Public art in India: Brushed aside

On October, a large public art installation by Jitish Kallat was unveiled at a traffic roundabout in far away Stockerou, 20 kilometres north of Austria's capital Vienna. Here After Here After Here — a very large work, six metres in height and 17 metres in diameter — is conceived by Kallat as a large dome made of unending loops of traffic signs, the strips of blue-painted metal with place names, distances and the like written on them. Kallat was one of three artists who'd been invited by a consortium of 10 municipalities and the Advisory Council of Public Art of Lower Austria to make permanent public installations at three designated traffic islands in the region. It was their way of promoting development in the region.

It's not just Austria. Cities all over the world (mostly the West) are turning to public art to create a new energy around public spaces, or to draw in tourists. Think of Anish Kapoor's mammoth sculptures and the way they transform or make us think anew of the spaces they occupy, and how some, like Chicago's Cloud Gate, affectionately called The Bean, have become a popular selfie spot.

We in India, however, are very far from sharing that mindset. Those such as corporate houses, citizens' groups and art institutions, who try to get permissions from city bodies to install artworks, report of endless red-tape.

"There is the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation), heritage committee and traffic police authorities," says Harsh Goenka, industrialist, art patron and collector who's been trying to put up something of a "public art corridor" in Mumbai. The RPG Art Foundation, which Goenka has set up, is responsible for Arzan Khambatta's Rhino at Juhu, Chintan Upadhyay's giant Baby Head at the Nariman Point traffic circle, and a recently removed 2D outdoor sculpture of Sachin Tendulkar's face by Jaideep Mehrotra on the Prabhadevi-Worli stretch.

Drying linen in public
But the installation of another Mehrotra piece, Mumbaikars' beloved icon Tendulkar again, has been stalled because a local residents' association complained to the heritage committee that such "arbitrary" and "ad hoc" installations would disrupt the heritage precinct, "inconvenience" pedestrians and "obstruct" their view of the sea. "And all this after we've received written permission from the BMC," says Goenka.

Young, contemporary artist Valay Shende faced worse. A 14-foot-high public sculpture of a Dabbawala by Shende, another RPG Art initiative, was to have been installed outside Mahatma Phule (Crawford) Market. It was — but that very night, he was told that the artwork didn't have all the required permissions and had to be brought down. By the time he got there, someone had already taken a hatchet and pulled it down, wrecking the leg in the process. "I had spent six months working on the sculpture and spent some of my own money in making it. It now lies in my studio, occupying a lot of space. I have been told that they've found another space opposite Metro Cinema. Let's see," says Shende.

Stories of vandalism are not new. It happened to two of veteran artist Anjolie Ela Menon's public murals — relics of the Nehruvian-era rule that public buildings had to have 2 per cent of their budget set aside for art. One, at a metro station in Kolkata, had a nail driven through it; and the other, at the LIC building in Delhi, was stolen, bit by bit.

Arzan Khambatta, the sculptor of the Rhino and several others like the Dolphins at the Podar hospital junction in Worli, the Pebble at Napean Sea Road (and two more coming up at Colaba), speaks of another such incident a few years ago at Haji Ali. Piloo Pochkanawala's Spark was one of the first public art sculptures in India, but no one took care of it. It had a lot of spikes and slumdwellers would use these to dry their laundry upon, he says. It's a 'compliment' that's been paid to Khambatta's own Rhino, which sometimes can be seen festooned with undergarments! As for Pochkanawala's sculpture, it was taken off when the traffic island was demolished.

Similarly, Suresh Sakpal's statues of RK Laxman's much loved Common Man on Worli Sea Face, where it is common to see people pose for pictures, was so badly damaged three years ago — by urchins, presumably, who would break its nose and its glasses, and once even walked away with an arm — that it had to be taken off and extensively repaired. No wonder, RPG Art spends on a full-time security guard at all its installations.

But then, vandals come in many forms. Around June last year, the mayor of Baroda proposed that he'd shave off the length of Banyan Tree, a 20-feet tall abstract sculpture by Nagji Patel, one of India's foremost modern sculptors, in order to accommodate a flyover that was to come up at the Fatehgunj circle junction where it had stood, a popular landmark. Thankfully, there was media outrage and the plan was dropped. But the tree had to make way.

"It has been reinstalled now at another traffic circle, but there has been no landscaping done around it," says 78-year-old Patel, one of few of his generation who emphasised public sculptures as much as gallery shows.

Abacus, another famous public sculpture in the city, had to be similarly taken off in 2004 when a flyover was being built. Transpex Silox, the company which had commissioned the work, took it to its factory some distance away, where it remains now.

Clearly, India would seem not to have a conducive atmosphere for public art. While Goenka and other art patrons are driven by the desire to "make art accessible to the general public, to take it out of gallery spaces", as he says, some like Shende feel "masses in India don't know what art is, they are completely without any education in that area".

Those like Vibhor Sogani, the designer/artist who's responsible for the steel Sprouts at the AIIMS flyover in Delhi that created a storm when they first came up in 2008, are more hopeful. A lot of people hated the stainless buds back then, but Sogani says he's happy that they've now come to be representative of the city. "People have begun associating with them, liking them even, which is so much better than if they'd ignored them completely," he says.

Engage the public
Khambatta agrees. "It's okay not to like something — as long as people react to it. For it is only when they are exposed to contemporary art will they realise that, say, a broken bottle can be art too. This sets off a new thought process."

It is this, the tussle between public ignorance, which would prefer, given a choice, a conventional statue, and the desire of art patrons and corporate houses to 'beautify' our cities with modern and contemporary artworks as they do with cities in the West, that has driven public art in India until now. Often, there's little public engagement in the process of choosing the kind of art to be put up, much less transparency. Of late, malls, office complexes and airports have emerged as halfway spaces for art, where one can put it out for a wider audience without the hassle of getting multiple civic approvals and the risk of vandalism.

Surbhi Modi, however, hopes to change this somewhat. Modi is the organiser of Publica, the public arts festival which will be up for a month in February 2016, and this time, it'll be held in Mumbai as well as Delhi. Large works — the largest by Anant Mishra at Delhi's Nehru Park, 70 feet high papier-mache sculptures of an elephant and tiger hung upside down, by national and international artists, will come up all over parks, malls, marketplaces and metro stations in both the cities.

Publica also intends to run a campaign asking people which of these they'd like to see as a permanent installation in their city. "The idea is to engage the people and then speak to the authorities. Once there is a groundswell of public opinion, it will become that much easier to get approvals," she says.

After all, public art is for the people.