BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke to the artist half an hour to find out more about the artistic concerns he addresses through the show.
Someone performing a
postmortem is usually looking for something. What was it that you were looking
for?
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
