In history some deaths are events and some others are not.
Deaths can never be farcical because they don’t occur a second time for the
same person; some deaths are enacted twice for legal-economic reasons. We are
talking about normal deaths. Looking at the social media response towards the
death of artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff aka Christo, it seriously feels a
notch less than being an event. Things were not the same with Maya Angelou and
Marquez; people all over the world had gone crazy with affected grief
disseminated like a mocking virus. Christo, the Belgium born French artist was
an artistic phenomenon like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys though he has never
been celebrated like the former duo.
It would be interesting to see the impact and influence of
Christo among the Indian artists. Till mid-1990s, art historical information
and the details regarding contemporary experiments with art in the West and the
powerful Eastern countries like China were a highly guarded secret in the
Indian art scene. Affluent and lucky seniors were able to travel abroad and
could get firsthand information about contemporary art. The catalogues that
they had brought to India were treated like top secrets. By the second half of
the same decade the impact of globalization was slowly seeping in; in the case
of art it was through the libraries.
(Wrapped Coast)
Two books made available to the major libraries in India,
namely Janson’s History of Modern Art and Hans Werner Holswarth’s ‘ ‘Modern
Art’ published by Taschen, a German publishing house started in 1980 giving a
tough competition to the till then unrivalled British art publishing house
Thames and Hudson, established in 1949. These two books covered modern western
art from Impressionism to mid-1990s along with the monographs and the art
movement based studies published by both Phaidon and Thames and Hudson. It was
in these books for the first time that the Indian artists came across the works
of Christo.
Oil painting was seriously challenged at that time by the
youngsters and many were greatly influenced by the works of Duchamp and Beuys.
Still the galleries and other art establishments were not ready to shake off
the grip of the oil painting genre, and had considerably controlled the meagre
art market that they themselves were instrumental in making. Young art
graduates were converging in Delhi and Mumbai and were seeking opportunities to
practice alternative art. The economics of art market was still a hard nut for
them to crack and the only way left to them was to challenge that economy both
in theory and practice. Inspired by the theories of conceptual art, ephemeral
art, happening art, process art and the early beginnings of performance art
heavily documented in the above -mentioned books, the contemporary artists started
meandering through the world of ephemeral art and conceptual art; perhaps that
was the starting point of installation practice in India.
(Wrapped Reichstag’ (1995)
Robert Smithson, Christo, Hans Hacke, Vito Acconci, Chris
Burden, Anne Menderita, Marina Abromovic, Richard Lang, Tony Crag, Richard
Long, Anselm Keifer, John Baldasseri, Meret Oppenheim, Richard Serra and so on
were the most inspiring figures and it was seriously difficult for the artists
to emulate any of those artists within the given socio-economic and cultural scenario.
A proper milieu and platform were needed but the extreme grip of the art market
did not allow any of these conceptual works to be displayed in their galleries.
Hence, the young artists had to live a double life; day time painters and night
time conceptual artists. Christo could have been the easiest one to mimic but
such mimicry would have landed the artists in the hands of law for the ruling
conservative environment.
The most attractive part of Christo was his gradual
progression in art that he had started with his French wife and collaborator
artist, Jeanne Claude. The available images and information regarding Christo’s
work were the ‘Wrapped Coast’ (1969), Valley Curtain (1970), Running Fence
(1972), The Umbrellas (1984-1991) and so on. His masterpiece, ‘Wrapped
Reichstag’ (1995) came after a prolonged legal fight with the German parliament
for almost 12 years. A book detailing the legal proceedings of the twelve years
were published in a book form and it was made available in the Central Lalit
Kala Akademi library. This was a major source of inspiration along with a
monograph on the life and works of Hans Hacke. Artists could allow themselves
to be influenced by those artists from the conceptual stream who did material
based works that could have been contained in the galleries. Vivan Sundaram is
a pioneering figure in the installation art in India while N.N.Rimzon could
ideate in the line of Tony Crag and Richard Lang, a few emerging feminist
artists could think in the lines of Abromovic and Carole Schneemann. Artists
like late Shantanu Lodh and Inder Salim started performing like Vito Acconci
and Chris Burden.
(The Umbrellas (1984-1991)
None dared to go in the path opened up by Robert Smithson
though some bold attempts were done by an artist named Umesh Madanahalli whose
earth based action, process and performance pieces were a new breakthrough in
Indian art in the late 1990s. Land and environment art became a fad later on in
the new millennium with the art market opening up globally and letting the
Indian art reach new heights. Christo still was an enigma for the Indian
artists. Christo’s Umbrellas in Japan and the US could have inspired Antony
Gormley to do his Horizon Field Project in Austria. In India none touched
Christ using the same aesthetical mode. But his methodology was largely
followed till one artist came up and did something similar to Christo but in a
miniature scale.
(Horizon Field by Antony Gormley)
Christo started covering up objects and houses and later on
huge buildings; the progression was gradual and the engineering involved was phenomenal.
Christo-Jeanne Claude liked changing the familiar into unfamiliar. He made
everything an obscure object of desire. In obscurity there were aesthetics and
a threat; a challenge and an incomprehensible phenomenon. The covering process
itself was quite challenging but the process defined his art than the covered
up object. It was a sort of impermanent art which could exist only in documents
and photographs. He rendered his art a sort of de-commodified anti-art. He
needed funds to make his art and he couldn’t have sold his works to any
collector for their sheer de-objectified nature. But patrons thronged up to
support him for the challenge was universal and once in a life time
opportunity.
(Les Moulins by Shilpa Gupta)
Following Christo in his methodology was Subodh Gupta whose
works using cast bronze or aluminium started off in a small but human scale
only to grow in size as the years progressed. Gupta’s idea was make the obvious
more obvious yet strange for their sheer shock value and curiosity. Christo was
definitely not attempting to shock but making the impossible relent. There was
something Promethean and Hemingwayesque about Christo’s works. But Gupta’s are
products that challenge the viewers with their unnatural thingness. Then came
another Gupta, Shilpa Gupta. She covered the objects confiscated by the airport
security personnel with band-aid clothes, erasing their brand and use values.
One could see and feel the shape but couldn’t have used or experienced. The
experience remained in the very act of seeing it. Shilpa Gupta was Christo-like
here in this body of works but she moved away from it as she had taken it as a
one off project, perhaps less lucrative as far as the market was concerned.
(Installation by Subodh Gupta)
Covering the objects and obscuring the identity, as an
artistic strategy was not entirely new with Christo. In art, the Indian artists
had previous encounters with the works of Georgio de Chirico and Rene Magrette.
Encounters with the works of Philip Guston, Otto Dix and George Gross also had
given some idea of masking the faces and obscuring the identities in their
paintings. Henry Moore’s sculptures also had given the viewers a sense of
wrapped up sculptures during the major part of the 20th century. Imagine
someone in India attempting a Christo act in the art scene. First of all it would
be treated as a criminal act; even if it is not taken so, it would take many of
years for people to even recognize a wrapped object as a work of art. We should
not forget that these are the days we see a lot of Christo works in real time;
the black body bags in the corridors of Covid-19 hospitals.
-
JohnyML
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