeast.
With the help of Fulbright, IGNCA and local scholars and artists, I am exploring the ‘moments” of art - in particular the evocation of “rasa” can be perceived and appreciated and sometimes translated into contemporary practices. And, finally, how can we envision artistic research as a unique and meaningful way to contemplate South Asian cultures outside of current lenses?
Dramatized dance worship performances in Sanskrit. Koodiyattam performers in Kerala May 2022 (2022© Les Joynes)
Thrissur Pooram 2022 (2022© Les Joynes)
Nature of Research
Joynes has collaborated with local and indigenous communities in Singapore, Brazil and Mongolia exploring the connections of communities to shamanism and magic. In Sao Paulo and Ulaanbaatar he led workshops connecting traditional and contemporary musicians with contemporary artists to create unique collaborative events (inspired by "Untitled Event" (1952) at Black Mountain College) exploring the spaces that engage performers and the audiences alike.
Fieldwork
“During nine months of fieldwork I am using shared-learning methodologies to experiment with and explore social structures, sites and the performative body (including rasa expressions of love, compassion, wonder, humor, peace, heroism).
I combine academic research with creative practice. Resisting the globalized and the colonial urge to impose homogenized contemporary aesthetics on the Indian artscape, contemporary scholars today now examine India’s participation in the “global artscape” (D’Souza, 2017).
The advancement of rapid communications and cultural exchange has caused the erosion and disappearance of important traditions through which cultures identify themselves. International art fairs, biennials and blockbuster museum exhibitions systematically reduce art into mere homogenized products made for global consumers. Artists, today need to be in-conversation (Lippard, 2010) with local cultures to foster mutual understanding and progress the field. My research will expand this conversation to explore India’s complex cultural landscapes.
Indian artists draw inspiration from a rich culture and unique aesthetic traditions. Artists in India that are shaping the field of contemporary performance include Sahej Rahal (b. 1988) who explores the alterity (otherness) of performance practices performed within public spaces which become pronounced precisely because they are simultaneously camouflaged within the visual complexity of modern Indian urban landscapes. And Pushpamala N (b. 1956) who explores the alterity of Indian heroine stereotypes inspired by gender roles from traditional Indian visual culture and recreated in Bollywood film. Using her body as subject, Pushpamala occupies and “flips” the audience’s passive perception of gendered roles. Nikhil Chopra (b. 1974) explores both his Indian family history and collective histories captured in semi-autobiographical performances and installations that explore the post-colonial Indian body. Also shaping the discipline is Natasha Ginwala (b.1985) who writes how “… the socialized body may attain freedom by altering its representational logic and public image.” (Documenta 2017).
Further, I am investigating other artists whose exploration of the performative body and ritual will inform my research including: Navtej Singh Johar, Maya Rao, Avni Sethi, Rajyashree Ramamurthy, Ranjana Dave, Zuleikha Chaudhari and Amitesh Grover who in particular has incorporated ritual 'mourners' into performance. The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun at Goldsmiths, London) in their film O Horizon (2018) explore the shifting topic of Transnational Borders through their sound and visual landscapes of Santiniriken in West Bengal as an entry point into Rabindranath Tagore’s experimental modes of learning across cultural borders.
Indian performative traditions that are at the foundations for Western and Eastern aesthetics. With Host and local artists I will collaboratively explore fundamental elements that have shaped histories of the performative body from pre-history to present. Through field research, I will expand my contemporary art practice and build relationships that foster cooperation and contribute to initiating artists research projects in India. This project will expand my creative practice with new forms of performance that will inspire my practice, writing and teaching.”
Preparation for this research
This research builds upon the artist’s prior Fulbright research projects in Asia well as research at the Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archeology including coursework with South Asia specialists at Columbia University including: Professor John Stratton Hawley; Professor Thomas Yarnall; Professor Vidya Dehejia; Professor Jonathan Crary and Professor Uttara Asha Coorlawala, on South Asian performance.
Ritual and Performing Spring. A woman wearing Ghagra Choli performing Gangaur Puja where she presents a temple idol to Gangaur Ghat on Lake Pichola at the feet of the City Palace in Udaipur (4 April 2022), one of the festivals of Rajasthan that celebrates the worship the Goddess Parvati 2022 © Les Joynes
Exploring New Modes of Site Specific-Reactivity
As a test model for Site Specific art, FormLAB examines the ontogenesis of a work of art: its evolution from raw materials, to a work-in-process, and finally to finished work (and sometimes devolving back again to raw materials). From 2008-2017 FormLAB has created projects in Germany, Singapore, South Korea, France, Brazil, Russia, Mongolia and China. Today it is exploring disruption: not only in interrupting art processes but reinventing how we perceive of a museum.
By presenting art that is observable within performance spaces such as a museum, I seek to refocus the spectators’ gaze so that art can be re-perceived as a dynamic series of processes with multiple outcomes that continually change over the duration of the exhibition. The radical nature of shared art-making can lead to unexpected discoveries that are unique to local-specific contexts, bringing about new ways of engaging with art, sites and performances. This has the potential to disrupt the static visual economies and narratives often reinforced by museums, art fairs and commercial galleries.
Shared processes with others and utilizing found objects that have been collected over time offers a structure where we can explore the spaces between the Self and the Other. FormLaboratory becomes a lens into cultural traditions through the creation of dynamic interdisciplinary structures (shared art-making). It appropriates found-objects, sound, music, oral traditions, performance, and emergent technologies and reinterprets them anew. Shared processes with local inhabitants of an unfamiliar culture creates an othering of self and a resulting parapraxis (11) through the invocation of a subconscious. Michel Foucault writes of an “…unveiling of the non-conscious.” It is this “othering of the self” that evokes a fecund unfamiliar territory in my practice.
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About
Les Joynes (born 1963) is a sculptor and multi-media performance artist based in New York.
Born in Santa Barbara, California Joynes trained as a sculptor and multi-media artist in London at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, and in Tokyo at Musashino Art University. He is recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for India.
A contemporary artist, he resists the tendency that works of art become immediately commoditized (Fracsna 2015) and explores the formless and the abject through performance, installation sculpture and moving image.
In the late 90’s Joynes and fellow Goldsmiths DIY artists resisting popular slick YBA trends and preferring making artworks using ephemeral, impoverished and formless materials. His work has been referred to as exuding “an abject but somehow jovial formlessness which is calculated to insult every formalist sensibility available…a kind of ground Zero of sculptural irresponsibility” (ArtMonthly, London).
In 1997, he created FormLAB (www.formlaboratory.com) as a traveling laboratory-in-museums that indexes the 18th century cabinets of curiosities that were precursors to the contemporary museum. Installed in Brazil, France, Mongolia, South Korea, and recently China these works channel the Cadavre Exquis games popularized by French Surrealist André Breton.
FormLAB’s outcomes include installation of elaborate assembly-line art making systems using defunct technologies (computers, old communications devices, typewriters, fragmented factory machines) in performances that explore a sense of shared consciousness (Foucault 1970 and Burroughs and Gyson 1978).
Joynes is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award (2022), Japan Ministry of Education and Culture (MeXT) Scholarship (1997-2001), University of the Arts London Fellow at the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (2015), the NKD Fellowship (2008), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016), Bauhaus Artist Fellow (2008-2009), Edwin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum (2009), and the King Sturge Sculpture Prize, London (1995).
Early life and education
Joynes was born in Santa Barbara, California. Meeting Andy Warhol in New York in the 1980s he was inspired by Warhol and his factory as a space ability to “flip” the way we perceive art in its relationship with consumerism. He was also inspired by artists Josef Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth and Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy and the philosopher Julia Kristeva in their exploration of abject spaces. He also explored painting techniques under the artist James Rosenquist.
Joynes completed his BA (cum laude) in History at Boston University in and M.Sc. from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. Completing his BA (Hons) Fine Art (1996) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London he studied under minimalist sculptors Stephen Furlonger and David Annesley and was selected to study under French sculptor Jean Cardot at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1995).
During his MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths, he studied under conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin and while in Japan 1997-2001 under Japanese public arts sculptor Hideyuki Mogami during his masters in fine art at Musashino Art University, Tokyo.
Researching new forms of experimental and collaborative art practices, Joynes earned his PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; and Post-Doctorate (2017) in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Work
Since 1979, he has explored found objects as ready-mades and photographed Southern Californian track-home garages as ready-made installations. First exhibiting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art at age eighteen, Joynes has exhibited at the Barbican, London, the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Paris, Milch Gallery, London, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Mongolia Zanabazar National Museum of Fine Art Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Museum of Brazilian Arts Brazil, Åmotgård Museum, Norway, Norimatsu Museum, Japan CBGB, New York, Art Fair Tokyo and Fenberger House, Nagano, Japan.
Later in the early 1990s inspired by Gordon Matta Clark and Jason Rhoades he began excavating structures amid demolition rescuing objects, books, masonry and posing as a Docklands Light Railways worker to excavate from the abandoned factories and warehouses in London’s Isle of Dogs, unused sites that were used as film locations for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).
In London and Japan he worked with formless materials including pigmented polyurethane creating objects that attempted to defy sculptural norms and sensibilities and created forests of giant globular slip-cast polyurethane flowers for exhibitions in Korea and the UK.
Extending his practice into painting and moving image in 2017, he explored random recollections of forms and memory he created a series of paintings inspired by dreams of shape-shifting. Exhibited at Michael Steinberg Gallery in 2008, his diptych painting Golden State captures recollections of the grossly illuminated candy-colored technology emporiums spilling out into the streets in Shinjuku and Akihabara. Inspired also by film he exhibited paintings at Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York that explored the reassembling of fragmented images recollected in dreams after watching Alain Resnais’ time-dysjunctive Last Year in Marienbad (1961).
Invited by art critic, essayist Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, Joynes was 2018-2020 Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia where he continued to explore power relations between the spectator, the art-object and the museum.
In 2012 he began to turn the museum inside out, re-lensing and shifting the ordered and predicable experiences of museum spectatorship inside-out. At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paolo, Brazil he exhibited FormLAB as a museum-within-a-museum where within a central transparent studio module he would continuously tamper with and remake the works displayed in the exhibition as an effort to destabilize the experience of the spectator and question when, if ever, a work of art is really finished.
His moving image works have exhibited at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival and the Douba Film Festival, Sichuan, China and museums and galleries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Inspired by narratives of Chris Marker and Agnes Varda, he is always exploring new forms of filmmaking and founded KinoForm Films (kinoform.com) which is exploring the creation of arte povera-inspired ‘low wave’ moving image.
He has led artistic research projects since the early 1990s. Trained in Advanced Curriculum Design at Columbia, he has designed models for the Art School of the Future building in Artistic Research curricula into MFA and PhD programs. He recently designed and led a PhD Master Class on Artistic Research at University of the Arts London.
He continues to explore the tandem processes of experimental art-making and critical interpretation. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist he is examining how Indian contemporary art indexes Indian classical and folk art forms that have reflected facets of Indian identity.