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Last week, on a bright and clear Bangalore evening, a handful of photographers turned up at Church Street, plastering the pristine white walls outside Coconut Grove with photographic prints.

Some of the photographs went up on a giant electricity transformer cage next to Barton Centre, a few were incongruously pasted against graffiti on the walls, next to a street side chaat walla.

The photographs were of unlikely men on children’s swings, construction debris and tin sheets scarring the streets, a traffic cone with unlikely hands, feet and a briefcase, the shadow of a dog in a city that is quickly becoming a shadow of itself.

People stopped by to look at the 50-odd prints. They smiled, shook their heads in disbelief, some grabbed a pani puri from the nearby chaat vendor and mulled over the images, others left their smudgy finger prints on the pictures.

In 30 minutes the open-air exhibition had clocked in an audience several fold larger than what an art gallery would have seen in a week. ‘BlowUp: A Photographic Street Intervention’, as the exhibition was called (see www.blindboys.org), reminded people of the sense of aesthetics that had gone missing in their lives. It was art being returned to the people.

Artists thrive when they interact with others, the environment, with issues, objects, ideas and impossibilities. They enrich our sensibilities and open our minds with their challenging interpretations, their acute sense of observation, their defiant values, their zero-gravity perspectives and rebellious humour. Unfortunately, the debates they start stay confined in restrictive art galleries — inaccessible, impotent, surrounded by hushed silence and locked in air-conditioning.

Art in public space can transform theaesthetics of a city — one of the biggest
reasons that draw people to a city — and, more importantly, it can help punctuate life with moments of reflection, insight and drama, changing the very way we live and think.

But our public spaces have been polluted, abused, encroached upon and consumed by commerce. They have been run over by glass, concrete, traffic and trash. There is hardly any space left for people, let alone art and culture, performance and theatre.
But a slow process of change may have begun. The Central Jail, now Freedom Park, can hold performances and exhibitions. We have Chitra Sante, a street art exhibition organised by the Chitrakala Parishat.

There is Bengaluru Habba, a multi-cultural event that unfolds largely on the streets. But it is time to get away from the macro and deal with the micro — every park, street corner, public library, bus stop, bridge, underpass, upcoming metro station and traffic signal needs to be transformed with paintings, sculptures and installations, with theatre, music and dance.

Public spaces should inspire us, guide our sensibilities and — urgently — provide options to our consumerist souls that have begun to demand malls and are emotionally disconnected with anything other than MP3 players and mobile phones (okay, they are connected via Facebook and Twitter, but that’s another story).

Of course, handing over the task to the government (alone) can have hilarious results as some other cities have had the misfortune to witness. Delhi, for example, has Rs 4 crore worth of funny steel pinheads along the famed AIIMS flyover. They have been classified as art, which is debatable.

Mumbai has a particularly beefy reputation for producing public kitsch instead of public art. It started in the 70s, when 35-foot high monstrous concrete lollipops sprung up on the highway to the airport with paintings of birds like the Belted Kingfisher, the Grey Francolin and the Grey Necked Pigeon.

Chennai has an appalling Rs 1 crore sculpture as part of its IT corridor. Hyderabad has fiberglass pineapples that are completely out of context along with other miscellaneous misdemeanors in its Rs 70 crore NTR Park. Sometimes the atrocities perpetrated in the name of public art appear curious, strange, even despicable. But they are more misguided than anything else. The will exists. The wherewithal doesn’t.

Sometimes, the result of government intervention can border on the comic. In 2004, Balan Nambiar discovered that his Rs 6 lakh steel sculpture which had been for eight years at a traffic island on Lavelle Road near St. Mark’s Cathedral had vanished along with the traffic island. Nambiar, a well-known sculptor, painter, enamellist and photographer, complained to the police commissioner, only to find that it was the city traffic police that had taken away his work.

Bangalore needs room for an artistic, aesthetic view of life. It is time to tap into the creative energies of the city — teams of photographers like Akshay Mahajan of BlowUp, artists, gypsies, painters, musicians, magicians and poets — to come up with a plan where we bump into art and entertainment in our everyday lives. Bangalore does need a real way of celebrating life.

The writer is a content and communications consultant