For an enthusiast, walking on to the fifth floor of the 70,000 sq. ft. Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) is like stepping into art heaven. Clear glass skylight and walls pour warm November sunlight into a gleaming white quadrangle that’s dominated by an enormous bamboo-and-pith Ravana made by students the day before. On the sides are racks and racks of art books and material samples (like gold dust or polymer clay) of every conceivable kind.
At the far end are printers: a 3D printer that’s churning out an elephant in some kind of plastic, a large format digital printer, a laser cutter that’s etching out signages. All these resources will soon be available at a membership cost, say the organisers.
Glass, sunlight, space, white, and wood combine to make a wonderfully light and bright structure, one that glows and breathes, and is eminently suited to bring to life KCC’s aim — that of becoming an interactive, state-of-the-art, multi-disciplinary art centre. There’s a dance studio, auditorium, children’s art centre, conservation room and amphitheatre, each superbly designed and appointed.
Exhibits at the show.
The ground floor has been set aside as 10,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the first floor showcases high-end artifacts and replicas sourced from around the world, while the second floor markets customised handicrafts (in a collaboration with designer Rajeev Sethi). In a nod to culinary art, a cafeteria specialises in signature vegetarian cuisine.
Two things are immediately clear: first that a lot of money and care has gone into the project, and second that Kolkata, and indeed every Indian city, urgently needs spaces like these. For this, the Kolkata-based Emami Group is to be congratulated.
Not so passé
What is less clear though is whether KCC itself understands what it wants to be. At the press conference held last week to inaugurate the centre — in its fabulous amphitheatre — words like museum, art centre, showroom, commerce, culture, spirituality were all thrown out easily and interchangeably, but the image that came through was that of KCC as high-end art and design shop. In coming days, it will become important for the centre to establish a distinct identity and stay true to it.
The library. Photo: Vaishna Roy
This is usually the task of the creative director and for KCC, that role is being played by Mumbai-based designer Pinakin Patel. At the press conference, Patel suggested that museums, and indeed art itself, has become passé. Statistics suggest otherwise: The Met saw 7 million visitors in 2017, while the Louvre saw 8 million, and the numbers are growing. The difference lies in how excitingly they curate and display their collections, unlike our own dusty, state-run storehouses.
Indeed, there are several exceptions to this now, both public and private, such as Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji, Delhi’s Kiran Nadar museum or Ahmedabad’s Calico Museum, which prove how well art can thrive, given funding, goodwill and discernment.
KCC’s gallery, Emami Art, was inaugurated with an exhibition of India’s early modernist and Renaissance man Dashrath Patel (1927-2010). Titled ‘School, A Retrospective’, there were around 92 pieces on show — his early oils, photographs and line drawings as well as some of the fabulous dinnerware he had designed as founder-secretary of Ahmedabad’s National Institute of Design. But disturbingly, the show also showcased pieces for sale made by the Dashrath Patel Studio in Alibaug, with no labelling to distinguish originals from reproductions.
The Dashrath Patel exhibition.
Upon enquiry, an email stated that the gilded ceramic plates were produced in a kiln belonging to Dashrath’s friend, and the tapestries woven by artist Jayshree Poddar to Dashrath’s designs. But with dates, collaboration details and attributions missing across the show, it was impossible to tell if they were produced during the artist’s lifetime or are later reproductions. It was from the email that one discovered that the paper-on-plywood collages were sets of multiple replicas.
A wall panel said that works were “available for sale with an authenticity certificate from the Dashrath Patel Foundation,” but with no catalogued and printed records of the originals the artist left behind or the reproductions he sanctioned, there is a blurring of boundaries here.
The Dashrath Patel exhibition.
Call for curation
These are early days, and KCC is, perhaps, still finding its feet. Which is why it was imperative that it find first-rate curators for its art shows at least. For example, names such as Nancy Adajania, Natasha Ginwala and Shanay Jhaveri come to mind for a Dashrath retrospective. Some will also remember the major retrospective of his work in 1998 at NGMA, Delhi, curated by Sadanand Menon.
Of course, Pinakin Patel was a friend of the artist and inherited the Dashrath Patel Museum in Alibaug, but that legacy comes also with a tremendous responsibility. And regardless of glib rationalising about removing boundaries between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, it’s impossible to overlook the devaluation of an artist of Dashrath’s calibre which is the danger of a loose show like this.
Richa Agarwal, art collector, daughter-in-law of the Emami family, and CEO of Emami Art, said that besides the ₹70 crore spent on the complex, an unspecified corpus fund has also been set aside. This is excellent news for a fund-strapped art world; and part of an ongoing movement where corporate houses are entering the art museum space.
KCC is an ambitious project, and for fruition it has to go beyond showroom into committed, serious art shows, archiving, cataloguing, lectures, workshops and more, with at least some of the latter heavily subsidised.
The finest such centres achieve either basic financial viability or use philanthropy to prioritise edification over commerce. This could be fairly straightforward, but KCC muddies the waters somewhat by endlessly harping on art’s ‘spirituality’ and ‘soft power’ even as Pinakin’s concern is clear when he says that KCC must become “self-sufficient” and not “go begging” to the promoters.
One phrase repeatedly heard during the launch was the “playful blurring of boundaries between art and commerce”. One has nothing against commerce, it’s the playful blurring that is worrisome.
(The writer was in Kolkata at the invitation of Kolkata Centre for Creativity.)
