Art for whose sake

The latest, Surendran Nair had the ignominy (or honour, depending on your point of view) of having his work removed from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art. The Director of the Gallery saw the canvas (a nude Icarus preparing to take flight from the top of an Asoka pillar) as being “disrespectful to the national emblem.” Doubtless, if she were more familiar with the Icarus legend, the worthy might have equally objected to the work as being “disrespectful to those wonderful men from Greece in their flying machines.” Nair’s work sold for one lakh, so, in real terms, there are only winners here: including the bureaucrats who earned their 15 minutes of fame while displaying their patriotism. The Culture Secretary’s doublespeak — if the work had been in a private gallery, there would have been no problem, he said — was of a piece with the official reaction. The joint secretary, culture, has been quoted as saying, “Why should a Greek god, and that too naked, stand atop the nationalemblem?”

I am not sure that Icarus qualifies as a Greek god, but the point seems to be that Nair’s work would somehow be enhanced if it had a fully-clothed mythical figure who jumped off the top of a tree. But even then the kind of tree might lend itself to political interpretation. If it were a coconut tree, for example, an argument could be made that it was an insult to the coastal people of India for whom the coconut tree provides a living. There is nothing, repeat, nothing that a clever politician or bureaucrat cannot twist to his advantage.

This does not mean, of course that there is no good art and bad art. The NGMA Director reacted `squeamishly’ to one of the works while the exhibition was being put up, while in another instance she wanted a sculpture shifted because little children might trip on it. If the artist has the right to put up his work on public display, the public equally has the right to show its displeasure by reacting squeamishly.

We thus come to the two sides of the argument — on the one hand, all art is right (the cliche is art for art’s sake); on the other there are limits to what may be art, these limits being prescribed by either the curator’s or the public’s understanding of what constitutes decency. This is the art vs morality question that has never been satisfactorily resolved, because as George Orwell said, “People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked, or of seeming not to be shocked , to be able to define the relationship between art and morals.” In Surendran Nair’s case, he and his fellow-artists are up in arms against the establishment; their question being:“Who is the culture secretary (or anybody else) to decide on the merits of an artist’s work?” It is as if artists must be allowed some amount of irresponsibility because they work outside the system to hold up a mirror to it.

What throws a bridge across the two extremes is the public’s reaction. No one is forced to like a work of art, and the public has every right to ignore what it doesn’t like. Often it is the media which tell the public what it should or shouldn’t like, and in that sense the media are indistinguishable from the bureaucrats mentioned above. Elephant dung used as art material is news, and it is even bigger news when the mayor of New York objects to it, as happened last year. That is all the publicity needed to draw in the crowds. What constitutes obscenity in one generation is often seen as normal in another. Lady Chatterley’s Lover might have earned D H Lawrence notoriety when it was first published, but today it is impossible to read some portions of it as anything but pure farce.

The bureaucrats who objected to Nair’s works were acting beyond the call of duty, and deserve our pity. There are sensible laws to prevent artists from becoming public nuisances. You cannot, for instance, chop up visitors as they walk into a gallery and pass that off as art. The new craze, `Installation art’ will not be tolerated if it gives off poisonous gases at regular intervals as visitors approach it. Only the insecure are affected by parodies. If, as a nation, we are unable to laugh at those who poke fun at us, there is a deeper problem here than harm done to national emblems. Surrealism, by definition, goes beyond reality. Unfortunately, official reaction to it continues to be real, all too real.