Petition for a New NGMA

I went to the Amrita Sher Gil retrospective at the NGMA, Mumbai, this morning. And had an experience that was disconcerting, to say the least. How is possible for one exhibition to leave me curious and interested, and incredibly annoyed, all at the same time? Here's how.  

The mounting of this show reveals a complete absence of imagination on the part of the curatorial team. Somewhere along the line, someone said (or thought) the following, and set events in motion accordingly. "Let's find a sparkling, provocative personality and a significant artistic influence and pay tribute to her. Let's structure her prodigious body of work chronologically because what other approach is there? Let's only have the most turgid, textbook curator-speak typed out on posters at the beginning of each section, and let's not include any other notes that may help give a viewer a perspective on the work or the artist as they walk through those sections. Let's use the same high-intensity lighting for all the works, so that some of them cannot be seen clearly, no matter what the angle. And right at the end of the show, to make up for the absence of detail along the way, let's gum up massive print outs of photos from the artist's life and quotes from her letters. Let's not worry about the fact that these print outs are unevenly pasted and ripping from the excess glue and would be approximately 10 times more interesting in context to, maybe, a painting." 

Just last weekend, I was so excited when I heard about this retrospective. Firstly, because I wanted to see more of Sher Gil's work, and secondly, because I was hoping it meant that the moribund NGMA, Mumbai was scraping its way back to relevance. As it so happens, this show is entirely in keeping with almost everything else the NGMA has served up under Rajeev Lochan's Delhi-based stewardship. Gone are the ambitiously mounted shows, the collaborations with international museums and galleries, the weekend and holiday art workshops for kids, the guided tours and the crowds. What we have instead are shows that pass through the city on their way across the country, interspersed only by repeated rearrangements of the institute's existing collections and virtually zero public engagement.  

Photo Credit: www.buzzintown.com

If this sounds like a rant, that's because it is. I remember how the NGMA used to be when it was run by Dr. Sarayu Doshi - collections by the great Indian modernists, the city's first brush with Picasso, with Egyptian exhibits from the British Musuem, with Italian post-modernism, with Fluxus, the sense that something new was happening here every month. Post the Cowasjee Jehangir Hall's restoration and inauguration, the NGMA was where many people in the city had their first brush with international art, with public exhibitions and with careful, thoughtful curation. Prior to this, the only themed multi-artist exhibitions I had seen were the RPG sponsored annual shows at the Jehangir Art Gallery. 

The NGMA Mumbai's decline since Dr. Doshi's departure has been steep and has remained unchecked in spite of some publicly aired misgivings. In the last five years, I can count the number of interesting shows I have seen here on the fingers of one hand - the TIFR's collection of modern Indian art (2011), a Bollywood and film themed exhibition celebrating a 100 years of Indian cinema (2012), and the Rabindranath Tagore and Homai Vyarawalla retrospectives (2013 and 2011 respectively). Most of these exhibitions were launched in Delhi and passed through Mumbai as a matter of form. Even the TIFR show can be attributed to the energies of the that institute's director, and not to any lapse into initiative at the NGMA. Girish Shahane made many of these points in a trenchant post written about 3.5 years ago. Since then, little has changed.

This is just not good enough for what is supposed to be a premier art space in the country's financial capital. Across the way, the stately Prince of Wales museum has reinvented itself. The Bhau Daji Lad has also been consistently and imaginatively engaging with the city's community since its overhaul. 

It seems the NGMA has witnessed the appointment of a new Director for Mumbai, a Mr. Shivaprasad Khened. But Mr. Lochan's shadow must loom large, because any signs of a new dispensation and new energies are conspicuous by their absence. Mumbai needs more cultural spaces and museums, but the present NGMA is doing us a disservice, occupying prime real estate and consuming public resources and giving back very little in return, other than subsidized rentals for theater groups during the Kala Ghoda Festival. I don't know who's paying attention, and I'll wager nobody is, but since the new government claims to be coming in with cleaning supplies and a big broom, maybe I'll drop them a tweet. Or two.  

Paintings, Prints and Ports

It isn't just me. Over the past year or so, the CSMVS (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) has significantly upped its game, hosting events, exhibitions, lectures and meet-and-greets with a frequency that is quite surprising to anyone familiar with its history as a worthy, but deeply sleepy institution. 

This morning, the first Sunday of the New Year, saw me at the Premchand Roychand Gallery, which is hosting "Flemish Masterpieces From Antwerp" till the 6th of February. Interestingly, it's a show presented by the Port of Antwerp in collaboration with the city's museums. Not the other way around. 

The curatorial intent is intriguing - an exploration of the intersection between ports and art, the unwitting role of wealthy merchants and traders in creating currency and cachet for an artist or a style, the popularization of art through innovations in print-making, the Biblical and religious underpinnings of 17th century landscape and still-life works. This is a lot of ground to cover, and the show works best if approached as a sort of 'tasting menu' of Flemish art. It provides just enough exposure to portraiture, genre paintings, still life(s) and the celebrated artists Rubens, Van Dyk and Brueghel to whet the appetite. 

The paintings attest to the ability of Flemish artists to work with light and with lush, sensuous brush-strokes. But linger over the prints, most of which are simply outstanding. Print-making and etching are incredibly demanding and unforgiving endeavors. Artists and craftsmen have to labor hard and long, and there is little room for error. I've always thought of a great print - one filled with texture, depth and movement - as something of a marvel. I'd wager that many of the prints in this exhibition (done after Rubens) match or possibly even outdo the original paintings and drawings. There are hunting scenes swirling with lions, crocodiles and a hippopotamus, families in repose, scenes of drunken debauchery and a luminous (yes, in print form) portrait of a grandmother and grandson holding a candle. 

Keep an eye out for an easy-to-miss nobleman's portrait, one whose flamboyant lines and bold lack of detail from the neck down are nothing short of provocative, given the time in which it was produced. Last, but not the least, spend some time with Gonzales Coques and Daniel Segher's 'Portrait of a man in a garland.' Hundreds of years later, the flowers in that garland look beautiful and vibrant enough to break off and take home. 

So don't let the unimaginative title of the show dissuade you. You'll come away impressed by the art, and dare I say it, by the Port of Antwerp.  

The Polymath As Painter

It is difficult, if not impossible, to visit the 'Last Harvest,' an exhibition of over 200 of Rabindranath Tagore's artworks, with a truly open mind. After all, one is talking about India's greatest polymath, a man equal parts poet, playwright, philosopher, cultural ambassador, educator, writer and humanist. His genius is authentic and undisputed. One hundred and fifty years after his birth, his ideas continue to resonate, his large body of work continues to move and to inspire. Surely, his paintings and sketches can be no different, even if the man himself was modest and diffident about them, describing his skill as limited and his interest as more of an indulgence, an infatuation? And so, one approaches the exhibition in a spirit of respectful curiosity. Critique is superfluous.

But I do have my opinions, and my overriding impression is that Rabindranath Tagore was not a great artist, but an interesting and significant one, although I would contend that at least some of the significance derives from the fact that Tagore was, well, Tagore. 

He started out making idiosyncratic doodles - forms in the margins of books, attempts to convert unseemly jottings and scratchings in his writing into larger patterns. His friend Victoria Ocampo encouraged him to pursue this fledgling interest and he eventually exhibited publicly in Paris in May 1930. His work was acclaimed,and travelled to other countries before being shown in Calcutta in 1931. 

This idiosyncrasy is evident in the first part of the exhibition - an aggregation of softly sinuous or severely angular forms rendered in pen, ink, pastels and watercolours. These are mostly fantastical creatures, monsters, flights of fancy that seem vaguely Asian or Polynesian, the substance of ancient art and old stories, simultaneously strange and familiar. The second part of the exhibition, devoted to inky landscapes, left me cold. The third and fourth parts - drawings of people, group scenes and faces - were the most rewarding. Tagore had a profound and sensitive understanding of character, drama and gesture and it's no surprise that all of the figures and faces in the exhibition express and emote. The women with their baleful eyes and elongated heads leave an indistinct, hazy impression, although there a couple of pen and ink drawings that are  so cleanly delineated and whimsical that they could almost have been drawn by another hand. 

Overall, the dark colour schemes, the smudgings, cross-hatchings and soft lines all combine to make you feel like you have wandered into a part of Tagore's mind where things are ideas are still suggestions and forms unresolved. Tagore spoke of his painting and sketching as having a rhythm and meaning that didn't require explanation. I'm not sure about the meaning, but there is a rhythm here - sibilant, soft, slow, serious and very occasionally, lilting. 

In his art, as in other spheres, he was modern before his time and by some accounts he catalyzed modern Indian art. When I look at his work I am reminded forcefully of KG Subramanyan's, and Subramanyan was himself a pioneer. Tagore was a titan before he picked up the paintbrush in his late sixties. And while his art does not build his genius, it does burnish it. 

Two Saturday Mornings, Mostly Well Spent

It's been a promising few weeks for art in Bombay. The art world's equivalent of a rockstar making his debut in the city, a festival of photography, more shows previewing than I could keep count of and several populating the weekly must-do/must-see lists of lifestyle magazines. As always, there was more that I wish I had seen than I could actually make the time for.

A Photograph is Not an Opinion - Contemporary Photography by Women

Curated by Sunil Gupta and Veeranganakumari Solanki, featuring multiple artists

March 14th - 27th, Terrace Gallery (at Jehangir Art Gallery)

Many photographers, many concerns - disease and death, the environment, the body, the passage of time and meaning, a woman's right to physical autonomy in public spaces, the burdensof conflict and loss that women bear, longings and explorations, the constitution of family, socialization, repression and coming of age, desolation and its conceits. Some works were overtly feminist, some less so, some perhaps not at all. There was a lot to see and to process. Multiple themes jostled together and what one eventually got was a glimpse of an artist's work rather than an articulation of a narrative, process or aesthetic. Full marks for breadth and for bringing a few lesser-known names (to me, at least) into the spotlight. But none too many for depth.

A Village in Bengal

Chirodeep Chaudhari

March 14th - 26th, Project 88

I'd seen one of Chaudhari's photographs from this exhibition in my morning newspaper. It struck me enough to have me venture out in the afternoon sun to see the complete show. Anyone who's been in Bombay over the last few days will acknowledge that that's no mean feat for a badly reproduced photograph to accomplish.

Chaudhari's show consists exclusively of images of the Durga Pujo his extended family celebrates in their ancestral home in rural Bengal. Taken over a span of 12 years, the pictures are an attempt to capture his family's history as it evolves, takes on new forms and transforms completely. It is also a story of the photographer's own acquaintanceship with a place that is significant, but not, a place that is not quite home, but not quite away. If you visit, flip through the accompanying coffee table book - A Village in Bengal - and read the artist's essay, which describes his process much more eloquently and clearly than I have.

Looking at the show does feel a little bit like looking at a family album, but in the best possible way. Intimate without being intrusive, these images are vividly personal and particular but also instantly recognizable, each evoking a mood or a moment the viewer could have experienced in a completely different context. And they're beautiful - fine-grained and detailed in a way a lot of photography no longer seems to be. Ripples, creases, gestures and pauses are all captured with skill, deliberation and without mawkishness. Craft that doesn't crumble under the weight of concern might be old-fashioned, but it will always get my vote, and this show has plenty of it.

Anatomy of Silence

Rakhi Peswani

11th February - 9th March, Guild

I never know quite what to make of the Guild. I can't predict what I'm going to see - works that are angry and shrill, confusing, thought-through or simply well-intentioned. Rakhi Peswani's show checks the last three boxes, some more vigorously than others. It's an interesting idea - the exploration of the hand-made and its associations with art, myth or more appropriately in this country, labour. As a supposedly evolving consumption society, we exoticize and fetishize the hand-made but do not often enough investigate its origins in the repetitive and exploitative. What price do we - or does someone - pay for our crafts? The best works are those that bring light to bear on the unnoticed and unacknowledged 'handmade-ness' of the mundane - handkerchiefs, washcloths, mattresses. The least effective are the quotes embroidered on limply hanging sheets of gauze/ chiffon/ something ethereal.

Poems I Used To Know

William Kentridge

6th February - 20th March, Volte

What can I say about this show that hasn't already been said? Kentridge is much celebrated and lauded, and anyone who pretends to have even the most cursory interest in contemporary art has been hot-footing it to Volte over the past few weeks. The show has been heralded as a coup for the gallery and the city and for once, the heralds seem to have gotten it right.

I haven't seen enough of Kentridge's work or its staging to be able to compare this show with his other triumphs, but the art is indisputably interesting and good. I am not me, the horse is not mine is the centerpiece. Part collage, part film, part performance, part text, it's ultimately a work about the absurdity of disavowal and the conditions that make it necessary. What gestures and words does one employ to distance oneself from one's own gestures and words? It's ultimately a futile exercise but one that produces interesting and amusing theater when performed on a large enough scale.

There's enough and more to see and lots of technique on display - hand woven wool, ink and charcoal drawings on pages torn from the Oxford Universal Dictionary, sculpture, lithographs, smaller sets of films. I didn't expect to have fun, but I did, especially when watching 'No, IT IS' (2012), a triptych of flipbook films. I suppose it's because I really enjoy looking at sketches and pen and ink drawings, and Kentridge has a lightness and deftness of touch that I wasn't expecting.

So go, make sure you look at everything, and come away feeling that you've spent your time well.

In Praise of Parsis

PARSIS

Sooni Taraporevala

March 6th - April 6th, 2013

I've studied for 12 years in a school run by a Parsi trust, been taught by Parsi teachers, grown up around Parsi friends, done the chicken-dance at Navjotes, attended accounting and French lessons in baugs and in the course of so doing, acquired the art of navigating said baugs while avoiding eye-contact with their resident eccentrics. I was taught Hindustani classical music for several years by a wonderful Parsi teacher named Zarine. She was already in her 70s when I started studying with her. But she didn't let her age, or the fact that she had been blind virtually her entire life, dissuade her from wearing floral printed saris and garas, pearls, perfume and a glittering colour-coordinated sari pin to every single lesson. She taught us entirely by ear and I cannot remember her repeating a single sari although of course, she must have. 

All of this is an extremely long-winded way of saying that I know Parsis, at least a little bit. And that I like them, a lot. So in visiting Sooni Taraporewala's exhibition, I thought - portraits of Parsis, what's not to like?

Plenty of paeans have been sung to this city's Parsis, all richly deserved, and this exhibition is an addition to the chorus. A community whose members are equal parts irascible, cantankerous, orderly, gregarious, boisterous, insular, sophisticated and crude; whose mighty contributions to Bombay and India are out of all proportion to its tiny numbers; increasingly lamented as dwindling in size and influence, but continuing to thrive regardless. I've realized that the rest of us think of Parsis affectionately, but in terms of stock 'roles' or 'types' - the flamboyant eccentric, the chic ingenue, the mummy's boy, the elegantly wasted, the pernickety store-owner, the protector and preserver of all-things-automobile, the piner for past (imperial) glories, the punter at the races, the teacher/ tormentor, the titan of art and industry. All of these characters are very much in evidence in the photographs, but so are others - mickey mouse boys, piano tuners, grandparents, pickle-purveyors, ladies catching up at street-corners in their big-print dresses. The exhibition, for me, is a pleasant pause - a reminder of a different (and better) city. 

It's all very pleasant and likeable. Though sometimes I wonder if we're doing Parsis a disservice by imbuing them with our nostalgia a little too soon, even though we can agree that the city and its other communities would be much the poorer without them. 

And for all the conversations I've been hearing lately about who is really from this city and when a person becomes of this city - here's one simple, innocuous question  that could help settle matters - do you know Parsis? Do you have a story about them? To qualify as a true-blue Mumbaikar, one with real roots here, you must. It almost goes without saying.  

Shilpa Gupta's Someone Else: Concern Meets Circuitry

Shilpa Gupta: Someone Else
Chemould Prescott Road
21st January - 16th February, 2012

This was a show about identities, boundaries, conventions and struggles, about lines that are drawn but must be crossed, about selves that are hidden, made and unmade, about compromises that are imposed on individuals. It was coherent and cohesive, with each art-work clearly articulating these themes.

But it was more interesting when read as a show about technique in the service of expression, about science and technology enabling art. Whether it was an interactive installation ordering the viewer to move backwards, forwards and stop! along a brick line facing a blank wall; whether it was a book heated to several hundred degrees Celsius and emitting a warning red glow; an airport flap-board asking tricky questions on loop -  neither of these works would have been as effective without all the wiring underpinning them.

The centre-piece of the show was an eponymous work comprising a hundred stainless-steel books, hollowed out with only the covers left behind. These covers were replicas of literary classics, with one small intervention - an explanation of why the author chose (?) to assume a pseudonym or camouflage some aspect of their selves. It's sobering to think of the price we continue to pay to be able to express an opinion or even a talent. The work I responded to most was 'Singing Cloud,' a massive form constituted of over 4000 microphones emitting a single sing-song lament. It loomed, exuding an energy of its own. And it must have taken a substantial amount of effort and skill to build and suspend.  

A show where concept met concern met circuitry. I left lugging a soap-bar embossed with the legend 'THREAT.' It now sits innocuously in my home, which is of course the point.  

  

Making Amends: Several Shows, Scattered Recollections

First, the caveats: This post is an attempt to make good on the commitment that I would engage more frequently with art and that I would document that engagement. I have forgotten more than I remember about all the shows discussed here. But having seen them, I still have something - tentative, succinct, partially accurate or otherwise - to say.

Atul Dodiya: 'bako exists. imagine'

Chemould Prescott Road

10th September - 20th October, 2011

Atul Dodiya is almost impossible to dislike. He is intelligent, sensitive, talented, willing to experiment, but also self-deprecating, humorous and approachable. A critic's artist, a collector's artist and a viewer's artist.

bako exists. imagine was one more in a long line of successful shows for Dodiya. It covered familiar ground but was also animated by ongoing personal concerns. There were cabinets jam-packed with references, almost like puzzles waiting to be put together; elements of autobiography; a recognizable visual style. There were also illustrations of Gujarati poet Labhshanker Thacker's fictions in which a young boy called Bako dreams of Mahatma Gandhi, fondly referred to as Bapu. There was something surreal about these visuals - renderings of renderings - and they weren't easy to navigate. The viewer felt removed, twice-over. But then, so too was Dodiya, who was examining his inner landscape as refracted through Thacker's work. The whole show was oddly discomfiting, but maybe that is to be expected when a real-world artist sets out to explore a fictional character's dreams of a defining historical figure.  

Balaji Ponna: 'Looking is not Seeing'

The Guild, Mumbai

September 8th - October 3rd, 2011

This was ostensibly a show about sub-text, in which words would intervene between the viewer and the work - creating a momentary disconnection, but ultimately framing the audience's interpretation of the work. In foregrounding sub-text, an artist essentially calls on the viewer to be conscious and aware of his or her responses, to look out for cues and contradictions. When a show hinges on semantics it's important that neither the words nor the work are literal. They cannot stand in for each other, they have to create space for (mis)interpretation.

But Balaji Ponna's works were the kind that left no room for doubt - either about his opinions or the intended meaning of the painting/sculpture/installation. One example would be paver blocks embossed with forms of sleeping men, meant to represent urban India's burgeoning homeless population. The work was entitled 'New Designs for our Country's Pavements.' When the substance is this apparent and overt, the sub-text is rendered irrelevant.    

Sudhir Patwardhan (Curator): The Art of Drawing

The Guild, Mumbai

October 2011

Drawing is the foundation for artistic skill. Most art students spend hours sketching, diligently seeking out scenes, subjects, angles, perspectives. Drawings also illustrate art-making, telling us where an artist comes from, how he sees, and why he ends up going where he does with his work. Drawings and scribbles are fascinating, and museums abroad mount special exhibitions dedicated to them. But they have fallen sadly out of fashion, particularly in Bombay's contemporary art 'scene.'

I must confess that I was happy just to see drawings in a gallery. There's something reassuring about pen and ink, just as there is something reassuring about making things with one's hands after hours spent tapping away at a keyboard or moving a mouse.

Because drawings are so intimately linked to an artist's process, it goes without saying that all drawings are different and that some work better than others. Gieve Patel's clouds, for instance, were ruminations. Sudhir Patwardhan's views of a street were definite but not beautiful - part of an exercise. Krishan Khanna's and Tushar Joag's sketches were cohesive, almost complete; others dream-like and disjointed. Whether these drawings succeeded as works depended almost entirely on how interested the viewer was in the artistic process, and what kind of process he sympathized with.  

Yardena Kurulkar: 'Transcience'

Gallery BMB

11th August - 7th September, 2011

Death and Life are part of a single cycle, each is meaningless without the other. It's interesting that we prefer to think of them as being distinct, apart: life is impermanent, uncertain, precious; death is the given we prefer not to contemplate. These were Kurulkar's concerns: not unique, but definitely weighty. In juxtaposing death and life, she had given herself the opportunity to convey something important and significant. 

Unfortunately, Kurulkar's works seemed less about exploring these juxtapositions and more about describing decay. Mottled heads and limbs, rotting bodies; black lines fading into whiteness and then nothingness - this was a show that emphatically reminded its viewers that not only is death inevitable, it also leaves us looking rather the worse for wear.

Sheeba Chhachhi: 'Luminarium: A Prelude'

Volte

13th June - 1st August 2011

Sheeba Chhacchi's works glowed. Sophisticated, complex, layered, drawing on current affairs, myth and history, they were a delight to decode. Looking back, I realize that what was most interesting about her show was not the visual detail nor the multiple references or even the technology - it was the pace of the installations.

Each installation moved at a certain speed, and in order to 'see' and 'understand,' viewers had to make associations and align themselves to the movement of birds across a landscape. This reorientation, facilitated by a specially designed soundtrack, yielded its own rewards. People slowed down, they looked closely, they took their time. There really was no other way to satisfactorily experience Chhachhi's show. It takes a special kind of skill and attention to detail to merit that kind of effort. Chhachhi's success lay in getting viewers to look and linger.