Earlier this week, I participated in a short and informal discussion about how art is often the product of an interaction between multiple actors. Institutions such as museums, galleries, auction houses and workshops are not mere receptacles for art, or sites dedicated to its ‘display.’ They are active agents that are complicit in granting or denying artworks a measure of legitimacy, value and credibility. We concluded that the artist and the work are only a small part of a larger picture composed of the prevalent zeitgeist, political imperatives and personal proclivities.
The conversation brought to mind my own encounters with galleries in Bombay. Art galleries, and not museums, are where I have had my first encounters with art – they are amongst the most accessible venues offering a quick overview of the city’s contemporary art practices. While our museums are affordable and informative in their own right, one visits them to understand how things used to be, not to see how things are or might be in future.
I thought it would be interesting, for once, to look past the art and at the galleries instead. After all, these are spaces with their own legacies and histories. I have picked three well-known venues that I believe are tracing very different paths for themselves at the moment.
Decline: The Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda
Before a slew of private galleries and exhibition spaces began to mushroom around Bombay, the ‘Jehangir’ was where artists big and small, reputed and unknown, exhibited their works. Jehangir has played host to just about anyone and everyone – Hussain, Ram Kumar, Bhupen Khakhar, John Fernandes, Milburn Cherian, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gujral, Paresh Maity, the lavishly mounted RPG shows curated by Harsh Goenka, student exhibitions, page-3 painters. Artists waited years to show their works here – and viewers showed up week after week, confident in the knowledge that they would find something worthwhile to look at. And the Jehangir was truly a ‘public’ art gallery – no entrance fees, no discreet doorways that made you wonder whether visitors, were, in fact welcome. It was very easy to walk into a show, up to the artist, and ask questions. Believe me – my sister and I did this repeatedly, once asking Laxman Shreshtha silly things like – “Why is there a big patch of red on this canvas?”
While the setting continues to remain low-key and no-frills, it seems as if almost everything else has changed. It has been a long, long time since I have seen a memorable show here. The last time I visited, parts of the ground floor were littered with debris. The authorities are apparently renovating the structure, but I failed to see any significant changes. To add insult to injury, the art on display was poorly executed and haphazardly selected. A sorry state of affairs for what was once, indisputably, the city’s most important and prestigious art gallery.
Transformation: (erstwhile) Bodhi, Kala Ghoda
The space that Bodhi once occupied has had many avatars – restaurant, showroom, abandoned real estate. So it’s fitting that the contemporary art gallery was itself replaced by something ‘au courant’ – an Italian furniture design studio.
Bodhi imploded after the recession in 2008, but it was one of those galleries that had a tangible impact on the Indian art ‘circuit.’ Lavish launches, dizzying prices, the best artists, high quality and interesting work, international outposts – Bodhi was an ambitious, bold, and by some accounts, brash venture whose influence was out of all proportion to its short existence. I have seen some excellent shows here, and, like many others, I was disappointed when the gallery shut down.
When I passed by the space and saw that it was clearly functional once again, I was curious to see what was on offer. I found elegant and expensive Italian furniture, clearly targeted at consumers with a surplus of taste and income. What I liked most about the design studio was its use of the space itself – large windows, expanses of trees, roominess, interspersed with some interesting (and not so interesting) design. Neither an ideal, nor a preposterous successor to the previous occupant.
Re-invention: Coomaraswamy Hall, Kala Ghoda
Nestled in the grounds of what was once known as the Prince of Wales Museum, the Coomaraswamy Hall is named after the great scholar-curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. The hall abuts a quaint curator’s cottage – it has whitewashed walls, tall ceilings, old-school fans, and potted palms at the entrance. Call me fanciful, but everything about this space evokes a quieter, bygone era.
Evocations aside, the Coomaraswamy Hall is easily one of the more dynamic exhibition venues in the city. In the course of fairly infrequent visits here, I have been lucky enough to see Dutch still-life paintings, century old antiques, German photography, silk saris and Indian handicrafts. Most recently, the Hall exhibited Tarun Tahiliani’s collection of trousseau saris from the Delhi Couture Week. I was very keen to visit, not so much to see the saris themselves, but to see fashion in a museum – a promising juxtaposition that our curators and bureaucrats have long resisted.
The Coomaraswamy Hall is quiet, unassuming and indiscriminate – characteristics that are likely to keep it going strong for some time yet. It’s easy to find the unexpected (good or bad) over here. It is a space that is always re-inventing itself, perhaps unwittingly so. Which is why I like to go back every once in a while.
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