Feb 8, 1999
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EDGE OF THE CENTURY The Creative Urge An innovative exhibition on diverse art forms brings out new modes of expression of artists. By Madhu Jain
Incongruous? Perhaps. The mammoth exhibition titled Edge of the Century has been curated by art historian Amit Mukhopadhyay, assisted by Manjit Debashish. It has thrown together haphazardly, works of nearly a hundred artists. The sublime and the absurd, and the aesthetic and the plain ugly are included into this hold-all of a show. And the show has been strung on a rather nebulous thread of a theme of breakdown on the way to contemporaneity in the journey of modern art. In other words, whither Indian art at the precipice of the new millennium.
They often feed guiltlessly upon western art and internationalism: globalisation yes, but with local colour, interpretations and sensibilities. "Five years ago it would have been impossible to have installations, textiles, photography and paintings in one show," says curator Pooja Sood. "The definitions were clear: this is sculpture, this is a graphic print." Technology figures prominently in this show and is quite the other equaliser here. A surprisingly large number of artists have used virtual reality to convey the sense of their own experience of reality. Navjot, a painter and sculptor, has made a video animation film of a road (paralleled in white acrylic on the gallery floor leading to the television monitor showing her film) to mark the time she spent working with tribal artists in Bastar. Painter Ranbir Kaleka projects a video film of a man threading a needle upon his painting of a man threading a needle, making the play of the electronic upon a static-painted image truly fascinating. Rummana Husain's video installation records another kind of journey: her video film follows her slowly crossing an immensely long bridge to a New York borough peopled by Indians and partially echoes the journey thousands in the Indian diaspora make. Bharati Kher in a most amusing work has an Indian doll with a bobbing head placed inside a temple-like structure. When the doll is touched, the Macarena blares out. Interactive technology has also found its way. Shilpa Gupta's installation includes several cards with a message offering to share happiness and a phone number as well as audio cassettes of responses to the message. Many of the artists are obviously responding to what they see round them and nature rather than to larger issues. What's there is as art writer Yashodhara Dalmia puts it, "a celebration of expressiveness, of a democracy, of all materials and of the self". Art for many of the younger painters also appears to be no longer about skill, but as London-based artist Anish Kapoor says, "about the essence of being" stalkers of the quotidian. Some of their works are musings on the everyday things of life, like the drainage pipes or shanties in the work of painter Nataraj Sharma. Popular culture -- coming in non-stop from satellite television and advertising -- has also made inroads into the artistic imagination. Says Ray: "There is a synthesising effort to take in the elements from everyday life that they are exposed to, especially to the media interventions in their life." Kitsch becomes part of the canvas as the artist learn to negotiate what Ray describes as "market-generated images". Clothes occupy the imagination too. Surekha's work comprises various blouses made out of rice paper and pigment and are meant to be the lost memory of a body. Bits of clothing or textiles are used in several canvases. And gobar (cow dung) is obviously the hot new medium: Sheela Gowda who won the newly instituted Sotheby's award for contemporary Indian art had used this ubiquitous material, as did the latest winner of the prestigious Turner award in the UK, Chris Ofili, who had layered his canvas with elephant turd. For this show, painter Subodh Gupta has used gobar to frame images, (mostly of cows and street scenes). Gupta has also plonked his self-portrait in the middle of a canvas layered with gobar. Also, red lights spell out Bihari in Hindi at the bottom of the work. Some artists like N. Puspamala have even used themselves: the body as site. Puspamala continues with her adventures: the last time, it was the artist as Nadia Hunterwali. This time, there are hand-tinted photographs of her in Modinagar enacting the Sunehre Sapne (golden dreams) playing out the fantasies of an Indian housewife. Interestingly, photography forms a significant component of the show. Sculptors and painters have intermittently used photographs as part of their work, used as motifs or as part of their narrative. But this time, it's photography as an art which is on display. Working in what he describes as a "diaristic mode", Ram Rahman has used black and white pictures taken over the course of several years to make a narrative frieze which goes beyond the use of simple juxtaposition. And in his exploration of the twilight area between the public and the private, Rahman makes pungently sharp comments on the similarities and equations at play between the two kinds of parties: the social and the political. Toothful socialites and politicians at leisure are caught off guard by his candid camera. Satish Sharma's mission is quite different, and mission it is. These photographs are from his project, "Photography and the Construction of Culture, Tourism and Identity". And they are quite another take on ruins and monuments which he feels are being used to construct mythical pasts and identities. Particularly compelling are the photographs taken in Taxila and Harappa in Pakistan. So, strangely, while tipping into the next millennium, it's not the future which captures the imagination of the artist but the past in a present pregnant with the future: comprised as it does stalkers of memories and meditations on the present. |
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They stand there
in the middle of the gallery like some lost civilisation which has suddenly resurfaced
after centuries-old hibernation at the bottom of the ocean. Broken columns carved with
atavistic figures, lettering with the gravity of hieroglyphics. A stump of reclaimed
memory in stone-like fibreglass hangs from the ceiling, yet another -- fragment of a story
or a myth -- lies on the floor. Tutu Patnaik's installation titled Dadima Ki Kahani
(Grandmother's Story) is not just an elegy to the passing of time. It's his way of letting
this collective memory of demons and deities, of folklore and historical legends of Orissa
surface to and resonate in the present. Courtesy, of course, grandma. Just behind it, hung
on the wall is the work of B. Manjunath Kamath called Collected Thoughts: rows of square
pillows on which the everyday, boringly ordinary things of life like taps and faces are
drawn with acrylic silver foil. 
Awesome though the theme may
sound, some of the younger artists have risen to the challenge by unfettering themselves
from the must-dos of conventional artists. The most exciting aspect of the show is the
absence of the caste system in art: there are no hierarchies here. Purity is shown up as
passe as the boundaries between the art forms blur. Painters metamorphose into sculptors,
sculptors into video artists, graphic artists into photographers: anybody can do anything.
"There has been a breakdown, the youngsters mistrust the pedantry of the languages
used so far in modern Indian art," says Calcutta art critic Pranabranjan Ray, adding,
"So there is an anxiety to find a new language through the use of new
materials." 
