Notes on the (dis)appearance of the real: Its about the frame, stupid!

It used to be easy to tell the difference between the real and the image: images came in frames, reality was unframed. Its no longer so convenient any more, we are boxed inside frames within frames. And its hard to tell, because the frames no longer have palpable edges. With industrialization, we increasingly and massively got removed from our origins: the natural. We secured ourselves from its chaosis by placing ourselves inside glass and brick boxes, framing its infinity in windows, containing its wildness in pots. Machines began performing backbreaking labour at the press of a button, turning physicality into spectacle. Electronics inserted intelligence into communication, delinking signal from its origin. Cameras and photographs freed us from our corporeality, turning actuality into on-demand verisimilitude. As reality began retreating from our everyday, art found itself groping for purpose. Where did the real end, and artifice begin? What was the source and what was the sign? What was the point? Magritte made the first iconic reference to this in his famous Ceci nest pas une pipe painting, alerting us that the image was not the real thing, nor for that matter the word itself. McLuhan announced the annihilation of content by form (or technology, if you will) in his immortal The medium is the message/massage statement. Baudrillard gave us a name for the pervasion of image as reality, simulacrum, which shares the same root as simulation, and also a model of how image becomes reality step by step. Reality has not quite been the same since then, prompted by technologys leaps and bounds. Sitting in India, this seemed like an alien narrative. However, before we could blink, we found ourselves being framed and articulated by the cathode ray tube and its progeny. News collapsed into fiction and reality shows showed reality up close as never before. Fantasy became legitimate, drudgery became just a recurring bad dream. Image stepped out of the frame. Commerce silently re-orchestrated authenticity, using the genie-twins of advertising and media. The sixth Berlin Biennale also returned art to the reality question, with even a section called Extreme Realism. Curator Kathrin Rhomberg wrote of a growing gap between the world we talk about and the world as it really is. Why is there a gap? What is this world that we only talk about how do we

know that it really exists? Why should we care? With reality having crept into the box, it is becoming hard to say which is reality and which is not. The out there argument no longer cuts any ice, because frankly, out there is beyond the horizon of our senses, or caring. We are right here, how can the locus of reality be removed from our own? In order for any remote reality to be ours, it has to be brought right here and now (unless we choose to relocate ourselves) and the only way for that to happen is through our screens, where we actively surrender our disbelief in order to immerse ourselves into the instant and immediate reality of our choice increasingly, without even Coleridges condition of a semblance of truth. In this regard, the trajectory of contemporary Indian artists has taken a very different route, concentrating more on the quality of reality and experience rather than its technical resolution. Bhupen Khakar, for instance, uses colour and inverted perspective that instantly connote real space and meaning to an audience familiar with the miniature tradition. C K Rajan also evokes the miniature, albeit his imagery is drawn from newspapers and magazines. The recent Bhimayana graphic novel features drawings and layouts that reveal the reality that resides in our mind. In her introduction to the epic The New Media Reader, Janet Murray proclaims the emergence of a single digital medium that produces a unified digital reality. Really real and digital real are not contradictory because signing an online petition seems a more palpable activism than spending a day under a pigeon-decorated Mahatma Gandhi statue. Reality is multiple, simultaneous and activated with a click: it is digital. The physical spaces we inhabit are increasingly like themed chat rooms with mobile phones providing hyperlinks to other sites. What seems, is. Lynn Hershman cites Freud in linking reality to perception. From this perspective, Freud may well have endorsed Facebook as satisfying our perceptions of sociality far better than instances of real socializing where we end up feeling insignificant. From the perspective of Graham Macphee, technology has colonized our subconscious processes through which we perceive and make sense of the sensate world, which is why he says we (i.e. subjects) no longer frame or form appearance based on our sensation; they are delivered to us pre-formed. Its all part of the Matrix: even if we could

discern, we no longer want to. Where does that leave image, in that case? And what might be the value of art? As the physical and digital rapidly and inevitably blur into one another, everything becomes image (or reality, if you will). Digital technology intermediates us with our reality, and becomes its substitute. There will be no back end, or we wont know, or it wont matter. The camera replaces the mirror, and our every action becomes a performance. We will be liberated from the constraints of the real, reality as we fadingly know it will be just one more immersive multisensory game that we may choose to play on occasion. There will be no frame separating the two: it will be entirely up to us to draw the line, and there will be many offering us tempting templates with which to do so hopefully, art will be offering, too. We live in interesting times. Reality and image have collapsed into each other, and the onus is now on us, as subjects, to arbitrate or leave it be. As the Ben Pagano song goes, Reality is only an opinion. Whats yours?

As we see it, art has two contributions to make literacy and ethics. Literacy, in the sense of educating us in the vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric and poetics of the new image-reality continuum.And ethics, in the sense of posing to us the philosophical and ethical questions that emerge like Magritte did nearly a century ago. His pipe painting was titled La trahison des images: the treachery of images. As artists and curators, we have a definitive role to play.