Sprouting options

Should art be necessarily beautiful? This is the heart of the matter of Delhi’s “sprout controversy”. If you haven’t been following the debate, it is just this: should a public art installation, comprising giant clumps of stainless-steel “sprouts”, be removed from the borders of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) flyover?

The issue is not around the terms of a deal with the Jindals, contracted to maintain that space, and who have put up these artworks, or even their sheer expense. The public debate is about how they look. Are they pretty or ugly? This focus on their aesthetics and their potential decapitation is an important moment for public art.

There has always been disagreement about how a given work of art looks — and with what ease it falls into anyone’s frame of “visually pleasing”. Tastes are different and evolve at a different pace. There can never be a single work of art that we will all agree upon. For that reason, there will never be the possibility of anything universally pleasing. Had Delhi been a small town, with a contained population, a referendum may have been possible.

Anything less is random and unrepresentative apart from being statistically irrelevant. We are therefore asking the wrong question about the “sprouts” and their place in Delhi.

Yet, the debate is insightful, because it presumes that art must be beautiful and this alone determines its chances of public survival and support. This is at odds with newer ideas of public art in the first place. Public art is not an artwork made of hardy, weatherproof materials and placed where everyone can see it. In this century, more than beauty, art needs to explore the local topography, and to intervene in it to underscore a point.

An artist must be able to mark out the history, geography of a space, and signal their conceptual framing to a viewer. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it does have to be able to initiate a dialogue. This is exactly the kind of thing murals on the walls of government buildings fail to do, but which — and I am serious — many statues of iconic leaders do. Any statue of Ambedkar, for example, becomes a shrine and a positive reinforcer of community-based and national identity.

And, as far as Washington DC, an extraordinarily poorly made bronze of Gandhi has become a second-rung must-see in the historic Diplomatic Row. Very few of these statues of leaders display advanced artistic skills. But that becomes secondary compared to their inherent potency.

This is no advocacy for more statues but an illustration of how imbued with emotion and symbolism art can be. Do the “sprouts” succeed on this account? Undeniably, they have forced people to confront their own sense of aesthetics and debate what Delhi should look like. There is discussion about trees, flyovers and modernity. And dozens of “I would have instead...” ideas have been shared. In that sense, these have made a successful opening. My own opinion is that they do nothing for the space, are decorative in intent, visually bankrupt and an expense that the city can do without. But should they be removed? Not at all.

Erasing them would be no different from VHP hooligans tearing down M F Husain’s exhibitions because they found his works offensive. Or like Hitler, who organised his infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition, showcasing the “wrong” aesthetics and mocking the idea of artistic freedom. The issue of the “sprouts” is as much about public art as it is about democratic principles.

For all those who hate the way they look, the only democratic hope of not having to see them lies in their refusal by the Delhi Urban Arts Commission, which will act as the arbitrator on our behalf. But if it does give them a lease of life, we should be mature enough to live with it, because this is the other face of our democratic freedoms.