How Seeing Art is also an Art that Remains Infinite!

I stand in front of a digital painting at the India Art Fair in Mumbai while admiring Krishna’s face, which appears hazy to be recognised as Krishna’s face. However, the 70-year-old artist behind the artwork, Vinay Mehta, standing close to me, approaches to mention, “There is a particular way to see this art.” As he asks me to start walking from left to right while keeping my eyes fixated on the art, the painting suddenly changes to that of a Radha.

While this might be a small incident of gazing at art in the “right” way, the mere fact that there can be a “right” way of seeing art itself is mysteriously amusing. To inquire about the nature of art might be artistic in itself as well. Notably, there have been many artists, and philosophers who have spent lifetimes wondering about art.

The popular painter Pablo Picasso (painter) had once said: “The experience of art is a cleansing of the spirit, a return to deeper emotional and imaginative states.” Talking about Indian artists, Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet and mystic, in his book, The Religion of Man (1931), mentioned: “The experience of art is spiritual, a reflection of the divine in the material world.”

However, Anupa Mehta, an art gallery owner and curator says, “It might be very subjective,” as we stand close to one of the intriguing art pieces named, ‘My Story if often rejected’ at her gallery in Colaba, an upmarket area in South Mumbai.

Created in the span of five years, it appears like a pedestal from a demolished home that stands as a symbol of loss and longing, speaking of displacement. The artist behind the work, Benitha Perciyal, a sculptor and installation artist from Chennai reportedly says about the work: “It shows the identities shift where the shelter is temporary, and chaos lingers.”

Hard to notice, however, the two eyes made in this artwork — which, otherwise, has been created with materials like frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, clove, bark powder, lemongrass, cedarwood essential oil, water, agate stone, re-used Burma teak wood, restored rosewood pillar and more — are different. Could it offer a perspective within the perspective? “It is open to interpretations always,” Mehta says while talking about the artwork.

Just right from here lies Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s artwork made of polished mahogany wood, acrylic and violin strings, but there is something sad about it. The Kolkata-based artist who is popular for blending painting, sculpture, light, and industrial materials to craft immersive installations, has given it the name, ‘A lost note on an altar’ that looks like a broken violin. 

An object of paradox, it appears to me as a piece that still carries sound— in its current state, the sound that it once carried. “It is about remembrance as the music lies in the remembrance now with it,” says Mehta. But in the artist’s description, it is about the “voices that are lost in the history”.

The renowned writer Henry Miller, once said: “The experience of art challenges us to break free from conventional thinking and embrace the extraordinary.” But are you seeing it the right way in the first place to embrace the extraordinary, is the question one might ask. An art curator who has worked for two years just curating the art objects for a newly-opened space in Mumbai’s Lower Parel, Nillaya Anthology, says, “One might be seeing it the right way if they feel that the art piece is saying something to them. And, perhaps, that is only the right way to see it.”

As we walk exploring the art pieces on display, many such intriguing pieces come to notice, one of which contains multiple eyes while another, in the form of Sputnik, is just a chandelier. Do the colours and the brightness go ironical and contradictory with the fate of the Soviet Union? An answer might be one of the many ways of seeing it or must lie within the artists of Italy where it is created!

But one of the most intriguing has been the artworks where the artists have played well with the subject’s eyes; like another on display, here at Anthology. This is Priya Kambli’s ‘Buttons For Eyes’ — a photography show that experiments with a beam of light, haldi, and rangoli powder on the faces of her family photographs.

The Bombay-born Kambli (1975) had moved to the US at the age of 18. It is said that her artworks experiment a lot with her journey after having moved to a different country with just a family photographic album as she lost both parents at an early age. Even this display talks about the family bonds that are sustained through photography and diaspora. But it does not fail to give a dilemma over its meaning, as it feels a confluence of Indian and cosmopolitan — aligning with the artist’s background.

In an ongoing exhibition in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Brahmdeo Ram Pandit, an artist from Bihar, has imagined what must be under the islands of Mumbai, already made up of seven islands and if there would be even more. He has used ceramic pots while marine life was created with intricate detailing to define the same. But what baffles one’s mind is the vertical positioning of these pots, which gives it another layered meaning.

“This is ‘Samudra Manthan’ that talks about the origination of Mumbai out of the churning of the sea, but what if there are more islands that exist under the sea?” explains the curator Aanchal Gupta, who has also spent good time with the artist about his work. “It is a vertical city, and it grows further, and as it grows, more islands get added to it; hence, he has put 13 pots as of yet,” Gupta adds, still amazed by the number being 13!

A few steps from here, in the same exhibition, is hanging another work of Gond art from Madhya Pradesh, an acrylic paint on canvas by Venkat Raman Singh Shyam. It is a painting aiming to describe the effect of mining on tribal communities and people in general. Here, as trees fall, animals lose their homes while indigenous people are displaced from their ancestral forests that sustain their culture.

However, there are a lot of puzzles within this art, which is a traditional painting style for the Gond community. Gupta answers a lot of them but a lot are still open to understanding, as we continue to discuss more.

As self-explanatory as it might be to perceive art for the viewers, there comes the necessity of the artist themselves or someone related to them to narrate the “right” way of seeing the art if a concealed message has to be conveyed. However, disappointingly, that surely reduces the art from the infinite imagination to merely a closed connotation. Gupta says, “People stumble upon the art pieces that they, in some way, recognise or think that they understand.” Here, the “understanding” keeps changing.

Amidst the ever-bewildering concept of understanding art and the openness to subjectivity, the last perception of any artwork, however, can be “offensive” — which, if nothing, surely defies the purpose of liberal arts. A Russian painter, Wassily Kandinsky had once said: “There is no must in art  because art is free.”

Even if the “right” way to understand art is never explored and just the free nature of it is, it would lead to the hold on the practices like curbing the display of artworks unlike the recent one for some of M.F Hussain’s paintings from a Delhi exhibition. Free flow of air and art, after all, has been the one element that transcends time and the globe since time immemorial and must be seen for the generations to come.