The Close View

A woman in a white kimono is eating an orange tree in Okhla—and no one is impressed. Gimmicky acts like a painting slated to self-destruct over three days (Muhammad Zeeshan of Latitude 28) and Priyanka Chaudhury’s live performance (‘How to become the Lemon Butterfly’), wherein she mimicked an insect that destroys citrus plants, green juices artfully dribbling down her garment, were among several works that were more annoying than sublime at this year’s India Art Fair (IAF), just held in Delhi from 29 January to 1 February. If you are a regular visitor to the annual art extravaganza, full of VIPs and schoolchildren, you may have been a little disappointed by the lack of real provocation in the fair’s seventh edition. Perhaps a reminder that IAF, founded by Neha Kirpal in 2008, has always been primarily about business; about buying and selling, curating and advising, as opposed to more practice-oriented and participatory events like the Kochi Muziris Biennale, to which it is increasingly being compared.

But look close and you will find much that is pleasing, if not revelatory. The fair’s real delights were meaty and accessible, often more traditional. Valay Shende’s ‘Virar Fast—Mumbai Local’, using sculptures made of metal pellets to create an eerie installation of men hanging off an imaginary bus, had visitors constantly crooking their hand around those metal hands, sympathetically. Paresh Maity’s outdoor installation of ants, headlights serving as their antennae, was as successful as its neighbour, Veer Munshi’s falling- over house. And ‘Include Me Out II’, Vivek Vilasini’s subversion of a crowded South Indian temple, which bears a whole village of people on its facets instead of gods, made viewers grin.

“I always enjoy the IAF,” says designer Peter D’Ascoli, of Delhi’s Talianna Studio. “The fact that in fifty or one hundred years most of what we see today will be consigned to the trash bin should not dissuade us from participating in and enjoying contemporary art. Though I often struggle with ‘conceptual art’ that is disconnected from the pursuit of beauty or does not transmit sensory values except when accompanied by words of explanation.”

No such explanations were required for much of what was special at the Fair. Volte Gallery’s ‘Based Upon’, a shiny metallic map of India created by a group of artists, was quietly magnetic, like Valay Gada’s ‘Real Gold’ at Mumbai’s The Loft, an elaborate golden tree exploding with pointed flowers, made of brass painted with polyurethane paint . Similarly, several dramatic photographs from Iran lifted the display at Delhi’s Art Heritage, including one from Babak Kazemi’s riveting series featuring women wrapped in carpets. A gorgeous panorama staging the dramatic scene of a crime from Azadeh Akhlaghi, the woman who became famous for a series called ‘By an Eyewitness’, restaging infamous murders in Iran, also thrilled viewers. The Delhi Art Gallery’s straightforward exhibition offered a nice, clean baseline, with its retrospective of over a thousand works of modern Indian art, together with collateral events such as the classic-filled Rameshwar Broota show around masculinity opening at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art the night before the IAF preview.

There were some rare finds, so close yet so far from home; a Krishen Khanna print from a Japanese collection, whose original lies in the Holocaust Museum in Israel. It was displayed by the Grosvenor Gallery, which also displayed Olivia Fraser’s elegant new Kundalini series—just the right amount of India-inspired. And Latvian entry Art Gallery 21 offered some of the most special works, like other international galleries choosing to represent more Indian work than international. It featured quiet beauty from Anita Arbidane, whose wistful painting of a woman with a swan is haunting—and a striking showpiece by Delhi’s own Krishna Murari. ‘Her’ features a sinewy, fur-covered hunter figure, its hand on the lever of the sewing machine that forms its head, a hail of scissors hanging off a pelt: an alarming combination of cautionary statement and declaration of pride. One of the most thought-provoking pieces at IAF, it came to Delhi via Riga.

Photography, that stepchild of the art fair, was represented through stalwarts like Dayanita Singh, Sebastian Cortes and Gauri Gill. Talented newer photographers are hard to come by, generally, but a few made it over. Kolkata’s Ronny Sen loves it when people take selfies with his work; “It’s almost like they want to have it with them,” he said. At Rs 35,000 for the first print run, his prints were probably the cheapest work available at the fair.

Around 80,000 plus visitors were recorded , and sales were up from the previous year by approximately 25 per cent, the IAF team reported. It registered an increase of new buyers from second-tier cities and artists from second and even third-tier towns. “We had the largest number of buyers under 30 in the last seven editions, the youngest being 8 years old,” said Wol Balston, director of the India Art Fair’s public relations team. “There is a significant trend of younger artists and younger collectors emerging. And the top 2 per cent of collectors collectively spent over Rs 30 crore at the fair. Faith is slowly returning to the contemporary market, but cautious purchases at low to mid segment values.” A lot of Indian art, it reported, went to buyers from Doha, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, New Zealand and Australia, and sales were focused on this segment of the market, to the disappointment of gallerists showing international work.

“The India Art Fair continues to be a world-class fair even though the focus is 90 per cent India,” says Premala Matthen of London-based ArtTactic, an art market analysis firm which reported a 34 per cent increase in Indian art market confidence in December. “There continues to be a full ‘VIP culture’, but there is also talk of democratising fine art, engaging the public domain and increasing the social value of art. The announcement of the India Arts Council [a group of leading patrons, decision-makers and influencers for the management of the arts] is a big step.”

Entrants like Barcelona’s Galeria Joan Gaspar were encouraged to visit for the first time, selling limited edition Miros and Picassos as well as relatively affordable work by upcoming artist, Miguel Rasero (in the vicinity of Rs 3 lakh). “There are new attitudes and customers here. In Europe, in Barcelona, it’s much the same,” said the gallery’s director, Joan Gaspar. “But [contemporary] Indian art seems very influenced by the West.” His quibbles were mostly about the lack of internet connectivity, which stymied sales; like those of other international participants.

The Fair counted around a 100 international museum group visitors, including the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, but these visitors were markedly more low- profile than in previous years. Equally palpable was the absence of set and exhibition designer Sumant Jayakrishnan’s brilliant threads of colour, which lit up previous editions of the fair. What was certainly in evidence was the ‘highest corporate patronage’ IAF also mentioned in its roundup, up by 30 per cent from last year and loudly displayed in brand labels all over the fair, calling to mind Krishna Murari’s ‘She’, also on display at Art Gallery 21: a dark female form with a bar code on one leg and its corresponding numbers on another, a box-shaped house for a head and a TV screen face.

Some local gallerists enjoyed the new enthusiasm of the crowd. “Six or seven of Jogen [Chowdhury] have already gone out of fifteen, three Satish Gujrals, already more than last year,” said Vikram Bachhawat of Kolkata’s Aakriti Gallery (a Delhi branch opened six months ago), on the second day of the fair. “In fact, I have seen a change in pattern. Earlier, people would come and depend on others—another gallery, or an art dealer, or a self-proclaimed expert—and bargain and buy it. Now, they take their own decisions. Most of the work we have sold on the spot; maybe they have given up on third party expertise. If your buyer is knowledgeable, it’s easier to sell.”

The fair is also the kind of space which includes discussions of bibliophilia in art history, as presented by Asia Art Archive representatives: talks by Christie’s Amin Jaffer and The Gujral Foundation on their Venice Biennale participation this year; and the release of a new monograph on senior artist Arpita Singh, which she spoke about reticently with art historian Deepak Ananth and Dr Chaitanya Sambrani of The Australian National University’s School of Art, as part of the Speaker’s Forum ‘spotlight series’.

“I was impressed with the curated art projects and especially impressed with the Speakers Forum and Spotlight Series. I think Girish Shahane [IAF’s artistic director] did a great job in being inclusive. I wish there was more attendance but I suppose that will eventually happen,” says writer and independent curator Meenakshi Thirukode, formerly gallery manager at Guild Art Gallery, New York City and creative director of DakshinaChitra, a first-time IAF visitor. “In terms of the contemporary galleries, I thought the Indian galleries had stronger presentations and the international galleries fell short. I hope that they can focus a bit more on the selection process in the future and be a bit more discerning.”

An art fair is representative of the impossibility of labelling or managing art, its inherent anarchy, even while binding it up and presenting it to us nicely—ultimately, it reflects the current mood, in all its contradictions.

“IAF 2015 was predictable in terms of commerce, audience and general response,” says Peter Nagy, whose Nature Morte (a south Delhi arm, arrived via the East Village in 1997) represents many leading contemporary Indian artists. “The fair looked strong overall, benefiting from fewer galleries and more serious art in general. But Indian art is now firmly entrenched on a plateau and I don’t think we can expect big changes in the overall scenario any time soon.”

Is this just a replication of what is happening the world over? ‘Can art still shock?’ novelist Adam Thirlwell asked recently (The Guardian, 23 January): ‘The future works of shock I imagine are as formally adventurous as they are intellectually destructive. I’m not in fact sure that true resistance to ideology is possible without resisting aesthetic conventions. The new shock moves might well be quieter, more low-rent— in the invention of new forms that are troublesome, and mischievous.’

Yes, the work at an art fair is not always the freshest or the best there is, certainly. But sometimes, plain and simple beauty is buried behind layers and layers of commerce. Take ‘Chand LC’, a project announced for viewing during the closing night celebration of IAF, curated by designer and architect Ashiesh Shah using drawings, photographs and furniture inspired by—and, indeed, made up of—Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Mostly party and not much project, we discovered. At last, at the very end of a room full of art royalty, drowned out by the DJ and the buffet and bar, while the photographers threw their spotlights on visiting dignitaries from Bollywood, as one art world fixture murmured the Fair “should take a break and come back in 2017”, we found the classic pieces of furniture owned by the great architect himself, softly lit. A few of us crowded around the little stage, French and Indian and American, writer and artist and gallerist; we planned how to make off with a chair or sofa. Here was beauty, if not truth. Here was our low-rent move.

art showIndia Art Fair 2015Muhammad ZeeshanPriyanka ChaudhuryValay Shende