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Cut-'n'-paste a city
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Bangalore-based artist Avinash Veeraraghavan creates imaginary cities from familiar idioms and images from everyday life, writes HEMANGINI GUPTA
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Avinash Veeraraghavan: `Read the pictures like you might read words.' — Photo: Murali Kumar K.
TREADING CAREFULLY around the peripheries of "popular culture" and "kitsch", Bangalore-based artist Avinash Veeraraghavan's I Love My India uses photography and digital cut-and-paste techniques to present scenes from the city. Commissioned to write a book by Tara Publishing, Veeraraghavan was given the broadest mandate in terms of content and style. He chose the enduring theme of cityscapes to present a work intended, he says, for anyone; inviting them to intervene and construct their own city, guided broadly by the child-friendly instructions sprinkled across the pages — "cut and paste, connect the dots" and so on.
Explaining the intention behind the book, Veeraraghavan says: "My starting point was that the borderline between real and fantasy is quite blurred. Instead of documenting existing cities as real, I collected pictures from all over and reconstructed an imaginary, generic city. I needed some register to compose my images and so I used billboards, architecture and television; things I know best."
Although I Love... is divided into these three sections (Billboard City, Weak Architecture and Remote City), in his introduction, Italian artist Andrea Anastasio warns against "seeing the structuring of the book as a closing of intent".
Veeraraghavan does not intend the book for any particular audience. He reminds us that "this book has room (in gesture) for intervention. The Bangalore I know and the Bangalore you know are different, and I wanted to leave little spaces where people could intervene and make their own city."
Tweaking images born out of a familiar urban aesthetic, Veeraraghavan obviously navigates territory that could all too easily fall into conventional stereotype and be labelled as yet another work reducing India to exotic images and expected idioms. "I've been watchful to avoid things that constantly show up... there are no images of God... the only reference is so disguised that you wouldn't even spot it unless you were informed," he points out. "I've been very selective in my usage of kitsch and pop culture; there's nothing that's dramatically exotic."
Instead his images, camp and surreal, offer perspectives on what are undeniably familiar, even mundane everyday sights. His upbringing might have confined him to influences in and around Bangalore, but his influences are, clearly, drawn from a more diverse panorama.
During the post-school programme at the Centre for Learning where he studied, Veeraraghavan was given a chance to spend a year with Italian artist Andrea Anastasio. It was one entire year spent helping Anastasio, but also instrumental in shaping Veeraraghavan's own sensibilities as he soaked in the myriad influences present in the wall-high stacks of books, music and art in the Italian's study. This exposure to international influences helped him contextualise and locate the art he later saw while travelling in Europe.
"I have a strange suspicion that the book might do better abroad," says Veeraraghavan, explaining that Western exposure to digital art might render it easier for them to assimilate his graphic work even if the themes were unfamiliar.
For those approaching I Love My India with trepidation born out of unfamiliarity with its form, Veeraraghavan has easy enough advice: "Read the pictures like you might read words. This book is not about the formal quality of work but rather about what it says and how it says it!"
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