A G20 Spectacle Masquerading as Public Art

Moving around the city has been a surreal experience these last few days. Brightly painted murals have erupted on metal facades encasing half built buildings, monumental sculptures have sprouted at every important traffic junction, a coordinated coming together of contemporary art galleries at the Bikaner House is showcasing “cutting edge” art. One hears about a curated shopping experience of textiles and artefacts for the spouses of world leaders on the lawns of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), with the government enlisting the services of the administrative bureaucracy to put on a display of antiquities at the same venue. 

The list of art interventions and beautification projects to greet visitors for the G20 summit is long and varied, their intent and purpose therefore needs serious scrutiny. What, for instance, are we to make of the “scrap to art” sculptures of birds that sit on a traffic island abutting Ashoka Hotel in a face-off with a bust of Ho Chí Minh the communist revolutionary, gifted decades earlier by the Vietnamese government ? 

What does recapitulation of the architectural wonders of the world, among them the leaning tower of Pisa and the Eiffel tower, nestling in a garden adjacent to Sarai Kale Khan, point towards? What does the consecration of a large Shiva sculpture – not as Shambhu (benign”) or Shankara (beneficent) but as Natraj the cosmic dancer trampling a dwarf – placed outside a conference venue mean? 

Can the answer be found in the infinity mirror-like multiplication of the prime minister’s visage across billboards, bus stop shelters and every other form of public interface capitalised by the government? Unlike straightforward propaganda, where the stage is set for a hierarchy of relations to be put on display, this redistribution of a singular image at street level, which is viewed by pedestrians and mobile bodies in cars and buses, displays an understanding of liminal placement of images to saturate the mind. The inscrutable visage reveals very little, but the carefully worded slogans and accompanying visuals suggest that the next election campaign is well underway. 

A smell that I am familiar with hung in the air of Delhi as I made my way across the city, past the shiny silver globs of steel that dot the green island opposite the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in South Delhi. I had photographed these just a few days before, at night, when suddenly their base sprouted a water fountain, after years of being surrounded by a green carpet of grass. It was noon when I next encountered them on the eve of the G20 summit. This time the sun was directly above my head and the flyover loop that I was negotiating had contract workers, some barefoot, swiftly applying paint on the protective traffic barriers of the lanes.

The odour of paint solvents mixed with automobile fumes stung the eyes and my vision blurred as it took in the potted plants that lined the ring road to offset the wedding cake architecture of luxury boutiques along side lanes of South Extension, an upmarket shopping complex. Further down, as I took a U- turn under a flyover, I saw a large, plastic encased pair of folded hands, placed atop a pedestal, being unwrapped by two young men who were also trying to prevent the hastily put together tiling of the pedestal from being dislodged. 

This unstable seat of the sculpture, with its veneer of tiled surface, resonates with the state of our contemporary democracy. In today’s India, when the mosaic of democracy is slowly being dislodged and its joinery eroded, one cannot help but ruminate about the history of the public institution that is slated to play host to a number of G20 festivities, namely the NGMA, and its association with sculpture in particular.

When a palatial former royal dwelling, converted into the NGMA, was first handed over to the public soon after independence in March 1954 to house modernist works, its inaugural exhibition showcased maquettes (small preliminary models) of sculptures that had been realized through an open call competition to identify an appropriate way of signifying a nation coming into being. 

Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury who took away the honours for his figural group ‘The Triumph of Labour’, took six years to make the work and two casts were made. One cast is installed on the lawns of NGMA where the spouses of G20 leaders (all but one being women) are being entertained over the conference weekend.   

The sculpture’s present location is however purely anomalous. Its final destination was initially supposed to be either the Vijay Chowk next to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or the traffic island at Parliament street. It was conceived of as a public sculpture to be viewed as a marker in the landscape, as traffic and pedestrians negotiated its physical site. The lawns of the NGMA were considered inappropriate by the artist as well as the commissioning authority the, Ministry of Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs, for its lack of public access. 

However, subsequent to its arrival in Delhi from the foundry, adequate labour to relocate the heavy bronze sculpture of labouring bodies could not be found. Made specifically for the Marina beach in Chennai – where in May 1923, M. Singaravelu, a labour union organiser, mobilised a workers’ gathering to demand a just working environment – its twin cast today will incongruously provide the backdrop for an exhibition of labour intensive luxury goods for the G20 extravaganza, where “designers” who anonymise the labouring hands of those who make the actual objects, will get to showcase their brands for private consumption. 

To put matters in perspective, one needs to understand how over the decades after independence, the NGMA became the nucleus of an art collection which, taking a democratic approach, filled its repository largely through an open call to artists who would send their works for purchase through a juried process. It also fulfilled the role of buying up significant collections. So the large corpus of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work or Ramkinkar Baij’s oeuvre that the NGMA houses, is due to some astute thinking on part of former gallery directors.

Criticised rightly for eventually becoming the template institution to showcase the imagination of the “national bourgeoisie,” the NGMA certainly needed a rethink about how it would shape up in the future and whether it would evolve with time to accommodate views that provided a critical perspective on the world around. 

The question of the “contemporary” foregrounded by alternative institutions such as the Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal in the 1980s and the Crafts Museum in Delhi by Jagdish Swaminathan and Jyotindra Jain setup between 1977-80 needed to be acknowledged and made integral to the way NGMA would move into the future. 

These two museums had succeeded in laying bare the discriminatory frames of modernism and the failure of the NGMA to acknowledge the contemporaneity of rural and folk art practitioners. Pertinent questions raised by practitioners of “New Art History” that foregrounded the conceptual turn in the discipline through a critical lens focusing on class, caste and gender dynamics had to be acknowledged.

The question is, did the political shift to the right in 2014, that brought to power a unidimensional political dispensation with a dangerously narrow minded agenda, impact the direction of how “art” as a cultural category would be understood ? 

Let us turn our attention to recent developments at the NGMA for some clarity. A few months ago, there was the heavily criticised alliance between a private collector Kiran Nadar and the NGMA in support of a radio programme by the prime minister. 

The latest exhibition intervention, inaugurated by the spouses of visiting G20 leaders, titled ‘Roots and Routes: Past Present and Continuous’, has thrown up some odd claims. A scrutiny of the videos released by the government and by the press regarding the exhibition, reveal the extent to which culture is being mobilised to make specific class and ethnocentric claims regarding India’s past. No interview is more telling than one given by the Minister of State for External Affairs and Culture, Meenakshi Lekhi, to a news channel , declaring that the “class” to which the G20 spouses belong, does not need contextual explanations through curatorial texts.

An equally complicated word “taste” has also been evoked in the publicity videos promoting the exhibition, to describe the aesthetics of displayed objects. It is clear that “tradition” was suitably modified to appeal to the sensibilities of an upmarket clientele that had a subdued sensibility. To understand the complicated issue of “taste” let us draw upon the  French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who points out how social judgments based on  distinctions in  taste are how elite  groups continue to skillfully navigate their way into positions of power. 

It is therefore amusing to note that the inaugural show, in 2017, of the first director of NGMA to be appointed by the current political dispensation, known for his many commissioned monuments for the current government, was titled Itihaas (history).  It  brought back into view the 1954 inaugural exhibition of maquettes entered into the competition to signify the nation. This time, though, the sculptures were displayed on the packing cases that the works had travelled in across the country and world-wide as a marker of their modernist restlessness.  

Sculpture as a signifying device has a long history in India, but the placement of sculptures and statues (two very distinct categories) on traffic islands, public greens and alongside traffic arteries is relatively new. A colonial era practice, it has now been domesticated by the powers that be to proclaim their self-importance and dominate the skyline through gigantic incarnations of men in bronze. The “cannon in the park” idea of public art, a term used by Suzan Lacy to describe nationalistic endeavours to condense the granular history of a nation into individual figures or narrative statements of historical events, now dominates our sight-lines everywhere we go. 

What kind of a sculptural practice would an artist from a subaltern perspective have conceived of? The maquettes of Baij’s works in NGMA’s collection provide one answer. The other lies in an interview given by him in 1963 when he was in Delhi to begin his sculptural commission for the entryway of the RBI. On the suggestion that he create a sculpture of Kuber and Lakshmi to guard the portals, Baij is reported to have said, “No those are gods; mine will be Yaksha and Yakshi, who are demi-gods. Because the Reserve Bank is a democratic institution” 

While the powerful sculptures executed in line with Baij’s creative directives will no doubt remain a part of the art historical canon, one wonders what will happen to the numerous public art works that were made for the reception of G20 delegates over the last few months. What will become of the groups of galloping horses, serenading musicians, preening peacocks, roaring lions and triumphant elephants that have stoically performed their role for the duration of the G20 summit? It’s a question that assumes significance on every occasion when a tightly controlled spectacle, sans any public participation, masquerades as public art. 

Shukla Sawant teaches Art History and Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.