First published on 25th November 2024
L.N. Tallur’s latest exhibition, titled Neti-Neti: Glitch in the Code, transforms the Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi into a perfectly transparent three-dimensional matrix. We are introduced (‘jacked in’) to an invisible circuit of phygital code, in the midst of which rest Tallur’s sculptures -- scarlet pyramids rising onto an interface where data ceases to be alpha-numeric and transforms into a colour-coded landscape of bronze, metallic, wooden, and concrete forms. In Tallur’s world, we become computer users, surfing a dynamic interface obstructed with malicious and weaponized code --his sculptural glitches -- and protected by a firewall of irony. Such sculptures, infectious Trojans malfunctioning our understanding of what is familiar, are consciously made erroneous and misshapen. Consider “Mind-Gut Link” and “Mind-Gut Link 2.” Their outward forms -- aberrations that resemble a tumorous CT scan more than our digestive tract -- engage conformity with bewilderment, presenting a caricaturist imagination of human physiology corrupted (rather, mutated) by a digital bug, and rending the representation from material memory. No longer recognized as a passive facsimile of what is realistic or ‘accurate,’ these works force us to think of them as objects that are not -- a hallucination, a glitch from the real. The display leads viewers towards a negation of what is consciously familiar, making them aware of a consciousness (what the sculptor identifies as artificial intelligence) that is not informed by the object, but by its very lack. In that sense, the show lives up to its name, leaving an impression of sculptures that are “neither this, nor that” (neti-neti).
This state of in-betweenness -- a manipulation of traditional and contemporary images that is customarily Tallurian -- precariously balances the represented with the abstract, or the source code with a new command. The titanic sculpture “Data Weave” highlights this radical transformation/mutation lucidly: modelled, carved and cast on the image of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader’s iconic presence is suffocated by an unrecognizable mass that envelops his figure. As a result, the sculpture comically rests upon the absurd notion of either being a poorly executed command, or an unfortunate victim of a virus -- in both instances, a glitch of the original. While it is possible to ‘rescue’ the image of Gandhi for the semiotician -- the cloth-like folds of khadi around his figure, the exposed walking stick, the distinguishable gait, and a bald head -- the sculpture remains an anxious aberration, a mishap that is as confusing literarily as it is visually (DataWeave is a programming language for the transformation of data, while ‘Data Weave’ can be inferred as the interlacing of thread-like structures of data for the creation of a sculpture, similar to Gandhi’s weaving of khadi). [1] Tallur creates a cybernetic Third Space where conspiratorial whispers between incongruous forms and ideas, belief systems and scientific inquiry, result in the making of oddities and hybridities. The traditional divine figures in “Overfitting” and “Fire Wall” morph into a ruinous effigy of desecrated and desiccated data; a corruption that attacks, arrests, as well as appropriates their mythical presence. Tallur’s matrix --building upon the neural pathways of Chirag-e-AI, his solo exhibition at the Museum of Art and Photography in 2023 -- glitches their celestial expression of an all-knowing, all-seeing benevolence (and thereby our own ephemeral understanding of the divine). It manipulates an artificially intelligent rupture; a rupture in history, religion -- and tradition -- that the American political commentator, Walter Lipmann, understood as merely a “machine-made imitation,” an exercise of decoding data from our ancestors that Tallur constantly undertakes.
For Tallur’s sardonic practice, “Glitch Tandava” serves as a brilliant metaphor. By casting Shiva Nataraja’s image, the sculptor blesses his matrix with a wild card -- a creator, preserver and destroyer, or an antivirus software -- a primordial strain against a digital strain. The jubilation, nevertheless, is short-lived: at this convergence of the supernatural and the supranatural, Tallur grants himself administrator rights, crucifying Nataraja’s celestial dance. This creates a site of arrest: the sculpture’s graceful ancient form is violently abandoned, phasing in-and-out of this realm. Tallur’s hand models a contortionist in agony, suffocating in limbo, as parasitic lines of code tear through his flaming halo (absolution for a billion souls, abandoned by pressing shift+delete). This is an animal caged in bitter torture -- his damaru becomes a beacon of distress; the world-ending agni is snuffed; the grace of abhayamudra, or the gesture of allaying fear, lost to his devotees. Even Apasmara, the dwarf destined to be trampled under Shiva’s dance, ironically becomes the very thing he is being punished for: an illusion, a phantom that leads us astray. This is where the sculptor’s genius comes into its own -- by embodying all that is familiar, Tallur makes the Nataraja a vessel of torture than salvation; a deluge of corrupted code that taints our most sacred beliefs, leaving us neither here nor there. This is a battle that the Lord of Dance cannot outperform, for when the glitch becomes part of the code, Shiva is the virus.
How do we make sense of an exhibition -- a matrix, a circuitry of sculptural data -- that is fundamentally built upon abnormality and deviance? Writing in “Sculptures in Quotation Marks,” Peter Nagy described the sensation of viewing Tallur’s works as “attending a masked ball of sorts…mixing metaphors and exchanging costumes so as to befuddle any simplistic cognition the audience may have hoped to encounter.” [2] Such befuddlement has remained characteristic throughout Tallur’s practice. For instance, Chromatophobia: The Fear of Money, his solo exhibition with Nature Morte in 2011, mischievously manipulated the conversation between sculptural ‘found objects’ of classical Indian antiquity, and modernity, convoluting our understanding of categorizations. Form and shape, figuration and abstraction, traditional and contemporary, become redundant listings with works such as “Obituary Note” (currently in the collection of Grounds for Sculpture), where burnt wood engulfed in Nataraja’s halo of fire teases the tension between our ancient past, modern present, and an uncertain future.
Neti-Neti takes this masquerade a step further: Tallur’s sculptures result from what William Gibson called a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions”; a cyberspace of neural highways, networks and codes, where a virtual reality redefines the physical laws that govern us. [3] With names such as “Digital Sage”and“CodeKeepers” for his works, the sculptor-as-a-coder teases a hallucinatory experience between the physical and the immaterial world, that keeps shifting the boundary of what is ‘real.’ “Deep Learning PI (Portable Intelligence)” is the most visually explicit step in this eversion (and by far, the most experimental sculpture in the exhibition). By building artificial neurons that process pictures, texts, sounds and other data from his artistic practice, Tallur ‘allows’ (an illusion of control?) an AI seedling to recognize, classify and mimic his sculptural oeuvre. However, when does deep learning stop and creation begin? In the end, navigating this newfound geography becomes the exhibition’s most astute observation -- when the visitor finally logs off and exits the gallery/application, the ‘glitch’ is everywhere. How does one get back to the normal?
Shankar Tripathi is an arts writer, editor and curator based out of New Delhi.
Neti-Neti: Glitch in the Code, is on at Nature More, New Delhi, from October 17 till December 1, 2024.
Notes
[1] Incidentally, the Hindi word ‘data’ (????) translates as ‘giver’ or ‘saviour,’ another moniker informally attributed to Gandhi, for his role in the Indian freedom struggle.
[2] Peter Nagy, “Sculptures in Quotation Marks,” in Smoke Out (Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road and Arario Gallery, 2018).
[3] In 1984, William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in the book Neuromancer, describing it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.”