Rx 36 / Notation
Tanya Goel, notation in x, y, z, 2015
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Bernhard and Ranjana Steinruecke, 2016 (2016-193-1)
When I’m looking at things, the only way I understand them is when I really look very closely. I understand the world around me in bits and fragments and when you really zoom into things, the surface and texture of things become very obvious. And that is where my study of material and color started developing.
— Tanya Goel
notation in x,y,z features grids of demolition refuse. Produced in the midst of New Delhi’s dis- orienting mass modernization, contemporary artist Tanya Goel’s paintings intimately combine remnants of architecture and the built environment. In a burgeoning metropolis of over twenty million people, old buildings are torn down and new ones are erected at breakneck pace. The structural remnants from this rapid turnover form the basis of Goel’s work.The artist laboriously pulverized limestone, charcoal, soil, concrete and other found materials into handmade pigments, which she used in place of paints. The work, then, is a geological snapshot of the urban stratum—an almanac of debris. Upon close inspection, viewers can identify the texture of the abstract composition where, as Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Amanda Sroka explained,“each color is marked with Goel’s scribbled inscriptions to denote the geographic coordinates of her findings.”
As Sophie Kovel wrote in Artforum,“New Delhi’s Housing for All scheme, a beautification and infrastructural effort intended to create shelter for the poor and marginalized, has ironically resulted in demolitions, forced evictions, land grabs from indigenous communities, and, ultimately, homelessness. Goel’s deceptively cool abstractions take on an ethical bent as records of displacement.” In New Delhi and beyond, urbanization is often linked to structural inequity and economic injustice, whether it reinforces or counters these processes. As Goel creates what Sroka terms “an alternative blueprint to the city’s rapidly changing structures,” she pauses to visualize and interpret these transformations.
notation in x, y, z belies its minimalism, literally preserving and transporting the material ecology of South Asia to the gallery. Although informed by global transformations to architecture and ecology that have taken hold in the twenty-first century, Goel’s work draws aesthetic inspiration from the past.“In so many cultures abstraction is everywhere—on the borders around traditional Mughal paintings, in Islamic architecture and tiles, in silk weavings,” explained Goel. Her turn to a traditional medium such as painting is particularly meaningful in an era “with so many screens and moving images around us,” she said.“Painting has the ability to hold time still.”
reflections…
In light of New Delhi’s rapid urban change catalyzed by environmental, socioeconomic and political forces, Goel pauses to take stock of the landscape. As she sifts through urban detritus, there is a certain attentiveness to granularity. Enacting a process of abstraction, the artist transforms lived experiences and material conditions into aesthetic forms and patterned visualization. In performing this translational work, Goel invites us to consider what is gained and lost as lives become data points and data points become a system to understand the world.
How can we begin to grasp the ways in which individual lives are impacted and determined by the structures and spaces we live within? What happens to the complexity and texture of lives as our perspective expands from micro to macro? How is notation in x,y,z at once a Modernist approach to bring order to ecological chaos and a reconciliation of individual lived experiences and big data? As Goel brings a representation of data into an inherently humanistic space, such as the museum, she implictly asks: how can we humanize data? How do spaces like the hospital and clinical encounter similarly translate and mediate between the individual and larger systems?
Similar to urbanization, technology is transform- ing many of the interpersonal aspects of medicine into more objective, data-driven approaches. Names and faces of patients give way to diagnoses and binary codes flashing across screens. Electronic medical record (EMR) platforms have transferred the delivery of care from the bedside to computer hubs. At a glance, modern medicine resembles the syncopated patterns created by Goel—orderly, repetitious, almost algorithmic, like an Agnes Martin painting. Just as Goel laboriously strives to give each box texture and identity, how can providers strive to retain the humanistic aspects of care even as technology is rapidly changing medicine? How can the EMR become a space for humanizing patient data?
sources
Kovel, Sophie. Tanya Goel at Nature MORTE at High Line Nine. 9 May 2019, www.artforum.com/picks/tanya-goel-79755.
“Notation in x, y, z.” Philadelphia Museum of Art, philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/337220.html.
“Out of the Blue.” Wallpaper*, 9 May 2018, www.wallpaper.com/video/art/tanya-goel-india-art-fair.
Rees, Lucy. “Emerging Artist Tanya Goel's Breathtaking Abstract Canvases.” Galerie, Galerie, 13 June 2019, www.galeriemagazine.com/trending-talent-tanya-goel/.
“Tanya Goel: Artist Profile, Exhibitions & Artworks.” Ocula the Best in Contemporary Art Icon., ocula.com/artists/tanya-goel/.
