In the 1960s, American artist Claes Oldenburg said, “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself”. Two major art events in India endorse Oldenburg’s view of art. The India Art Fair in Delhi scheduled for mid-February and the Kochi Biennale which began late December and ends early March are both events as diverse and sweet and stupid as life itself.

As with similar exhibitions in London, Dubai and Singapore, the Delhi Art Fair is a short four-day event which draws the public with the clear message that here’s a chance to acquire beautiful objects for the office lobby or the home drawing room. It draws the potential moneyed buyer — some with cheque books in hand — to a vast warehouse of art, to view, negotiate, and pick up. And the options are astounding. A Bastar metal sculpture by a tribal artist could be selling for Rs 8,000 alongside a Spanish gallery displaying a Rs 8 crore Picasso. The wildly exuberant crowds that jostle through the halls may not be the expected clientele of established art galleries, but the event supports a generous egalitarian exposition and the incoherent juxtaposition of diverse art displays. A sort of artist’s Dilli Haat for art, local and international. Now running successfully for 13 years, the India Art Fair has expanded to include art debates, conferences, and public art events; this year the program will extend into digital art, tribal art, and artists in residence programs as well.

Commerce and culture: The India Art Fair is aiming to be more inclusive. (Above) A work by Bhil artist Bhuri Bai who was once a daily wager

By contrast, the Kochi Biennale is an antidote to the unthinking assemblage of the Delhi fair. With its more international reach and philosophical bent, artworks are organised as political statements, addressing disparate global issues like gender equality, climate change and economic disparity. Kochi’s ambition is to move art out of the static white gallery into the news and noise of a troubled world. “Even when we work alone,” says the curatorial note, “we amplify the voice of others.” The politics of dissonance resounds and pulls the Kochi exhibitions away from artistic conventions of beauty into more squalid, difficult and contradictory subjects: restaurants that serve the meat of rare and soon to be extinct animals; people lifted out of poverty during the largest ice-melt in the Arctic; the world’s richest cities with highest number of homeless. Such oppressive and conflicting references use art to reason out new possibilities in shows like ‘Toxicity’, ‘Oh to Believe in a Better World’. Others like ‘Communities of Choice’ and ‘Archive of Tibetan Resistance’ are overtly political and clearly blur boundaries between art, history, news and documentary.

How art can contemplate such heavy topics and what impact they have on actual problems is another story. The real value of the Kochi exhibition is in fact in the trespasses into different disciplines and territories.

At one time, there used to be a serious difference between posters and paintings, between toys and sculptures, indeed between photojournalism and art photography. No more.

Both events, the India Art Fair and the Kochi Biennale, try to bridge the gap between reality and hope. One does it by selling art as beautiful objects, the other by reinventing current affairs into political statements. Which is valid art is not even a fair question. It is unlikely that someone will replace a M F Hussain painting from their living room wall with a neon-light installation, just to be with the times. Art, after all, is a riddle not waiting to be solved. When French surrealist Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa, it did not take away from Leonardo’s masterpiece, but added another dimension to her enigmatic smile. Was Duchamp the real master, and Da Vinci just a conventional draftsman? Who knows, art couldn’t care less.

But art matters. In the center of Philadelphia’s business district, between high-rise office buildings, is a 30-foot-high clothes pin of cast iron — Oldenburg’s gift to the city. Every once in a while someone strings a clothesline from it, and hangs ten-foot-wide shorts and underwear on it. As they walk below the billowing briefs, suited office-goers gape in astonishment, and smile.

Could we paint the Taj Mahal red for a few days, or wrap India Gate in khadi cloth the way Christo wrapped the Bundestag, the German parliament? Could the public be encouraged to write or paint their grievances on Kartavya Path in washable paint? Could we install anything other than expensive statues of political leaders? What if an Indian Banksy emerged mysteriously at night to scribble a drawing on the Supreme Court wall? The trouble is, we in India take life so deathly seriously that the artistic freedom to push ideas and boundaries has been lost.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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