Body macabre

A colleague in Mumbai wants to know if we should cover an 18-year-old artist who has been spending more time than is normal at city morgues, studying and painting carcasses.

Bharti Kher's 2002 fibreglass installation of copulating dogs is as fascinating as it is repelling, like a nagging toothache that numbs the senses.

In recent years, and particularly in the West, artists have transcended the barrier of the bizarre to open the gates to the morbid rather more frequently than before.

Therefore, the use of blood, skin, hair, nail clippings and other body parts too delicate to mention here, are becoming forms of protest.

Protest itself is hardly new to art "" the genesis of modern art being a protest against prettied-up aesthetic sensibilities to begin with. But, as the culture of violence continues to grow in the 21st century, it's becoming increasingly important to understand whether protest itself is sufficient reason to diminish art merely as a radical resort that is anti-aesthetics.

Distortion has played an important role in contemporary art "" whether in Vincent van Gogh's portraits of suffering industrial workers, or Rabin Mondal's canvases on the famine in Bengal. But to physically violate content? To use the frame of art to evoke nausea, to actually repel the senses? Is this valid art?

The definition of art can both be narrow as well as vast. Certainly, it has evolved sufficiently to move away from the pretty pictures of angels and fairies in the past, and of realism in the last centuries, to a more dynamic interpretation that is as individual as the painter's (and the viewer's) own imagination.

By its very nature, modern art has proved radical, and has often evoked protests from the state, the administration and audiences. The macabre is merely another limb in this direction, no more nor less important than other strands.

But it does beg a question. Since it is intended to be viewed to evoke a reaction, does the art of the macabre, or work that inspires revulsion, deliver? Especially since galleries are loathe to show such work "" they're in it for the money.

State-sponsored galleries are often the victim of limitations imposed by the state, failing which it can withdraw all benefits.

At most, therefore, such art is little seen (and people are less inclined to want to see it too). At most, it might find a few institutional purchasers for reasons of documentation. But will it have a popular market?

The theory that dictates that art should not be a marketable commodity has been shown up to be flawed time and again. Art, to survive, needs patronage. Street art lacks the sophistication to reach the audience against whom the intellectualisation of the argument is intended.

And there is the fear that, to make a statement, artists of the macabre will stop at little. Therefore, will we be subjected to corpses by way of art? To murder even, to make a point? Will dog turds represent the acme of 21st century aesthetics?

Within these arguments lie the more relevant questions on how the artist looks at development. In the linoleum-draped sanitisation of the Western world, the macabre may shock more than in India, for in societies such ours the body macabre is too much a way of life to become a form of protest art.

In attempting to follow, therefore, the radical sensibilities of Western aesthetics, are we merely pawns moving away from more pertinent Indian realities? Or are we, in taking it in our stride rather more comfortably than the developed world, missing some point? Only time, as the cliche goes, will tell.