Installation of found or chosen objects has been a trend that always manages to puzzle me.
Installation of found or chosen objects has been a trend that always manages to puzzle me. Maybe I have the IQ of a bird or something, but it makes me wonder as to what impels artists to collect objects/things and place them in a specific arrangement in the conviction that it also makes sense to the onlooker. One can put garbage in an art gallery and allow it to stink and claim that it is protest against the pollution in the Ganga, or call it a protest against commercialisation of the arts. It is bad enough that the artists indulge in it, worse is how the hapless audience has been intellectually terrorised into appreciating it like the emperor’s new clothes. Is it then only a matter of perspective Or is there a deeper, more instinctive reason for this “arrangement” These thoughts came bounding as I viewed my dearest friend and one of the most creative abstract artist of our times, Shridhar Iyer’s latest installations Friendly Strangers: Fields of the Universe. The artist’s instinct for seeing beyond the obvious is something I always have respect for, as he stands head and shoulders above most others. This time, Iyer has used wood shavings, fish nets, coconut husk, khus or musk grass tatties to support his thought process of exploring empty spaces that have more energy fields than anything else in the Universe; and all objects, matter, particles we know, constitute fewer than 10 per cent of the universe. Iyer hails from the gharana of contemporary abstraction from Bharat Bhavan and has been exploring the unknown energy and force of the Universe primarily through the medium of painting and drawing. Highly experimental in life and work, Iyer has often made forays into installation-based art practices and his installations have drawn a lot of response. He makes a foray into this eternal vastness that occupies the spaces between us and our known objects. He combines this representational quest with the love for the organic and the perishable. The artist has pledged himself to a spiritual connection with the Universe, for him all the energy fields surrounding us are eternal, omnipresent, powerful, ethereal and friendly. It is a new and very important body of work in the context of the artist’s journey into sculptural abstraction that shows a sustained engagement with alternative mediums and new sculpture. His work of wearable art — a jacket of wood shavings, is really experimental yet very cute. However, when mounting such an experimental body of work, the display needs to be done in very clean lines and spaces that don’t overlap but have enough breathing room. Mounted at the NIV centre, the work clearly didn’t “belong” in that space and needed more space around it to say what it was saying. It needed to be “framed” in a better manner for the contextualisation to work. But what is more disturbing is that NIV seems to have made a practice of using senior artists to “support” junior artists to the point of not giving seniors the respect they deserve. Like the earlier Terracotta show where all the senior artists like Anupam Sud, Gogi Sarojpal, Kavita Nayyar, Seema Kohli etc. were mounted in a second floor gallery with even poorer air conditioning and quirky walls, and a junior nobody given prime space in the printed text and space, this time too, Iyer’s show is mounted upstairs with all the inherent problems intact. NIV should perhaps reconsider having shows only in better weather in case the air conditioning problem cannot be fixed. I have been very supportive of the NIV initiative and still feel that their heart is in the right place, issues on the ground level must be addressed too. This brings us back to the tradition of installations that is usually in the votive and decorative context like the Ganesh pandals, Durga puja pandals, wedding pandals or other pujas, artists would do well to remember that the audiences need to be educated to appreciate the contemporary thought processes in the stream of installations, or else they might as well stay away from the emperor’s new clothes!
Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi @yahoo.com
