If you look at the India Art Fair grounds in Okhla from the elevated Govindpuri metro station, you will see people at ease—smoking, looking into their phones, finding their Ubers. It’s different from watching people step out of a cinema hall after an intense film and struggle to form coherent sentences. To paraphrase Kafka, shouldn’t art be the axe for the frozen sea within us? How is it that scores of people can pretend to be normal when they step out of the fairgrounds, particularly after the kind of art they have seen? I don’t expect them to be bawling their eyes out, but after consuming hundreds of artworks, surely, they should be ruminative?
I step into the India Art Fair grounds cautiously. Its scale is intimidating. A lot has changed since I last visited over seven years ago. “You can’t do an Art Fair without a map,” an artist friend warns me. “There is so much to see, so much.”
Indeed. There is much to see. When I bump into friends, the question is the same: “Which artwork did I like?” Regardless of my answer, everyone wants to convince me there is a better one around the corner. “Oh, you liked Atul Dodiya’s Rope? Wait till you see the photography booth. You will be shocked to see the pathos in Raghu Rai’s works.”
Pathos? That’s a heavy word to process on a Sunday afternoon. I’m all for art appreciation, but let’s be honest with each other. Why can’t we say Raghu Rai takes great pictures? How his images bring India alive? No, we must say pathos. It aligns with the billowing overlays we’ve picked to wear at India Art Fair, not to mention the Doc Martens.
It is this encounter that annoys the contrarian in me, making me trace my footsteps back to Dodiya’s Rope, courtesy of Vadehra Art Gallery. This time, I actually see it. On the surface, it’s an easy enough artwork to understand. There is a shutter painted with, you guessed it, rope. Lots of it. There is also a painting of The Girl in the White Dress by the American artist Milton Keynes. After a few minutes, the shutter lifts on its own to reveal a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 crime thriller, Rope. According to the official description, Dodiya wanted to make sense of the closed shop shutters during the Bombay riots in the ’90s.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
