Title: Comm…
Year: 1999
Illustrator: Nikorn Studio
Page: 272 (Softcover)
Publisher: S by S Co., Ltd., Tokyo and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver

Comm…
A book that is at once about art and a piece of art in itself.

Comm… began with a discussion between Navin Rawanchaikul and Helen Michaelsen, a German art historian who also collaborated with Navin on the Super(m)art project. Six key concepts were brought together like words on a scrabble board. These words were ‘commotion’, ‘community’, ‘commodity’, ‘common’, ‘commute’, and ‘communication’. The book’s title, simply ‘Comm’ followed by an ellipsis, invites readers to complete the title themselves.

Comm… presents Navin’s work in the 1990s. The six keywords also suggest his approach to art concepts. The emphasis on such things as community and communication relate to Navin’s process, which focuses on collaboration with people from varying backgrounds – curators and taxi drivers, for example. The book also exposes readers to his concept sketches, pre-production images and correspondence with collaborators. 

Navin faces the ambiguity of being a Thai citizen and ethnic Indian, a situation which makes self-definition difficult. His collaborative projects act as a subtle means both of self-criticism and self-definition. His interest in mobility pushes him to move beyond his national identity. This ironically allows him a clearer sense of identity.

Navin’s early work concerns issues such as community, identity, and the impact of the arts. He meditates on the lack of art spaces and the role of art in the public sphere. Consequently, he sometimes employs mobile spaces such as his Taxi Gallery to approach his audience. Such projects target alternative spaces for art aimed at engaging with public space.

Navin questions whether the limitation of the arts lies in craftsmanship or the ability to engage an audience in dialogue. The interaction of the internal and external in the art world is the starting point for the universalization of art. This leads to a debate over Navin’s later work, in which Navin employs personal narratives to open up space for debate. He plays with methods of subverting the master narrative by creating smaller narratives. He asks, for example, the elderly to criticize modern society. And he ponders ways of transforming the lives of taxi drivers around the world. 

For Navin, narrative has the greatest potential as a means of communicating attitudes about art. He appropriates tools from popular culture such as movie posters, comics, and objects of kitschiness. Comm… presents the reader with many photographs. Turning narrative into artwork (or turning artwork into narrative) can only be achieved through strategies that shape the art form. This, for Navin, involves recontextualizing art. His work aims at appropriating and transforming the stuff of everyday life into pieces of art. Thus, his art may consist of bottling polluted water, storing photos of old people in bottles, and sending postcards to random recipients.

Photographs serve not only as art but also as documentation of the creative process as well as production. Old or new, photographs have a flattening effect. Photos of a city or its people, aged or young, awaken the imagination while compressing fragments of time into one. Narratives are superimposed and layered.

Comm… is a compilation of Navin’s work; however, it is presented as a piece of art rather than simply a descriptive monograph. Its complicated design is supplemented with a piece of pha khao mar cloth, a post-it paper with the question ‘What is Art’ written in the artist’s hand, and a Thai-style comic book – a signature of Navin Production. Comm… is a complex profile of an artist and his art. It attempts to portray Navin as he really is with his creativity arising from his environment and the act of engaging with his social context and his journey being more than a naive search for identity.

Words: Worathep Akkabootara
Published in Navin’s Sala