Material man

ANJALI SIRCAR profiles Vivan Sundaram, perhaps the most dynamic and cerebral artist on the contemporary art scene.

"Thou are the sky and thou are the nest as well."

- Tagore

VIVAN SUNDARAM has produced, over his 56-year-old career, many seemingly contradictory bodies of work: in his oils on canvas he has been one of the foremost contributors to a contemporary mythology, in his works on paper he has been a vigorous destroyer of those very myths, and now his installations, an area he had entered even in the year 1992, stand like animated edifices, demanding attention. These are his new works, new presences, that compel you to give measure to your step, to pause over the hybrid forms. Preferences are tucked into the view as the signposts of new thinking and directions.

Sundaram says: "At each point, depending on a certain need I feel, or what the situation is, I locate the appropriate medium and then what it does is to allow me to express different facets of myself because whatever the medium I am handling is very important. I have really to feel it as easily and as intuitively as I can. So it is the medium, to a great extent, that develops what I want to say and it communicates to the viewer. It is like unless you fully grasp the pleasure of that medium, the way it is applied, the way it leaves its marks, then to my mind there is always the short form between the idea and the way it finally manifests itself."

When he entered the area of installation, Sundaram found himself recalling his 1960's experience of international art. A great deal of the 1990's, in a way, reconstitutes the structures and materials of the 1960's with content that "engages with the personal/political". All through the 1990's, he got down to the use of an array of materials and skills and manufactured objects with varied inputs. Here he makes a reference to the collaborative nature of the artworks that had special significance for him.

For the recent show at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, and the immediately earlier exposition at the Russian Centre for Science and Culture, he worked on paper, wood, steel, glass, grease, liquids, latex and the electronic. He worked with a blacksmith, Suraj Vishvkarma, who fabricated the steel framework for "House/Boat", and with Chanan and Sadhan Singh with whom he designed and executed the woodwork.

Reminiscing about his childhood he says: "I have always loved carpentry. In school I spent all my craft classes in the carpentry shop. My grandfather, Umrao Singh, used to have a professional carpentry table in his bedroom study and I have childhood memories of playing with his tools." No doubt, there is an almost childlike joy reawakened in the unexpected metamorphosis of materials. Throughout the past few years, Sundaram's installation-making, his manufactured objects have shared equal time and space with found objects, and the works covering a six-year period, have been made at different locations. They all deal with placement, dislocation and relocation. "If rupture informs a great part of my work, the desire to suture and structure the dismembered parts engages me equally."

He would not turn away from the fact that his installations such as "Memorial" and "Sher-Gil Archive" have an inherent sepulchural quality, a built-in melancholy - a melancholy, which Sundaram would say is lodged in the "underbelly" of his affirmative self. Sometimes it takes on the spatial qualities of distance, remoteness. Death, directly referred to or implied in the narrative, is a recurring motif. Installations carry in their presentations a death of the object or an afterlife fraught with uncertainties.

The intentionally sutured and collapsible structures with perishable themes are simultaneously tragic and remote. He is unafraid of the bleakness of the blow-torched, devastated image. "I would like to put a lightness to the idea. I can fold it up and pack it up, stack it. I know how utterly staid and decrepit my works look when not on display while the dustiest of paintings acquire a glow after a quick cleansing. It is unlikely anybody will find a masterpiece of an installation in an attic."

Asked if it was important for him to have a link or continuity from one work to another, he replied that when some links were established, then, in that sense, one felt certain satisfaction, but he personally was always interested in disjunctures - in breaks which were there within the work itself. "I make the work, position it and see myself in relationship to it as to how it locates itself in the context. I am continuously posing questions and, therefore, what I do is opening out its meanings. If I am making continuous moves which are strategical or tactical - well that is my effort to find my own self."

The enjoyment is in a range of physicalities - the stone's carver's handiwork, the architect's drawing, the photographer's image - all rendered in collaboration, and juxtaposed with quotations from history. He looks at his own pleasure, raises it through the layers of transparencies.

All these can be discerned in his current works: "The Table is Laid", "Carrier", "Black Boat", "House". The structures are all for use, they await people's arrival - house, boat, table and bed. Arrival, rest and departure connect the structures - many monuments have this quality. But the phenomenological experience of the art work is about silence, stillness, secret metamorphoses, on site, in space.

Born in Shimla in 1943, Vivan Sundaram, with a post-diploma from Slade School, London, is perhaps the most dynamic and cerebral artist functioning on the contemporary Indian art scene, with an international reputation almost unmatched. To quote artist Nilima Sheikh: "It requires every bit of his artistic energy, obsession and instinct to conduct each varied instrument of expression into the making of a complex, sensuous object."

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