INTRODUCTION:

Various facets of Ecological art have undoubtedly been associated with us for centuries. The environment plays a major and primary role in the many relationships we attain during our lifespan. It has been ingrained ubiquitously in our traditional practices or indigenous customs and deeds. The following lines by Jeffrey Kastner say it all how humans confront nature:

“The elemental background against which all our activity is played out, nature is the biggest of the big pictures. We worship and loathe it, sanctify and destroy it. Birth, death and all that is graceful and vicious between, sit comfortably within the natural web. We ‘singular creatures’ also bloom and rot on its vast matrix, but the combination of our ambition and our gifts makes us want more than simply to survive”¹

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, things started to alter at an alarming rate. The rise of capitalism and consumerism was an added setback for the environment. In India, in the early 20^th century, Shri Rabindranath Tagore, through his writings and deeds, portrayed his love for Nature and his environmentalism. He introduced practices such as Halakarshana and Vriksharopan ceremony in Santiniketan (West Bengal), where he spent most of his life. These rituals reinforced notions such as collectiveness, community engagement, eco-aesthetics, and many analogous notions among the public. He was a true environmentalist of his time and his thoughts and actions are very much relevant in these troubled times of the 21^st century. Mahatma Gandhi never mentioned anything regarding the environment or ecology. But his forethoughtfulness for India’s swadeshi future can be regarded as a characteristic of a true environmentalist.

In the West, a new genre took its root in the social sphere with the upsurge of the socialist movement and revolution in the second half of the 20^th century. This was a result of the rising concerns towards the protection of environment and ecology from the rampant capitalist and consumerist culture. Ecological art/eco-art or environmental art paved its way with its core notion of conservation of the planet. Various strategies were implemented to portray this concern and which is being continued today in contemporary times with an added potential with a hope for a better future.

In this research paper, I will be discussing the outstanding efforts made in the field of the environment by an enthusiastic young artist, Mrs. Shweta Bhattad. She resides in her ancestor village Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh, which shares its boundary with Maharashtra’s Nagpur district. Shweta incorporates various methods and approaches to tackle as well as challenge the disharmony in the environmental scenario in India and particularly her village Paradsinga. This paper is based on qualitative research methodologies such as in-depth interviews, participant observation, and field trips.

Current Environmental Scenario:

We Indians are full of paradoxes. On one hand, we worship nature personated in crores of ‘devatas’ and ‘devis’ we have fashioned, and on the other hand, we then shambolically mutilate it, both intentionally and unintentionally each and every day of our lives. Our warped system is also to blame. The ruthless activities which humans perform throughout the day staunchly alter our environment, biodiversity, and ecosystem in innumerable detrimental ways. These actions performed are somewhere visible and somewhere they are invisible to our naked eyes. Ramachandra Guha very well describes the scenario by stating:

“India today is an environmental basket-case, marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests. Meanwhile, tribal and peasant communities continue to be pushed off their lands through destructive and carelessly conceived projects.”²

At this juncture, a very important question arises. Why choosing art to cope up with this degraded environmental situation? Why not science or technology or something else but art? The first and foremost answer is that society and art cannot be pulled apart from each other. We have been practicing art since we were cave-dwellers. Art makes society and vice versa is correspondingly true. Art represents culture, social settings, and social relations. Moreover, art is not just about the visuals, but also, it involves participation, collectiveness, shared interaction, and dialogue. It creates a site of activity and performance. It traverses our sight, mind, heart (feelings/catharsis), and in some cases, our sense of smell and touch. The shared form of knowledge and wisdom engendered in the artistic practice involving members of a society or a community plays a dynamic role. Through various activities performed by Mrs. Bhattad, I will be tapping on each of these concepts in the following paragraphs.

Shweta Bhattad’s endeavour for Environment and Social Justice

The art which incorporates and comprehends myriad forms and practices of engagement along with the representation of the environment is known as Ecological art or Eco-art. It is also interchangeably known as Environmental art. After the social upsurge in the 1960s and then particularly after the 1990s, gaining stimulus from Land art³, many artists started collaborating with the physical environment around them. It was a response to the much-needed consideration of the environmental problems pertaining to their area and correspondingly in the whole ecosphere.

The first and foremost artistic sphere which comes to my mind in terms of the methods and strategies unified by Shweta is the domain of Public Art. It encompasses a vast number of categories in the field of art. Here, the artwork could be placed on-site, or a site can become a work of art. This progression happens while undergoing artistic processes which can be ephemeral or may have performative aspects. The artwork can be biodegradable, disintegrate or flourishes with time, or can be static throughout. Public art acts as a tool to provoke and bring social and environmental change for Shweta Bhattad.

Figure 1 : During a performance in Orissa [FAITH]

Figure 2: A non-violent performance [FAITH] against the Iron ore mining in Orissa

Bhattad’s first response to me while I was interviewing her was “I cannot imagine my art limited within four walls”. The concept of ‘studio-practice’ or object-based aesthetics (such as that of painting and sculpture) has been obliterated from her art practices. She always wanted to engage more directly to the public, address social, political, and environmental issues. To achieve this, she chose to do performances and interventions.

In performance art, the actions performed by the artist could well be scripted or impetuous, can be performed alone or in collaboration with other participants. An important element involved is the relationship between performer and audience/spectators. These performance artworks are ephemeral and can be documented if the artist or the audience wishes to do so. It acts as a tool to provoke and raise awareness among the public.

The above images (Fig. 1 & 2) represent one of her performances- ‘Faith’, which she did in an art residency in Orissa. The actions performed by Shweta in the barren land are done in collaboration with 100 saplings which form the artwork. After visiting iron ore mines in Orissa, Shweta personally felt and saw its extreme dreadful effects on nature, on the miners' poor working conditions, and the destruction it causes in the name of ‘development’. She felt disheartened after carefully observing the situation. Therefore, she decided to perform on dry and barren land. This artwork is all about to have ‘faith’ in ourselves if we are to collaborate with nature and hope that everything may get okay one day.

The performer's body plays a key role in performance art and for this reason, Bhattad can be found in white attire in most of her performances. According to her, white produces more curiosity in the minds of the viewer, grasps attention, and isn’t related to any caste/religion. Performance art holds strong roots in the ideas of Conceptual art⁴. She also practices intervention art which is mostly linked to conceptual and performance art. The artist in the public domain interacts either with the audience, institution, another work, or existing situation/structure. Shweta incorporates this practice several times in her artistic journey which is mostly to promote awareness and question the existing social and environmental state.

Figure 3: ‘Three Course Meal and a Dessert of Vomit’

Fig. 3 shows Shweta’s another thoughtful and provoking performance which she calls ‘Three Course Meal and a Dessert of Vomit’. It is a critique of the economic system of India where around 40% of children are still malnourished. There exist huge economic gaps amongst the public where on one hand there is hunger and starvation and on the other, there is a huge amount of food available for the rich and is wasted away. It’s a critique for the overprivileged 1%.

Shweta decided to move back to her ancestral village Paradsinga a few years after completing her post-graduation (gold-medallist recipient) from M. S. University of Baroda in Sculpture. There are various social and ecological issues prevailing in this area. As a concerned responsible citizen and righteous human, she always wanted art to be an instrument for social change. Villages near Nagpur has high farmer-suicide cases, land degradation issues, water-scarcity problems, sanitation and hygiene issues, open defecation related problems, and various other complications. This directly confirms that our rural India, which constitutes almost 66% of our population, lives in such an unsettled and distressed situation. What is the ‘development’ cloud all about when our maximum populace face such difficulties? To this, Bertalanffy very aptly expresses by saying:

“The application of the modern methods of scientific agriculture, husbandry, etc., would well suffice to sustain a human population far surpassing the present one of our planet. What is lacking, however, is knowledge of the laws of human society, and consequently a sociological technology. So the achievements of physics are put to use forevermore efficient destruction; we have famines in vast parts of the world while harvests rot or are destroyed in other parts; war and indiscriminate annihilation of human life, culture, and means of sustenance are the only way out of uncontrolled fertility and consequent overpopulation. They are the outcome of the fact that we know and control physical forces only too well, biological forces tolerably well, and social forces not at all. If therefore, we would have a well-developed science of human society and a corresponding technology, it would be the way out of the chaos and impending destruction of our present world.”⁵

At this juncture, I would like to introduce an important term of the art realm. Suzanne Lacy⁶ coined the term ‘New Genre Public Art’ in 1993, for it to differentiate from ‘Public art’ stating that New Genre Public Art is the “visual art that uses both traditional and non-traditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives- is based on engagement”.⁷ Shweta moved to Paradsinga village along with her family and they all started a collective in 2014. They named it as ‘Gram Art Project’. They began collaborating with like-minded people. Villagers, farmers, young environmental enthusiasts, peasants, musicians, and other artists joined hands with them and formed its main foundation pillars. Nootan (primary school teacher), Aditi (artist), Ganesh (young farmer), Parth (pursuing B.Sc. in nearby college), Kavita (young girl/ daughter of a farmer), Meena (a young lady), Vedant (College graduate) and many more, deep-rooted folks, both old and young. Suzi Gablik very well puts what Shweta might have felt at that point of time:

“The socially entrenched scenarios of innovative style, fashion and competitive consumerism as a way of life were being challenged by other possibilities that included a sense of community, an ecological perspective, and a deeper understanding of the mythical and archetypal underpinnings of spiritual life. What was in the air was a new set of values, concerned with “right” living in an interconnected universe rather than with achieving success in the art world. Only an altogether different topology of art as creative work in service to the whole could encompass this vision and make it plausible — a philosophical framework for artists who see themselves as agents of social change.”⁸

Now in the labyrinth of the artistic realm, Shweta Bhattad has entered another street. She has now devoted herself to the practice of Socially engaged art /community art/ collaborative art. It is also known as Social Practice and can be allied to activism and even social sciences, where it contends with social, political, and environmental issues. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud considers that “contemporary art is definitely developing a political project when it endeavours to move into the relational realm by turning it into an issue.”⁹ Shweta now devotes most of her time mixing and interacting with the villagers. They have become an engaged community and work in the direction of a common objective with major concerns towards social upliftment and environmental sustainability. Timothy Morton expresses the notion of environmentalism as:

“Environmentalism is a set of cultural and political responses to a crisis in humans' relationships with their surroundings. Those responses could be scientific, activist, or artistic, or a mixture of all three. […] Environmentalism is broad and inconsistent. You can be a communist environmentalist, or a capitalist one, like the American "wise use " Republicans. You can be a "soft" conservationist, sending money to charities such as Britain's Woodland Trust, or a "hard" one who lives in trees to stop logging and road building. And you could, of course, be both at the same time. You could produce scientific papers on global warming or write "ecocritical " literary essays. You could create poems, or environmental sculpture, or ambient music. You could do environmental philosophy ("ecosophy "), establishing ways of thinking, feeling, and acting based on benign relationships with our environment(s).” ¹⁰

Figure 4: Gram Art Collective’s meeting.

The collaborative/socially engaged art or ‘Social practice’ falls “within the tradition of conceptual process art”¹¹. This is the path where Shweta will be losing her identity in the process of artmaking but will act as a catalyst or facilitator in the community. This is a “performative, process-based approach”¹², where her work “involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations, well beyond the institutional confines of the gallery or museum”¹³. To define the term, “Socially engaged practice describes art that is collaborative, often participatory and involves people as the medium or material of the work”¹⁴. This practice is multidisciplinary in character and the importance is given to every community member for his/her views and actions. The key element here is participation and the process of creation rather than the end product or result. This process of interaction and sharing is entitled as Art. Buchloh further elucidates that:

“Because the proposal inherent in Conceptual Art was to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone (the work as an analytic proposition), it thus constituted the most consequential assault on the status of that object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form of distribution. Confronting the full range of the implications of Duchamp's legacy for the first time, Conceptual practices, furthermore, reflected upon the construction and the role (or the death) of the author just as much as they redefined the conditions of receivership and the role of the spectator. Thus they performed the postwar period's most rigorous investigation of the conventions of pictorial and sculptural representation and a critique of the traditional paradigms of visuality.”¹⁵

Figure 5: Seed paper made from upcycled waste paper, dyed with natural pigments.

Gram Art Project or Gram Art Collective aims to deal with the prevailing agricultural/social/environmental injustice happening in their ‘gram’ or village Paradsinga. As there is a range of individuals collaborating with Gram Art, with varied upbringings, experiences, identities, and characteristics, their interaction generated significant dialogue in the community setting. Therefore, this dialogical process or active listening plays a vital role in every single action the collective wishes to perform. As Grant Kester notes, “We determine the relationship between our interpretation of another’s state of mind or condition and his or her actual inner state through a performative interaction, an empathetic feedback loop in which we observe the other’s responses to our statements and actions (and modify our own subsequent actions accordingly). This empathetic identification is a necessary component of dialogical art practice- it provides a way to decentre a fixed identity through interactions with others. It is also necessary for the formation of a (contingent and locally defined) solidarity based on shared identification, allowing individual subjects to form provisional alliances.”¹⁶

The collective aims to build a society that is free from social and environmental abuse, offering eco-friendly and sustainable lifestyle alternatives. Their essential and primary concern is to revive and restore rural communities by raising awareness regarding various issues and to offer sustainable solutions. They try to achieve it by using eccentric methodologies. They practice performance art, paint posters, established a library (Gram Art Library), do inspirational and motivational storytelling and theatre, and combine many other media.

Figure 6: Seed balls containing various indigenous seeds which can be put at any soil and it will eventually turn into a plant/tree.

Figure 7: The seed paper sprouting its roots.

Figure 8: Seed calendar with natural dye.

Figure 9: Few Gram Art Members with the annual cotton produce.

Figure 10: The women-power of Gram Art Project busy in making rakhis

There is a high suicide rate among Indian farmers, particularly in the cotton belt area (which also falls in their area). This was a major issue of the region and was an outcome of the use of genetically modified seeds of cotton. So, the Gram Art team decided to go back to the traditional roots and planted indigenous cotton seeds in their farmlands. One of their members, Ganesh, learned watershed management technique by contouring and thus solved the water-scarcity problem in the area. He teaches the same technique in nearby villages where there are water-related problems. The other ingenious act was the creation of cotton bands or rakhis (for the festival Raksha-Bandhan). The main body of the rakhi is designed such that it represents an issue or a matter to question upon, mostly including social and environmental issues. It is further ornamented with indigenous seeds of different plant/ tree varieties. This job is fulfilled particularly by the women's power of the nearby villages.

This excellent and skillful initiative empowers the women-folks of the region. They are able to earn little money in addition to food grains by whatever the profit these rakhis make. Moreover, as these rakhis are bought via online orders across the nation, it not only engenders awareness locally but also nationally and internationally on various issues. Similarly, the collective also makes seed calendars and seed balls made from recycled paper, cloth bags, and many more daily life essentials. I would like to mention famous lines said by an influential and distinguished artist Joseph Beuys: “Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives.”¹⁷

Figure 11: A very thoughtful and ingenious rakhi

Figure 12: Land art against Genetically Modified crops.

Figure 13: An appeal to PM of India to Grow in India with Indigenous seeds and not to buy seeds from foreign companies like Monsanto.

Another powerful artistic tool they implemented is ‘Land Art’. Here, the collective directly works in collaboration with the organic landscape and treats it as their canvas of ideas and concepts. Gram Art Project also organised the International Land Art Festival in their village Paradsinga. Many people belonging to varied backgrounds and nationalities joined hands with them to create some interesting ephemeral land and performance artworks.

The artistic journey of Shweta Bhattad is astounding and encouraging. Her identity is now merged with the collective project where everybody is a participant and a viewer. Finally, I would like to discuss one courageous performance on the issue of farmer suicide made by the collective in collaboration with school children, the villagers accompanied by the people from other cities/ villages who visit the collective.

Figure 12: A mass performance on farmers' distress & suicide in which nearby school children participated.

Figure 15: A mass performance on farmer's distress & suicide where anybody could participate.

CONCLUSION:

Art is part of our lives for centuries and has manifested in various forms in our culture and society. One cannot frame the meaning of art or define art in a single sentence. Art has numerous expressions and does not need to be defined; nonetheless, it needs to be experienced. In this difficult time of the pandemic (COVID-19), when I realise and write about what Shweta Bhattad and the Gram art project collective is doing with its strong sustainable and noble objectives, I truly feel the society today needs Art more than ever. This article points out to one of the chief aspects of current artistic tradition, i.e., the object-based artwork is meant for the galleries and the museums but on the other hand, collaborative, ephemeral, socially engaged art is something to experience and gain internal ethical satisfaction as a human being. If we don’t realise this soon, then James Lovelock hypothesis may become true:

“Until this change of heart and mind happens, we will not instinctively sense that we live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make, either by cancelling the changes or by cancelling us. Unless we see the Earth as a planet that behaves as if it were alive, at least to the extent of regulating its climate and chemistry, we will lack the will to change our way of life and to understand that we have made it our greatest enemy.”¹⁸

The art practice adapted by Shweta and the Gram Art Collective holds a strong form of Institutional Critique. The museum/gallery/institution holds the authority and control over viewing and sale of a work of Art and this aspect is totally challenged by them. The collective altered the entire notion of ‘site’ of art production and gave unabridged emphasis on the ‘process’ of creation. The art practices discussed here sets unique examples in the present social and ecological state of India. The genre of Environmental Art holds a huge potential and scope in the realm of Art and environmental ethics.

REFERENCES:

1. Kastner J. Preface. In Land and Environmental Art. Edited by Kastner J and Wallis B. Phaidon, London. 1998. p. 11

2. Guha R. Environmentalism: A Global History. Penguin Books. 2014. p. xix

3. Land Art or Earth art is an art movement emerged in the 1960s in the Western countries.

4. Conceptual Art is an art movement came to the fore in the 1960s and crowns the idea or the concept as the chief element of the work.

5. Bertalanffy L. v. General System Theory. George Braziller, New York. 1968, p. 52

6. Suzanne Lacy is an artist, writer, critic and professor at USC Roski School of Art and Design, USA

7. Lacy S. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Bay Press, USA. 1995. p. 19

8. Gablik S. Art For Earth’s Sake. Available from http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/gablik202.htm

9. Bourriaud N. Relational Aesthetics. 1998. p. 17.

10. Morton T. Ecology without Nature. Harvard University Press, London. 2007. p. 9

11. Helguera P. Education for Socially Engaged Art. Jorge Pinto Books, New York. 2011. p. 2.

12. Kester G. Conversation Pieces. University of California Press. 2004.

13. Ibid. p.

14. Socially Engaged Practice. Available from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socially-engaged-practice

15. Buchloh B. H. Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions. October. 55; 1990: 105-143.

16. Kester G. Conversation Pieces. University of California Press. 2004. p. 77

17. Quotes by Joseph Beuys. Available from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8310.Joseph_Beuys.

18. Lovelock J. The Revenge of Gaia. Penguin Books. 2006. pp. 21-22.

Received on 11.06.2020 Modified on 11.07.2020

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2020; 11(3):251-258.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2020.00041.8