Beyond the problematic of art and ritual customs Attitudes Turing a happening on the 8th of February 2004, Debesh Goswami dressed him out in a new skin which he then had to tear off in order to breathe, to see and to hear. While performing he had taken on the aspect of a rotting corpse evoking ancient anatomical plates used in Western medicine. This ambivalent image came two years after another happening on the 16th of October, 2002.He lay down on his back, nude, in just a white loin-cloth, his body was then covered in a layer of ground bricks. When he arose, a very blurred shape or shadow was revealed in contrast to the very precise mark where his finger tips had touched the ground, the only proof that he had come in contact with the soil. This last action, which in time took place in 2002 and was entitled «Emancipation» .Here an Indian, rises from the ground leaving but a faint mark of his passage if it were his memory fading away: The second in 2004, was entitled »Flexible Borders », here Debesch Goswami gave the following description: My body, my person, to take an exemple supports my actions. I am the mainspring which perceives from the inside but is unable to observe from the outside. The two short video films « Black will take no other hue » or « Flexible Borders » exploit a simple fact which for me is very real: one cannot change one’s skin, one’s hide nor that of an ordinary object when their identity is part their being. He continues to explain: the action consists in the preparation of my second skin with flour, waters, oil: it will be white. By repeated ritual movements I try to imagine that these gestures will render the borders more flexible. The dough covers my body entirely; I can see nothing nor can I breathe. But this separation between the outside world and myself cannot last, this separation is unbearable as it is also delicate and relevant .So to free myself I tear off this new skin; free to be reborn. But in truth, this is an act of despair; I am suffocation and feeling very uncomfortable. This second skin is trickling down creating un pleasant pictures which evoke decomposing elements, is this more Death than Birth? These two in Nature are as alike as the rising and setting sun » This border between the body,the colore of the skin,the individuel and the world are an attempt to try and find freedom,but this new skin is unbearable. These gestestures are followed nevertheless by others,to protect and to open up. Thus Debesh Goswami in 2004,envelopped himself with a fine reticulation of thorns before showing us two years later his body covered in rubber nipples and taking up six different yoga positions in “ As you like”. In the “uprooted” given in Moscow, in 2005 there were hanging on the wall a line of shoes showing their soles from which sprouted tiny roots. Yes, Debesh Goswami is definitely uprooted. He manipulates ambivalent signes and without doubt one can hear a certain polyphony can be heard in his voices. He is an Indian, a Bengali, of a prominent Hindu family, he lives within an improbable triangle formed by the cities of Paris, Rennes and Calcutta. His skin is darker than flour, he speaks English but lives in France, which chose for its culture. . The Post Colonialism and « subaltern studies » could shed light on this exile, but that world be a serious mistake, not because these schools of thought don’t have any meaning with their political stakes and theories concerning the works of some citizens, but it is a possibility that some people might just try and illustrate in too didactic a fashion, theories formulation before they made their first artistic steps. Also the fact that Debesh Goswami comes from an intellectual capital whose most well-know figure is Rabindranath Tagore whose books were very early on translated into French , and he is neither a colonialist nor has he a peasant’s obedience. He sat his thesis in France, but he is without doubt « uprooted », open to the world he has chosen and simultaneously nostalgic for where « attitudes have a form »ever since rituals have existed. In this sense he contradicts Arjun Appadurai’s remark which wants to show up the cultural forms of mass-media : « imagination has abandoned the expression of specific art, as also the myths and rituals , it is thus in the many different societies and in the daily mentality of ordinary people »*. Artists like Debesh Goswami, must propose in opposition to all these collective constructions belonging to today’s dynamics, vision and way of working that redistributes the tasks between different forms of expression,, be they those of the people, or those of the specialists whose esthetic signs are more vague.

That is why it world be wrong to approach from a psychological angle or moreover to judge the conscience of someone who expresses nothing of his real state of mind. .For none of these figures proposed by the artist aim at drawing the portrait of an individual solely interested in himself. When the subject claims « I am what I am « (Je suis ce que je suis) it is in the framework of three pieces created in 2007, within a very different context one from the other. »Je suis ce que je suis/ Moscow shows in the center of one of the museums galleries five busts mounted on so many columns. One of the busts is covered with full-blown roses and from the top emerges an unlikely piece of wood. All the busts are seen from the side, in profile and we will never know whether the one enveloped in flowers was watching us...Antique Rome or Greece is just about an equal distance from either Moscow or India. Yet there is an enormous gulf between « Je suis ce que je suis » Calcutta and « Je suis ce que je suis/Sanchi ». In these last two photos there disappear under garlands of flowers mysterious and unknown objects. In the different galleries these figures are amongst other artifacts ranging from. Bas-reliefs containing several figures isolated sculptures, other divinities and semi-decorative animals. We are no longer amidst the crowds of isolated individuals in a Moscow museum, but before a Pantheon where beings are much more diverse. The roses envelopes unevenly and imprecisely each individual unknown to his neighbor whereas the garland covers more efficiently a sign amongst the other signs Each statue of a divinity being but a sign amidst others and which have come to an agreement whilst each portrait claims its otherness. In other words these heterogeneous identities that wish to play the same roles, even to the flowers, and are not easy to introduce when some are assembled in disparity, others remain a consistent sign .Between a world where signs have no boundaries and the universe that mimics the uncompromising reality, these identities are not in the same place. If Debesh Goswami hides this figure by covering it up, is it not to show us by a gesture comparable but not identical the difference between the « I »who hides behind the same pronoun? Narrations I have been obliged to drag the readers with me through an improbable narrative in which I force the happenings to file past , one after the other, in couples or in series, so that Debesch Goswami’s vague method filters through the discontinuous way he exposes and reproduces various aspects of his work. Without doubt he is reluctant to take part in an account linear, be it chronological or theoretical. Nevertheless it is difficult not to link together « Rhythm/Karma 2003 « and « Bread Land 2007 ». This installation is composed of right human shapes made of wire netting, they are laid out on the floor Inside them are arranged an irregular number of coconuts. Each one is laid out to let one suppose that the body it represents is lying on its back, feet up right, heels on the ground. Four years later another installation at Pont-Scorff shows us a carpet made of 10,000 breads on which at least seven places are supposedly to suggest a human body lying face down, as Debesh Goswami shows us in a photograph accompanying the installation. It is not improbable that these two installations are hugely separated from each other by the « Wall of Hunger » which looks place in 2004 in Calcutta. This exhibition exposes loaves of bread-for toast. Between the light and transparent bodies fading the sky, nourished frugally and already absent if not yet drowned in a sea of rolls, there are other images and other installations. Let us stay for the moment in the same place depending on which cycle he chooses, whether it be one where frugality is accepted in a universe rich with food but where there is no perspective or the fertile lands cape (Bread Land) or is it won over by the presence of a few human shows face down towards the soil forever producing bread. This I underline that although bread loaves are not here a « flexible border «. There are again more images that produce a double interpretation such as « Diving 2006 »and « Wave ». Some sculptured heads cut into stratographic piles of buckwheat pancakes cakes emerging from a sea of flour. Diving or drowning, who can tell? As so, they appear as serene as the stones that lie settled in Zen gardens..Debesh Goswami probably did not wish for this. Without any doubt this calm sea of flour places before our eyes, figures made from simple food-stuff- which although common place is not abundant. As he feared that a conflict might arise if he brought too close together man’s Fate with his access to food, the artist preferred to evoke the comparison of harvesting with the work produced by the artist which is constantly reviewed in « Work in

progress »bread, or the sea in Wave, the flood of cider in a constellation of bottles, and to find again the elements of the landscape in whose face he has chosen to live a large part of the year. Even when Debesh Goswami is flooding a car under a sea of rolls it is not a realistic art and it is best never to seriously take at first glance his propositions, for how should one interpretate the uncanny presence in a photograph of someone standing with lowered head and one sees only the necklaces of rolls that entirely cover his body. What is this figure of fertility, evoking an ancient divinity doing in a world where we are never living in the same period or in one sole culture. Though there are the peasant scenes by Millet and the more violent crashes in the happenings where the car is bogged down under a mound of rolls, one must not forget the longer memories in which buckwheat pan cakes, garlands of flowers cover ancient silhouettes which are more part of that was once the boundaries of Ancient Rome. The story of the drift from Bengal to its most western point may cross the mind of one looking at Debesh Goswami’s work, but the following object will divers his attention from such a straight road. Academy One sometimes uses the expression in French « academy » to designer a class of anatomy where artistes draw from life nude figures. Maybe this is a figure of style to qualify a representation of the nude body as having the same qualities as those produced in different academies, thus the body becomes the product of a certain school. To produce the body’s likeness is then an academic matter, above all an exercise for artistes. So under the double name of Yogalaya / academy Debesh Goswami proposes a strange lay out. We are confronted with a knotted formation suggesting the improbable entanglement of a yogin that is capable of performing in order to master his souls temporary abode. Thus this knotted form is a body, quite different to chose described anatomically or by the rational knowledge we have of our skeleton and our muscles. It seems strange that with the know-how of a sculptor who models clay and sculpts plaster, Debesh Goswami shows us such weird shapes that we find familiarly alive. We can decipher these tangles with the help of a few images. As like in 2006, as us not to fonder, not to loose one’s self in the contemplation of pure form as John Coplans world do with his the close-ups of his body exposed to the photographic lens and irregularly centered. Yogalava/Academy world like the school of form to be also the school of life at least that one question about the space between these two disciplines. The dividing line between Art and Nature, between Body and Soul, do not pass through the same space, the same configuration, depending on which side if the Indus it is. Once again Debesh Goswami world like to evoke an image that covers the length of this flexible border. Through Antiquity to the Renaissance, allegory was the artist’s friend and he wants to represent the world with only a few figures. In world-wide society uniformity is brought through the news and commerce, the mass-media and the culture that these carry spread their net over the entire planet making us realize that we are global individuals every minute, every instant The news invades every pore of our skin beyond here it starts to be digested in our knotted guts it suffers constriction and congestion, the newspaper tripes wrapped in cling film stretch out their painful curves on the galleries floor. The net of world-wide communication takes us by our tripes whose convulsions will not necessarily produce anything positive unless after a few excrement’s we are able to again concentrate on the respect of rites. Stupa ll Sanchi, 2007, is an enigmatic picture of a series of small stupas from. The site on which the most ancient stupa was discovered (era Sunga 187-75av J.C.).By enveloping the remains of the monument in garlands of flowers, the custom is faithfully observed. Although the choice of the site at Madhya Pradesh, situation in the center of the Indian sub-continent is historically and symbolically very important, the happening which Debesh Goswami has constructed is not an archeological reconstruction. The meaning that he gives to the Stupas the same as is found in the Mahayana which corresponds with Buddhist’s evolution during the first century B.C. If one can believe the article on the Stupa in the Encyclopedia Universalis; « With the sudden appearance of the Mahayana, Buddhist preaching which now touches the whole Cosmos, the Stupa takes on new symbolic meanings, it represent or is supposed to represent, as it faces the four cardinal points, the four Bouddhas of the East, sometimes also the fifth at the Zénith ( Vairocana) Through a well establishment system of correspondences, the Stupa represents Buddhist truths and also those of the entire Universe. It is a « mandala » a symbolic image of the world destined to aid the faithful meditate The transformation of this in situ, the image that Debesh Goswami, sitting in front of his computer manipulates, inspires the idea of installing a multitude of little stupas, as so many cosmic extras and other universal conceptions. The white rounds on the grass are a prediction of their multiplication, caught between the macro cosmos that all cultures claim to clarify through their

cosmogony and the micro cosmos where we are but individual units. Fed with global news we should be able to find our place. Debesh Goswami’s art is not here to give us the solution, but to encourage us not to search to hastily. Jean-Marc Poinsot Professor of art history, Université Rennes 2 Founder of Art critic Archives

* Arjun Appadurai, Après le colonialisme. Les conséquences culturelles de la globalisation, Paris : Payot, 2005, p.33