When you can no longer make sense of it, when cruelty and stupidity are touted as creativity, Gargi Gupta wonders whether artists are playing to the gallery of the absurd or stretching all limits of imagination
Vivan Sundaram’s Trash is a paean to garbage. The show consists of photographs and a video of a large “city” that Sundaram constructed in his New Delhi studio from the detritus of urban waste — crushed cans and plastic bottles, used toothbrushes, broken mattresses, pipes, tins, glass and cardboard — recast into an urbanscape, complete with skyscrapers and avenues and bridges and playgrounds and shanty towns and landfills.
You might be nonplussed at Sundaram’s use of garbage as a medium, but you’ll find more such abstruse specimens of “contemporary art” that use unconventional media.
The most celebrated Indian example of these is, of course, Subodh Gupta’s composite steel bartan installations; but there’s also Jitish Kallat’s large conceptual works like Public Notice (speeches by iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi written out in alphabets shaped like fibreglass bones and arranged on shelves running through the gallery walls).
If these leave you lost, then what of Nikhil Chopra who spent days painting the Mumbai cityscape in a gallery with viewers open to walk in any time to see him paint!
Such “experimental” or “avant garde” art is still the preserve of young artists like Shilpa Gupta or Anita Dube who’ve stayed abroad for years, but lately more and more well known painters and sculptors are eschewing conventional art forms for such works.
It’s a global trend, of course, with Damien Hirst of animals-pickled-in-formaldehyde fame; but there are others like Pakistani artist Huma Mulji whose Arabian Delight, consisting of a stuffed camel in a suitcase, created a splash at the Dubai Art Fair earlier this year.
But where’s the art?
A starving dog dying painfully in a gallery as part of an art installation, dog pooh being touted as art, a calf being cut up and preserved in solution, a pile of cow patties disguised as high art — are we, in fact, being fooled? Laughed at by artists taking the piss out of collectors?
When artists themselves have begun to question the content of much of contemporary art, are we merely victims of artistic gobbledy-gook? Are we being had?
Pooja Sood, director of Khoj, one of the pioneering institutions in this area which has been pushing the boundaries of art experimentation in India and South-east Asia for 10 years now, argues, “Artists today can’t be limited by old-fashioned mediums or practices.”
Today’s artists, and curators and galleries after them, take seriously their role to hold up a mirror to reality — to create art that’s anxious, edgy, provocative and sensational to reflect a world that is anxious, edgy and complicated. If that means things are, er, ugly, or indecipherable — too bad!
“There is a surfeit of visual stimuli, an overload of the visual. Most viewers don’t have the time to take it all in,” says Gitanjali Dang, who has curated Anxiety, a group show of paintings at Mumbai’s Galerie Mirchandani + Stienrucke around the theme of “post visuality”. So you have paintings mounted upside down, placed out of visual range near the ceiling, or very low near the floor of a nearly dark gallery — with red herring aids to seeing like a hand mirror, a ladder and fairy lights — works that you have to screw up your eyes or stoop to see.
If this is art, what are its characteristics?
“Concept —not content — is the defining feature of this art,” says Renu Modi of Gallery Espace. “Unconventional” mediums is one distinguishing feature, and a multiplicity of them — most typically video, with sculpture and painting in a kind of “installation”, an umbrella term for “anything goes”, really. Mostly they’re large format, even monumental pieces.
“Difficulty” is a sine qua non. More often than not, you’ll have to plough through catalogue essays written in a particularly obfuscating, post-modern jargon or be familiar with an artist’s past work to make sense of what you’re seeing. And even then there are multiple readings, semiotic red herrings or dead-ends, to tantalise and complicate things.
The naming of the art works is another device used widely, especially by the Kerala school artists. I mean, what is one to make of Smell of Mute Mirrors?
So how do you distinguish the good from the gimmicky?
It’s not very difficult, if you put your mind to it. Take Trash. Sundaram has been engaging with garbage for the past decade. His 12 Bed Ward, an installation made with hospital beds and lined with soles of used shoes. Even if you aren’t familiar with all that, a closer look at the large format prints at Delhi’s PhotoInk gallery and you get a sense of what the artist is trying to do.
There is, at one level, Sundaram’s very real enjoyment at mucking around, while at the other, he’s objectifying the absurdity of laying out grand cities. You can intellectualise further and read into it, taking a clue from Chaintaya Sambrani’s essay in the catalogue, an entire critique of “modernity and its immanent experience of turbulence”.
“Why do we presume that art should be easy?” counters Sood. “Everything has a grammar — law, marketing, medicine — and it needs some amount of intellectual activity to unravel it. So why not art?”
But that’s the whole point — does art have any grammar any longer? Eventually, why would you want a fornicating dinosaur in your living room unless you’re a teenager with his hormones gone awry? It’s alright to use found materials for art, but cities + garbage is more like a college sophomore’s theoretical intellectualising than art. Besides, why would you want to hang pictures of garbage in your room? A poster in a hostel maybe, but as an artistic conceit: perhaps not.
“Contemporary art makes generous use of the techniques of quotation, and makes art-historical and other references which can make it a kind of code that needs to be cracked,” agrees Anupam Poddar, one of the most important collectors of such art. “(S)uch a multiplicity of references also means that the audience can engage with the work on many different levels — the work can sometimes bring alive a memory, trigger off an epiphany, or engage you critically, or even am use you.”
Sood has a simple thumb rule to set the wheat apart from the chaff — “A good artist will always provide clues to understanding. Art that’s very, very obscure is often bad art, because you can’t even make out the idea. And anyway, you have so much bad painting as well.”
Who buys these?
There is little viewer interest and institutional support for conceptual art in India. (Thankfully?) It’s changing, led by a few galleries in the metros that are providing it space. But it’s still largely a phenomenon that’s marginal — and sexier for that, some argue.
As for buyers, they are largely Western and institutional. Both Kallat’s and Gupta’s more monumental works have found their way into museums from Los Angeles to Brussels and into the collections of large private/institutional collectors like Pinault and Saatchi and Cohen Larry Sanitsky and Susanne Van Hagen.
In India, there’s Poddar of course, along with a few like Rajshree Pathy in Coimbatore, the Paul sisters (Priya and Preeti), and Nitin Bhayana, who have been collecting such works over the past few years.
What are prices like?
Not cheap, although they haven’t touched anywhere near the astronomical levels that contemporary paintings have. A video loop by a newcomer can be tagged Rs 40,000 while for a senior like Ranbir Kaleka, it can go up to $30,000. Prices have, in the past years, risen by 20 per cent say gallerists.
If you buy, what should you be looking for?
Quality and workability can be issues. Peter Nagy recalls Anita Dube’s experiments with her installations comprising “found objects” covered in velvet, a set of works she showed at the Nature Morte gallery in Delhi a few years ago. “A few months later we were taking the show to New York and while transporting it, we found that most of them were coming apart… It’s only now that Anita has been able to work on the technique and has come up with a more lasting solution.”
Then there is the problem of display and storage. As Ranjana Steinrucke says, “It’s not homes that these works can go to.” Few people like Poddar have a house where they can display a huge work like Gupta’s My Mother and Me in his dining room. That’s only in the formal one, says Poddar, not used by the family much, but his private dining space has an equally discomfitting piece — Anita Dube’s Blood Wedding. “And this in a strictly vegetarian Marwari family!” So nope, very few buyers still.
