ARTISTS' WORKSHOP
Material Obsession

Using everyday objects--dung, cloth and twigs--these innovative artists create playful and quirky art form.

By Madhu Jain

There's something crazy about the place, we are all doing kinky work.'' Manisha Parekh is not exaggerating. The gathering of talented artists working in an experimental mode on the 25-acre sprawl of Sikri Bagh in Modinagar, Uttar Pradesh, is like a, well, Mad Hatter's tea party. Sudarshan Shetty's huge fake-velvet black and magenta plane lies on a sofa in the eccentric-looking mansion. C.K. Rajan has painted eggplant and carrots florid pink and purple, while Ajay Desai has painted bits and pieces of shrubbery that he found in the jungle-like garden of the house. Anita Dube is looking for a peacock which she will christen Victoria and put in a cage which she will decorate with twinkling wedding lights. P.S. Ladi is transforming an ancient accounts machine found in the local junkyard into a more human-looking machine, turning out his personal hieroglyphics which begin with paper and then go on to becoming three-dimensional objects. Subodh Gupta is building a walled enclosure (shades of Anarkali?) with gobar (dung) cakes. Iftikar Dadi is superimposing translucent lice combs over kitsch cards of buxom Bollywood stars he's found in the local market because he wants to show how Pakistan's efforts to censure Indian films and popular culture only make them more seductive. Why, there's even a mysterious cloth-covered tunnel winding towards nowhere in particular which Jyoti Kolte is putting finishing touches to. And yes, Manisha Parekh's stacking up little stools from which she's suspended "thingies which look like ear buds".

She did say kinky, right? But kinky here is serious: this group of thirty- something artists are earnestly experimental even as they turn playful and make do with whatever they find at the site, including the local market with its headless rubber and plastic dolls, kitsch calendars, lividly coloured saris and of course the junkyards of factories which abound here.

She also said crazy, and it's the place with its overwrought almost-magical realism foliage -- bottle palm trees, an incongruous pond, eccentric ashram-turned-house and fine black particles which perpetually cover everything -- that seems to have cast a spell on the artists, allowing them to throw out all isms, schisms and theories. Almost as if it were "teacher's day off", with students making their own rules. Sculptors turn painters, painters turn sculptors and all boundaries evaporate. "See, I am a painter," explains Desai. "But now I am not painting on canvas but on objects. Paint a useless object and it becomes precious; the inconsequential is transformed. This way you can take painting into another dimension."

The two-week international artists' workshop, aptly called Khoj, has been organised by the artists themselves with corporate support. There are a dozen Indian artists and 10 from nine other countries. But what is interesting is how different this generation of Indian artists is from previous ones and how similar they are to artists from Namibia, Australia, the United Kingdom, Austria, Pakistan, Cuba, Sri Lanka and Kenya.

What binds them is their relationship with the object. It is a material obsession and a romance with found objects. The sacred cows of High Art have long been put to pasture. It's an "anything goes" world, with the artist as Prospero, conjuring up anything -- no matter how far or how mundane; even sacred or profane -- which finds a place in his personal pictorial vocabulary. Having offloaded both the post-colonial baggage of artists who sought alternatives in indigenous or folk art, as well as the guilt of those who changed the colours of their palette according to what was happening in Paris or London, this generation has no ready-made maps for their journeys.

Moreover, for most of the younger Indian artists there are no longer any hierarchies of medium or subject. Oil and water colours or marble and bronze are as heavyweight or light as papier mache, fibreglass, terracotta, polyester, jute, grass or even videotape.

The world's really their oyster. And they are as free as magpies -- to pick up whatever catches their fancy from the vast cultural storehouse of images, techniques, symbols and histories of the world. Just as a Picasso, Matisse or Gauguin might have refuelled themselves in, respectively, Africa, North Africa and Tahiti, these raiders of other worlds are comfortable with their borrowings.

Nor are they really concerned with problems of cultural identity which troubled older artists. The new internationalism expands their canvas, allowing them to reach across the borders as well as explore all facets of mass culture in India. Bollywood has never really been more than the occasional backdrop for most Indian artists. But for artists like Dube, Hindi films are also the stuff of their inner lives. "It is mythical material," says Dube. "Our ideas of love are conditioned by film, we don't really have any idea of romance without film."

This was no romantic retreat. Nor was this a pursuit of nature and the "common folk". Yet there was a curious, unsought collision of different worlds. Last fortnight, a group of village women made little sculpted mounds of earth near the pond for their puja and placed diyas on the water. Those mounds were of a piece with the installations the artists were in the process of making. Especially Rini Tandon, a Viennese sculptor of Indian origin who dug three large holes in the ground and made different forms in the process. Joyba from Namibia had come even closer: the line he strung across one end of the pond, like a washing line, was a "bridge for ants, not human beings".

As for the Indian artist, the bridge leads in all directions: from the kitsch and vibrancy of the market place and mass culture to vestiges from the High Art of the temple to whatever strikes his fantasy the world over.

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