From webs to tin, art finds a new canvas

Seven empty boxes lie scattered on the floor, some open, some shut, a few small, a few big. They look like ordinary packing cartons but they’re not — the boxes are actually made of wood, carefully carved and veneered to look like cardboard. And it’s serious art.

Few would view ‘No title’, an installation from Sudarshan Shetty’s 2011 series Listen Outside this House, as a work of art that anyone would pay good money for. Cecillia Morelli-Parikh did and the installation occupies pride of place in a corner of her living room in Mumbai.

“I have been collecting contemporary Indian art for more than two years now, ever since I moved to India,” says Morelli-Parikh, founder-partner of high-end lifestyle store Le Mill in Mumbai. Her acquisitions are scattered all over her spacious apartment in a heritage Art Deco building on Marine  Drive overlooking the Arabian Sea.

There’s also a Shilpa Gupta piece, one of India’s most highly-regarded contemporary artists, represented by a large print in the dining area and an installation, a library of 100 books written anonymously or under pseudonyms, which is stainless steel ‘books’ etched with realistic details of jacket covers and arranged on shelves.

Morelli-Parikh is representative of a band of collectors in India who buy unconventional and avant-garde art, works that make a statement, disrupt, provoke or set viewers thinking about issues.

This is the kind of art that most young Indian artists have been producing in the last two decades.

It has won acclaim abroad and been acquired by foreign institutions like museums, banks and companies as well as individuals. Though a growing number of galleries have come up all over the country and offer such art — Experimenter in Kolkata, GallerySKE in Bangalore, Gallery Maskara and Chemould Prescott in Mumbai and Nature Morte in Delhi to name a few — Indian collectors are still fixated on paintings and sculptures by artists who have proven their worth in
the market.

There are a few well-known, honourable exceptions of course — Anupam Poddar, whose Devi Art Museum in Gurgaon houses his collection, the Paul sisters, Priti and Priya, of Park Hotels and Rajshree Pathy who is building a museum of contemporary arts in Coimbatore. But three collectors can hardly sustain a market.

“There are so few new media art collectors that you can probably count them on one hand,” says Parmesh Shahani, head of Godrej Media Culture Lab and an art collector himself.

The good news is that there is a trajectory of growth. Indian contemporary, new media art is increasingly attracting a new breed of collectors, mostly young professionals and independent entrepreneurs (unlike the earlier collector class that came from old business families). And while they do not have very large collections yet, what they do has been bought with conviction and passion. This is the lot that actively follows art trends in the West, reads up on the subject, travels to important gallery shows, fairs and biennales and is ready to put money where their aesthetic sense lies, even if the chosen artists’ ability to give “value for money” is untested.

Foremost among them is Anurag Khanna, director of a medium-sized coke-making unit in Gandhidham in Kutch, Gujarat. Khanna has built an eclectic and focussed collection of 100-odd works, including painting, photography and films, by young and mid-career artists from South Asia and beyond. Khanna, a first generation art collector, has been collecting art since 2001 and says he devotes at least an hour to his passion of reading books, magazines and monographs on art and art history and watching films by masters such as Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa who influence artists working in the audio-visual medium. He also takes every opportunity to travel to galleries abroad and visit fairs and biennials like Venice and Istanbul.

Khanna was in Germany a few months ago to catch shows at museums in Dusseldorf, Essen and Cologne. He says he was especially taken with Tomas Saraceno, an artist whose art practice is to let spiders make webs in museums. “He has studied them in detail and knows what kind of webs different species spiders make. He imports spiders from different parts of the world to make unbelievable webs. You come out of the show a changed person.”

That may well be so, but a spider’s web as a work of art can’t be easy to display! This is indeed a problem confronting most collectors of installations and new-media art — the former are often too large for domestic spaces, and the latter require technical equipment.

But collectors will, and do, find a way around it, reveling in the fact that the unconventional aesthetics are often a wonderful ice-breaker with guests. Rasika Kajaria, Delhi-based collector who also owns the gallery Exhibit 320, for instance, has a Nandan Ghiya installation placed just over her dinner table. It is an arrangement of old photographs that the artist has framed in vintage-looking frames and worked over so that the faces are blurred.

“People begin by saying, ‘Oh! How nice!’ Then they go closer and are puzzled to see the faces are pixellated. Then I explain that it is a metaphor for the loss of identity in the virtual space,” she says.

Kajaria is, of course, fortunate in having a mansion large enough to accommodate works such as Rajesh PS’ more-than-six-feet tall wooden sculptures, “The Portraits of the Architects who stood for their Conquerors”, and Sachin George Sebastian’s very large set of three paper flowers with enough space left over for a large ghungroo-work by Vibha Galhotra and another similarly large Seher Shah work. But where space is a crunch, imagination steps in. Mumbai’s Ashiesh Shah, an architect and interior designer (now also dna columnist), has the larger-than-life, inflatable sculpture of a human child by Canadian artist Max Streicher floating eerily above the staircase of his around 1,200 sqft apartment in Mumbai. Shah, like Morelli-Parekh, has an edition of Shetty’s cardboard boxes at the entrance, a work he says evokes the “transience” of life. There is also a bindi painting in black by Bharti Kher, a sculpture of a stuffed eagle and crane by Shine Shivan, another of a reclining life-size donkey by Sakshi Gupta and works by Pakistani artists Bani Abidi and Rashid Rana.

The other collector who specialises in similar cutting-edge contemporary art is Delhi-based advertising professional Swapan Seth. In fact, Seth has been collecting for so long and is so well-networked among the younger generation of artists that he was invited by Sakshi Gallery to curate the show ‘Scratch’ in 2010. The Seth’s duplex apartment in Gurgaon too is crammed full with art. “Contemporary art is slowly catching up among HNIs (high net worth individuals) in India especially in the under Rs 10 lakh range,” says Kajaria. But clearly the pace of growth is not fast enough. “It is still international buyers who account for 80 per cent of the sales,” adds Shah.

Galleries such as Mumbai’s Mirchandani + Steinrucke have started “affordable art” initiatives of late to draw potential collectors but it hasn’t helped much. One reason for that is the pricing, which at between Rs1 lakh to Rs10 lakh may be “cheap” for art but still unaffordable for all other than the extremely well-heeled. Morelli-Parikh says she is beginning to find even young artists “very expensive”. Galleryists in India, says Shahani, are to blame became they are not creating the mechanisms to attract a wider base of buyers or connoisseurs, schemes like what he found in the US where people could pay a nominal sum and take a work of art home for a certain period.

After all, as Khanna has found, “Living with art is far more rewarding, intellectually and aesthetically, than anything money can buy.”

A spider’s web as a work of art can’t be easy to display! This is indeed a problem confronting most collectors of installations and new-media art