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THE ARTS: 10TH TRIENNALE-INDIA
Artless Artistry
Attempts to showcase the widest selection-and not
the best-result in a disappointing exhibition
By Anshul Avijit
 The
Lalit Kala Akademi's triennial art rite has once again rapped Delhi but
most voyeurs could do with a copy of "Everything that sickened you
about the 10th Triennale-India but didn't know whom to blame" (both
volumes). Take this vexing situation: the 30-something Swedish participants
Gunilla Klinberg and Peter Geschwind, like many of their foreign counterparts,
were given just three months' notice about their inclusion and had to
muster up their installation to meet a three-week deadline. "Ya,
but it's okay," dismissed an insouciant Geschwind. "We had fun
doing the work." Fine, this couple got away with doing some Chandni
Chowk-Red Fort sightseeing and putting up a catchy work of tubular intestines
and plastic bag kitsch. But for the viewer it was only a temporary respite
in an exhibition of high-octane mediocrity.
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Mistry's ALoC: The
Object |
It was really the Indian section, crammed in
the second tier of the main Rabindra Bhawan gallery, that had the maximum
posers.
A ragtag list of about 34 artists in a space comfortable for only 10.
Seemed funny because in the other two allocated centres, the National
Gallery of Modern Art and AIFACS, the big spaces and halls lay annoyingly
empty. Then there was the rickety selection process, grandly dubbed "democratic",
which only resulted in the usual pageant of ailing styles (mistaken to
be avant-garde) and brought-from-the-dead images. The selection was done
in two rounds. Firstly, a bunch of nine "regional commissioners"
or referees chosen by the executive board of the Lalit Kala short-listed
favourable artists on the basis of many art camps. In the next phase,
a varnished list of 36 Indian participants was picked by four others by
perusing through "bio-data and photographs rather than original works
of the artists" and by honouring the regional quota. It was for the
first time in a Triennale selection that pan-Indian representation was
given more weightage than simply choosing the best artists. The result
was for all to see.
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| Gupta with Remembering
Soutine |
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But a few had the nerve to be deviant. Hema Upadhyay,
a 29-year-old who did an MFA in print-making from M.S. University in Baroda,
adopted a wall at the venue and let it run amuck with roaches made of
acrylic and stuck with M-seal. About a thousand of them, tots, adults
and the elderly, of varying oval sizes and varying ochre shades, eeky
and horridly life-like, shown going about their ceremony of survival.
The installation, though provocative, was not without a metaphorical intent:
the creatures which have no lovers (except perhaps entomologists and aerosol
manufacturers) are probably the most resilient animals on the planet-they
could survive a nuclear holocaust. "With the splitting of the atom
in the middle of the century, humanity has the technical potential to
destroy itself," points out Upadhyay. "The next war might bring
an end to all life," she adds with foreboding. The artist's modish
concern for the survival of the human race, given its inherent fixation
for self-slaughter, got her one of the nine awards given out at the Triennale.
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Aku's Mind of Feelings
(I) & (II) |
Dhruva Mistry didn't, but the 44-year-old sculptor-also
from Baroda-was in form with two stainless steel scaffoldings
(ALoC: The Object) that looked like they could be the blueprint for H.G.
Wells' Time Machine or a children's playground that had been compacted.
As yarns of polished steel formed ghostly rooftops, chimneys, turrets,
columns, cylinders, parabolas, slides and semi-spheres in a sharp and
finicky unison, Mistry's great love of phenomenology also became evident.
Aku's Mind of Feelings was also an eyecatcher. The 48-year-old artist
from Banaras Hindu University had suspended five large scrolls of uncut
leather to resemble hunks of meat in a cold storage-and a few other pieces
that were arranged like miniature tents.
Probir Gupta became the other Indian to be decorated,
but this time, like the mood of the Triennale, his installation caused
more flap than fascination. Gupta's recent attempts to be a pictorial
polyglot (abstracts, figurative kitsch, installations) like many other
artists is welcome but his current bouquet of forms seemed to malfunction
a bit. Sequence of Food Bowls 1,2,3,4 & 5 was an exhausting journey
of middle-class angst while Remembering Soutine dutifully listed (through
slogans, pictures and weapons)
all the ills of India's democratic and social life in a booby-trap-like
hook-up. Gupta seemed to be in a hurry to say everything together, maybe
forgetting that the shelf life of installations isn't likely to be that
short. But the fad probably is.
Should the Lalit Kala continue with needless
exercise? Veteran artist Akbar Padamsee, one of the five jurors at this
Triennale, said that qualitatively this was one of the worst. "I
go by the result," says Padamsee. "If the result is poor, so
must be the method." Difficult to argue with that.
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