Special FX

a Trick, a Wonder
- Joey Lubitz

The trace of carbon paper is a vanishing. A technology superseded: first by photocopies and then by the digital files of the computer. And yet, in the old-guard offices of shops and businesses subsisting in anachronism, in bill books, for bureaucratic form-filing, and in more informal segments of various economic frontiers and holdouts, the tried-and-true analog of the carbon copy endures.

Carbon paper is a time-tested artifact, attesting to the changing technologies of record-keeping and concepts of verification. Imprinted in the exact moment the original document is generated, the carbon copy emanates analog trustworthiness. Indeed, the material itself grounds the document’s special relationship to veracity—no matter how symbolic the signature or abstract the monetary transaction that it authenticates. 

In the body of work Shaktimaan SFX (2020–ongoing), Nihaal Faizal uses sheets of carbon paper to trace and render the visual effects from Shaktimaan, the famous Indian superhero TV show from the 90’s. For each special effect, Faizal chooses a video still and uses multiple colors of carbon paper to isolate and trace the animation. Leaving the background and all else blank, the artist’s delicate drawings of every effect for each episode produce a soft taxonomy of decontextualized figures of the effects themselves. 

These special effects are the rhetorical centerpiece of a mass media product that centers a Hindu superhero who takes on the existential crimes of humanity (embodied in a chaotic cast of demons, villains, and regular everyday wrongdoers). The main character, a cardboard cutout of an American superhero painted with Hindu cultural signifiers and dubbed “Indian”, was both played and dreamed up by the same man, Mukesh Khanna. Not surprisingly, Shaktimaan’s star and creator happens also to be an ardent and long-time supporter of the current political regime. While no expense was spared on the television show’s effects, the narrative arcs are phoned in, simplistic, repetitive. Content is clearly deprioritized in relationship to the appearance of technical supremacy and achievement—part of the show’s primary appeal. 

Although Shaktimaan was the first Indian television show to use special effects widely, its landmark use of effects ironically appears kitsch, even slapstick, from today’s vantage (or even by comparison to the effects of Hollywood just three decades prior). Part of the economy of a special effect is the projection of contemporaneity—cutting edge, state-of-the-art, a certain sublime potential of artifice—all of which eventually wears off. Today state-of-the art technologies, including moving-image special effects, are not only in use in Indian entertainment, but the many “silicon valley’s” and industrial nodes of the subcontinent are primary sites for their development and export. Where and how the special effect lands, and then eventually expires, is the result of historical and geopolitical forces. Read this way, the character of Shaktimaan, and the show’s special effects, can be understood as fictions that arbitrate the interface between a specifically “Indian” nationalist project (with diasporic circulation) and the adoption of late-capitalist (American) exports, including economic liberalization. 
Where the visual effects of Shaktimaan are tricks of animation that occur in the post-production studio, the special effect of the carbon copy is of a different order, a mundane trick of the copy. In Faizal’s drawings, these special effects are excised from their context and media circulation, so they appear as muted, playful sketches. What is lost is the special effect, along with its production of an illusion, or a certain ideological instrumentalization of the special possibilities of a medium.

Like Shaktimaan, the 1996 film English Babu Desi Mem, the source for the artist’s video work in the exhibition, English Babu Desi Mem (Flashback Cut) (2021), could be thought of as copying without citation an already existing work from the West. In this case, it is not the Hindu-fication of a genre, rather it is an unfaithful copying of a specific film: the 1960 Hollywood romantic drama It Started in Naples, starring Clark Gable and Sophia Loren. Both the television show and movie certainly deprioritize originality. Importantly, so does Faizal’s practice. Instead, the artist’s work operates at the level of citation, foregrounding the basic effects, capacities, and textures of his charged source materials. 

While English Babu Desi Mem (Flashback Cut)’s duration remains the same as the original film at 163 minutes, the footage and soundtrack have been almost entirely eliminated. All that remains is a segment of the opening credits and four short black-and-white sequences. Some shared conventions of commercial cinema signal to the viewer that these are out-of-sequence insert scenes—they are flashbacks. Singling out one mode of cinematic storytelling, Faizal’s redaction is a simple artistic operation that contrasts the dense agglomeration and multiplicity of styles, narrative modes, and cinematic genres that comprise Hindi cinema, as well as this film in particular (not Shah Rukh Khan’s best according to an inexhaustive review of the reviews). 

The final work in the exhibition, RTI/1242/2021-PMR (2021), is the official response received by the artist to his Right to information (RTI) request filed with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Under the Right to Information Act of the Parliament of India of 2005, any ordinary citizen is entitled to request information from any public authority, and that body is obligated by law to reply within 30 days. This request was for a complete list of artworks on view at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, the residential premises of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The artist has printed, laminated, and displayed the 5-page PDF of scanned documents that make up the official response, which includes a summary of the initial request alongside four pages of simple two-column tables.

The limited information contained in these tables only increases the sense of mystery around the objects on display in the official dwelling of the Head of State. At the same time, the scant details begin to articulate ideological content through the differing levels of authorship, historical provenance, and medium information attributed to art of various religious, aesthetic, and unknown or obscure import. In the space between these descriptions—which are not even descriptions, but the barest kind of caption leaving much undescribed, undocumented, or even unknown—an extrapolation from the text conjures the pastoral, romantic, or traditional qualities of images and objects embedded in this complex of residences and offices that are located also, like this exhibition, in New Delhi. This work documents that distance, between the artworks in it of themselves, and their possible function as an unclassified, but inaccessible, display of art serving a set of state functions.

Rather than the artist’s signature, each page of RTI/1242/2021-PMR has the blue stamp and signature of the responding official, as well as some handwritten identifying notations. All of this can be scanned, printed, and copied ad infinitum. These documents are not a unique artwork, or a limited print edition, but simply what they are: further copies of the official response to the RTI request. The work itself is not confined to these laminated prints. It is also available for download on the artist’s website and is reproduced in this catalogue. Rather than a discrete object, the work takes shape through its sharing and transmission—the request and the answer—and through a kind of mise en abyme of filing; it is a checklist of artworks that is also listed on the checklist of works for this exhibition.

While we can’t know or view them, the artworks in the PMO sanctioned checklist seem to each perform their own effect. Some special effects are split-second: phaser fire in Star Wars, the ubiquitous folly audio of glasses shattering, lighter’s lighting, or the thud of a punch, even the smoke out vanishing act of a magician. Other effects are as timeless as perspective, flying ramparts, trompe l’oeil, and stained glass. It is a display of capacity, grandiosity, the power to instill wonder and to impress—all the while reaffirming the potency of their benefactor, rather than pulling back the curtain. A trick to make the impossible possible. A scent, a sight, a sound. A synthetic spectacle of the quirks, extras, and possibilities of the medium itself. Alternatively, a special effect might be that which is necessary to maintain the illusion. In RTI/1242/2021-PMR it might be the trick of transparency and of a procedure that reaffirms the citizen’s position through an exercise of their rights. 

The works in this show are the outcome of a set of conceptual operations that cut and paste to reveal a complex sense of the ideological overdetermination of entertainment and bureaucracy enacted through the abilities of certain media. Simple techniques and serial processes contrast the playful sensibility of appropriations drawn like readymades from the cultural toolbox of a millennial childhood. 

These days, special effects, like toys, are cheaper, plastic, more easily copied, and a major vector of global consumption. They are domestic interpolations of foreign policy or a global export of the image and brand of India and its international media production. They occupy sites in which ideology is comfortable or uncontested—distinct from the State’s violent instantiations in zones of conflict. These are not direct products of the border, camp, or jungle, but in the case of something like Shaktimaan, the television set of a children’s bedroom filled with the imaginary possibilities of mediated spins, swirls, transformations, and other forms of magic justice. 

Joey Lubitz is curator and arts worker living in New York. Joey co-directs the Center for Experimental Lectures with Gordon Hall, is part of the collective Video School with Gabo Camnitzer and Candice Strongwater, and works in the archives of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In 2019, Joey curated the exhibition ‘Bangalore Flat’ at Home Sweet Home, Bangalore.