(a work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres)
“Make your work as complicated as possible,” said a
comparatively senior woman artist to an up and coming artist. The inflow of
money unexpectedly in those days had given him this permanent expression of confusion
on his face. Not hiding the puzzlement he asked politely why it had to be so. “Be
specific about your work and its display,” she continued, “so they will invite
you to the venue of exhibition for installing your work and you know what that
means! That means you can travel with your works.” He gazed at her face
unbelievingly. “Don’t look at me like that,” she told him. “What I say is truth
and that’s how travel all over the world.” He thought about it. Yes, she did
travel to various art destinations with her works. Though none knew about her
works, everybody knew that she was travelling. And if you travelled in those
days, you were thought to be a great artist.
You don’t be puzzled like the young artist in our story. I
mean by ‘those days’ the days of our art market boom. Sky was the limit for the
artists. Someone in some small town in India once got enough recognition for
him and his works decided to make a building with iron pieces welded together.
He was lucky enough to push it out of the fabricator’s facilities. There were
many in those days of market collapse who couldn’t take their works out of the
fabricators’ premises. One day, it would be interesting to think about curating
a show of such works that still remain in crates at the factories either with
no takers or in dispute with the fabricator himself. Yes, those days were such
wonderful days when the Indian artists could travel all over the world. The
openings of the exhibitions were star studded affairs where not only wine and
cheese flowed but there flew kisses and hugs thick and fast. But everyone was
not so lucky to have travelled the world. Their works were simple, as in
paintings, sculptures, affordable installations, video art and so on. Nobody
had serious thought about it body performances in those days. One good thing
about performance art is that you have to travel to perform it anywhere in the
world. But all the performance artists are not invited everywhere. You need to
make a name for yourself not only with your performance but with your ability
to exotic-ize it, speak of it in obscure terms often mixed with spiritual
jargon and express yourself in good English. If you don’t have any such thing
with you, try and get a foreign girl friend or boyfriend. But as you know, all
of you are not that lucky in that department.
(artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres)
Forget it. Let’s focus on the conversation between the
mid-career globe-trotting female artist and the novice who had just found some
success, some money and a lot of ambition. What she told him on that day says a
lot about the attitude of the artists who made themselves precious. It was
quite understandable that your works travelled and you couldn’t because your
works were too easy to be handled. Handling in art means, the work-boys in the
galleries who generally assist the curators should find it easy to fix it on
the wall or on the floor as per the demand and design of the curators. And
curators in turn are often instructed by the artists themselves though emails,
chats or over phone calls. Sometimes they exchange the design through
photographs or diagrams. Today, with the advanced communication technologies,
one could make a real time video chat with the artist sitting elsewhere in her
studio. But travelling makes a lot of difference. Travelling on the one hand
helps the artists get a good exposure to the world, the art scene elsewhere,
visit museums, make friends and create networks. Networking is one important
thing to be successful in the art scene in any part of the world.
However, it is not necessary for any artist to be invited to
the gallery only because his/her work is in a group show or part of a
curatorial project. If the gallery is out of the country it becomes rather
difficult. But the boom days where the days when money lost its real value; it
became a part of the show off. Given a chance the artists all over the world
would have lit their cigarettes with burning dollars or pounds. But as Indians
always had this auto-moneychanger built into their brains they wouldn’t have
done such thing. A dollar in Indian rupees counts a lot. They in fact had not
seen such things in their lives. So it became a norm most of the times for the
galleries to invite a flock of artists to be a part of the vernissage or to be
humble, the opening ceremony. See, one had to be in that elite lot to get
invited. Being an artist not always was a passport to travelling. But then some
clever people like the lady whom we met at the beginning devised a way that it
became imperative for the curators to get the artist in situ to complete the display.
It may be a question of a thread running across frame. It could be forty five
degrees or forty seven degrees. But what about a degree that only the artist
could figure out? Then the artist has to be there in the gallery during the
display. This curatorial pressure was not really minded by the cash rich
galleries then. They invited the artists without much ado. Once you travelled you
could not only put your work in forty six point three three degrees but also could
travel to the museums and do a lot of networking.
(work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres)
I am extremely clear about this thing happening in those
days not just because I was a part of the traveling contingent of the artists
and experts or simply being a cheer leader depending on from what side you
would like to have seen your own place in the traveling group but also because
I had faced it first hand in one of the shows curated by me in a Delhi gallery.
I wouldn’t reveal the name of the artist. The artist had sent a diagram. A few
threads had to run across a frame which would create some shadows falling on
the main body of the work or rather some part of the work. In those good old
days, to pre-empt the artists vagaries, arrogance and at times stupidity, the
gallerists had created a particular post called ‘exhibition designers’. Anyone
with some knowledge about design, electricity, projection, electronics and
basic arrogance to shout at anybody or get the works done, could have become an
exhibition designer. Hardly Indians became exhibition designers. Often jobless
mechanics, engineers and ex-museum hands used to be flown in from Europe. It
was exactly like having white girls at a farm house reception for a billionaire’s
marriage party, which would boost up your status several notches (even you
could read it as the Empire strikes back). They simply would stand there at the
gate and say ‘na-ma-ste’ and put vermillion marks on the guests’ foreheads.
That’s all. Imported exhibition designers did not do anything more than this.
In my exhibition, fairly funded, I did not look for a
foreign hand as exhibition designer. We got an Indian lady to do the needful.
She would say that this couldn’t be exhibited here or that had to be thrown out
etc. But eventually she would place it where exactly I had suggested. Then we
came to the complicated work sent by the artist from Mumbai. We followed the
design to the T. Once the exhibition designer herself was satisfied, the funder
took a photograph and sent to the artist. The artist gave a green signal. She
was even offered a ticket to fly into do a double check. She did not come
either for the display or for the opening ceremony. But she did visit the show
on the third day or so with some foreign friends. Then I got a call from my
gallerist friend saying that the artist was screaming at him and in the absence
of the curator, was remembering his parents and their lineage etc. Her
complaint was that the threads were not in the right place! She wanted to be
out of the show. She wanted the label to be removed and the gallerist made it
clear that she was no longer a part of the show. He consulted with me and as I
excelled in defiance asked the gallerist to remove the label and declare her to
be out of the whole thing, and he did it promptly. Eventually the whole thing
had snowballed into an ugly fight where the important gallerists were pitted
against the curator.
(work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres)
Artists did a lot of mean things in those good old days just
to travel and put the other artists many leagues behind in snobbishness. I
remembered this when I was reading a conversation between the conceptual artist
Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Let me quote them to give a clear
picture and how the intelligent artists approach this issue of ‘one inch left
and two inches right’ business of the conceptual artists:
Hans Ulrich Obrist: So it is very different from most
conceptual or minimal art where there are certificates that are used as control
tools.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Yes, I don’t have that phobia of the
two inches. You know: ‘If a work is two inches to the left, you have to destroy
the work!’ No, that is just that big thing from the 1960s; they were
constipated. I always say, ‘Honey, take a bow and relax, no big deal, two
inches, three inches.’ But it is funny because when I send this stuff to
museums, art handlers and historians have a hard time deciding what to do with
them. They keep faxing us back saying, ‘What do we do with this thing?’ and we
keep faxing them back saying, ‘Whatever you want!’ and they just don’t believe
it. They say, ‘This cannot be true!’
HUO: They would rather refuse the liberty that you offer to
them?
FG-T: Right- they want the traditional conceptual
instruction saying ‘five inches to the left, six inches to the right and then
two-two feet down,’ and I say, ‘No, you do whatever you want. You are
responsible for the construction of the piece. IIN the same way, I tell the
viewer, ‘You are responsible for the final meaning…”
Our artists were not like Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the boom
days. They are still not like that. Only difference between then and now is
that now nobody is inviting them to in the gallery/museum during the installation
of the works.
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