The validity of art

Kishore Singh writes on three group shows with one central concern: how do you define art?

Is art design? Is design art? At a time when the definition of art has been substantially increased to include anything the artist deems a valid medium and a valid exploration of an idea, the very genesis of these questions is void. And building on this synergy is Peter Nagy’s curated show at Kala Ghoda in Mumbai. Vistaar II, by Delhi’s Seven Art Limited with, and at, Art & Soul in Mumbai, presents “increasingly dematerialised” art that is “more about image and idea than object”.

 

The group show has come to occupy the principal exhibition space in recent times over rapidly declining interest in solo shows, a fallout of the economic meltdown, and though interest is building up again, for some time it is group shows that will command interest. The second part in Arushi Arts’ tenth annual Harvest show in Delhi is interestingly labelled Ctrl + Alt + Del, its take on the terror that visited Mumbai recently. The first part of the showing focussed on the threads of tradition that bind modern and contemporary art, but here, says Payal Kapoor, was another part of the show that allows “the modern contemporary art scene to come about on its own”.

The raison d’être of Harvest appears to be to juxtapose younger artists alongside their seniors, and to showcase emerging trends — which last year was video art, and this year points to new age installations as well as the signalling of international artists in India. “I view works round the year, see shows, look through portfolios,” Kapoor says. “What you like, I may not, and vice versa, so the guiding principle is that I must react to the work.”

Known and unknown names jostle on the marquee, with the edgy grabbing the eyeballs. “Younger collectors,” says Kapoor, “don’t want an art that is just about beauty but has a deeper meaning.” Hence the concept centred around terrorism which, for her is as much about art as “archiving it into history”. “We are at an interesting point of time,” Kapoor points out, “when younger artists are experimenting.” The energy of India becomes contained within the rigidity that confines art, but it also bursts out — in kitsch (Sanjay Verma) and firecrackers (Siddhartha Karawal) and photographs (Shilpa Gupta), in installations across mediums that are impossible to define, but where the language of violence is so vocal it sends a shiver down your spine. Not the least of these is Arbind Kumar Singh’s Next Target which has toys skewered through in an installation that is as graphic as it is tongue-in-cheek. Joydeep Sengupta plays with neon light, a neglected Gandhi statue is drowned in the mess of suburbia in Vivek Vilasini’s archival print, Atul Bhalla can scarcely wash the blood away in the Wash/Water/Blood sequence, T V Santhosh is scarily brilliant in Ancient Error — II, and international artist Danielle Buetti’s inkjet print mounted on a PVC perforated light box is engaging in its message — piquant, or plaintive, you decide.

In another part of the capital, another group show, also an annual, is Bajaj Capital Art House’s Beyond the Form (also on view in Mumbai in the last week of August) where again the famous and the less well-known rub shoulders. Curator Sushma K Bahl too questions the “contested territory” of art. “Though the initial trigger for an artistic expression might be the creator’s personal dream, idea, imagination, experience, fear, hope or vision,” she suggests, “an artist’s ultimate desire, consciously or unconsciously, is to produce something with a more universally appreciable aesthetics.”

That might explain the choice of artists from Paresh Maity and Jayasri Burman to Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Maya Burman and Sunil Padwal — all of them to an extent decorative in their narrations — and in the exuberance of George Martin P J, of the whimsy of Jagadish Chinthala, of Murali Cheeroth’s fantastic imagery and Nitish Bhattacharjee’s abstracts. Here, Bahl spots “a free play of spontaneity and ingenuity” in possibilities ranging from paintings to sculpture to hybrid forms and installations, “a perennial rendezvous,” she points out, “with a personal notion of beauty and an engagement with the idea or story behind the work”.

Bahl says that “to go beyond the form and ascertain and appreciate what lays ahead of that which the bare eye can see” means that differing perspectives need to coalesce to make the invisible visible. “There are new modes of embodiment, production, consumption and appreciation of art that raise some interesting issues around what makes something a work of art,” she insists. These group shows should be an interesting pointer to that.