Dramatic installations

NATESH studied painting at the Government College of Arts and Craft, Chennai, and has been making installations for the last three years. This has bearing on his other preoccupation - theatre.

"I use theatre's neurosis for my work. I fix a date for it, I keep the idea of the installation happening, and in the process I paint, draw and write. Then I make it. The process is like that of an actor who moves towards the day of the performance and has to peak on that day."

On the appointed day, Natesh begins work on an installation with the help of his assistants. The "neurosis of theatre", as he puts it, "peaks" on the day of the construction. The installation becomes the focal point of all his fragmentary thoughts and ideas that demand to be resolved into a whole. The overwhelming energy with which the structures are erected make it seem as if the actual work is not so much the finished work but the very process of making. Watching this performance would be a prolonged and tedious affair, but for the artist it has a cathartic function, ridding him of his pet irritations - capitalism, violence and immorality. It makes him survive, in a manner of speaking, allowing him to go on to do the next piece of work. Natesh's metaphor then talks about how he comes to put together his installations and what it means for him. It does not account for what it ought to do finally; he has other metaphors for that.

His most recent work was at the Alliance Francaise de Chennai: An anti-installation piece in the press was the centrepiece. A few days after its publication, Natesh photocopies the offending article and masks the photographs accompanying it (photographs that apparently illustrate installation art in India). He then highlights and counters two rather self-defeating arguments in the essay and displays the subverted text, now laminated, on a tree.

If we stay with the metaphor of theatre, this act of urgent protest and forthright expression is faintly reminiscent of certain politically motivated street theatre performances. It is certainly not the sustained and well-rehearsed performance of a theatre of the proscenium. There is an obvious connection here - theatre at the level of the street and installation as an art form whose aim it is to merge art into life. Although Natesh believes that the public sphere has to be a place of debate and contention, and in this instance, he seems to be taking on the responsibility of raising critical awareness, the emphasis is much more on the act of subversion than on strategic instruction.

The theatricality of Natesh's subversions draw attention to the "enraged" artist persona that he fronts. Chennai has had its fair share of such existential heroes in the past; most of them, however, practised a form of impressionist landscape or depicted lovers under the moon in a pseudo-cubist language. Natesh is the angry young man of the more recent generation and goes much further than those who came before him. Not only can he say that "the soul is political", but his instinct for self-parody, best seen in his writings rather than his work, almost over balances his need to be righteous.

If the archetypal Dada artist of the "cabaret Voltaire" in the early 20th Century registered a form of tragic/comic protest, countering reason (which sanctioned mass murder through war) with unreason, Natesh, at the beginning of a new millennium, expresses, inevitably, a bitterly ironic and self-obsessed one.

Take the work titled "Bhishma unborn", a veritable anti-war text and the least literal of all his works. A large egg shaped cage that has a real egg (representing potential life) is laid on a bed of nails (Bhishma's bed of arrows/a violent world). Killed the moment it is born, it is plain and simple.

Natesh attacks aggression with cynicism. In works such as these, he is not really concerned with how a society may come to accept war or forms of violence as being reasonable and correct - conditions that make such things acceptable. Perhaps that is not what he wants from his work. The gratification comes from the nihilistic rejections. The work stood there for weeks at the Max Muller, braving the elements. It appeared stoical and almost tragic at times.

Natesh recasts images loaded with meaning and symbols just as he recycles his material. The cage component of "Bhishma" has appeared in his last three installations with a different meaning in each context. In this way, his works invite interpretation. Natesh offers the viewer "not an open catharsis, as in the performance arts", but an experience that is "like a book, to be read very privately". Thus, we are back full circle to an earlier notion of an interaction between isolated individuals and a work of art, of individual experience of the work.

Natesh's installations stand on the lawns of the Max Muller and the Alliance, sometimes towering high, and sometimes innocuously merging with the environment. They ask nothing and give nothing unless you happen to ask something of them. They fulfil, on the one hand his idea that the experience of installation ought to be at the level of an everyday occurrence, "like sleeping or like drinking a cup of coffee". On the other, they seem to resist an easy transition into everyday life. Is this resistance because they value their autonomy too much, like a book, like a painting, like art?

If Natesh's installations represent the transition in Chennai from an older autonomy of art argument (of the formalist/classicist type) towards a more meaningful relationship with life, should he then be looking for other formal devices to accomplish this, such as narration or even performance?

In the artist's own words, these installations aspire "to resensitise with a sense of shock and present the ever present volume and three-dimensionality of existence". A heroic aspiration certainly, but the suggestion of the interminable and variegated sense of existence has to go beyond sheer spatial presence.

Keeping aside concerns with the internal logic and workings of these installations, Natesh's work symbolically "sticks out" and claims a space, as art, in the Chennai art scene and its urban landscape. It points to itself and raises the question of the role of art in this city and its relation to the public. It does this by the very nature of its form.

It is the "inappropriateness" of these questions, the persona and the work that has managed to infuriate the powers that be, the numerous local and self-styled gatekeepers of culture. The hysteria with which installation art is being berated at the moment in Chennai is to be expected, for what else can the establishment do when a claim for art is made outside the protected spaces of a gallery or museum?

What are the options, when paintings and sculptures that speak of "universal themes" and employ "essential forms" are its emblems of good taste and where a rejection of these values is a threat to its very being?

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Scandal dotcom
Next     : A man from Kabul