In the name of art

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing a lot of very strange configurations of objects that is called ‘art’. It varies from fossilised lumps of dough to old shoe soles to video clips strung together, but all if it has had some kind of deeper meaning that, very often, has escaped me completely, never mind that the artist has actually shown me around personally and explained the exhibit to me in simple terms that would clarify things for even a two year old with a rather tenuous grasp of all things grown up. In this, I have managed to learn more about human behaviour and mental make-ups than about the art itself, both being more or less subject to whimsicality and mood, perhaps even time of day and lunch menu.

One of the most fascinating and yet perhaps most meaningless was a show called Fluxus, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai. My city is a place full of contradiction and dynamism, eccentricity and even madness, but this surpassed all, overtaking anything that Mumbai and its inhabitants could possibly dream up in the name of creative expression. For me, it was a delight, something that amused me and delighted me with its insanity, making less sense than it wanted to, but a lot more than it could have if I had seen it with any preconceived notions of what it should be. It seemed to be a motley collection of arbitrary objects placed randomly for maximum effect. Like I said earlier, a few dried out lumps of dough set into a frame was art; a piano with objects tied to it with rope was art; and a smile made of a slice of watermelon (plaster or plastic, I hope) was art. It was engaging, flirty, fun and each piece winked at me as if the artist who had created it knew that it was all a huge big joke. It made sense, in a world where everyone took themselves and their work a little too seriously….

Soon after, I went to a show that was all about installations. The artist was a well known painter who had not painted in many years – an affliction that affected the next person I went to interview as well, I found. She had lost her partner some years previous to this show and it seemed to colour her work. The videos playing on different screens in the various rooms of the gallery were gloomy as a whole, somehow sad and depressed, crying quietly rather than shouting exuberantly with joy. Even though the music was hardly dark and grieving, the mood was – Pink Floyd, Abba, Bob Dylan: reality bit me rather harder than I wanted it to that morning. And, when I talked to her, the artist spoke of remembering, the past, times gone by, all that good stuff but with a grey pall over it that affected me in the telling, the writing and then the reading of my own article.

This past weekend I went to see another artist, one with a beaming smile and an endless articulateness. He talked a great deal, seemed to know what he wanted to convey through his work and found some meaning in his own world that he was trying to tell the rest of those around him through video, photographs, models and, strangely enough, shoe soles. There was opportunity for a great number of puns and somehow I seem to find them as he spoke, working through his sentences and his art to see what he was trying to do and say. It made sense from some perspective that I was standing at, but it also made me wonder what happened to the good old-fashioned ways of expressing yourself with a certain simplicity that in a manner that always has more meaning than convoluted, cross-references sentences (like this one, for instance). But it was all fun, soles, souls and all.

Now I await the next exhibition. Some day I hope I will see conventional art again, something that can be seen, felt and remembered with no confusion of space, time and objects to force me to push it right out of my mind.