Smoke out the halo

LN Tallur, the Kundapur-born Seoul-based artist and sculptor, has been on a roll of late. Occupying centre stage at the ongoing India and the World exhibition at CSMVS, is his contemporised Nataraja titled Unicode (2011). Next door, at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), as part of SUB-PLOTS: Laughing in the Vernacular exhibition, is his 2012 interactive piece, titled ATM (Anger Management Machine) that fans the user to ‘cool’ him/her down.

Till January 7, his 2012 Quintessential exhibit, part of the ‘10 Contemporary Art Acquisitions Exhibition’ at Byculla’s Bhau Daji Lad museum, was inspired by the mended stone elephant that hails from the Elephanta Island and currently stands outside the museum. Chromatophobia (2012) depicts the fear of money through a wooden log embedded with coins, is on display at the sculpture park recently unveiled at Madhavendra Palace in Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur. In the light of these one-off displays is an ongoing solo at Chemould Prescott Road, titled Smoke Out. Point to Tallur about his omnipresence and he blushes, “What can I say... I've been lucky.”

Tallur wasn’t as lucky when he started his practice in 1999. “There was no acceptance or no market for my kind of art. So I did the reverse... I showed extensively from New York to China for 15 years before exhibiting in India again. But most of the state governments here are still unaware about the contemporary art practice. The audience too is tiny and artists have no support or much of a collection in museums. Though South Korea, despite being half the size of Maharashtra, has 320 museums on contemporary art, India has barely 5-6.”

Tallur, however, takes the unconventional route. For instance, he’s also the curator of ‘Smoke out’ that displays his 16 works in wood, stone and metal, all dating 2017. Each work is in tandem with the other. For instance, the mammoth Threshold (swirly blades with razor-sharp jagged edges and spears), towers over Tongue Twister 2 (conjoined human jaws, a dagger and a depression where the tongue should’ve been).

“Threshold is that in-between area, as in the case of making a Samurai sword, where if the bladesmith doesn’t achieve the right temperature-threshold the sword will break. It’s that moment when the bride crosses the threshold of her maternal home forever. Whereas Tongue Twister 2 represents the ‘gap’ between what’s on your mind as opposed to what you want to say.”

Armed with an MFA degree in Museology from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, among other painterly qualifications, Tallur has treated each artwork with chemicals used to conserve archaeological finds. For instance, the Turkish stone in Tongue Twister is treated with a thermoplastic resin surface-coating called Paraloid B 72, common in conservation. 

Despite the precautionary measures, he hasn’t deified his works. On the contrary, he's ensured they are tactile for the viewer to enjoy play of surfaces both coarse and polished, rake up memories and draw their own interpretations. “Such opportunities, to touch and feel, are slowly vanishing in a digital age, and so I want the viewer to gain a diverse experience, and do some thinking.” Tallur is also unwilling to bracket his art under activism and clarifies that no work of his associated to religion, despite outwardly appearances. "However, the viewer is free to form their own associations."

The piece on which Smoke Out is centred is a ‘rat’ from a rock drilled with holes – the animal whose essence, he says, of being dirty and Ganesh’s vahana at the same time, traditional sculptors, have failed to capture. “The Nandi bull can be looked as a ‘brand’, but the human psyche doesn’t classify the rat on the same level. I’ve tried to sort this problem by giving the rat a contemporary form that’s made porous by drilling stone through ‘stone flaming’, technique that sees the end of the drill, flamed.”

It was his observation of sculptures at museums, where a rod protrudes from the head of the statue to support its halo, that birthed his prominent Halo series. “While the rod was placed to fix a technical problem, I saw it as the head carrying the weight of the halo.” This led to his 7th and current Halo at Smoke Out, titled Tolerance, of a concrete sculpture having a cracked disc wedged into a cross-legged human. This halo is a departure from the earlier ones, that now appear as prototypes in comparison. “Sometimes, the perception/expectation of people and yourself about you is bigger than what your body can carry. We forget that we are not as self-aware as we assume to be and are yet to comb the deepest ravine and sea.” On the other hand, Intolerance 2 (2017), a larger-than-life pile of stones that resemble a game of lagori or a cairn – what Inuit Indians used as direction-markers. The sculpture, in actuality, is carved out of a single Mahabalipuram stone, like few temples in south India are. It also invites the viewer to deface this setup by scribbling on it with an electric engraver, like miscreants who ruin public edifices with mostly explicit messages.

Of Antila, however, Tallur doesn't want to reveal whether it concerns the Ambani abode, or why the elephantine sculpture has a grinder mechanism for a head, which, after a point doesn’t work and switches over to grind its own grind.

The work most personal to Tallur, is Supply Chain (2017) in shellac and bronze, that is a blown-up photograph of a red 'X', sewn by his mother over two years using 2.5lakh cross stitches. “I wanted to keep her busy after my father's passing away,” says Tallur, who thinks that unlike his Halo series, this work is the first and final interpretation in this medium. “There is no scope to push this idea any further, differently.”