Artists opting to make a social statement find the subtext of sculptural art too sterile
Installations are believed by many to be sculptures that got too big for their boots. But size alone cannot define them. Installations are meant to excite and provoke, turning the artist into an activist, a role they adopt to draw attention to ironies and contradictions, hypocrisies and dichotomies. The mediums are diverse and new age: Manufactured products, found objects, natural and manmade materials, sometimes supported by technology. They tend to play an important part in encouraging fresh discourse, and are best reserved for public spaces (appearing at biennales) or in museums where they engage viewers in acts of interrogation. The last decades have seen promising work by Indian artists, though the art has still to gain currency or be understood in acceptable ways by a largely art-illiterate population.
Love
2006
Sudarshan Shetty (b 1961)
The artist who stunned Mumbai with his installation of a bus has this time turned his attention to a shocking installation that shows two beasts mechanised to replicate the act of love-making in a voyeuristic manner. Shetty, who shuns obvious symbolism, finds amusement in familiar scenes of domesticity that he turns into larger-than-life spectacles. His use of the vestiges of the body, particularly its skeleton—he casts these in stainless steel, moulded from real bones—to point to the absence of the body; of the human conundrum of being elsewhere even in the act of making love. This grotesqueness is accentuated by the rocking motion of the assemblage, reducing the tender emotion to lust. In fact, the many manifestations of love in this series of works included an installation that showed a dinosaur copulating with a Jaguar sports car, a Braille writer typing out the word ‘love’ continuously, and a mechanical heart morphing, first into a human heart and, then into a valentine, representative of a new generation’s restless search for instant gratification.
Death of Distance
2006
Jitish Kallat (b 1974)
The curator of the second edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale and one of the more relevant of contemporary artists, Jitish Kallat’s imagery emerges from his explorations of Mumbai in the form of large installations that are as energising as they are thought-provoking. He brings urban consumerism to the fore, though his striking images suggest a deeper, darker past than a current present at first glance. While better known for his use of an anthropological language to evocatively address his concerns—creating fibre-glass ‘bones’ for cars and trucks, for instance, to depict the terror they wreak on our roads—in ‘Death of Distance’ he draws out the irony of a global economy in which the Indian rupee has played catch-up with developed economies and holds the promise and seduction of increasing materialism amidst hunger, farmer suicides and death. A large coin is surrounded by reports that comment on India’s negative indices, pointing out the dichotomy between perception and reality in a way that is rife with illusions of wealth amidst degrading poverty.
(This story appears in the May-June 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)