The East-West encounter, in the arts sphere at least, can be a very productive engagement. The fruit of one such collaboration between French installation artist Jean-Michel Othoniel and the glass blowers of Firozabad is “Precious Stone Wall”, which will be on show at the NGMA in the capital sometime in February next year and thereafter, travel to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Othoniel is fairly well know internationally for his monumental, often public, sculptures in glass — the most spectacular being “Kiosque des Noctambules” on the subway entrance to the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre on the Paris Metro, consisting of two huge cupolas made of coloured glass beads threaded on an aluminum structure.
“Transformations” — glass’s almost magical “metamorphosis from powder to liquid and then stone” — inspire Othoniel and he has worked with traditional glassblowers from Venice, Spain and the US to give shape to his imagination. Naturally Othoniel had heard about the glassblowers of Firozabad and agreed enthusiastically when the French embassy suggested that, as part of Bonjour India, the on-going Festival of France in India, he should work with the artisans. “I wanted to discover the spirit of Indian glass,” he says.
It was, however, a taxing assignment. The first time Othoniel came to India for about a week in late 2007, the weather was mild enough. But his next visit was in March, just as the summer heat was picking up through the flatlands of north India. “It was hot. These were areas far off the tourist track — finding a place to stay, even water was very difficult.
But the interactions with the Firozabad artisans “who were still blowing glass the way it was done 2,000 years ago”, and the glass beadmakers of Purdilnagar, some 60 km away, made up for the discomfort. Othoniel, familiar with the assembly-line operations of modern glass-blowers in Europe, was also struck by how everything was done by hand by what seemed to him an “army of people” in the “glass city”. “In Europe, most of the old-time glass factories have closed down,” says the artist, who also runs an institute for glass-blowers in the south of France.
“Precious Wall of Stone” is Othoniel’s ode to his idea of India. On the road to Firozabad, the Frenchman was struck by the piles of bricks everywhere; India seemed, to him, “a country of builders” and the bricks, symbols of “energy”. So the installation will be a wall, measuring 4m x 3.5m x 3.5m, made of 5,000 amber-coloured glass bricks and strung with 150 4-m-long necklaces made of the glass beads, invoking the old India of maharajas and opulent jewels.
Despite all the euphoria about the “new” India, the West, it seems, still can’t quite abandon the stock images of the old one.