Day 3

The class started with us discussing how the blind dream, and we all shared what we found about the kinds of the dreams the blind. Narendra shared with his experience with the blind people when he was working with them in Ahmedabad. While discussing this we started to question that whether we are more blind or them? This discussion made me recall Ruskin Bond’s short story called ‘The eye’s have it’. The story also talks about how we have eye sight we still tend to miss the most obvious things that are right in front of us.

We talked about how everything is designed around us, and what aesthetics is? If it’s a conscious decisions or not? Narendra discussed with us how so many people get displaced for making a city look good, for the sake of aesthetics people without money are pushed to the outskirts and are asked to settle there.

Narendra introduced us to performance art, which wasn’t a new cause earlier in the first semester I had a course mainly based on performance art. In the course we had discussed a lot of performance artists.
In brief Narendra discussed with us a few artists and what performance art is.

After that we got our first activity- we were asked to make pairs and create performance art and thing of a concept behind it, along with how and where will we perform. While researching what struck to me and my partner Nehal was that performance art can be spontaneous. And the idea that appealed to me the most was that in performance art the audience and the artist can co-create work. So me and Nehal decided that, we wanted to something that would engage he audience.
so, we decided to come up with the idea od connecting people with a ball of yarn. We started with ourselves and we connected ourselves with a yarn my tying one end of the yarn to any part of our body and then passing the yarn around to people around us, and then they would continue passing it to the next person of their choice and like this it would continue.
we knew, that in the end a pattern would be made but we wanted to see how  people respond in this situation and how they connect themselves to the next person with the yarn. Whether to chose to pass it to the person they know and are comfortable with or do they pass it to someone with the idea of creating a conscious aesthetic pattern with the yarn.

After discussing our ideas in class we were expected to perform.
At  12:45 we started, Nehal started it and passed it to me and I decided to pass it to a friend, and this went on. It was interesting to see how everyone was enjoying this activity and how more and more people started joining in. the number od people kept increasing and the pattern that was being made by the yarn started to show, people kept tying and passing the yarn on, Some tied on their waists, some held between teeth, some wrapped it around their legs and hands and so on.

After about 15mins the yarn was over, and everyone had their own idea about, what should be done next. Some ideas that came up were move around tangled together, dance and another idea was push and pull further tangling.

Eventually everyone decided to move in opposite directions further entangling. Slowly everyone un-tangled themselves and let go.


what was the best about about today’s class was thet it wasn’t just about theory , we learned and experience what it feel s like to actually be a part of a performance art. We also saw our other batch mates performances, which was an amazing experience. We experience how suddenly our college basement changed into a new space and how people respond to such kind of art.
Altogether it was an amazing experience.

After all our performances, we went up to class and saw a few videos of famous performance artists works, which included Marina Abramovic’s work called ‘the artist is present’, we saw Yoko Ono’s ‘cut piece’ and we discussed Frida kahlo and what kind of work she does.

Today’s class has been by far the best for me.