Final MA Paper

UNDISSOLVED

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

                                              

                                             

“…Here, no here makes sense… presence and absence battle at the core of its every word, with absence winning out.’

(E.J. la Demeure et le livre’, Mercure de France – Gabriel Bounoure – quoted in ‘The Book of Margins’- Edmund Jabes, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.)

                                                                        

  CONTENTS

ABSTRACT                                                                                                                     

PROLOGUE                                                                                                 

ACT I – The Presence of Absence                          

ACT II – On The Threshold                                     

               Paintings and Drawings                                         

                  Abstraction of Ballet characters                      

ACT III – (Un)Tracing The Footprints                    

EPILOGUE                                                                  

NOTES                                                                        

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                       

                                                                 ABSTRACT                                                                    

Presence.

Absence.

Though they appear to be opposites, there is an intrinsic undercurrent of rhythm which binds these two - often bringing out various connections and inferences. They become much more than two sides of the same coin; they often melt into each other, blurring the boundary that separates them. Sometimes it is a very subtle exchange, and sometimes an exaggerated expression. This kind of creative articulation which navigates between presence and absence, also moves towards the masked broader question of what is accepted as real and what is not – what is perceived as true and what is not (in both a materialistic and philosophical sense) - The presence of what? The absence of why? Is presence necessary? Is absence unavoidable?

Although my approach is more of a philosophical one, various examples and references of Art works and critical writings are used to explore the different dimensions of the subject. ‘UNDISSOLVED’ explores this terrain of the threshold which is both the point of departure and the portal of arrival, in the context of performance art and also with drawings, photographs, and writing.

                                                          PROLOGUE

‘THE CORINTHIAN MAID’                                Joseph Wright of Derby                                 Oil on Canvas                          1782-1784

 ‘At the basis of body art, one can discover the unsatisfied need for a love that extends itself without limits in time – the need for primary love’ (Lea Vergine, Body art and performance)

It must have indeed been a very deep sense of attachment, an intense need for her lover’s presence that inspired the Corinthian maid to trace his sleeping shadow on the wall the night before his departure. Knowing that she would be denied of his physical sense, she created her own souvenir of his shadow upon which she could gaze. That illusion of his presence, that representation of his body was real enough for her. She did not think of composition or color or even form, she merely traced out the shadow breathing in that moment.

Pliny, in his work ‘Natural History’, has described this story as perhaps the birth of painting. This illustrates a deep human desire to immortalize someone’s presence and to keep frozen a particular moment in time. Art satisfies that need to an extent – It freezes a landscape, a person, an idea, a moment, a scene, or an aura for eternity to experience. In fact, even the social systems of Marriage and Inheritance are based on this need to keep one’s legacy, one’s presence alive.

This story also illustrates the beginning of my questions of research. I find three different layers in this and they form the basis of this paper. These three layers – making a record in space and time, dealing with real/unreal/representation, and being unguarded and spontaneous in artistic expression - are the main concerns. Both my theoretical and studio based practice navigate between 3 main mediums - Performance, drawing, and writing, all weighed down by these three layers of pondering.

 Taken in the context of performance art (which I am working in and writing about more in-depth), these three layers take on a slightly different note; they begin to deal with making a transient record, with real/representation within the performance, and the task of retaining the spontaneity and purity of movement in the midst of all the rehearsals/choreography.

To me they are like 3 acts of an un-choreographed ballet which are linked to each other, meander through each other’s pathways and spill into each other in ripples and waves.

                                                                    ACT I

                                                     PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

‘Performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Defined by its ephemeral nature, it can’t be documented; when it is, it ceases to be performance art and becomes a photo/video’.

(1)

Martin Heidegger has declared that ‘Art has its self-sufficient presence’, (2) but it does make me wonder how self-sufficient our own presence is to ourselves, how self-sufficient the artist’s presence is to himself/herself.

And not just in a philosophical way.

Making a record is one of Art’s main aims; and this need is somehow justified in the mediums of painting, sculpture, perhaps even poetry which use the cage of words, and basically in any art that is tangible and is object oriented. They all hold within them that one moment or series of moments frozen together. And though it is an object, ‘… it says something than the mere thing itself is ‘allo agoreue’. The work makes public something other than itself, it manifests something other, it is an allegory.’

(3)

But in performance art it is not so. Firstly, there is no object or thing that is made or created as Art. There is no proof of something being frozen in time. The body becomes the art, and the art exists as long as the body is in a state of performance. It is ephemeral. The body becomes the symbol, the idea, and the thing that floats in time and space, usually identified by rhythm, music, sound, or sometimes silence.

The art exists as long as the artist exists on stage (or on the stage of the world.) there is no trace left for eternity. Performance also manifests something else – the artist’s persona, his idea, and his articulation of the specific time and the space.

All the three layers of my inquiry are to an extent demonstrated in contemporary performance artist Marina Abramovic’s performance piece – ‘The Artist Is Present,’ though, as the title suggests, it is (in my perception) concerned with the enquiry into presence and absence the most.

In my reading of the work, (of which I have seen the video document and not the actual performance, which raises the question of the absence of the viewer’s presence which I have written about further on); the artist is ‘present’, sitting on a chair. She is not another person or a character; she is not illustrating any other identity. In fact, even her body is not camouflaged with movements or actions. She is just herself, in a very regular human position of being seated on a chair. (This is probably the simplest form of what ‘real’ might be).

One by one, the audience sits in front of her. They look into each other’s eyes, and that is the most performance that happens. There is no barrier of stage between the artist and the audience; they both are completely visible to each other, physically as well as emotionally. Some people cry, some are transformed into a meditative state and seem to leave with a heavy heart, some feel uncomfortable and make an abrupt exit, and some seem to not be affected at all.

Here the artist is leaving back an impersonal emotional trace, which is completely different for every viewer.

Whose experience is real? Or rather ‘complete’? Can my experience, of having watched the documentation rather than having been physically present at the performance, hold any good at all? Or does it give me an extra edge since I have witnessed the experience of the others as well?

In contrast to the absence of the viewer, can there be performance in which the ‘performer’ is absent?

In Frances Stark’s piece Osservate, Leggete Con me (2012) which is currently showing at the Hayward Gallery, the void left by the absence of a person is completely filled up by text. The work is a chronicle of the artist’s online chats with 9 various online romantic partners. As we sit in the big gallery space, Mozart’s Don Giovanni opera fills our ears and we are drawn to the text conversations projected on the walls. (Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts, based on the legends of Don Juan, a fictional libertine and seducer. It is billed as a mixing of serious and comic action.)’(4)

 Mozart’s genius captures the mood of the character and his dalliances perfectly in music, and the music lends itself to the flirtatious, jovial and sometimes the slightly saddening twists in the conversations. The voices start talking in your head as you read on, and the sense and essence of the characters writing the texts and conversing is beautifully captured in it with the aid of the music; So much so that you do not need to have the presence of people or even the imagination of people in your head that could have been having the conversations. The void that I had started out with did not feel like a void that was filled up, but rather a void that was not there in the first place. Personally for me, this work answered a lot of questions and made perfect sense in its use of technology blended with classical music, which though not labeled as performance art, was for me a very special ‘performance’.

One of my own performance pieces, ‘UNDISSOLVED’, premiered during the MA Interim show at Cookhouse Gallery, dealt partly with aspects of this absence of presence and proof.

The theme was derived from the Classic fairytale ‘Sleeping Beauty’, more specifically from the character of the witch with the spindle, who is the reason for the princess’s sleep.

I see this character as someone existing on the threshold between life and death, between real and unreal. She is like the door that can either open or remain closed. Being precariously balanced on this bridge between the white and the black so to speak symbolically, this piece has characters that live in that imaginary liquid world. Characters that do not know that they exist, do not realize the existence of the others around them, and neither belong to this world nor not belong to it. Living in an imaginary emotional world, their physical presence also becomes an illusion. In the performance, the character of the witch is not present, is not physically embodied by a performer, though she is metaphorically present as the controller of this world of seemingly mindless characters. A witch-like laughter that echoes at various periods during this non-linear performance is the only thing that suggests her character and her existence.

The voice is present but not the body that holds it.

Is physical absence an illusion? Is physical presence or proof an indication of the real?

The word ‘performance’ automatically means that the artists will be present, physically, involved in doing some kind of action or movement or stillness. But in the current contemporary climate where the boundaries between art forms and artists are so rapidly blurring, there are Performative paintings, sculptures, and media art as well, like the Frances Stark piece previously described. There can be a substitute for a human body, like a voice or a sound or even text. The person can be absent and yet be present at the same time, giving multiple dimensions to the meaning of ‘existence’ and ‘being’. Heidegger puts it rather poetically when he says, ‘Being is in no way identical with reality or with a precisely determined actuality.’(5)

Physical absence need not make a person an illusion. Representing existence by being physically present need not make a person absolutely true. For what if he is acting/being someone else?

Perhaps the main thing that differentiates ‘Dance’ from ‘Performance’ is that dance adheres to its rules, patterns and techniques, whereas performance can have simplest of movements like walking, sitting , or just staying still and breathing.

 Expanding on these different dimensions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ is Marina Abramovic’s newest work 512 Hours which is currently on at the Serpentine Gallery. The artist is present but there is absolutely nothing else – No performance, no movement, no text, and no sound. Complete silence and a complete connection of the artist with the thronging viewers in that void. In fact we, the viewers, become a sort of performers with the artist leading us – holding our hand and performing the Tibetan Meditation Walk, seating us on a chair and making us close our eyes or asking us to separate rice grains and sunflower seeds from a huge pile and count them. They seem like very simple actions, whose ultimate aim is perhaps to calm the viewers and take them to a state of trance, but there are various interesting results. Some are agitated with the nil-ness in the work, some are very comfortable in it, and some just do not relate to the absolute sense of silence and void in the gallery rooms. There is an absence of even a connection between the performer and the viewer as in her previous piece I have described. In this piece, she just guides the viewers and then leaves them alone to deal with their own silence.

As an audience I was personally, physically present on one of the days of the performance, but that did not make it any more intense an experience to me than the previous one I had viewed on video.

If there is nothing whatsoever, No presence of body, or nothing that could even suggest the presence of a body, can it still be performance? Is it representative of something or is it real and complete in itself?

This leads us to the next main inquiry – crossing the threshold of the real and the unreal.

                                                                 ACT II

                                                    ON THE THRESHOLD

The greatest tragedy of human life is perhaps this – throughout our journey we are assailed with things, experiences, and encounters which we classify as ‘truth’ or ‘false’. Yet as opposed to the superficial belief and understanding of these, it is the truth that often tortures us, leaves us shaken.

Falsehood can float upon words. It can be told, heard, understood, denied, and accepted. But ‘truth’ is imperceptible. It is an essence which can only be felt. And few people are cursed with the calmness to bear truth’s turbulence. It besieges them unexpectedly and they have no choice but to confront it, as if locked up in a dark room with no choice but to drink in the darkness. But truth is not dark, and it is not light either. It probably does not have doors on whose doors we can go and bang in injured patience. So, can truth be pinned down? Does it have to be? Does it need to be?

Broadly speaking, art becomes a strong realistic foothold for a mind that perceives the world as an illusion, or it becomes a comforting apparition for a mind that perceives everything with its veil of banality. Realism, surrealism, impressionism, and all the other ‘isms’ throughout the period of art history are all evidence of the innumerable perceptions.

How does Performance Art, being such a transient medium, draw the line between an illusion, a disillusion, or a warped reality? Its transience itself can be its illusionistic quality, unless one is convinced of eternity as an illusion.

In this medium, real and illusion can be said to exist simultaneously.

The performer and his presence are real, but the identity they don can be an illusion.

This exploration of the real and unreal can be done not only in relation to the performers and what they ‘perform’ or not perform, but also in relation to the response of the audience to a particular work.

In the realm of Classical dance where the movement patterns are all codified and the characters and narratives are all given to the dancers fully sketched, the real and unreal is seen in the way these characters are depicted. In the exploration of the characters and in the embodiment of the characters, the dancers become either a bland representation of its expectations, or a portrayal of it that is both realistic and relatable. The intangible and invisible part of the performer and the performance is here addressed – the emotional and intellectual side, when the dancer ‘becomes’ the character. Both the dancer and the character are ‘present’ simultaneously.

The most perfect example of this is the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, who is said to have been very genuine in her ‘representation’ of characters- she makes the representations seem as genuine as possible. Her embodiment, especially of the Sleeping Beauty and also of Ondine is very highly regarded. As she has famously said, “Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life.”(1)

Another interesting incident which I would like to quote is the instance of Bharathanatyam doyen Balasaraswati’s concert. During the recital, there was a particular piece where her character puts her baby to sleep and exits the stage. When the audience started cheering and applauding her performance, she suddenly emerged from the side wings, and with her finger on her lips, shushed the audience and said that their noise might awaken the sleeping child. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that the audience could shake the silence away and smile at what had just happened. So immersed in the character was she, that she was able to take the audience as well with her.

In some rare occasions, however, this line between ‘real’ and ‘illusion’ is sometimes so blurred that it becomes almost nonexistent, and the results can be disastrous. Let us take the example of another genre – folk dance forms. There is a famous tale in south India that says that during one of the folk performances of Yakshagana (a folk dance form which has very elaborate and heavy hand gestures and costumes) in a village, the performers were enacting the story of the demon Hiranyakashipu being killed by Narasimha, an incarnation of lord Vishnu. The person who was doing the role of Narasimha became so completely involved, so completely identified with the character, that his supposed ‘enactment’ of rage went beyond his control and the performance ended on a very tragic note when he killed the dancer doing the role of the demon. The audience, instead of reacting with horror, was actually completely in awe, and fell at the feet of the actor who had seemed to have forgotten he was just a representation. This is either a blatantly honest illusion on the part of both the actor and the audience, or this is the epitome of warped reality.

This relation between the performer and the audience is an interesting concept to observe. In Indian theory of aesthetics, it is called as ‘RASA’. ‘Rasa’ is that emotional exchange between the artist and the audience which happens only when the path of communication between them is open and there is an exchange of energy. There are various ways and levels in which they connect, as has been seen in the examples of the different works quoted so far.

In the NATYASHASTRA, the Indian Classical treatise that gives elaborate descriptions and explanations of every aspect related to performance and theatre, the writer Bharata Muni advises to always have a subtle line between yourself and the character. It is easy to practice this in the Indian Classical dance forms, because the lyrics weave in and out of characters and the solo dancer becomes the narrator of the story as well. However in the case of performance art, my explorations have yielded different results. In photo shoot collaboration with a photography student from LCC, I explored different characterizations through body movements and postures alone, without any change in costume. My understanding of what was within me and what was projected was completely different. Sometimes the viewer was not able to grasp the character with just a photograph. Would the addition of movement have helped? Would the change in costumes and appearance been able to make the characters more obvious and hence more ‘real’?

PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS:

In my paintings/drawings, I am concerned with the real and the unreal with regard to the representation of the human body. In a performance installation piece called ‘Tears of Autumn’, I have contrasted my own living breathing body against that of painted silhouettes. Does having something tangible, in this case an umbrella and a body, make it more real?

‘TEARS OF AUTUMN’   Performance Installation   Born in March 2014

ABSTRACTING CHARACTERS:

In another series of drawings, I have taken some of the most intense characters from famous Classical Ballets and have abstracted them into just colors and shapes, trying to capture a feel of their characters visually rather than through movements.

I do not, however see the human body as an object or as something political, social, or even as a tool to make a political or social statement. It is, for me, the mere canvas. It is the perpetrator and the victim, the enjoyer and the sufferer, the medium and the result, and also the actor and the witness/audience.

Let us take another curve on this already meandering path, and move from the stage to the real world. In the context of the ‘real’ world, the world in which we exist, the meaning of adopting personas takes on a whole new dimension. Everyone’s lives seem predetermined and expected that any event that does not take place automatically gives rise to a lot of concern, dilemmas, and questions. Aren’t we all just living/acting out the past again and again? Isn’t everyone’s lives almost similarly demarcated with social/educational/economic systems?

Judith Butler says in regard to gender identity: ‘Gender Identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo’ (2)

Expanding on this, we are all putting on gender/racial/cultural/social personas or constantly changing our personas to suit the systems and blend with it. In this way, life itself is a performance. Here the rehearsals are often preconditioned in our minds through morals/values/the way we are all brought up.

Shakespeare’s much loved quote sums it up perfectly – “ All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”(3)

Judith Butler continues, ‘Identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results.’(4)

This inquiry into identity and its multiple layers can take up a complete research question by itself which is beyond the scope of this paper; but it is interesting to get this view from the seemingly ‘non-performing’ world and look at it in contrast with the world of the stage and performance.

‘A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out in the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real.’(5)

       

                                                                      ACT III

                                               (UN)TRACING THE FOOTPRINTS

“…Perhaps civilization means that you no longer have to see the excrement and blood, illness and death on the streets, in everyday life, and that all the processes of life are locked away in water closets, hospitals and morgues...” – Klaus Biesenbach(1)

When the Corinthian maid was tracing out her lover’s shadow on the wall, she wasn’t planning on elaborate compositions, the nature of lines, or the end result. All she wanted was to capture that moment, no matter how beautiful or how distorted. In Literature, this is called as stream of consciousness, a manner of writing in which the writer writes from an unbridled sense of wanting to express, and not sieve it through carefully guarded antics.

This type of working is also termed as Improvisation. Modern dance has developed contact improvisation (Steve Paxton, Merce Cunningham), and in western music John Cage is an example of a practitioner who played with ‘chance’ a lot.

In Indian Classical Music and Dance, improvisation, or ‘Manodharma’, has been a very integral part of every concert and performance since ages. For example, though a classical vocalist uses the 7 notes, there are certain opportunities in the rendering of certain kritis (songs) where he can create and play spontaneously with his own combination of notes, which is a showcase of his expertise.

In Indian Classical dance, we use the ‘Sancharis’, or the brief episodes as interludes in the songs, where we move away from the lyrics of the song and create an actual scene with its physical descriptions, the characters, how they would have responded to each other, and also how they relate to the whole scene. A dancer’s ability to emote is often measured by how well she/he depicts the ‘Sancharis’.

In my own personal practice, in an attempt to free myself of all conditioning, I started to keep regular visual diaries. In these diaries and stream of consciousness writing exercises, which I maintain as consistently as possible, I try to rid myself of all preconditioned notions of what it should be, what colors, what mediums, and subject matter I should use. It is challenging at first, but as time progresses it becomes a spontaneous expression of my impulse to create. This impulse is what interests and guides me the most in all of my art works, this impulse itself becomes the subject matter. The ‘idea’ for me is no longer of much significance, for it is interesting to see where the impulse leads me, where the path of complete chance ends at. They are visual improvisations.

It is indeed difficult to free oneself, or rather unlearn what one has already learnt. The results of this can be varied as well; it could either be a complete void (which is not a very comfortable place to stay while trying to be an artist), or it could be a very overwhelming culmination of everything gathered across the years.

The performative action done during these drawings or paintings is also essential, though the actions/movements are invisible after the work is completed and only its traces and proof remain. This led me to make large Visual improvisations as well (ex- Curious Conversations), which have of late begun to include even objects. They satisfy my need for something tangible, and in blurring the distinction between real and representation; at the same time also expanding on my original questions of what is real and unreal.

With my writings (poetry and prose), my main inspiration has been Virginia Woolf.  In an attempt to get a feel of her essence, though she is not ‘physically’ present anymore, I visited her summer house – ‘Monk’s House’ in Rodmell village several months ago. It was eerie and inspiring at the same time to feel her absence and it was admittedly a very strong and overpowering feeling. Tracing her possible footsteps along the river Ouse where she drowned herself, some of the words of her last letter to her husband kept echoing in my mind. This was a performance in itself, though there is an absence of any video documentation of the walk or even of me at that space. All that remains is my feelings of it, and a few photographs.

‘As Roland Barthes writes in his seminal book Camera Lucida, “€very photograph is a certificate of presence…. This to him is the very noem, the very essence of the photograph, that the thing has been there (barthes). (2)”’

For me these photographs not only remind of my presence there, but also of Virginia Woolf’s presence decades ago. The absence of a human figure in the photograph is not an absence of the human in that actual space.

At that particular time, though, there was also the absence of an audience, except the vast, alarmingly still countryside, flocks of sheep dotted here and there, and the early sunset of the English winters.

A few lines from my stream-of-consciousness writing diary:

“He comes and knocks upon the grey walls.

But the scarlet stupor has

Eaten away the sequestered soul.

The candle in the corner now begins to howl

As it watches itself cradle,

Into its own melting pyre;

And suddenly cries for the little matchstick,

Sailing away into (non-existent) eternity.”

(From my collection MIDLIGHT)

“An ant couple begin downhill;

I crush one casually,

And then wonder,

Have I killed a love or a life?

Have a begun or ended strife?

Do I applaud myself or hurtfully chide?

For love had left a stain,

On the one still breathing,

But life had left nothing worthwhile,

For the dead poor one to hide.”

(From my collection MIDLIGHT)

                                                   EPILOGUE

On a rainy afternoon during my travels in and around the English countryside, I chanced upon an antique shop on a quiet street in Bristol. They had a collection of old postcards either thrown or given away. Being a collector of anything that holds in it a semblance of the past, I gathered a handful of them, and while sorting them out at home, I discovered some were a collection of correspondence between a grandmother and her grandchild. The loving grandma, living in London city, often visited exhibitions and art shows and wrote to her grand-daughter about the paintings, the artists and anything interesting she heard or read about Art. The granddaughter, seemingly someone with an interest in drawing and painting, must have loved getting these, (some of them postcards from galleries), for the correspondence continues for quite a long time. Unfortunately I do not have any replies from the grand-daughter, but it did set me thinking about these two characters, their relationship, their personalities, and possibly what could have happened in their future lives. This set the mood for my most recent performance piece ‘It Could Have Been So’ which was premiered during our collaborative event with Goldsmiths university students which I organized and curated at the Cookhouse gallery on 17th July, 2014.

It includes two obscure characters, neither clear in their role as grandmother or granddaughter. I, as the imagination of what could have happened made visible, give the movement articulation of their words on the postcards and also my own images in my head of their moods, thoughts, and possible reactions and responses. This work is done in collaboration with the installation artist Ozlem Demirel (MA Fine Art, Chelsea, 13-14), who does the visual, or rather the object-orientation of their obscured and anonymous lives.

These lives exist, yet might not exist anymore. They might be real, yet here they are represented or perhaps even mis-represented. They might have lead a free life, yet here they are bound up with choreography and rehearsal, and some music.

Perhaps it is all in the ponderings.

NOTES

ACT I

1.      ‘Unmarked’- The Politics of Performance – Peggy Phelan

2.      ‘Poetry, Language, and Thought’ - Martin Heidegger; translated by Albert Hofstadter

3.      ‘Poetry, language, and Thought’ - Martin Heidegger; translated by Albert Hofstadter

4.      Wikipedia – ‘Don Juan’

5.      ‘Poetry. Language, and Thought’ – Martin Heidegger; translated by Albert Hofstadter

ACT II

1.      Margot Fonteyn – Wikipedia – Brainy Quotes

2.      ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory – Judith Butler

3.      Shakespeare – ‘As You Like It’ – Wikipedia – Brainy quotes

4.      ‘Gender Trouble’ – London, Routledge, 1999 (1990), p.33; quoted in Performative Realism (Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev)

5.      ‘The Divided Self’ - RD Laing, quoted in Conceptual Art, Tony Godfrey

ACT III

1.      ‘Into me/Out of me’- Klaus Biesenbach

2.      Roland Barthes quoted in ‘Performative Realism : Intermediate Studies in Art and Media’ – Rune Gade, Anne Jerslav

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Courage to be alone : reinventing of narratives in contemporary art. / Hegyi, Lóránd. / Milan : Edizioni Charta, 2004. 

Body art and performance : the body as language / Lea Vergine. / Vergine, Lea. / Milan : Skira, 2007.

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Pochibukuro / [text by PIE Books ; photographs by Katsumi Yumioka]. / Pie Bukkusu (Firm). / Tokyo : PIE Books, c2007. 

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Poetry, language, thought / Martin Heidegger; translations [from the German] and introduction by Albert Hofstadter. / Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. / New York ; London : Harper & Row, 1975. 

Telling stories : countering narrative in art, theory and film / edited by Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley. / / Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

Time, desire and horror : towards a history of the senses / Alain Corbin; translated by Jean Birrell. / Corbin, Alain, 1936- / Cambridge : Polity Press, 1995. 

 Book of Promethea : Le livre de Promethea / Hélène Cixous; translated & with an introduction by Betsy Wing. / Cixous, Hélène, 1937- / Lincoln ; London : University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Drawing on space. / / London : The Drawing Room, 2002. 

Idea : a concept in art theory / (by) Erwin Panofsky. / Panofsky, Erwin, 1892-1968. / New York (etc.) ; London : Harper and Row, (1975). 

Art of time : essays on the avant-garde / by Michael Kirby. / Kirby, Michael, 1931- / New York : Dutton, 1969.

Object of performance : the American avant-garde since 1970 / Henry M. Sayre. / Sayre, Henry M., 1948- / Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 1989. 

Site-specific art : performance, place, and documentation / Nick Kaye. / Kaye, Nick. / London : Routledge, 2000. 

Analysis of performance art : a guide to its theory and practice / Anthony Howell. / Howell, Anthony, 1945- / Amsterdam : Harwood Academic, 2000. 

Dialogue between painting and poetry : livres d'artistes, 1874-1999 / edited by Jean Khalfa. / / Cambridge : Black Apollo Press, c2001. 

Water and dreams : an essay on the imagination of matter / [by] Gaston Bachelard; translated from the French by Edith R Farrell. / Bachelard, Gaston, 1884-1962. / Dallas : The Dallas Institute Publications, 1983. 

Bloodaxe book of contemporary women poets : eleven British writers / edited by Jeni Couzyn. / / Newcastle upon Tyne : Bloodaxe, 1985. 

Life is more important than art / edited by Gilane Tawadros ; with an introduction by Paul Hobson. / / London : Ostrich, 2007. 

Art and illusion : a study in the psychology of pictorial representation / E.H. Gombrich. / Gombrich, E. H. (Ernst Hans), 1909-2001. / London : Phaidon, 1977. 

Drawing : interpretation/translation / curated by Paul Coldwell and Stephen Farthing. / / London : CCW Graduate School, 2011

 ‘Tracing Shadows – Reflections on the Origins of Painting’ (essay) – Hagi Kenaan- Internet     Resource

To hell with culture, and other essays on art and society. / Read, Herbert, 1893-1968. / London : Routledge & K. Paul, (1963).

Rhythmanalysis : space, time and everyday life / Henri Lefebvre. / Lefebvre, Henri, 1901-1991. / New York ; London : Continuum, 2004

On poetic imagination and reverie / selected, translated, and introduced by Colette Gaudin. / Bachelard, Gaston, 1884-1962. / Putnam, CT : Spring, c2005. 

                   Radhika SrinivasaPrabhu

     www.radhikaprabhu.com

   ‘UNDISSOLVED – The Presence of Absence’

                       FINAL CRITICAL RESEARCH PAPER

                       MA FINE ART  (2013-2014)

                       CHELSEA COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

                       University of the Arts London