Where in the World

The India Gate district, architect Edwin Lutyens’ neo-classical interpretation of empire as urban form, once necessitated the use of an adjective to highlight its impact. Today, however, this bureaucratic neighbourhood in what used to be the centre of Delhi doesn’t quite live up to its earlier promise. The ‘new’ is no longer ‘original’; it has been corrupted. Described as seedy by some, Lutyens’ district is better characterized as bedraggled.

A bit of biography: India Gate is of more than passing interest to a South African like me. Before travelling to India, where he became the quintessential nabob, Lutyens lived and worked in Johannesburg. While its original Edwardian form has been somewhat spoiled by subsequent additions, Lutyens’ Johannesburg Art Gallery remains a vital part of the city’s cultural life. It is more than just the common vestiges of empire that connect South Africa and India.

Travancore Art Gallery, Travancore Palace, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Delhi

A short walk north from the Rajpath, the processional boulevard that connects the Secretariat with the faux Arc de Triomphe that gives India Gate its name, is the Travancore Art Gallery. Housed in a whitewashed colonial mansion, the space recently hosted an exhibition of paintings by young Indian artists, many from Kerala, a province in south-western India. For a first-time visitor to the country, as I was, for someone intrigued by the vast amounts of column space devoted to India’s contemporary art boom, it was both a good and a bad place to start. Pacing from room to room, adjectives like good or bad seemed inappropriate to qualify the many pseudo-surreal, Magritte-like fantasy landscapes assembled in ‘Cross Country’, the breezy rubric for Travancore’s conservative painterly showcase. The word familiar seemed closer the truth.

K.T. Mathai, Climaterics 20 (2008)

One artist in particular made me stop and look. K.T. Mathai paints in a manner similar to artists from South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province: flat, depthless pictorial scenes of (mostly) rural enterprise and virtue are animated by the use of a bright colour palette. Mathai’s Climaterics 19 and 20 (both 2008) are painted in rich primary tones, chiefly emerald green and burnt Indian red. What redeems them is their ambiguity. The neatly patterned hills in Climaterics 20, for instance, are the outcome of the various earth-moving devices reforming the Indian landscape.

India’s financial growth in recent years is a matter of public record, the country now a member of the Group of 20 (G20) leading nations. Evidence of prosperity and change are everywhere apparent, from the cranes circling Delhi to the billboards advertising metropolitan living in far-flung provincial cities.

In Guargon, on the southern outskirts of Delhi, this change is stark and unremitting. As was the case with Lutyens’ Anglo-Indian-Roman fantasy that is India Gate, change in this edge city is expressed through an architectural polyphony. Set amidst Guargon’s sprawl of office parks, hotels, retail centres and the odd electrical substation, down an unpaved backstreet, is the Devi Art Foundation, India’s first private contemporary art museum. The Devi’s current show, its second since opening in August last year, is a rather self-conscious affair. Titled ‘Where in the World’ (on until May 3), it attempts to fathom contemporary Indian art’s ‘relationship with the world – the art world as well as the world beyond the art world’.

The Devi Art Foundation, designed by Aniket Bhagwat

A discrete reading of select works only tells half the story. Like Travancore, where the agitated pitter-patter of pigeons inside the second floor ceiling lends a Hitchcockian weirdness to the viewing experience, the Devi is slightly creepy. An angular monolith in rust red, tradesmen outnumber administrative staff, a magnetic security guard (‘No photos!’) merely adding to the unease navigating this optimistic showpiece of Indian cultural modernity.

The Devi, which showcases the holdings of Anupam Poddar and his mother, Lekha, is spread over five floors, two of them subterranean (and airlessly noisy the deeper you go, the result of the insistent purr of a diesel generator). The work of Delhi-based superstar artist Subodh Gupta in many ways forms the aesthetic and intellectual bedrock of its collection. Indeed, Gupta’s Rani (2001), a brilliant pink fibreglass sculpture of a Brahman cow, was Poddar’s first purchase.

Made in 2001, the work is one of number of Gupta’s early works in which the artist interrogates his identity. Later pieces, such as The Other Thing (Chimta) (2005-6), a spherical wall-hung sculpture made from accumulated chimta, a silver tong-like percussion instrument, and High Life II (2002), a large orb made from steel drinking cans suspended in the open-air foyer, begin to demonstrate the antagonism between ‘location and mobility’. In a thoughtfully argued catalogue essay, Kavita Singh, co-curator of ‘Where in the World’, suggests that as contemporary Indian artists have gained international prominence, they have opted to speak in ‘the double register of Indian content and transnational form’.

Gupta aside, the curators rely heavily on the work of Bharti Kher and Mithu Sen to visually propose their arguments. Schooled in London and Newcastle, British-born Kher immigrated to India in her twenties. Hirsute (1999-2000) is a series of pop-documentary paintings illustrating the endless ways in which the Indian moustache is worn. Inevitably, Good Overcomes Evil (1999-2000), a similarly conceived series of paintings, presents violent scenes from Bollywood movies, onto which the artist overlays felt bindis. Both are snappy one-liners.

An earlier pair of works, Spit and Swallow (both 1998), sees Kher achieve more with less. Here pop-coloured sperm, made from die-cut felt bindi, swim to, and away from the centre of the circular form that frames them. The bold, expressive sexuality characterizing the Devi’s holdings is not hard to miss. In one room, a large colour photograph shows Gupta naked, covered in Vaseline, seated in a chair. Nearby, a projection replays a scene of Sonia Khurana doing a ritualized performance, naked. Hidden in the basement, Sudarshan Shetty’s sculpture Love (2006) depicts a stainless steel T-Rex perpetually making mechanical love to an old-fashioned Jaguar coupe. For all its scale, Shetty’s work lacks effrontery; otherwise put, it is glib. To a provincial critic from a provincial outpost, this realisation offered more solace than annoyance.

In a recent catalogue text for ‘Past-Forward’ (2008), an exhibition co-ordinated by London’s Zabludowicz Art Projects, Los Angeles-based art writer Michael Ned Holte remarks how ‘itinerant’ artists, their dealers, their collectors and curators now form a ‘tent community’ on a ‘never-ending circus parade of biennials and art fairs’. Critics, by distinction, lacking travel budget, ‘are often stranded at home, more firmly entrenched in their provinciality’.

Entrenched yes, but also bemused – when they travel – by the realisation that distance does not necessarily equate with difference. At risk of proposing a tautology, contemporary Indian is remarkably current. It shows the same anxieties of influence and confusion of grammars of art being made elsewhere. Well, certainly in my elsewhere, perhaps even in yours too.