At this Ted Talk, Ravin Agrawai presents an overview of 10 upcoming contemporary Indian artists. Below is the talk, and more in depth information about each artist.

More about the artists

• Bharti Kher at Hauser & Wirth
• Alwar Balasubramaniam
• Chitra Ganesh
  Excerpt from Rabbithole

• Jitish Kallat
  Perspectives on contemporary art, interview with The Economist
  
• N.S. Harsha
• Dhruvi Acharya
• Raqib Shah
  A group show including the work of Raqib Shah where ornamentation is given voice.
  
• Raqs Media Collective
  
• Subodh Gupta
  Show from the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
  
• Ranjani Shettar

Indian culture found in the artist’s work

• amar chitra kathas – “Immortal Captivating (or Picture) Stories”, is one of India’s largest selling comic book series, with more than 90 million copies sold in 20 Indian languages. Founded in 1967, the imprint has more than 400 titles that retell stories from the great Indian epics, mythology, history, folklore, and fables in a comic book format. (wikipedia)
• bindi (as used by Bharti Kher) – is a forehead decoration worn in South Asia (particularly India) and Southeast Asia… Traditionally it is a dot of red colour applied in the center of the forehead close to the eyebrows, but it can also consist of a sign or piece of jewelry worn at this location. The bindi has become a decorative item and is no longer restricted in colour or shape. Self-adhesive bindis (also known as sticker bindis) are available, usually made of felt or thin metal and adhesive on the other side. These are simple to apply, disposable substitutes for older tilak bindis. Sticker bindis come in many colors, designs, materials, and sizes. Fancier sticker bindis are decorated with sequins, glass beads, or rhinestones. (wikipedia)

City Hostel, in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, features 54 rooms, each designed and decorated by 47 Seattle artists. The hostel also features a 20 seat movie theatre, with frequent art events, screenings and openings. In 2008, City Hostel was voted the top hostel in the United States by Hostelworld.com.

Artists were asked to volunteer their efforts instead of being paid outright, which caused some controversy in the Seattle art community. As some artists pointed out, when artists work on spec or for free, it devalues all artist’s work, making it likely future jobs to any artist will be for free as well. Hostels are however usually operated less for profit than passion. Hopefully in the future artists will be paid for their work. If the capital isn’t there for up front payment, then give them a royalty – 1% of the proceeds from each room stay goes to the artist who designed it.

Even without payment, the artists are largely excited about the project and the exposure it has actually brought after the hostel opened. The artists were uncensored and allowed free reign to the final outcome of each room, and have formed a community from the experience. Several reported commissions and buyers from the exposure even before the hostel opened.

Like other Art accommodations, this one is a unique, creative place to stay, celebrating local artists.

Read more

• City Hostel site
• Hostel Art Collective, a blog by the hostel’s artists
• A list of all City Hostel artists
• Hostel Art Collective Flickr Photostream
• Lynn Shirmer’s Blog, thoughts on her experience working on her room
• It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times, The Stranger Slog. Includes comments by many artists who argue the benefits they received from working on the project, even though for free
• City Hostel Seattle – Some Actual Information, from Belltown People
• Hostel in Seattle Voted Best in US from ABC News

Related posts:

1. Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space
2. David Byrne’s Perfect City

I’ve had friends who collected Star Wars toys and kept them in the original packaging to protect their value. This certainly protects the monetary value, but doesn’t it deprive you of getting everything out of that toy it was created for? If you want to spark your imagination, have a fun afternoon, and play with your friends, you need to rip open that package and start shooting storm troopers and levitating x-wings. It’s almost impossible to experience all the joy, fun, creativity and bonding with friends those toy-makers intended if you leave the toys in their package.

For much of the art in the world, you can look at it or listen to it and get everything the artist intended. It doesn’t matter if most paintings are behind glass, you can still see it just fine and get the full effect. Like a baseball card collector who keeps his cards in plastic sleeves, you can still see the cards just fine and enjoy them to their full effect. Their monetary value is still protected too.

But more and more contemporary art is created by artists who intend you to play with it. The full meaning and experience of the work requires you to interact, contributing your ideas and sometimes even physically building what the work becomes. This work needs to be touched for it to have any significant form, emotion and meaning.

Most museums and galleries are the stewards of the art in their collections. All objects are treated as historic artifacts, and must be maintained, restored, protected and studied. Museums must also protect all the money they’ve invested in building and maintaining the collection. Insurers, donors and the community, also understandably want to protect their own investments. Insurance rates may go up if art isn’t thoroughly protected from accidents, wear and theft. Many museums and galleries sometimes borrow work from other organizations. Obviously they want to return any work leant to them in the same condition it arrived, and want the same for their own work that’s been let out into the world.

Unfortunately, for that growing collection of contemporary artwork that gets its primary meaning, emotion and significance from interacting with it, keeping it locked behind glass isn’t good enough. Most museums and galleries have not caught up to this idea, even though this type of work has existed for almost a hundred years. All objects, regardless of the artist’s intent, are treated the same.

I first noticed this when I attended a Yoko Ono retrospective in the ’90s. In most of her work, Yoko gives direct instructions to be completed, sometimes completely in the reader’s imagination, other times interacting with objects she’s made. In this exhibition, though, there were guards and watchers in each room who would stop anyone from touching anything, even when Yoko’s instructions told you to. One example is Play It By Trust, a long table with 10 completely white chessboards. In Montreal, 2009, it happened as it should:

Yoko Ono’s idea of license, the setting up of a situation where others could complete a work of art instead of the artist, was a radical departure from the existing concept of the role of the artist. – Jon Hendricks

Yoko Ono’s work continues to cause interaction problems for museums. In August of this year, the Seattle Art Museum fired a security guard who interacted with Painting to Hammer a Nail In, a piece which asks you to hammer a nail into the painting. On the wall next to the painting was this text placed by the museum, along with a box of nails:

Museum visitors are invited to pound a nail into this painting. Like so
much of the work in this exhibition, while the idea might at first seem a
destructive, physically aggressive act against the accepted traditions of
painting and museums in general, in the end the concept opens up new
potentials for painting, and for bringing others besides the artist into
the creative act.

Yoko Ono herself poetically states her intentions.

What I’m trying to do is make something happen by throwing a pebble into the water and creating ripples…I don’t want to control the ripples. – Yoko Ono

In 1957, Paris, a group of “reactionary nihilist intellectuals” stormed a Dada exhibition and grabbed Man Ray’s piece titled Object to Destroy. They threw it on the ground and shot it with a pistol before police arrived and arrested them for doing just as the title commanded. Time Magazine wrote about the incident at the time in The Theater: Battle of the Nihilists.

How do we know what’s allowed and what isn’t? Should we do what the artist tells us or follow the rules of a museum? Who gets to decide? A simple, direct solution is presented by The Onion in Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings:

“Though it contains more than two million pieces and represents a profound legacy of artistic achievement, most people remain completely indifferent to our museum,” Met director Thomas P. Campbell said. “So we decided to try something a little different and give visitors a chance to experience our timeless works of art up close and personal.”

“You can’t grasp the brilliance of a great painting just by looking at it,” said Phil Brehm, 32, who acknowledged that he hadn’t set foot inside a museum since a mandatory field trip in high school. “To truly appreciate fine art, you need to be able to run your fingers over its surface and explore its range of textures.”

“Or just rub your face all over it, like I do,” Brehm added.

Of course, In the real world, I hope for a middle ground. Museums need to determine which pieces derive a large part of their meaning and significance from interaction. For these pieces, the museum’s primary purpose should no longer be to simply protect their objects. They must protect the full artistic experience, so that people can feel for themselves the art’s purpose and meaning.

One museum that gets this is the Tate Modern. I visited several years ago and found the five-story swirly-slide by artist Carsten Höller. Laughter echoed around the large room as people slid down the tubes.

In 1971, the Tate exhibited a very interactive artwork, Bodyspacemotionthings, by artist Robert Morris. After only four days, and many splinters and bruises, the artwork was broken by all the interaction and then closed. Last May, a new version of the work was exhibited, and this is what it looked like:

Even knowing the potential for destruction, possibly higher insurance rates and injured patrons, Tate did it anyway.

So what’s the answer? And why should we care?

I forgot to mention that I had lots of Star Wars toys when I was growing up. I played with them all the time. They ended up with broken arms, unrecognizable dog-chewed heads, peeling paint and caked-in mud. Every dent and scrape added more to their made-up history in my imagination, making them even more fun and interesting. Today, I no longer have them. If I did, I certainly couldn’t sell them for any money. No one would want them.

I don’t want irreplaceable, important parts of our history destroyed. But in the museum’s Star Wars collector zeal, preserving every piece of art behind plastic and glass, we lose the art’s spirit, we lose it’s importance, the very reason it’s worth collecting to begin with. And the people visiting this work are disconnected from it. They don’t get it, shrug and move on. This is the very work that has the most potential to deeply connect with people in our modern world.

I think there must be a middle way.
Maybe museums can have artists build two copies of each work. One to protect for value and history, the other to take out of the box, to get dirty and broken. That’s what the most passionate toy collectors do.

Read more:

• Time Magazine, The Theater: Battle of the Nihilists, April 1957
• Yoko Ono’s Official Site
• More about Man Ray
• What is Conceptual Art?
• The Seattle Art Museum
• The Stranger Slog, Dear Yoko: This is an Intervention
• Tate Modern, Bodyspacemotionthings
• BBC, What Closed Tate’s 1971 Art Show?
• Artists Robert Morris and Carsten Höller

Buy stuff:

• Yoko Ono
• Man Ray
• Dadaism and Dada
• Carsten Höller
• the Tate Modern
• Star Wars toys

Related posts:

1. Zoom Into Every Brush Stroke of Art History’s Masterpieces
2. Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space
3. Every Art Museum Needs a Five Story Swirly-Slide

Conceptual Art relies on ideas (concepts) and audience participation for it’s effectiveness, where many other kinds of art rely more on the object, and the skill the artist used to create it.

The New York Times asks Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark?

…conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

I think the premise of the story – that conceptual art doesn’t have good resale value – is sound. It’s hard to determine a piece’s monetary value when the object itself isn’t where the value lies. Because the artistic merit of something as etheral as an idea is very subjective and changes through time, how will you have any idea what it’s worth? This is in contrast to an object, good idea or not, that is created with a great deal of skill and effort. Even if the idea is a bad one, or whose merit fades over time, the high level of craft will likely still be appreciated.

This really raises the question – how should conceptual artists make a living? Those New Yorker cartoonists still get paid to create cartoons, even though the cartoons might not have the same impact 20 years from now. I’m sure some are understood to have a cultural lifespan. Yet their current value is still understood, and artists are paid. If this is true, that some conceptual art has concepts which have a lifespan, how can artists pay for their livelihood and efforts just like those cartoonists?

I have some ideas, but what do you think?

Books on conceptual art.

Related posts:

1. “Please Don’t Touch the (Touchable) Art.”
2. Mechanical Turk, Mechanical Art, Mechanical People

In the late ’80s, Czechoslovakia became a democratic state, and in 1993 peacefully separated into two countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. With democracy came capitalism and advertising, and with capitalism and advertising came The Hypermarket. Hypermarkets are the world’s superstores, selling shoes and spinach, pipe wrenches and pumpkins, all you would need to buy under one roof. Compared to the scarcity of goods in the pre-capitalist Czechoslovakia, this abundance was a big change.

Just like people in other countries had become critical of rampant consumerism and advertising eroding their culture, many Czechs felt the same way.

Two filmmakers created a fake advertising campaign, including radio, tv, sales flyers, posters and a web site, to promote the new hypermarket named Czech Dream – Cesky Sen. They announced a location and an opening day; built a huge fake storefront in a field, made of a tarp and scaffolding; and 3,000 people showed up. They filmed the whole thing, from inception, ad design, recording the theme song, filming the commercials, to the day 3,000 people standing in front of them found out they had been lied to.

The film is well made, but like many odd art events, the real art happened in the field that morning with those 3,000 people. The film just documents creating that art.

Controversy about the film and the ad campaign stretched all the way to the Czech Parliament and Prime Minister. Government arts funding had been used to make the film (and the fake ad campaigns), which outraged a lot of people. Supporters of the film argued this was no different than the government’s expenses for the huge “join the European Union” ad campaign. Both were advertising an ideology, it was better to also show a contrary view. (Joining the European Union, because of easier trade with other EU nations, was thought by many Czechs to be a huge unwanted step towards materialism and consumerism.)

Like Adbusters, The Yes Men, and some Michael Moore films, the artists set up circumstances that most clearly show the point they want to make. The set up is what usually gets people really riled up, because people feel manipulated, and the films no longer retain an illusion of neutrality. (Documentaries are rarely neutral. How up front a film is about its bias varies.) They’re big, social, political practical jokes.

Lessons of the film: 1. Advertising is bad. 2. Buying things won’t make you happy. 3. Standing outside in a field on a sunny day is much better than going to a mall.

Buy something about anti-consumerism:
Czech Dream (US DVD release date December 4, 2007)
Words by Adbusters and founder Kalle Lasn
Work by Michael Moore

I’ve been trying to learn Japanese this year. I’m making progress but it’s definitely slow. While I took Spanish in high school, my brain didn’t shift the way it is now. As I started to write and learn these brand new characters, I started noticing all the things I take for granted, all the built in assumptions that come from the structure and vocabulary of my native language. The way your language is shaped influences the way your ideas are shaped. Learning a language very different from your own makes you deconstruct what things mean. Not just what words mean, but the ideas behind the words. For instance, the belief in the void or emptiness in early India, combined with the structure of their language, likely led to the creation of the number zero.

I recently saw an exhibit of work by Xu Bing, a Chinese artist who wrote about a similar experience.

I didn’t come to America until I was 35. While my mind was already fully developed, my English level was still that of a child. This awkward feeling that came from my experience of cultural and linguistic miscommunication turned my interest towards symbols, language and communication.

His artwork often revolves around language and books, what forms they take and what they mean to a culture. The seeds for this artistic direction started as a child. His parents were librarians during the Cultural Revolution.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, I returned from the countryside to the city. I took advantage of my parent’s work-related access to the library, and read all kinds of books from the stacks enormous holdings… I was like a starving person who all at once has too much to eat, and winds up so uncomfortable that he is filled with disgust.

Some of his work includes:

• A Case Study of Transference – Two pigs in a pen littered with books, one female covered in fake Chinese characters, and one male covered in fake latin alphabet characters, mate in front of an invited “intellectual audience.”
• Silkworm Series I – IV – Moths lay small black silkworm eggs onto open books. The eggs form the appearance of a Braille-like language. Shortly after the exhibit opens, the eggs hatch, and the small black worms wriggle over the pages, forming the appearance of ink lines and squiggles, a second incomprehensible language.
• The Parrot – A parrot shouts learned phrases to the gallery visitors, such as “You people are so boring!”, “Modern art is crap!” and “Why are you holding me prisoner, you bastards!”

In Xu Bing’s most recent work, Book from the Ground, he is compiling a universal language created from existing international icons. The first icons came from airplane safety cards and airports, and later came from street signs, other safety instructions, advertising and other sources. The icons are chosen for their universality, and require almost no learning curve from most people who read them. His plan is to create a multilingual dictionary and software of these words (for universal translation) and to publish a novel written in this icon language.

Now when asked about the meaning of his work, he often simply points to the Chinese legend of the origin of writing, contained in the Huainanzi. In the story, when Cang Jie invents Cangjie, the God of Heaven is so afraid that grain falls from the sky and ghosts begin to wale.

Those whose culture embraces Chinese characters (i.e. people in Greater China, Korea, and Japan) have such respect for shu and consider it so sacred, that they believe it capable of effecting change in the natural order of things.

The artist’s web sites have many great insights into language, culture and art.
Xu Bing Dot Com (the artist’s web site)
Book from the Ground (project web site)
Xu Bing’s blog

Books by or about Xu Bing

Related posts:

1. Beijing Modern Dance Company – Pink Floyd’s The Wall

For the past few months, 12 7-Elevens in the United States were converted to real life Kwik-E-Marts, the very 7-Eleven-like stores featured in The Simpsons. The 12 stores have outsides changed to Kwik-E-Mart logos and colors, staff inside wears Kwik-E-Mart shirts, and the store sells Squishees, Buzz Cola, Krusty-O’s and pink doughnuts.

Before this actually happened, I always felt 7-Eleven was a pretty buttoned down corporation. I could imagine them replying to this with “we wouldn’t want to dilute our brand.” It’s nice that they didn’t.

To turn this into great installation art instead of purely an adventurous marketing scheme, they could have used less “The Simpsons” logos plastered everywhere, and just let the store be as it is in the show, covert and subtle. Of course, making installation art wasn’t the purpose, it was just a side effect. The marketing part worked like a charm though: stores converted to Kwik-E-Marts doubled their sales.

Another aspect of this marketing experiment is that some Arab and Indian owners and employees are offended by the Apu stereotype, and feel it goes too far, regardless of their increased sales. This is an understandable viewpoint. But beyond the surface stereotypes, Apu has been the focus of many shows all on his own, and beyond the surface, he is actually a smart, complex, interesting character. The same goes for many of the other stereotypical characters on the show (Flanders immediately comes to mind). They are initially shown the way many people expect, but over time these expectations are turned on their heads, to reveal them as individuals, beyond the stereotypes.

That debate will go on, as it should. Either way, like Cinderella at midnight, the Kwik-E-Marts turn back to normal 7-Elevens after July 31st.

Get The Simpsons DVDs