At home with art

Gargi Gupta and Anamika Mukharji visit two homes that house experimental works of art.

Time was when art meant a two-dimensional painted surface that you could take home and hang on the wall. Or, if it was a 3-D sculpture, and of manageable size, then you put it in a corner. No longer. Art these days can be anything — a piece of rope, barbed wire, a garment, bits of plastic, even cowdung. Often, these experimental works are unweildy (in size) and disruptive (in theme and aesthetic). No wonder, they’re mostly bought by museums or institutions. Few buyers get them for the home. After all, where would they put them?

The question does not seem to faze Swapan Seth, managing director of art investment advisory Henry S Clark. A prolific buyer of avant garde works by young artists, Seth has many of them installed in his duplex apartment in a Gurgaon highrise.

Suchitra Gahlot’s ‘One Thousand Tears’ is most prominent displayed, filling the wall just off the main entrace. It consists of a thousand little bottles, the rubber-stoppered glass ones in which medicines are sold, lined up on a glass shelf. Each is filled with a clear liquid, and neatly labelled “argument”, “saturday”, “forgot”, “hormones”, etc. The liquid signifies tears, and the words are responses Gahlot got to her question, “Why did you cry last?”, posted on a website created for her project. Gahlaut’s work has subtle appeal, glass against white walls, inviting you to stop and look, read and meditate. But surely, keeping all those little bottles clean must be a daunting task? Seth laughs, saying his household staff is well trained.

Pushkar Thakur’s ‘Four Digit Combination Lock’, a very large 10.8 square feet work made of 10,000 keys hanging in bunches, fills up the far right wall of the large, double-ceilinged living room. It’s a favourite of Seth’s and for a very unusual reason — all the keys are made of mild steel and have rusted. “But there’s one that will never rust,” says Seth, “and my sons and I often look for it.” The opposite wall too is take up by a large red canvas with a bicycle tyre fixed vertically on it with threads. This is Nekshan Debu’s “The Red Requiem”.

But there are smaller works peppered all around such as Karachi-based artist Adnan Madani’s bottle proclaiming “I did not drink the contents of this bottle”, Saravanan Parasuram’s rope (a noose? anchor?) hanging on the wall, and Akshay Rathore’s barbed wire art work spelling out Dylan’s famous line: “You may say I am a dreamer...” There’s quirky drama here and provocative charge, coexisting with the humdrum articles of a busy household with two young boys. In contrast, Aashish Shah’s apartment in South Mumbai is like an art gallery — white, tidy and sanitised.

Greeting visitors when they glance to their left on entering, is a large, life-size donkey. A creation of Delhi-based sculptor Sakshi Gupta, its body has a rough, sandy texture, adding to the life-like feel. Emaciated, it stands, but barely, its forelegs stretched out in exhaustion or even obeisance. “I’m exhausted,” it seems to say. “That’s life,” says Aashish, “that’s what happens.”

Another installation, this by New York-based Sreshta Rit Premnath, hangs on the wall — a transparent sheet of plastic with a squiggle on it. Titled “Zero Knot”, the squiggles are several zeros, and look like knots, but actually can be unravelled, which is when the nothingness beneath it all becomes clear.

Looking up the original exhibition, you realise that it is a strong political comment, part of a whole that includes a veiled statues of a political leader with his arm raised, as if in censure or protest.

All the art has been bought over a period of time. Shah collects art and is always on the lookout for anything he can add to his collection. This apartment came later, and he decided what went where based on the space. “But I always knew ‘The Baby’ would go right here,” says Shah. The “baby” is a work by Max Streicher, who works with kinetic inflatable forms. An umbilical cord-like pipe runs to the baby’s navel from a fan box. The baby hangs limp at the end (just above the staircase), held aloft close to the ceiling by the stiff pipe. Turn on the switch and the baby inflates, floating surreally above our heads.

Upstairs, the centrepiece seems to be a softly spot-lit “Rape of Ganymede” — artist Shine Shivan’s taxidermy eagle and crane work is a cloth phallus with a bejewelled tip, nestled between eagle feathers in a reference to Zeus’ rape of Ganymede in the form of an eagle. On a pillar, welcoming you into the bedroom, is Anita Dube’s “Love Songs”, several forceps welded together in an abstract shape, coated with red velvet. Instruments used to deliver babies, they represent blood and humanity (belatedly breathing life into the baby we passed on the staircase, still bobbing in the breeze blown in by its umbilical cord).

If the room is tidy and doesn’t look lived in, it’s because it isn’t. Shah is yet to move in. The windows are always kept shut to preserve the pristine whiteness. But when he does live here, how will he maintain everything, especially in a damp city like Mumbai? “I plan to install de-humidifiers,” he says, “and the staff is trained to clean everything in this house carefully.”