Chicago has an idea to offer to Indian cities. It’s what public art can become if it is creatively and bravely envisioned. Two landmark public sculptures bracket this idea. The first is Picasso’s famous and unnamed corrosive tensile steel work, installed in 1967 in the Civic Centre Plaza, outside the Daley Centre building.
The second is Anish Kapoor’s 2004 shiny steel work, Cloudgate, in the popular Millenium Park. Between them, they encompass the shift within sculpture in the public space in the last four decades.
Picasso never charged the city of Chicago for his skeletal bird-like work, which he designed and whose construction he supervised to his specifications. The giant creature is coated with flecks of dull iron rust, a homage to the Daley Centre, whose facade is also of the same material and outside which it stands. Picasso died soon after — in 1973 — and was already iconic when he made the donation to Chicago. It became a beloved denizen only after a trial by fire — it was intensely disliked. But it successfully changed the manner in which the city of Chicago looked at sculpture in the public arena for good.
The delightfully named Cloudgate stands opposite a row of famous architectural landmarks, buildings that dramatically changed the trajectory of modern architecture. It is located in a strip of park, designed to draw in tourists, almost at the foot of the Chicago Art Institute. It is something like our Victoria Memorial or India Gate — the kind of place where tourists wander around and take pictures. Except that Cloudgate, a 110-tonne, bean-like creature, sitting smugly on the ground, tickles the senses of most of its visitors. Its reflective facade distorts the line of buildings opposite, a cue to watch one’s own reflection turn into a squiggly something. Visitors love this — it engages them with its surprises. Throngs of people work at tricking the sculpture into giving them several new looks. Camera flashes are part of the micro-landscape here. With a deeply cerebral lineage, it unabashedly flirts with every visitor.
Both works pay a tribute to Chicago’s architecture. Cloudscape invites intense interaction, as close as you can possibly get to cuddling steel. Picasso’s work, a revered landmark, occasionally gets to wear the cap of a sports team. Both of them gesture towards the city in the vocabularies of their time.
Perhaps this is the central idea Indian cities can take home — art in the public sphere has to incite emotion. Bronze statues or wall murals — Delhi, for example, has an abundance of both — have failed ensconcement in the public realm. Who remembers the mosaic on the elegant Post & Telegraph building as anything more than a silly textbook cover illustration? If anything, it detracted from the building. Such art is not public, it just happens to be visible to everyone. We typically react to it as if we were lobotomised.
Commissioning such art requires the government to moult into a braver, risk-taking creature. Despite competitions, drawings, projections, you don’t know quite what an art work will finally look like when it is installed. Our babus have to also reign themselves in when it comes to taste. Experience from just the last decade shows many of them react to art as if it must necessarily be visually beautiful, conventionally tasteful and entirely placid. In a public art event late last year, a public servant insisted that he decide which art work be placed where. It was an expected decision — private taste often colours what we see in our cities.
India is unlikely to have work like Anish Kapoor’s unless we become confident enough to host such work. Perhaps, as in many other aspects of contemporary art practice, our vibrant private art world — galleries, curators, non-profits, collectors, critics and other individuals — will once more, find themselves leading the shift by their collective work, and push public opinion and taste beyond the fare we are doled out today.
