Blouin ArtInfo spoke to the artist half an hour to find out more about the artistic concerns he addresses through the show.
Well, I think postmortem has now many meanings, and if you google it,
you’ll see the results are all connected to business. I was amazed. It was all
about re-examining your business, questioning the parameters of what things
are, and at the end of it to make your administration efficient. I was quite
taken aback.
In one
sense it is about a re-examination, questioning what one did, of turning things
inside out. I felt that since trash and the found object has been part of my
thinking for the last 20 years I should then go back to the found object as
art. Because there was a crossover from art to fashion and I would call what I
created “sculptural garments.” The word garment was at the end of the word
sculpture.
Here there
are sculptures, and the interest in this inanimate, neutral mannequin, which is
not supposed to have any aspect of desire. It’s the human body, greatly
modeled, of course, on the Western body type. But it’s about how a throwaway
object — because these are all, as you can see, rejects from fashion studios —
can become a piece of a sculpture.
This kind
of transference to the human figure, which has been crafted and based on
certain types that come from art get discarded and now return to become
sculptural objects. The cutting up is an act of desecration, destruction. But
the point is always to hover on that line between destroying it and then
bringing it back into the domain of art.
You start
from a certain level of dismemberment on the ground floor of the gallery space,
when you go up, it becomes a more interior kind of dismemberment, where you’re
creating sculptures using models of human organs. But when you go up to the
top, you have the only “whole” figure, a woman representing “Liberty.” Was that
deliberate. What was the rationale?
I thought
that the first room would have works that have a symbolic, classical refinement
about them; minimalism. Then as you move to the ends of the room, the thematic
emerges. So when you come up to the first floor, the idea was to turn this
aesthetic into a counter aesthetic, of the studio space, of the whole room
becoming an installation. The one on top, the room with the single figure, has
a soundscape around it. So, there is a movement… from the macabre, from death,
to liberty.
Was there
a dialogue you were having with surrealist art? Or is the resonance incidental?
Of course.
Surrealism and the collage very much came together. I think in some of these
fantastical juxtapositions, the scale is part of the surrealist aspect.Somewhere,
people cross over from postmodern to theoretical art. I felt the need to,
because actually, what I’ve been saying is that I’ve returned to studio
practice after more than 20 years, because “Gagawaka” was a fashion-designer’s
studio with two assistants and a tailor. I felt the procedure of being involved
wasn’t as much. I would do a sketch, work with material, so how the artist
works with their hands was there, but here it’s much more. This work you see in
front, I mean, this pair of legs was cut off from something else, so it was lying
there. I’m an untidy artist, everything is in chaos. Suddenly I see this
spectacular head. Then I tried to work in another leg, but it wasn’t working.
It’s amazing that this head, that the two ears fit into the heels like as if
the heels were meant to block the ears. Then it seemed too obvious. I felt the
pose could be more poignant, so I propped one ear up… That’s so much of modern
art, you lift something, place it in a certain context and it becomes a work of
art. So these procedures have a whole century of its history. It’s a cliché,
but I felt I rejoined the studio practice of the artist constructing the image
in this very direct way.
How much
of a departure is this from “Gagawaka?”
It raises
many more questions and many more issues that are more personal and subjective
— like my relationship with all this that is evoking sexuality and desire and
dreams and death and mortality — in a much more frontal way than “Gagawaka”
would have; because it references the body that would have worn the garment and
walked the ramp.
So
“Gagawaka” was what brought you to this point?
Yeah. I
mean, “Gagawaka” was a big crossover. So in one sense, it sort of needed me to
take that step forward, and obviously, I wasn’t going to, every six months or
one year, do a new collection. There’s no doubt about that. But I was
interested in bringing it into the domain of fashion. In India not many people
were interested in what I was doing because a lot of the garments have to do
with a certain craft, and the idea to really experiment comes from the fact
that fashion in the West is at least 200 years old and you have institutions
that support the Alexander McQueens…
What do
you think this will take you towards?
Well, the
other thing is the sound work, the idea of collaborating with sound. The sound
work upstairs [created in collaboration with Bettina Wenzel and Ish S.] has a
3D quality to it. I think when you tune your ears to it, it’s not a
stereophonic sound, it’s a 3D kind of sound that is traveling from speaker to
speaker.
- See more at:
http://in.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/982924/interview-vivan-sundaram-on-postmortem-after-gagawaka#sthash.3B20U0Vp.dpuf
