Is there an audit of artworks commissioned in the public space?
Can you think of a more public place for displaying art than an airport? Arguably, a railway station or a bus terminus might be busier and more accessible, but an airport shares passenger time with the space and traffic dispersion module that is ideal for showcasing art to a large body of people. The showpiece T3 airport in New Delhi has used massive works by Paresh Maity, Seema Kohli, Satish Gupta and Ashish Khandelwal, and is said to be in the market for further acquisitions (as opposed to these commissioned works).
While T3 ponders over how best art can be presented, at the new and equally mind-boggling flagship Bharti Airtel office in Gurgaon, artist Manav Gupta’s creation of a five-storey mural there leads to some interesting questions. Gupta is a maverick, one of those artists who is also a performer. He’s painted live to music a la M F Husain, created canvases around environmental concerns, been billed among India’s emerging artists by Financial Times, and despite a passive presence in the country, has been active outside it.
Gupta uses his persuasive personality to great effect. At Airtel Centre, viewed from across the courtyard (which is where the main action is and where the employees are housed), the effect of his mural is stunning. In the main, he has chosen to use the Tree of Life to depict the five elements, one on each floor, uniting them through images, motifs, elements and colours. Closer up, large parts of the mural look amateur or kitschy or gauche. The brief to Gupta was to involve all or at least as many Bharti employees as had volunteered, to paint alongside him. They were given sections of the walls and staircases where their disjointed efforts were egged on and, where necessary, improved by Gupta.
For the few thousand employees who plied their brushes, whether with confidence or diffidence, participating in the gigantic work was on a par with having been part of a musical composition or the making of a film. Whether or not other companies emulate the model, bridging the gap between an artist — usually seen as a remote, mythical figure — and ordinary people would have eliminated some of the reluctance visitors show when entering an art gallery.
One might well wonder what Airtel paid Gupta for two-and-a-half months of work. Calculated in square-foot terms, it would probably be just a fraction of what Gupta might otherwise have charged for a canvas 60 ft in height. If Airtel had used an equivalent amount to buy his, or anyone else’s, canvases, they’d have got far less art for it, and certainly no stories of the kind that will become mythical around the mural as the years pass by.
It’s a given that Paresh Maity or Seema Kohli or Satish Gupta too have probably been paid a percentage of their worth for their contributions to T3 — Maity alone has provided 800 feet of running art, which in current market price should be worth around '15 crore. But these assets need to be guarded — they were created for a purpose and that intention, and contribution, must remain sacrosanct. The Taj Group, for instance, has used artist Anjolie Ela Menon’s work in its hotels in New Delhi and Goa, and this has been preserved through several rounds of renovations. On the other hand, sculptor Amar Nath Sehgal had to battle the authorities to have a sculpture restored at the prestigious Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi following renovations. In another similar story, when the Glaxo office in Mumbai was sold, the Krishen Khanna canvas that had been especially commissioned for its foyer was neglected by both seller and buyer and wound up in the caretaker’s shed, from where it was fortunately rescued by a gallery owner and restored to the marketplace (at considerable value).
When artists create special works for public spaces, it is up to us to demand that such works not be desecrated. The now-abandoned airport in Delhi had works commissioned for it by M F Husain and Anjolie Ela Menon, among others. These are public property and accountability demands that they be installed in some other public space — but does anybody know, or care, sufficiently about their health and whereabouts?