The recent grand inauguration of the INA Market metro station in Delhi saw an unlikely marriage of modern mass transport and traditional handicrafts. In an underground passageway, handlooms and handicrafts from across India were exhibited in squat enclosures, heavily framed. This is called the "Crafts of India Galleries".
So what if this static exhibit looks like it belongs in Stalinist Russia, one official said that “It is unique as public art in the city.” That comment makes a nonsense of two words in one sentence: ‘public’ and ‘art’. It epitomises our ignorance and our approach to art.
Unlike parts of the urban West, urban India has a history less of public art than of architectural embellishment. Sculptures, reliefs and murals adorned palaces, tombs, gateways and places of worship. In pre-colonial India, where would one find an equivalent of the Fountain of Trevi, Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square? Colonialism brought with it a culture of formal fountains and bronze statues that symbolised imperial supremacy.
In the name of public art, independent India has ‘decorated’ roundabouts and put tile mosaics on subway walls. Or, worse, Indians have been puritanical and labelled public art an elitist luxury in a society that barely manages to eke out roti kapda aur makaan, banishing it to stagnant museums.
I reject both contentions — that public art is en elite activity and that it merely contributes to ‘aesthetics’. Public art shapes the sociocultural fabric of the city. It is not just as imagery or to commemorate an event or person. It is about emotion, about remembering collective grief, agony, fear, triumph, exhilaration. Its primary function is not to educate but to evoke and provoke.
Take the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, or even London’s forthcoming ArcelorMittal Orbit by sculptor Anish Kapoor. These are innovative artifacts that express the national spirit. Alexander Calder’s famed red ‘Flamingo’ in Chicago, Bernard Tschumi’s 'follies' in the Parc de la Villette in Paris or Ricardo Legorreta’s cubist Pershing Square in Los Angeles, all carve place out of space.
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Recent endeavours in Delhi are few, despite a 1972 ruling of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission which says that 2 per cent of the cost of any public building must be allocated to art. Mumbai and Kolkata, despite being centres of art and culture, limit art to galleries and festivals. Chennai lags far behind.
Bird droppings, the harsh climate and vandalism are the excuses bureaucrats use to fend off public art, while artists blame the lack of policy and political consensus. These are hurdles, to be sure, but not attempting to run the race at all amounts to admitting that we are not capable of the civic sense of a civilised society.
Public art is not a replacement of the practical with the poetic. Both must coexist; and in that balance we may arrive at a public art apt for our environment. Imagine the city as a museum in which billboards and signage are a product of graphic art and not a clutter of colour, size and font. One where street furniture inspires humour even on a hot summer day; where traffic signals and light poles emulate the rhythmic linearity of a colonnade and engage an irritable child stuck in the back seat of a car; where construction barriers are not corrugated sheets but painted murals; and where paan-stained boundary walls are constantly refreshed galleries for young artists.
This museum, unlike our static ones, will be based on a conversation between citizens and the city. Public art, rather than individual expression for the benefit of the connoisseur, will be instead a catalyst for the ‘sense of wonder’ that is so important to the well-lived life. John Updike once said that “What art offers is space — a certain breathing room for the spirit.” If the possibility of any future urban reality lies in our ability to imagine it, then art is the tool that will clear us the space to do so.
(Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect)