Installation Art in India

For a lay person, the word art essentially conjures up images of paintings. If a lay person thinks of art in their consciousness, they would instantly think of all sorts of paintings on canvas. A riot of colours, human figures objects, vistas of nature, all these depicted on canvas would come to a lay person’s mind, when they think of art. Installation art of conceptual art is something that they lay viewer perhaps won’t associate with art at all. To him, a random set of objects or props kept or done up bizarrely being called art might not be so appealing, he/she might even have reservations against the idea of calling such a set up ‘art’ since there is no visual pleasure he derives.

Installation art began to make its presence felt in the Indian art scene 1970’s onwards. It drew its origins from conceptual art where the idea of the concept takes precedence over the technical and aesthetic aspects of art itself. It is a sort of an inversion of how we are taught to think about paintings wherein the work might or might not embody specific ideas of the artist. For some paintings, the artist starts with an idea and then spontaneity takes over. Or sometimes, the work displays the technical virtuosity of the artist. But the lay viewer, not so much aware of the techniques and mediums, appreciates the art work in their own way, drawing meanings out of it they can relate to. But in installation art or conceptual art, there is a well thought –out a priori concept, an idea and all objects in an installation are then just a means to execute that idea, that vision. So the art is rooted in the vision or the idea, all the arrangement and conclusion are made previously and implementation is an obligatory concern.

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The art world took notice of ‘installation’ art as a distinct genre in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp placed a Urinal in a gallery in 1917. The work titled ‘Fountain’ led to a raging debate over whether this qualifies as art at all. And while there was great controversy over submitting a an object of day to day, seemingly inconsequential mundane reality as an artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ definitely lay the foundations for the wider acceptance of installation art.

In India , installation art is becoming increasingly popular with many new and experimental art galleries promoting installation artists. The unique thing about installation art in India is that it becomes an exciting point of synthesis for critical ideas on politics, culture, society. It also offers exciting possibilities for the interplay of art with different genres like music, the written text, etc. An installation art show offers a viewer an intellectual experience in which art moves beyond the realm of offering sensory pleasure. The viewer can himself/ herself feel like an artist by trying to unravel the web of meanings around various installations. For example, a fairly recent exhibition titled ‘Phantom Limb’ at Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi curated by Meera Menez explored the sense of isolation, dislocation  suffered by people and communities across the world through photographs, paintings, written text on an artist’s personal wall as well as an installation of a brick wall. So the exhibition merged the written text, paintings, photographs as well as other objects to give the viewer that sense of the dislocation.

In India, many famous contemporary installation artists have been bringing to life objects of everyday use and have created a brilliant aura around these. Bharti Kher for example, uses Bindis, the quintessential item to Indian woman’s wardrobe to create gigantic installations of various kinds.
Kher makes use of bindis in a highly surreal fashion. Multi-coloured bindis in different shapes and sizes recur in concentric circles to create a seemingly chaotic universe, ironically self-contained in its very chaos. Kher’s bindi paintings and installations work at multiple levels. To begin with, the rich and vibrant colours draw in the viewer’s gaze strongly. And then, as one begins to look at the work closely, one gets to experience the magnanimity of the universe made of multiple bindus or focal points of energy as it were.

Then , there is the famous contemporary installation artist Subodh Gupta who is known for his monumental installations of  stainless steel. Gupta is specially known for bringing objects of a common person’s everyday life – things as ubiquitous as stainless steel utensils that are a common feature in every Indian household and creating gigantic, hyper-real installations out of the same. The novelty of Subodh Gupta’s work lies in the uniqueness of the idea. He is essentially making a statement by investing a thing as common as stainless steel utensils with an sort of magic realism almost, with a surrealism that makes these objects enter the discourse of  ‘art’. And this is where the uniqueness of conceptual art or installation art lies. It manages to create compelling myths out of mundane objects of day to day use, pretty much like what Bharti Kher does with bindis and Subodh Gupta with stainless steel utensils.

Although installation art has gained a great degree of legitimacy now as an art form, not all controversies surrounding it have died. There is the questions of ethics of artistic creation. The installation artists often don’t have to be at all involved with the implementation or the execution of the project, physically. That is, they can think of a concept, visualise the look, decide the materials and then hire people to set up the installation for them manually. This also gives them time to work on several projects together as they don’t have to be physically involved with the process of artistic creation. And this is precisely what comes across as problematic to many art practitioners. How can one be regarded as an artist if one is not at all directly involved in the process of creating an artwork? After all, the great artists have painstakingly studied so many different forms of paintings, sculptures, etc and physically laboured over their creations for years.  Great sculptors have also physically laboured over their sculptures and take enormous pride in that physical labour and technical perfection. Visual arts, if anything, has been, for a long time, a point of synthesis between the artist’s creativity and his/her technical genius. With genres such as installation or conceptual art, this is being totally challenged now. Would the new age artist be then solely the artist of ideas? Can everyone qualify as an artist if they have a great concept to execute, even if they know nothing or little of the formal knowledge of art? These are some difficult questions that art practitioners are still grappling with.

Rati Agnihotri