Karin Zitzewitz:Here we see stills from your 2019 video, How to be a SUCKcessful artist. It is just one in a series of video and text works that you've made to distribute over social media platforms, exploring the potentials and limitations of your role as an artist. It's a short video, and with extraordinary economy it skewers many typical curatorial approaches to the political position of “the female artist from the Global South.” As if in a parody of YouTube marketing or instructional videos, rolling text offers aspiring artists ten ways to “maximize your impact” and “become great archival content,” while you, anchoring the video, make sounds that approximate language but that are actually unintelligible. Hands poke into the frame, making gestures that appear to reinforce your words but instead are also disconnected from meaning. Mithu, what's at stake for you in this work? What audiences are you trying to reach, and how?
Mithu Sen: My SUCKcessful artist video addresses the state of the capitalist world, the art world in particular, and the models of productivity it prioritizes. The mock-instructional mode, in addition to being a pedagogical satire, is used to draw attention to the quick fix formulas touting the ways in which an artist can become successful, that is, acquire social, symbolic, and economic capital through their work. In the form of gibberish, however, this entire exercise is unproductive (simply from an instructional point of view). I think the video also works against the pragmatic and productive value of language and its structures, which are used for communication.
Like my other performances using nonlanguage, this video breaks down linguistic structures and their attendant meanings. The nonlanguage uttered by me and the visual language of the video are both postcolonial hybrids that, first of all, fix attention on the English-speaking art world. The gibberish utterances, along with the text in English, allow multiple nodes of reception. One of the work's audiences is the art world. But it is also addressed to those at the margins of the Anglophone world. The symbolic weight of English—a language so powerful that it encroaches on all spheres of life—is felt. I deliberately use the Comic Sans typeface, which surfaces a lot in parodies, in order to incorporate irony. The multiple hands need to be seen in light of the distortion and grotesque ferocity that has been accorded to multihanded gods and figures. The exoticism that is often attributed to me and my work is associated with the ever-looming figure of the devi. The formal language of the video is also key in critiquing both language and the absurd contradictions of the art system.
KZ:Your desire to reach different audiences has led you to take social media seriously, and to use very accessible platforms like YouTube and Instagram to extend particular threads of your work. For instance, you have used one of your Instagram profiles to explore the possibilities of the prefix “un-,” which is part of SUCKcessful Artist and has featured in a great deal of your recent work. How does your work explore the concept of “un-,” as in “un-social media”?
MS: “Un-” is a linguistic tool, a narrative trope, and a heuristic device that, when used as a prefix, lends a contrary meaning to a word. In works where I use the prefix “un-,” I do not attempt to explain or introduce it conceptually. I depend on its known meanings, which simultaneously suggest negation and a process posited in opposition. All meanings stand to be transformed by the unsettlements that “un-” brings to the surface; it has an affective quality, related to the confusion it can create, that might motivate my audience to take a second, deeper look at my work and rethink its own cognitive blind spots.
In “un-social media,” “un-” allows me to playfully release myself (even if only momentarily) from the cycles of consumption and validation online, which are marked by the capitalist privatization of virtual space, surveillance technologies, e-commerce, and an overburdened economy of looking. The very premise of my online presence, for instance, is a splitting of the self.
The personas @mithusen26 and @mithusenseriouslyofficial26 are themselves the product of a performative split that I enact to create two heteronymous selves, distinct from one another. The confusion of my internet presence that this may cause raises questions that make this split interesting: which profile is actually real, which profile should a publication interviewing me share with its viewers, which profile do my art world peers tag in posts?
KZ:You return to some of these ideas in UnLOCKDOWN, a video you made during the first weeks of the coronavirus quarantine in Delhi. That was a strange time, when people seemed to resist lockdown by engaging in a weird frenzy of activity, particularly once it became clear how much disruption there was going to be to the art world. You participated in one of the first projects to emerge, “Coronavirus Artpocalypse: The Art World Responds,” which was organized by India-resident American artist Waswo Waswo X. UnLOCKDOWN stages its own making, including the series of voice messages that Waswo left you to solicit work, shape it, and then finally make particular demands about when the work must arrive. How would you characterize the relationship between this work and How to be a SUCKcessful artist?
MS: While SUCKcessful artist emerged out of a concentrated reflection on my practice and its reception, keeping in my mind the particularity of my own work as well as the general temperament of curatorial practices, UnLOCKDOWN came out of different conditions, following from the instability and uncertainty of the times. The question of inhabiting a certain time in history as an artist is what I forefront in UnLOCKDOWN, while in SUCKcessful artist I am dealing with issues of location and space. Of course, this is to parse things down to their most elemental. There are more strands in both works than just these. But I think the fact that UnLOCKDOWN was a work that could not have been premeditated or anticipated is a crucial detail that needs to be emphasized. It is undoubtedly related to SUCKcessful artist in its conceptual ambit, its performative and instructional aspects, and its poker-faced satire. But it is also the product of a new, COVID-defined contemporaneity.
KZ:One thing that UnLOCKDOWN really captures is the strange need to do something that was widely felt at that time. I think most of us were determined to counter the dramatic, sudden shift in our day-to-day lives, going to huge lengths to create workarounds. How do you account for that aspect of the work?
MS: Even as they are different from regular nine-to-five office routines, the regular motions of work, for artists, have been dependent on the consistency of cycles enforced by capitalism. Now that COVID-19 has shuttered us all in and kept us all away from the auction houses, art fairs, exhibitions, studio visits, panel discussions, and keynote addresses, we necessarily have to confront what this means for the future of work in the art world. From what I see, we have entered a stage of overproduction, and our activities are akin to grasping at straws. We are confronting an attempt to commit every level of activity to the virtual world, and to find in this virtual performance of work a moral virtuosity in adapting or responding to the crisis. Instead of seeing these gestures as responses, I see them only as fillers closing in the fractures of capitalism. Having been approached by a daunting number of publications, I realized that in these questionnaires framed in the language of response there was a demand for material. This subtext, hinting at constant generation, the perpetual flow of data and information online, sits at amazing proximity to content generation. Are we now, as artists, simply supposed to generate content? And, in keeping with the markers of good content, are we to be relatable, viral, and clickable? To provide audiences with our critiques, capsuled in convenient word limits and shaped by an adequate aestheticization of politics?
I have continually asserted that my preferred medium is life itself, and that all artworks are essentially “byproducts.” This is to say, I give to my practice and my art the elasticity of time. Instead of fixing them in moments and frames, I define them through their nodular growth, associations, and meanings acquired over time. Artistic practice, then, as inflected by the medium of life and by the notion of art as byproduct has been a method of surreptitiously refusing the normative categories of professionalization. In this shocking moment that we live in, these strategies of professional disruption are emerging as new openings for me. I have allowed myself to embrace the distance and isolation (both physical and metaphorical), and the solitude that comes with it. And as I spent more time reevaluating the future of art, my practice included, it seemed more reasonable, to redefine my practice as a hobby.
KZ:Indeed, one thing that the idea of “content generation” does is fundamentally confuse hobbyists with professionals. You could imagine someone alighting on your Instagram account trying to sort out if it is a parody and, if so, of what. You have been subverting these kinds of fundamental distinctions for years, questioning the ways that the art system is and is not successful in securing value for the work of artists.
You've associated this impulse in your work with what you call radical hospitality, where you stage relationships that test the obligations individuals have to one another. That began with a 2006 residency in New York, It's Good To Be Queen (2006), for which you explored the dynamics of your relationship with your host, on the one hand, and your visitors/viewers/guests/friends, on the other. That found a more economic resonance with Freemithu (2007–), for which you solicited “letters with love” from viewers in exchange for an art work. Why are these episodes so crucial to you, as an artist?
MS: Radical hospitality rests on the precipice of indebtedness in a way, but the terms of mutuality are not defined by a simple give-and-take relationship. They are defined instead by troubling the weight of hospitality itself. The goal is to find a conducive hospitality that doesn't indulge in itself, in which one can comfortably pursue dialogues and activities that can generate discomfort. This contradictory pull is crucial to building a mutuality that takes work. The ideas of interactivity, participation, and collaboration have all in specific ways tried to create either a hospitable sense of community or the exact opposite, where what is truly inhospitable stands exposed. When I define my approach to audiences, radical hospitality is the foundation on which my interactions, whether personal, professional, or public, rest.
More recently, I have been furthering possibilities for mutuality with my audience online. I am interested now not so much in the numbers one reaches, but in the qualitative aspects of interaction, feedback, hospitability, and criticism. I treat debt/obligation as a responsibility that is multidirectional. This sense of an imagined community online fosters and cultivates like-mindedness, creates networks of intimate and affective feedback, and allows for a negotiation of the virtual and real distance between us: between an artist and a viewer who inches closer and reinstates the sense of responsibility and accountability that an artist should carry.
