The C-ART

“We are reaching out to the second and third-tier buyer base through this series of lectures funded by Mercedes. The car is seen as a luxury good and so is art,which is why the coming together of the two is symbiotic,” says Dinesh Vazirani,Director,Saffron Art. Agrees Girish Shanane,the man behind the Skoda Awards. He says the two make for an interesting match. His intention is to make the award as coveted as the Turner Prize.

There are also many examples in popular culture and advertising where these two disparate yet similar objects of desire come together: the latest is an advert for the Hyundai Santa Fe,where an attractive man is depicted painting and then driving around in the car. His taste in cars and art is designed to create aspiration.

Artists are moved as well. Bose Krishnamachari has hand-painted a Reva to promote the electric car. Subodh Gupta has meditated on the importance of the old Ambassador for the Indian middle-class with aspirations of going abroad: his canvas Saat Samundar Par and his metal sculpture of the same car are examples of this. The Fiat has played muse to artist Yusuf Arakkal,who converted his old 1956 Fiat Millicento into a work of art. It now adorns the garden at designer Nakul Sen’s O’Palacio store in Delhi. Artist Sudharshan Shetty took it a few notches up and gave us a sculpture of a dinosaur fornicating with an old Jaguar,while artist Chintan Upadhyay set a couple of old cars on fire and grew a garden in them.

Shetty says his intention is not to create a desire for the object,but to speak of the futility of creating objects. “I made the dinosaur to resemble a do-it-yourself,cut out toy. It examines how dinosaurs become a consumer commodity,” he says. “Similarly,the Jaguar 52 is a fibre-glass replica of a friend’s car,which is also a desirable object. It points to how we look at our past. Bringing these diverse objects together,I make them something else,” says Shetty,whose sculptural installation now belongs to the Devi Art Foundation,New Delhi.

Arakkal explains his reason for car mania: “I am sentimental about my old Fiat since it was the first one I bought. Instead of letting it get reduced into a heap of scrap,I decided to elevate it to a sculpture,” he says. He enjoyed the experience of working with the men in the garage to create the car sculpture,given that he spent a good part of his earlier life as a mechanic.

However,Upadhyay takes a critical look at the phenomenon. “I did my work when I was in Germany. It was difficult to find cars that I could set alight,since there are so many rules against arson. But my purpose was to bring about a dialogue of recycling and reuse which is why I planted flowers and saplings in the back of the burnt cars,” says the artist.