Out on the streets

ARTWALK

Do non-artsy audiences for public art exist? I am asking because of both an unlikely, recent encounter with public art in Delhi, and more globally, the Banksky phenomenon.

If you didn't know Banksky, take solace in the fact that hardly anyone knows him. Few people have ever seen him. His art began as witty, provocative stencil graffiti on street walls. He was a branded menace whose art work was cleaned by municipal authorities.

Then, he began working on paper and began to show in galleries. Now, you have books on him: The New Yorker has written about him and his works are all sold out in the usual hotcake fashion.

Graffiti, despite the coffee-table books on it, is still cleaned up as a defacement of public space. Not so Banksky. The next time he anonymously makes one of his hallmark works, will someone pay for keeping it on?

Meanwhile, in Delhi, Pradeep Saha works with environmental news magazine Down to Earth. He also happens to be an artist. Recently, as part of Khoj's workshops on the environment, he managed to showcase the blending of his two passions.

Pradeep invented a TV channel "" Hard Times. A reporter, whose face you never see, is filmed as she asks a range of people on the roads about air pollution. Several people in cars frame the fundamental consumption dilemma.

They insist that people need to drive less, but they are filmed sitting in their cars. One of them says that he can't not drive, but there are way too many cars on the roads.

A cynical bus driver is adamant: nothing can change anything. Nothing can be done about India. He shakes his head, his grim pronouncement a final indictment. The effect is far from severe. The audience that's gathered around the monitor to see the telecast begins to laugh.

Pradeep first set up his Hard Times telecast in Connaught Place and then, near the Auto Expo in Pragati Maidan. Each time, his video was only part of the art work.

The audiences, and the spectacle that gets unleashed in waves, are the work. But have audiences been so intensely involved always? It's hard to say, in part because we've had only a few artworks like this.

Public Art (and, in my opinion, a lot of good art), should be able to provoke thought. Hard Times does this, but it does more. It works as a cue to the art world that there is an increasing non chi-chi audience that will engage with art practice in the public domain.