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The Author is dead, Long Live the Author
Vivan Sundaram |
Young art critic Akansha Rastogi talks to the noted artist Vivan Sundaram about his installations and new media works. She takes a viewer’s position and tries to elicit lucid but critical answers from the artist. In this crisp interview Vivan opens up his views on installation art.
Akansha Rastogi: Lets begin with the installation art-genre itself. Its mortality and outreach in comparison with painting and sculpture is my immediate concern. As an artist, what was the need to explore several mediums? And, what was the starting point?
Vivan Sundaram: Installation is sculpture in the expanded field/ physicality. Earlier sculpture was an object of one material, and in an installation it is not a unified whole. It came down to floor, on different planes. The work is around the audience. The viewer enters into it and experiences its totality as architecture only after walking through that space. Installation could be anywhere, could be anything, with certain logic of its own.
Installation art offered me lot of possibilities to address large range of issues, which painting as a medium did not. Working in one medium becomes an ease. Each time new medium would allow me new locations. The art-work is enriched and becomes so complex. I start so many things as handicap, from other’s inputs and child like innocence. My constant endeavor is to work against any image of myself. Sometimes it is programmed, sometimes it is not.
Another aspect that interests me about installation art-practice is its assorted nature. I end up collaborating with architects, school children, craftsmen, manufacturers - people with different set of skills.
AR: You have done site-specific works, like the ‘Journey towards Freedom’ at Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata in 1997. Does this ‘short-life’ of the art-work bother you?
VS: I don’t hold this view that installation art is only site-specific, and thus stuck to one part. It can be taken to different locations, reconfigured by removing certain items from it, and elements can be re-positioned in relation with the whole. The entire point is representation has to be re-interpreted if the location changes. My exhibition ‘Memorial’ in 1993 at IFAC is traveling. It is something that can be packed, and re-presented according to the gallery space, and each time it is different from the last time you saw it. This is the fun of installation-art.
The site-specific installation gets destroyed the moment it’s created. I wrote on the dome of the Victoria Memorial Museum for the show. Now, it exists only as a document. It’s after-life is only translation into another medium, which is a documentary video etc.
AR: I want to know the market-dynamics of Installation art, i.e. how art-market responds to it?
VS: Installation-art is related to space and architecture, and cannot be presented directly as a concept of consumption like a painting. It works in a public domain. It is not bought by the private collector unless the collector has a space to exhibit. Aspects of installations are public in nature, and Museums should be accepting it as an art-object. Site-specific involves sponsorship. My ‘Memorial’ was bought by a private collector. Apart from conceptual frame, Installations require some financial backing.
Now, the ‘direct-consumption’ has under went change, i.e. the circulation of art as a commodity and its relationship with money has changed. The work of art need not have immediate ‘sale-value’. The market is becoming more inclusive. Radical collectors like Anupam Poddar are buying what is outside auction scene, outside the benchmark.
AR: Your works are often referred as “mini museums”, with heavy details of an organized space, which is meant to produce meanings. I wish to take this label at its extreme and henceforth, this statement can also be articulated as your art-works being reclusive, or are insulated. They do not share a familiar vocabulary. Doesn’t this put your works in a vulnerable position of being rejected and overlooked, the way museums are treated?
VS: Museum in the 21st century is a complex organism. They have acquired energy, interact with the public, and are not a passive container. The 19th century Museum buildings had so many stairs as if entering an altar. Now, it’s just the glass divide between public and art. This is more so in Europe. Culture is a matter of education, familiarity and registering into the unconscious. Museums offer all this as a socialized space – hanging out, cafeteria etc. My point is that the concept of Museum is not a static one, it’s a changing relationship and that is what public demands. Demands are put on NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art). It cannot have the same look as it has since 40 years.
It is human nature to reject the unfamiliar. We are generically conservative. Art produces new generation and the new generation produces art. Impressionists paintings were not accepted initially and questioned by salon realistic art. Same way in the 1990s when Installation art had begun to make a ground, senior artists of the country commented that it is western influenced art, etc.
AR: As an art-practitioner operating in the public domain, what is the ‘degree of awareness’ you exercise. By the ‘degree of awareness’ I mean the transaction between the socio-political issues and your art. Do they become the initiator/ inspiration of the art-project, or get roped in between the process of artistic manifestation.
VS: My works move over an expansive domain including social-political-historical. The struggle really is how each agenda is put through in my works, the socio-political events get translated. When I am homing on an image, the art-works definitely gets informed during the process of creation. What interests me is how the viewer discovers new meanings.
AR: Re-contextualizing forms an important part of your artistic process. You disfigure, disembody or to say it loud – you deconstruct ‘the given’, like ‘The SHER-GIL archive’. Does this new frame or re-worked frame self-conscious? How critical is it in nature? I feel the resultant of re-contextualization at once seems bizarre and very shocking. The renewed relations/ communication developed amongst the object reflect a dialogue on the third level which is resonant of the older version that lays latent underneath but very much readable.
VS: In ‘The SHER-GIL archive’, everything is fake but looks real/ original. An archive is a repository. But the moment it’s fake, it’s a new form, proposing a new content. A Family Album gives factual information about who is who. I tried to generate new meanings from the past. How do one break out of the nostalgic mode. You take the viewer back into the past, and then also forward, simultaneously. From a lie you make a truth, convincing the viewer that it’s worth looking at.
A photograph is a moment recorded. In my photo-montages, ‘Re-take of Amrita Shergil’, this moment never took place. Viewer initially accepts because they do not look manipulated. This play allows me to engage in narrative of the subject. Amrita Shergil is an iconic figure. Her personality also determines her art. She was a beautiful woman, died early, and led a promiscuous life. I tried to indulge and contribute to the mythology of her persona. The title ‘Re-take’ refers to a still from the films, to past unfolded. In that still image there is always a tension between past, present and future moments. What may happen next? My medium – Digital - in that sense helped me to flash back and retell the story, and look through the old material, approach an already existing image in a different manner.
AR: What do you think of the role of an artist as the producer of imagery, and thus also producer of meaning. Post-modern theories claim the artist as not the sole owner of meaning as explicated in famous quote – “Author is dead”.
V S: Meaning emanates from the form, the images, and is of course related to the intentionality of the artwork and the artist. But, the viewer also invests into the production of meaning. Earlier, to cull out the meaning that artist propagates was the object of an art-critic/historian. Yes, now the notion of authorship is marginalized; author as a single, unique genius, controlling the work of art is gone. Dismantling of authorship comes from the ‘idea’, when ‘idea’ gains primacy. When you provoke the idea in the audience, they not just see what they see. The viewers today have different lenses, apparatus, and range of experience.
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