I.

The First Information Report (FIR) is a written document prepared by the police in India when they receive information about the commission of a cognizable offence. Looking at FIRs is an exercise in the observation of the intersection and interlacing of many kinds of narrative strategies and claims to truth. When speaking of the FIR, one has to ask - who brings it into the domain of discourse, what methods are used to present it, and to what end is it sought to be presented.

It is common knowledge that the FIR can become an instrument used to shape ‘convenient truths’ on behalf of those who wield power. The FIR cantilevers ‘truths’ - the different truth claims of different parties, their different credibilities often an index of their material and enunciative capacity - and a ‘juridical truth’ together into a relationship that enables the precise application of legal force intended at achieving a specific aim that fulfils the objectives of power.

Sometimes this is done by framing false charges (fictional facticity) against a person who can then be made a target of police harassment, and on other occasions, the facts stated by a complainant can be deliberately distorted, elided, obscured, so that the charge loses credibility and is disqualified due to inconsistencies in the registration of the FIR. Here the inscription of the FIR is marked not by detail but by a blurred vagueness or a powerful opacity. The particular rhetoric of documentation implicit in the language of a given FIR can be co-related to a specific problem encountered by power.
What can be said about an FIR is generally valid for most ‘documents’. The normal function of the document is to register and index a stable picture of the world as power wills it to be. The documentary, like history, can be read as the ‘prose of counter insurgency’, as the record of a permanent military campaign to subdue a recalcitrant world of discomfiting, incongruous and insurgent realities – to produce in turn, images and representations that are well organized, persuasive, and that conform to the approximation of truth from the perspective of power.

II.

That the ‘document’ enters the art space at a time when the world seems to be grappling with visible crises should come as no surprise. The enhanced ‘visibility’ of the crises, particularly as a result of the intensification of the extensive presence of media networks, threatens to overwhelm all repositories of significant representations. If one function of art making is to offer a way of making sense of the realities we live in, then it is not as such remarkable that contemporary art practice chooses to engage with the visibility of global crises in our times. The art space cannot keep the troubled world at bay, and in order to apprehend reality as it is, in all its disarray, it has to permit the entry of the document as a ‘stable’ referent of the chaotic world it inhabits.

What magnifies the presence of the ‘document’ in the space of representation and discourse is the cognitive and epistemic pressure brought about by a belated recognition of globalization. Not only is reality visibly ‘crisis-ridden’, but the networked nature of each crisis - the thickly interlaced relationship of one manifestation of crisis to another, across a global space - also seems to magnify the impact of reality. This ‘magnified and amplified reality effect’ presses in. There is, in other words, no escape possible in art at the moment from what may at first seem to be the mere ‘facticity’ of the document, which seems to invade contemporary art from other semantic spaces and spheres.

III.

At heart, the dilemma remains one of what can be done with the images, testimonies and quotations of reality that a documentary mode brings in to art (from everywhere). Just as the FIR can be read as a statement by power about the world (and to the world), it is also always vulnerable to counter readings, to being prised open, and connected to other ‘documents’ or other realities, and to being made to reveal the inner logic of power. The FIR may not have much that is original or remarkable to say, but its evasions, narrative stances, and silences may be eloquent and compelling. The challenge of working with documents in an art space (for the artist, the curator, the critic and the viewer) is the possibility of decrypting the aporias in the representations of the real.

This is what makes working with documents aesthetically and formally a difficult thing to do, and this is why working with documents in contemporary art spaces can often end up only in the alleviation of representational anxieties (of artists, curators and the public). Because the document’s raw material is rhetoric, the practitioner has to constantly evolve a rhetoric of rhetoric in order to make documents yield. This requires more not less imagination, and a vigilance about the relationship between the externality of a document and the subjectivity implicit in the act of reading it differently from the norm.

That is why, just as the recovery of memory and history (of defeats and dispersal, of powerlessness and servitude as much as of survival and creation), and the painstaking reconstruction of an archive of lost and scattered meanings is one of the first cultural tasks on the agenda of the insurgent, a critical engagement with a documentary mode of practice too becomes (for the same reason) one of the key undertakings of the contemporary art practitioner who seeks to express contemporaneity as much as s/he engages with art. The contemporary moment, nothing if not a contest of images that seek to define ‘globality’, demands documents as counterweights to its own ‘documentary’ record.