Confidential Reports: The First Blueprints of War

We live in a society of surveillance. Whether we want it or not, our personal deeds are watched over by the visible and invisible eyes of the state/authorities. Showing one’s identity card has become a routine in the contemporary society. Your mind, body and the deeds done in the society become virtual identity cards, even when you don’t carry a real card with you. Your skin color, the color of the eyes, linguistic preferences, ideological leanings, gender specificities and so on leave you an open book for the authorities to read. You become naked when you want to be clothed. You become transparent, when you wish to be opaque. You are hunted when you prefer to hide. There is no escape for an individual human being in the contemporary society. Your confidential report is already made.

Tensing Joseph uses the virtual and real confidential reports made on people as a metaphor in his works of art. Trained as a sculptor, Tensing invests his energies both in sculpting and painting. He has always been discussing the dilemmas of the existential man in all his sculptures. In the latest suite of paintings, he extends the same thoughts and gives them a different visual effect. Titled ‘Confidential Report’, this show has Tensing’s paintings and drawings. In his works, the personal becomes the political and the political becomes the personal.

The travels between the macro and the micro worlds help Tensing to go beyond the private fears and desires and locate his ideas in a larger realm of discourse. Art historically speaking, his images are familiar and have a time tested quality to them. The stocky human figures find their origin in the artist’s alma mater, Trivandrum Fine Arts College. Most of these figures move between the realm of reality and imagination. Tensing reinvents these figures to emblematize his concerns on the issue of confidential reports created by the authorities.

When an artist critiques the making of confidential reports by the authorities, it becomes evident that the report contains something detrimental to his progress. Confidential reports, though they have a role in surveillance, are not always made for debilitating the movement of an individual in the society. However, for Tensing Joseph, a confidential report, even if it is made with a good intention, is an encroachment on the privacy of the individual. It violates the human rights, it violates identity and it reduces a human being into a set of collected and categorized data. It dehumanizes every being by making them vulnerable through the manipulation of information.

Tensing’s creative world often melts into the world of dreams, which is allegorical in a way, so that the artistic subjectivity could be hidden behind the intented critique. This hiding of subjectivity happens only when there is a perceived political or social threat around the subject. As in the case of the Expressionists of the 20th century, when one’s identity is under threat and the authorities can cause harm to the person and property, then it becomes inevitable to find a different narrative structure to explain his/her dilemmas to a larger society. Tensing also resorts to this way of story telling through parables and surreal narratives.

In ‘Your Dreams may be Disappeared beyond the Sky’, Tensing creates a man with a fiddle/violin. He stands before a huge notation pad, which melts into the surreal contours of the sky. A huge aircraft goes across the sky. Down on the right, one could see a glowing egg kept within an iron cage. A Lion is seen sleeping on a wall that divides the pictorial surface into two. Tensing creates a world of loaded symbolism. The brutal strength of the authorities is emphasized through the images of the sleeping lion and the hovering aircraft. The man with the fiddle is a stand in image for the artist himself. He can play the music of the universe but he is rendered helpless by the presence of the threatening forces. His creativity, which is as fragile and precious as an egg, which is already glowing with its internal/spiritual purity is however locked up in the iron cage.

Tensing externalizes his self through metaphors like egg and the musician. In the process, the artist also joins the hoards of people, who stand and watch how their identities are robbed and how they are made into just an information flow. However, the egg shows the hope of the artist; one day it would hatch and a much stronger and creative self would come out. Though this optimism prevails in his works, Tensing also plays the role of a skeptic in some of his works. For example, the work titled ‘Genetics’, what we see is a set of eggs, which are in the process of hatching. They contain a house, a chair, a heap of swords and a cross.

As Louis Althusser says, each and every establishment in the society, which are meant for taming the people into social citizens, is an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). Therefore, family, school, jail, hospital etc become ideological state apparatuses. They indoctrinate the individual with the ideas of the State. Trained in this way, they become citizens of a nation, confirming to all what is ‘normal’ to the state. In ‘Genetics’, Tensing indirectly portrays the establishments as symbols that are about to be hatched. The skeptic in the artist thinks that the creative eggs even could bring forth the versions of the ISAs that would tame an inherently rebellious individual.

Interestingly, Tensing does not end up with a sort of identifiable symbolism. He creates another metaphor for the information manipulation by the state using the new tools of information technology. Had it been the ISAs once controlled the individuals, now the innovations in the information technology also enslave the people in different ways. Information technology evokes a sort of addiction and desire amongst the unsuspecting individuals and they slowly become ‘controlled’ beings. Tensing creates the image of a huge cactus, which has a computer circuit for its base. The cactus, despite its thorns is an alluring image. It creates the desire in the viewer to posses. But soon one comes to know that the cactus is mutating itself into a human form with a remote control device in its hand. It grows to encompass the space and render the data below, which in turn feeds into the eggs, supplementing the ISAs with the power of information.

Remote Control device as a symbol comes once again in Tensing’s painting titled, ‘The Muted Game’. There something eerie about this painting. An angel is seen sitting and contemplating on her next move. She has a remote control device in her hand. Behind her there stands a nun with a lamp. On the table there is an open lap top with its screen glowing in blue. An unknown light source spots on a cock fight before the angel, in the middle of the room. Outside, a man in an elegant suit stands still with a rickshaw. Above him the sky is blooming into an apocalyptic night.

This is the night of revelation; not exactly the last night when everything ends. In this night, the artist perceives things taking a different shape and all kinds of role reversals happening. Tensing suggests that the divine agencies that once used to help the human beings to resist the authoritarian threats, now plays a hand in glow game with the hegemonic forces. The angel also holds a remote control and she can enjoy a cock fight, the fight of terror, the cruel charm of small scale wars, while a pious woman stands helpless behind the angel. The information control is also suggested by the open laptop computer.

The existential man, which has been a pivotal image in Tensing’s earlier works, comes as a side character here. He is a helpless man now with no power other than pulling his own burden in a rickshaw. Nobody knows why he is waiting there as if he were in a meditation. This could be a man of our times; elegantly dressed, but disastrously controlled. What do we call him- the artist, the business man, the teacher, the call centre executive or…the god himself?

The failure of divine agency however, is not a pessimistic vision of Tensing Joseph. In the painting, ‘Silent Dreams’, the artist conjures up a different scene, much optimistic one, with subtle reminders of the history and history of civilization and war. The moment is a precious one; it is a divine moment. The authority against all the ISAs is handed over to a common man by a winged creature from the heavens. Interestingly, the common man, who is now a surrogate for the artist, is none other than the man who used to model for all the students in the Trivandrum Fine Arts College. Not a single artist from the Trivandrum Fine Arts College might have left the college without portraying him at least once. Hence, here Chellappan becomes the other self of the artist.

The man who receives the lighted globe from the angel is both the artist and the model; the maker and the medium of his making. On the floor one sees the image of an anvil, on which the civilizations had hammered themselves into shape. In a half opened drawer of a low table one sees the photograph of Adolf Hitler, who changed the course of the modern history through information manipulation and mass murdering of people in gas chambers. Tensing once again invokes the cruel times of Hitler, where he collected all the information about the Jews in order to cleanse the world of a ‘bad’ race. ‘Silent Dreams’, hence is a warning against and a reminder of confidential reports, constantly being produced in our society. We never know when it would be used against us, the unsuspecting individuals of the society.

‘An Invisible Mishap Beyond Your Eyes’ is a quite surrealistic and Dada-istic painting. There cannot be a meeting and collision between a dragon fly and a fighter plane. In this painting, Tensing conjures up such a possibility. Interestingly, the impending collision is taking place within a tea cup, which is reflected in an open lap top. In the horizon line we see a sky gathering fiery clouds. It is a premonition of war and Tensing expresses it with a subtle humor. Through this painting he says that each war is created over a tea cup. The vagaries of a war monger leader can trigger off a war; then a dragon fly may be forced to confront a fighter jet. The open laptop becomes a strong metaphor here as Tensing suggests that the manipulation of a war can happen not only over a cup of tea, but while playing with the information in a lap top.

Tensing Joseph is a humanist. Through these paintings, he warns his viewers about an impending crackdown on the humanity by the cruel authorities who ‘produce’ war and its effects. Everywhere is war. It takes place in private and public realms. Confidential reports are created to subjugate people and the same information data is used to colonize not only the bodies but also the minds of the people. Colonization has a new meaning now. It is less painful and more lucrative. Confidential reports make the colonization process more subtle. These reports gnaw way the minds of the people and leave them hollow shells. That is the message Tensing wants to send out to the world. Confidential Reports draw the first blue prints of wars, whether you agree with it or not.

Johny M L
February 2010
New Delhi

Johny has three post-graduate degrees from the Goldsmiths College, University of London, MS University, Baroda, and the University of Kerala. He has contributed as an Editor / Writer to several online and print magazines, including the Stance Magazine, Art Tehelka,Matters of Art, Narada News Malayalamand Cart on Art. He was the chief curator of the first edition of United Art Fair, 2012.He also has curated several shows.He started his own blog in the year 2008 and writes about culture, art, politics, society and people.