art and chocolate

Four Phases of Vinod Dave's Art ------- Phase - 1: Early Works --------------- Beginning 1975 to 1981

2011-12-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

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IMPORTANT NOTE:

[During this phase, I had two eyes. I lost one of the eyes in an accident before beginning of 2nd phase of my art career. So there is a difference in my way of painting before and after. This phase shows how an artist with both good eyes would see depth/volume & translate them in works of visual art. All the phases after this one show how a one-eyed artist would struggle to invent a feeling of depth via juxtaposition of conflicting/contrasting elements. For full explaining statement, read it at the beginning of the post about phase 3.]

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My drawings, at least in the beginning, were concerned with emptiness and desolation. This feeling is a personal one. I found the image of a bat in a forlorn room an effective symbol of this. A bat hanging from a ceiling forebodes helplessness and death. When it flaps about blindly in a room, it carries this feeling with it.

The image of a bat, a small living thing with enormous wrappings led me into other metamorphic forms. These combined them in a way that showed a struggle between the inert and the active. This led me in its turn to pictures of erotic combat, sometimes combining the sensual and the brutal. I have probably tried to dramatize through these a feeling of personal desolation. I have probably tried to make a general comment to an environment which is a thing to us. We struggle to be a part of it but not be a thing ourselves. I am aware of an inherent contradiction like this in life, even the erotic.

My drawings have been so far quite personal, but of late, I have wanted to pull myself out of it into a distance and be a watcher not a party.

-Vinod Dave on his early works from 1975 – 1981

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Vinod Dave’s confiding note on his drawings is illuminating. It is disturbingly frank, as are his drawings. Handling a vast variety of forms – the bat, the nude, the disembodied garment – Dave’s delineation is so clear and aggressive, so sudden and striking in confrontation as visual images, that the drawings command immediate attention and respect. The anatomical details are rendered with fine observation and a revealing skill.

Some his works refer to the erotic but manage to avoid portraying the sensual or the sensuous. Dave does this by incorporating graphic elements or themes which make the drawings portray frustrations or mania. Compositions based on the forms of the bat imply and suggest the elastic , nervous power symbolized by this creature.

There is a genuineness about these images, a powerful but controlled statement and an unorthodoxy which mark Vinod Dave as a young artist of considerable talent.

-Richard Bartholomew

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One is immediately struck by Vinod Dave’s skill as draughtsman and painter. He reveals a sure and masterly grasp of pencil and paint. There is a fluidity and ease in the execution of his works, the dexterity and supple grace of the accomplished artist. Art comes naturally to him, it is his element.

But technique apart, Dave has developed a personal imagery which is compelling, with forms as persistent as figures in a dream. They are an assault on the senses, a nightmarish vision of the vampires, dismembered bodies, scattered remains, emptied skins juxtaposed with the cold crystalline hardware of modern life. They are painted with a meticulous almost obsessive realism, reassembled in a relationship which cast the hypnotic spell of the chimera. These disturbing convulsive transfigurations create a Kafkaesque fantasy, suffused in an atmosphere of sinister menace, the corporal elements seemingly victims in an infernal drama.

The drawings have the clinical assurance of the surgeon’s knife. While the pencil exults in the human form, tracing the rounded contours of the body with the lascivious scars, it explores with an unabashed sensuality and limitless curiosity the remotest regions. Side by side with the disjointed images of startling beauty we have the polished gloss of putrefaction, of the bulbous shapes, of tissues tainted with the settling hues of decay.

Whatever the morals of these works, they are evidence of a creative imagination of uncommon power.

-Ebrahim Alkazi

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We experience hard realities, the stresses in society and the nature of sleep, the sensuous repose of the body, its physical abandon, and the psychic state of the dream when experience is metamorphosed and memory is recast and experienced subliminally as a symbolic narrative while looking at work of Vinod Dave. His work projects both these areas of sensibility, often coalescing the two. The result is real enough to be of this world of phenomenal things and fantastic also in the way that the images are “arrested” images, phased in the rhythm and movement of the dream.

We see this distinctly in the series of drawings depicting a dog on the prowl. By changing the background, which engenders the mood, the expression changes from the sinister to the sad. In a sequence of frames the dog, despite being depicted in the same posture, appears to move on as the eye admits its representative-ness and the mind takes into account its progression.

This lone dog for all its forward thrust is a metamorphosed image. One leg seems rooted, planted, as though animal life were drawing substance from vegetative earth. The cycle is complete, with the dog asleep, under a bed, besides a blanketed figure – both creatures of this world, and out of it as well, at the same time.

Vinod Dave’s other recurring theme is the female nude. Depicted in varying degrees of delineation – sensuously graphic and exquisitely modeled as in the drawings – or transposed and transformed as in the paintings where figure and prop are surreal presences – the nude is the personification of the sleep world, sleep as a sexual encounter and sleep as the drama in the dream.
-Richard Bartholomew

One would also wish to see the artist's photography & drawing HERE

Four Phases of Vinod Dave's Art ------- Phase - 2: Photo-Journalism ---------- Beginning 1981 to 1991

2011-12-18T18:08:00.002-08:00

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PHASE-1

PHASE-3

PHASE-4

IMPORTANT NOTE:

[Starting with this phase, my way of seeing has changed due to loss of one of my eyes in an accident. So all works in all the phases starting this one are affected by my vision without spatial depth. As I have explained in my statement in phase 3, works from now on are depicted with an "invented" way of seeing depth - rather a feeling of depth that is achieved by "fooling" my eye. Please observe that my way of painting is clearly different now on compared to the previous phase. The major difference is that of an illusion of depth and the three dimensional modelling & rendering of shapes in the early phase as opposed to the flat masses & fluidly painted areas juxtaposed with hard-edged geometrical shapes, marks-making & text to "create" fooling feeling of depth. For full full statement, please find it at the beginning of the post about phase 3.]

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We each morning read and “digest” bad news with breakfast, mostly of violence of humans against humans, while we sit at our breakfast table. Reacting to that, my work involves manipulated re-photography of socially violent news-images in a way that makes the photograph, ‘frozen’ by a photojournalist’s camera, ‘melt’ again to convey a powerfully expressionistic statement about the hard world of relativity that one faces in contemporary global society. Part painting, part photograph, largely dark toned mixed-media work, at first looks like an interestingly patterned abstract pastiche; its figures taken from the news media provide an allegorical puzzle. The puzzle is soon solved with the discovery of my pre-occupation with violence, a violence that can not be categorized and that charges the whole of living. The photographs of a daily variety of ‘human made violence’ juxtaposed with purposeful slashes and strokes punctuate the composition with broken shards and a fragmented imagery that blend, one into the other, regardless of time and form. The news photograph aligned and juxtaposed with slashes and borders of color refer to the human condition. Taken out of context of black and white boxes of columns, print and headlines, the photograph now takes its reference from and has its energy in suggestive potentiality of color.

-Vinod Dave on his news photo based works from 1981 – 1991

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Vinod Dave’s work is informed with an unusual perception and a unique sensitivity to his medium. His work is imbued with a strong emotional intensity which is rendered means of rich color sense that speaks of both Western and Eastern influences. The intensity of his artistic voice speaks to everyone.

His The Green Empire of Her Psychosis, certainly recalls the Western collage tradition beginning with the work of Kurt Schwitters and continuing to Dada photographer Hans Bellmer. The composition as a whole alludes to the decorative planarity of Rajput and Mewar miniature, while the surface graffiti recalls tribal wall paintings, such as produced by the Warli painters. The reclining nude repoussoir figure recalls both the legion of the Western odalisques as well as the sensuous sacred figures of Eastern religious sculpture. Dave’s choice of the photographic medium finds its source in late Victorian portraits copied from photographs, or actually painted upon them. Commenting about these palimpsest images, Stuart Cary Welch states, “Such was their skill that it is often challenging to be sure whether or not some paintings are fundamentally what they seem.” The same could be said about Vinod Dave’s work.

-Thomas Sokolowski

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The magic fiery nature of modern-day Indian art is lighting up two galleries and a corridor at the Worcester Art Museum. Blazing colors, abstract imagery but also delicately drawn figures mark this show, the second the museum is devoting to contemporary Indian art. The oldest is Msqbool Fida Huasain. In this show, it is not Husain but Vinod Dave who carries the day. Dave’s mixed-media works light up the museum’s Fountain Gallery with their brilliant color schemes. Like an old master painter, he uses lots of bright reds and deep greens and other warm hues to focus attention on his collage-like scenes. Surrounding areas are in subdued hues or semi-darkness. His imagery is composed out of different objects. People, animals, architectural elements and scenes from contemporary life are joined into an electrifying whole. There is an unreal character to it, as if the artist has joined flashes from dreams in an effort to piece together the complete story. His imagery is expressive and powerful and cleverly combines reality with abstract. The impact is heightened by the scale of the works even though Dave shows himself no less effective in his smaller mixed-media works.

-Peter Donker

One would also wish to see the artist's photography & drawing HERE

Four Phases of Vinod Dave's Art ------- Phase - 3: Popular Mythology ------- Beginning 1991 to 2009

2011-12-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

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PHASE-1

PHASE-2

PHASE-4

By interpreting popular images of deities into personal statements, I have both paid homage to and, like an ordinary human being, ‘quarreled with Gods’ by viewing them with contemporary sensibility and turning them into art of social context. I have always been fascinated by stories and images of legendary gods and demons including their miracles, strange wars, incredible flights and their multi-headed, multi-handed heavenly physique.

But my personal statement of social nature via deities is not a revolt and it is not aimed at change like in a movement. What I am trying to do more than anything else by painting this is to heighten the tension between the duality of existence. And the duality is that of the superior and the inferior. Though the images painted refer mostly to the superior, their paraphernalia make the invisible presence of the other party felt indirectly. It is about the tension that connects to a sense of violence, a violence that can not be categorized; but it exists. And it exists between the powerful and the weak, the controller and the controlled, the master and the slave, the ruler and the ruled, the privileged and the deprived, the star and the masses, the special and the mundane.

My work is about the conflict of the opposites. This conflict is a fact of life and nature. In my case, it is also a conflict of physical and mental visions. I can not see like most. With only one seeing eye, I see without spatial distance.

I used to have two seeing eyes once and my mind remembers how I used to see then. So it still tries to see things that way and that creates a violent conflict of discomfort. I have found a way to make peace it. I have "invented" a way of depicting imagery juxtaposing fluid color areas in contrast with solid thickly painted hard-edged shapes and marks and text to "fool" my mind into "seeing" things in depth. Thus my personal conflict of partial disability resonate with the conflicts of life.

Coming from another culture and trying to live in different one is very conflicting. So for me personally, it is not only one conflict. Besides seeing differently and being aware of opposites in life, I face yet another challenge. I come from a tiny India village and now live in a western mega city. That adds to my awareness of how most people struggle to survive in the modern world despite difficulties. That sets the powerful clearly apart just like gods that most of us follow and worship without questioning. May be I am trying to question via what and how I paint

-Vinod Dave on his Indian Iconography based works 1991 – 2009

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The Shabda Brahma canvas can serve as an introduction to Vinod Dave’s show. It is shaped like a new scripture equating all the major religions practiced in India and relating those to things fine and bold in the lay world, inclusive of animals real - “ real as well as drawn from the artist’s private mythology, while misty layers of gentle, radiant illumination impregnate the whole with warm lyricism.

-Marta Jakimowicz

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Vinod Dave is a poet of amalgamation. In his early works of photographic mixed media from the 1980s Dave began with images from mass and popular culture and blew them up beyond their pictorial values into over-modulated intensities, then painted onto them birds and people of immense delicacy, producing realms where public and private life furiously---yet poetically—intersected. The banal beauties of calendar art found themselves printed onto canvas then etched in a gouache resonant with mauve gardens and pale blue temple portals. Old photos from the British Raj were plastered with multi-colored Rajasthani peacocks and language from pre-independence newspapers. The effect was to bring the runes of the past into the explosive politics and kitsched quotidians of the present, generating a poetry of mysterious derangement. From sources in Rauschenberg, Pop Art and Surrealism, also in temple architecture and Rajput painting, Dave created an empire of imagery straining the bounds of human rationality, in which anxiety and pleasure, social reality and human privacy, disorder and rearrangement became inseparable twins, jolting the brain and soothing the imagination.

His art has come a long distance in these twenty five years, and yet the central contours of his world and work have remained of a piece with those earlier days. Dave’s images still explode with a history situated on the far shores of human rationality; his pictures still place power in collusion with patina. These layerings and juxtapositions have become all the more intricate, and frightening, since 911, which is the subject of Dave’s current exhibition. 911 is something he felt viscerally as a New Yorker, but also as an Indian citizen grown up on the vast legacies of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Ironically the vastness of the subject has spiraled Dave into things smaller: a series of mixed media works done in miniature size, the size of an ordinary color photograph on the family mantle, that of a Rajput painting. This shrinking of range is the occasion for an expansion of domain: into a world torn apart by fundamentalism, recalcitrance, hatred, violence. And yet the violence appears more quietly. Dave’s pictures are closer than ever to the Indian miniature framework in their use of ornamental border and washes of color. In them figures float in boundless space, or travel courtesy of that jet propelled god who never crashed into the World Trade Towers, the Vishnu-Garud. The quiet timelessness of the miniature subdues the iron-wrought intensities of the statement in these tiny but jam packed works, by bathing the violence in layers of poetic gouache. This build up of patina is overwritten in Arabic script, a writing as elegant as Urdu poetry. In Dave’s aesthetic procedure the present is placed in a larger, oceanic past, raising the question of its emergence. How did things take the current turn? What of the old cultures, were they the same? How can lovely men reciting poems to one another while drinking mint tea have arrived at this? What is the difference between a religious incarnation/avatar and a violently derailed airplane? What happens to cultures when they collide like vessels in the air? In these pictures everything is raised and nothing answered. As always, frames are contained within images, and those within other frames, suggesting displacement, appropriation, incandescence. In Dave’s work, big ideas come in little packages.

-Daniel A. Herwitz

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The entanglement of the past in the present has long been a subtext of Vinod Dave’s work. Since the early 1980s he has satirized the overt and the subtle violence in the canvases jammed with images form contemporary popular culture and the grand Indian visual traditions. Dave transcends the familiar postmodern despair of cultural mix and his works fold multiple conflicting references into a few carefully chosen and richly handled images. In his works a brilliant interplay among these contradictions urges us to confront a paradox of mortal consequence: memory makes a lost dream of history, and that dream sustains us, even as it threatens to destroy us.

Dave’s paintings reverberate with a nostalgia for the traditions of village life. Initiating this project on a visit to his native Gujarat, he posed and photographed villagers costumed for the yearly Navratri performance of the Hindu classics. Blurred and painted over, these figures are shrouded into a gorgeous haze.

These are intimate mementos that link personal history with the historical past. Fading and frozen in time, Dave’s photographs evoke colonial images of the ‘natives’. He borrows the Bengal School’s melancholic nostalgia and the Company School’s treatment of the photograph as a flat surface to be painted over. These overlapping, divergent references remind us that Dave’s self-alienation is a cultural phenomenon, and that it began with colonization. But also, in synchronizing the past and present, he plumbs nostalgia’s deep, authentic roots. What reality has not yet redressed, the memorial imagination repairs with a unifying vision, a recollection entire at least in its beauty and intensity.

Contradictions embedded in the photographs and superimposed drawings go further. They replace nostalgia with an acceptance of the difficult ambiguities of the past. The photograph in The Divine Witness and Hawks of a Dreamland, so effectively doubling as personal keepsakes and colonial-era ethnographic documents, reveal that Dave shares an exoticising vision with the imperial photographer. This transposition of the colonial and postcolonial subject acknowledges that colonialism is not only the source of the proud victim’s alienation, but also the antecedent of cultural consciousness. The longing that signals the artist’s absence from the landscape also discloses that the freedom has had the unexpected and painfully borne consequence of making a tourist of the native son.

In addition to issuing warnings, the sharply contoured drawings of these two works are transformative images. On the one hand, the leaping, snarling tigers surreally threatening birds, and the heraldic weapons, recall the heroic imagery and refined style of the courtly miniature traditions. But they are reductive forms as well. They could be comic-strip characters or commercial logos. Surprisingly, they embrace the history of culture’s degradation into kitsch, and acknowledge the objectification of culture through mass production, tourism and symbol-seeking nationalism. If these elegant forms offer an image of the past, it is not the lost creature of cultural purity, but rather a motley, resilient and evanescent beast.

Dave does not dismiss nostalgia - the need for the cultural wholeness that fuels it is real - but because of the determinative force historical myths exert on the creations of the memorial imagination, he will not underestimate the danger. Perhaps most movingly of all, his paintings are remarkable for the faith they exhibit in art’s capacity to address these dangers.

-Karin Miller-Lewis

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In the artist's words "My ancestors had left a heritage of some very fascinating illustrated books on major Hindu epics that contained interesting drawings in which each character was identified with his or her name written underneath and even phrases telling what that character is doing...". That these illustrated manuscripts are an intrinsic part of storytelling, that as a body of work they stand in sharp variance to the pop iconic image of the bazaar was not lost on the young boy. Ajay Sinha in Contemporary Art in Baroda writes "By the time Vinod Dave finished his MFA, he had mastered oil painting as no one in his generation had." The early work was about sexuality as distinct from the sexual act. Dave, positioning himself as voyeur, part participant, part ineffectual presence, painted the press of bodies and limbs in a frontage of visual titillation. Dave has read the culture of the street to denote a potentially explosive admixture of sex, religion and violence. At one or other phase of his painting one or other ingredient in this heady brew has been dominating.
-Gayatri Sinha

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Since the ‘Oriental Renaissance,’ (1680-1880) in which Europeans ‘rediscovered’ Indian art and thought, Indian depictions of deities have been central components of many Western museums’Asian art collections. While this certainly played a crucial role in promoting knowledge and (partial)acceptance of Indian religious traditions for those living outside India, recategorisation of these pieces as ‘art’ also affected the perception of Indian artists engaged in the representation of deities. The ritual production of images (mūrti) that for centuries had been about proper reproduction, rather than personal innovation, was replaced by new schools of ‘art’ that used the images as allegory. This shift in the production process restricts the agency of the divine character, transferring it from subject to object, and making it devoid of ritual efficacy. However, these works remain involved in constructing the human relationship with the divine, which can be best described as a continuum of the sacred and the mundane.

Perhaps no example illustrates this better than images of the goddess Durgā slaying the buffalo-demon(Mahiṣāsuramardinī). Therefore, in this article I will examine how artists have portrayed this goddess and the implications of their images for the construction of a modern human-divine continuum within the Indian artistic sphere. The artists discussed are those that have had most impact on the flourishing Indian art market since the mid twentieth century: Husain, Bhattacharya, Mehta, Arjuna, Custodio, and Dave, illuminating each artist’s interpretation of the myth and focusing on the rationale behind either their controversy or acceptance within both the art world and India.

Beyond the Progressive Artists Group, a new generation of artists has been captivated by Mahiṣāsuramardinī. These artists produce images that further blur the lines of divine and secular. Using innovative techniques such as mixed media and serigraphy the artists are formulating new interpretations of how the divine image might fit into the everyday life of the audience. In these new productions the divine is transplanted amongst the mundane in a way that removes all transcendence from the image. Vinod Dave is amongst these artists. He was formally educated in the arts and received an MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda,ix before moving to the U.S. to complete an MA at the University of South Carolina. Early in his career Dave was injured by one of his own paintings, rendering him blind in one eye. This disability inspired him to begin producing art that would reflect his particular way of seeing. He also began producing images focused on Indian religious symbols and mythological characters, including Mahiṣāsuramardinī. The imagery of Durgā as the slayer of the buffalo also has personal significance. He uses his image of Mahiṣāsuramardinī, Mother Victory, on his biographical page to show his own personal triumph over obstacles that would have prevented his success. Dave uses his skills in mixed media to produce depictions of the goddess that intermingle various textures and styles: in Mother Victory, he used a classical manuscript of the Devi Mahatmyam as the centerpiece for an image set on a background of sombre earth tones. The manuscript is engulfed by smaller images of a pistol and a bomb. Dave’s mixing of the old and new is reminiscent of Arpita Singh’s Durga in which the goddess, dressed in a white sari, holds a pistol. Singh’s influence is also felt in several other images by Dave, especially an untitled piece in which the deity holds a pistol identical to that of Durga. Dave’s image, however, places the focus not on the deity but on the deity’s historical context by including the manuscript. The origin of the deity is removed from ‘time immemorial’ to a definite moment of textual creation. But as with Singh’s Durga, the focus of the image is the violence that ensues from such formations.

In Mahisasur Mardini, Dave again depicts a traditional form of the goddess in combat with the buffalo demon, but the use of various media expertly mixes the traditional with the new, and the magical with the real, as the image of the buffalo slowly transforms into a photograph of a raw piece of beef. From the goddess’s uplifted head an arc sweeps down the image to the head of the buffalo, moving the viewer’s eyes in the same motion as the swoop of her sword as she cuts off the head of her adversary. Similar arcs reverberate across the painting, while other hazy apparitions of the goddess fill voids in the image, displaying her as omnipresent. The work, like many traditional paintings, places the action in a mythological plane removed from the world of phenomenal existence; however, the use of such visceral imagery as raw meat ushers the deity into a very ‘real’ setting, while the use of photography gives realism to the battle: the viewer can see the texture of the flesh of the demon that has been torn apart by the goddess and her lion, while the buffalo’s severed head glistens from the light of the camera’s flash. Christopher Pinney has argued that by mixing photography and painting the mystical can become tangible. In the works Supreme Mistress and The Goddess’ Feet, Dave replaced the head of the painted deity with a photograph of a ‘real’ woman. Unlike the earlier works that placed the magical in the human realm, Dave’s images innovatively place the profane within the sacred.
-Caleb Simmons

One would also wish to see the artist's photography & drawing HERE

Four Phases of Vinod Dave's Art ------- Phase - 4: Books-as-Artworks - Beginning Late 2009 to Date

2011-12-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

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PHASE-1

PHASE-2

PHASE-3

Publishers engage in commercialization of anti-environmental over supply, hence, more of their products end up as utter waste. To somewhat reverse that, I use leftover, untouched and trashed books/catalogs as my raw material and turn them into art works. Often I have 50 copies of the same catalog as an ‘edition’ but each copy is individually worked upon and has unique character maintained via manual work. I like my work to be treated on real world level and not as a prized element on an elevated pedestal of high art. So I allow viewers to pick them up like regular books for closer observation. As a result (when viewers put the books back), their display shape/size keep altering as if giving them their organic roots back.

-Vinod Dave on his book-arts based works 2009 – now

One would also wish to see the artist's photography & drawing HERE

In His Own Words

2011-12-08T10:08:00.000-08:00

Swami Vivekananda's Speech in Chikago..... Original Voice. by sreeharsha gobhatt

Salute, Steve!

2011-10-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

Steve McCurry - A Retrospective

2011-09-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

Steve McCurry: A Retrospective from leica camera on Vimeo.

Stealing the Mona Lisa: the World's Most Famous Art Theft

2011-08-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world was returned to the Louvre only after World War 2.

Peruggia's mug-shot

Peruggia's room in Paris

Charney's book, "The Thefts of the Mona Lisa"

By Noah Charney

Vincenzo Peruggia breathed in heavily the scent of his sweat as he waited, barely willing to exhale, in the tight, dark closet beside the Salle des Sept Martres gallery in the Louvre. He listened for the footfalls of the guards. They gradually grew louder in a painfully slow crescendo. For an exquisite moment they seemed to stop right outside the door against which his ear was propped, but then continued into the distance, echoing along the length of the corridor and into the night museum.

Peruggia knew that the Louvre had over 400 rooms, but only 200 guards, with a great many fewer who patrolled the corridors by night. He knew the precise manner in which his quarry hung in the darkness ahead of him. He knew what he would say, if he were caught: he was just an employee of a company that had been subcontracted by the Louvre. But nothing would help him if he were found with the painting in hand.

He had been working at the museum over two four-month periods as a handyman, most recently involved in constructing wooden and glass cases used to protect some of the Louvre's most famous paintings from the threat of anarchists, whom the directorship feared might target a masterpiece for vandalism as a means of political protest after a woman slashed an Ingres painting in 1907. He was one of five workers in charge of cutting and cleaning glass to build these cases in October 1910. An amateur painter, born in Dumenza (near Milan), he had been living in Paris for many years, a member of a community of expatriate Italians in the City of Light. It was the heart of the art world, and as an aspiring artist of whatever limited talent, it was the place to be. From a pragmatic standpoint, it was a good deal easier to find work in France than it was in Italy, during a period that saw the mass exodus of unemployed lower-class Italians leaving for fairer shores. Most went to the United States. But for an art lover, Paris was a far better destination.

When Peruggia was as certain as he could be that the guards had moved on, he carefully twisted the handle of the wooden closet door and peeked out. When he saw no one, he slipped out of the stairwell and into the gallery, gently shutting the door behind him.
It was around 7:15 on Monday morning, and a gentle light filtered in through the windows of the galleries. He navigated as much by memory as by sight, moving from the closet to the Grande Gallerie and then the Salon Carré, which displayed the gems of the Louvre collection — works by Raphael, Titian, van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and many more. It did not take him long to reach his target: the most famous painting in the world. La Joconde, La Gioconda, the Mona Lisa.
Peruggia was under the impression that the Mona Lisa had been looted from Italy by Napoleon's army during his Italian Campaign of 1792-1797. This was a pretty fair guess, considering that Napoleon took tens of thousands of artworks from Italy during his time in power. Napoleon was responsible for establishing the first known military division dedicated to confiscating artworks, and for insisting on the transfer of art and antiquities from the collections of the vanquished to the Louvre. "You give us your art, or we don't stop shooting," was the message conveyed by his 1796 Modena Armistice, the first known military document to specify the payment in artworks as a requisite for ceasefire. Napoleon used the excuse of official art confiscation as a means of stealing works for his private collection, and his slippery-fingered officers lifted literally thousands of works, particularly prints and drawings, for themselves, while shipping the largest and most famous works back to Paris. More than a century later the Nazis would take a note from Napoleon's books and institute their own art looting division, which also sought to strip Europe of its art, the Mona Lisa included. Much of the Italian art on display in the Louvre in 1911 was looted by Napoleon. Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait was not.

Leonardo lived in France at the end of his life, under the patronage of François I, who greatly admired Leonardo and, by some accounts, was friendly with him. After Leonardo's death in 1519, François legally bought his estate from his assistant and executor — this included the Mona Lisa, which was said to be Leonardo's favorite of his own paintings, and which it is believed he never deemed finished.

As part of the French Royal Collections, the Mona Lisa had hung at the castle of Fontainebleau before it was sent for display at the Louvre, which was itself formerly the French royal residence in Paris and which Napoleon had made into a public art gallery and which, for a time, would bear the name Musée Napoleon.

But Vincenzo Peruggia did not know these details. He believed firmly that Mona Lisa (which he would have referred to by its Italian nickname, La Gioconda) had been stolen from Italy by Napoleon — and that, in stealing it back in order to repatriate it, he would be welcomed in Italy as a national hero. If he were able to profit personally in some way for his troubles, so much the better. But this was a crime which was meant to reverse an older crime, and therefore for Peruggia, it was not only morally excusable — it was practically the duty of a proud Italian to take back what had been torn by force from his ancestors. Like a Roman eagle lost in battle, the Mona Lisa must be returned to its rightful home, whatever the risk.

When his work as a handyman had led him to a firm that was hired by the Louvre to create protective cases for certain works in the museum's collection, Peruggia knew that fate had provided him with a fortuitous opportunity. He had an "in" — a Louvre uniform and access to at least some of the paintings, plus entry to the service corridors, workshops, and stairwells in the vast museum. A plan slowly formed in his mind. The opportunity was there as well as the motive — primarily ideological, with the possibility of profit as an added benefit.

Now Peruggia stood in the morning half-light, the museum like a mist around him, the eyes of dozens of paintings glaring at him from the packed walls. He lifted the Mona Lisa from the wall. It was heavy, painted on poplar wood and in a substantial frame. It was also hung in a particular way, by four iron nails that required the shifting of the painting in order for it to smoothly release from the wall. The fact that he did not have to bang the painting around as he worked it off of the nails would later provide a clue for the investigating detectives that they were dealing with someone who had insider knowledge — but it would bring them no closer to catching Peruggia, who would only be apprehended when he eventually turned himself in. With the Mona Lisa supported under his arm and sweat creasing his back, Peruggia retreated as quietly and quickly as he could to a service stairwell. He had not encountered a single guard.

In the darkness of the stairwell, Peruggia removed the Mona Lisa from its cumbersome glazed frame, cutting it out of the gray bands of fabric that tied it in place. He wrapped the wooden panel painting in a white sheet he had brought with him. His heart raced, but he could not believe his luck. His plan had proceeded smoothly — now came the easy part.

He wound his way down the spiral service staircase to the door at its foot, which opened onto the Court of the Sphinx, from which he could access the Visconti Court, and then vanish into the early-morning darkness of the sleeping city. At the foot of the stairs, he reached out. His moist palm clasped the brass doorknob and twisted.
It was locked.

He took a deep breath to quell the panic. He had thought that the door would not be locked from the inside. But he was prepared. Just in case such a development arose, he had brought a small kit of tools with him. He gingerly placed the Mona Lisa, carefully wrapped in its white sheet, on the floor beside him, then knelt and worked on the stubborn locked door. He might have thought to remove the door from its hinges, but dismissed this approach. Instead he unscrewed the doorknob itself, reasoning that the door would swing open without the doorknob to keep the bolt in place.

It was not to be. The door's lock was independent of the doorknob. What were his options? Breaking down the door was not a good one. It was built firmly to keep thieves out, and he would make such a ruckus that the guards would rush to the scene. Vincenzo Peruggia slumped to the floor. He was trapped inside the Louvre, with the world's most famous painting, freshly stolen, wrapped in a sheet beside him. He fought down the panic and tried to think clearly. He was dressed as a Louvre worker. He knew that it was not unheard-of for workers to be inadvertently locked into the museum at night, while it was so unusual as to be preposterous to think that someone dressed as a Louvre employee had just stolen something and managed to lock himself inside.

Then he heard approaching footsteps. A plumber, making his rounds, suddenly appeared beneath him, climbing the staircase. Peruggia quickly stuffed the doorknob into his pocket. The plumber glanced at him.

"Open the door for me," Peruggia requested, trying to sound as unsuspicious as the circumstances would permit.

The plumber, who had not noticed the rectangular white-wrapped package leaning against the wall, unlocked the door and let Peruggia out into the Court of the Sphinx.
What the plumber made of all this is, unfortunately, not clearly recorded, beyond his recollection of unlocking the door for someone who, to him, seemed to be a Louvre employee who had been accidentally locked in at night and was looking for an exit. There is no record of what the plumber thought of the fact that the door he was asked to unlock was missing its doorknob.

Peruggia muttered a thank you as he hurried out of the stairwell, the cool morning air refreshing his sweat-stained skin.

It was around 7:30 a.m. when Peruggia emerged from the Court of the Sphinx and headed towards the Visconti Court, which exited onto the street, Quai du Louvre. Luck was on his side — the guard who normally watches the Visconti Court entrance was not at his post. Peruggia slipped through the exit, removing his white Louvre worker’s apron as he stepped into the street. An employee of a store across from the museum recalled a man with a rectangular package under his arm hurrying towards the Pont du Carrousel. At the time he did not think twice when he saw this Louvre worker disappear into the distance, carrying a Mona Lisa-shaped object wrapped in a white sheet under his arm. It was only in retrospect that he recalled thinking it was odd that the employee had thrown a doorknob over his shoulder as he left. Thus, on August 21, 1911, transpired the most famous art theft in history.

This Sunday marks 100th anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa. It represents not only the most famous art heist in history, but quite possibly the most famous property theft, bar none.

The theft proved a huge embarrassment not only the museum but for France as a whole, and it sparked a media feeding frenzy, mocking the Louvre for its inability to keep its treasures safe. This was the first international art crime, and perhaps the first property theft, to receive regular international news coverage. The resulting investigation by French authorities was botched and, despite having Peruggia's fingerprint on the discarded frame of the painting, and despite having interrogated him on two occasions, he was not considered a suspect.

Nearly two years later, Peruggia showed up in Florence with the Mona Lisa hidden in the false bottom of a shipping trunk. He contacted a local art dealer, Alfredo Geri, and informed him that he hoped to give the Mona Lisa to the Uffizi Museum. He did not specifically request any money, but implied that he was a poor man and that some compensation would be welcome. He was surprised and exhibited no guilty conscience when he was arrested at his hotel in Florence, after having passed the Mona Lisa over to the Uffizi director.

Peruggia claimed throughout his arrest and trial that his only intention was to repatriate the Mona Lisa, which he believed had been looted from Italy. Peruggia did hope for some monetary compensation, and was not shy about saying as much, believing that he would be welcomed in Italy as a hero for the risks he took to bring the Mona Lisa back to its "native land."

During his trial, which was followed by the world press, he became a romantic figure, an amateur painter who risked everything for patriotism and a love of art. There was some evidence that he considered selling the painting before deciding to smuggle it back to Italy — a list was found in his apartment of prominent art dealers in major cities around the world. Peruggia's version of the story says that he kept the painting for so long because it cast a sort of spell over him (a not uncommon comment for art thieves to make), fascinated him, and rendered him unable to part with it. At the end of the trial, the judge sentenced Peruggia to 380 days in prison, which was appealed and lowered to seven months. The Mona Lisa was displayed at several museums in Italy to enormous crowds before it was returned to Paris.

This is the most famous example of ideologically driven thefts, although one must be wary of assuming that the theft was purely ideological when its possible Peruggia simply abandoned plans to sell the painting when that proved too difficult, shifting to the heroic repatriation — which the criminal surely knew would win him supporters — as a plan B. The entire incident was so well covered by world media that they influenced how the general public sees art theft: relatively innocuous, involving the collectibles of the elite, and not particularly frightening. The public perception has not caught up with reality. Since the Second World War, the majority of art crime has involved organized crime, and even terrorist groups fund themselves in part through the illicit trade in art and antiquities. The United States Department of Justice ranks art crime as the third highest-grossing criminal trade, behind only drugs and arms.

While stories like the Mona Lisa theft entertain, inform, and intrigue, we must be aware that they represent a high-profile minority of real art crimes, which are far more sinister and devastating than the public generally realizes.

Noah Charney is an internationally best-selling author and professor of art history who writes a regular column for ARTINFO entitled "The Secret History of Art." A number of Charney's recent columns have explored other aspects of the mysteries behind the Mona Lisa.

The dramatization that begins this article, based on extensive research, is an excerpt from the author's new book, "The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting" (ARCA Publications), which tells the true story not only of the 1911 theft, but also of the 1907 "affaire des statuettes" (in which Picasso and Apollinaire were interrogated about their involvement), the many vandalism attempts against the painting, and the mystery as to whether the Nazis stole the Mona Lisa during the Second World War. All profits from the sale of the print edition of this book go to charity.

Maula Salim Chishti

2011-06-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

Alvida, Maqbool Fida: M.F. Husain, Free at Last

2011-06-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

by Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Like possibly several other children growing up in the kind of lower-middle class metropolitan households that attempted to reconcile their aspirations towards culture with their frugal habits in the 1970s and1980s in Delhi, my first introduction to the art of our time was the framed print of a Husain painting. We had no television. And my parents had no gods. The only icons in our modest house were two framed pictures – an inexpensive N.S. Bendre, (Lalit Kala Akademi) print of a few women at a well and the reproduction of a Husain painting, possibly detached lovingly and carefully from an Air India calendar, possibly featuring the kind of goddess image that incensed the zealots who made it impossible for M. F. Husain to live out his final years in India.

The occasional bus ride to the National Gallery of Modern Art in the company of an enthusiastic (and wanting-to-be-enlightened parent) would yield a glimpses of more paintings, and then, again, there would be more Husains – bold, galloping horses, faceless angular, cheerful, dancers, myths, entire histories. My eyes would travel to odd corners of the paintings, where there were sometimes more interesting, if quieter things going on, at a slight remove from the central drama of the bold strokes that dominated the pictures.

On one such trip, I think it was my mother who pointed out to me a gaily, madly painted fiat, with a jolly (but gaunt) Santa Claus at the wheel, turning the circle of India Gate. “Look”, she said, “there goes the artist – M.F. Husain, he drives his car without chapels and shoes on his feet.” I think I must have been ten, but at that time, it did feel to me that if this was an artist, then to live the life of art must be an incredible freedom, literally footloose and fancy-footwear-free. What a jolly, fantastic, cheerful, ramshackle car, what a great burst of light of a beard, what a halo of hair ! That combustible locomotion of form and colour seemed to transport M.F. Husain, even then, in and out of my understanding of liberty like an automobile turning circles on a roundabout, not necessarily going anywhere, just happy to be alive, excited to be well-fueled and mobile.

Now, decades later, when I mumble ‘artist’ to the question ‘occupation ?’ asked curtly and almost invariably on arrival at airport immigration desks, that sense of liberty embodied in Husain’s drive-away grace, which made such a profound impression on my ten year old consciousness, still comes to the rescue of my ravaged forty-something mind under the bleak light of all those situations where one is asked to account for oneself under duress. I come away from all such encounters with my dignity intact. I never thought I would ever be an artist, but now that I am called out as one, I suppose one must make the best of being what it takes to be an artist. In my life-time Husain was one of those who invested the vocation of art with the artless grace of whimsy and liberty. For that alone, regardless of what I may think of the entire body of his work, I am grateful. I am sure I am not alone in my gratitude.

Husain could only have become who he did in the world of art. Art and sport, and to a lesser degree film and politics (which are both heavily mired in dynastic compulsions) are perhaps the only spheres of activity in our harshly, pathetically hierarchical society where a young man or woman can come, literally out of nowhere, like Husain did, paint billboards for a living and still (very rarely) make it eventually into a sustained presence in the limelight, touching the eyes and minds and senses of millions of people. It tells us something about the world we live in when we realize that when all else has failed, it is art, for whatever it is worth, that has sometimes lived up to its promise of being a tiny quasi-democratic, half-egalitarian island, where the wild-card of unexpected energy and talent can still upset the best laid plans of privilege and the easy habits of power. That is why we need art in our hollow society, to still keep a door half-ajar to the anonymous practitioners of today who might yet make us turn and think again about life tomorrow.

Last morning, Husain turned the corner of mortal existence. He steered the wheel of the incredibly colorful automobile of his life down a one-way road where we can no longer see him, nor follow him. He is, in a sense, free at last. And we, the ungrateful people of the country which made it impossible for him to die with dignity and honor in the city he loved, should be grateful that he will no longer have reason to blame us for his humiliation. Now we have the opportunity, as a society, to think a little carefully, for a while, about what fools, what philistines we have been to have lost his company while he was alive.

In my godless, unbelieving upbringing, the divine came calling, only occasionally, courtesy M. F. Husain. If there is a lasting, enduring affection that I have for the incredible vitality of the traditions that some people simplify by calling ‘Hindu’, it is to some measure the responsibility of Maqbool Fida Husain. His love for the stories of Ganesh and Durga, for the figures of the Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana took me into territories that the piety of countless Amar Chitra Kathas and the saccharine soap of Ramanand Sagar could never enter. He nudged me into an understanding of the fact that the traditions they call Hindu (because they are obsessed with names where the nameless is more appropriate) are richer, more ambiguous, laden with more secrets and stories and magic, laughter and desire than anything that any fart in saffron robes or khaki shorts and black cap can ever pretend to know or feel. He showed me lila, play, and made it the stuff of goddesses, and occasionally of gods. The goddess who rode the monkey’s tail, the resplendent but austere strength of the sky-clad goddess astride a tiger, these were worth more their weight in faith, fida, then the sermons of a million dharam sansads. He made me understand that one can say ‘maqbool’ (I accept) to ‘fida’ (faith) even when one is sustained most actively by doubt. My atheist soul’s abiding affection for the beauty of faith, and particularly for the faith of my ancestors, is partly by way of boyhood brushes with the reproductions of Maqbool Fida Husain.

If today, I turn to the Mahabharata or the Ramayana like an automatic reflex when thinking of a difficult ethical question, it is thanks to artists like Husain, to poets like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and to their affection for, claims on and deep, abiding, subversive respect for the dense forests of all our traditions.

It is thanks in part to this barefoot farishta, this strange white bearded, halo-haired namesake of the martyred bride-groom of Karbala, that I made peace with being born, at least fractionally, nominally Hindu. And contrary to what the censors in saffron might think, it was this lesson in liberality that also made me think that Salman Rushdie has a right to be read, that Taslima Nasreen has a right to be listened to, and yes, that even those handful of moronic cartoonists of Denmark whose work says more about their limitations than it does about their sense of humor, have a right to be seen, and if necessary, laughed away. God, or the gods, if they are in heaven, must be laughing loudest at our reluctance to laugh with them. Husain, if he is in the corner of heaven specially reserved for those accused of heresy on earh, must be laughing too.
In the end, Husain won his Karbala, even when he lost in battle. His horses, like the good horses of Imam Husain, will keep riding, even after their rider has dismounted. It is the VHP, the RSS, the BJP and every pompous holy-honcho who held forth on Husain’s heresies that stand defeated today. Their vision of culture, ‘samskruti’ ( to be said with a sufficiently upturned nasal twang) is in tatters and in need of having to be salvaged by a petulant contortionist with hunger-management issues and dreams of private militias. Their vision of politics is articulated by those who dance (and not, I have to say, very well) to display their mourning. Their morality is held hostage at the hands of mining mafias. Their poet-laureate is comatose and was never a good poet anyway, and he was a worse statesman than he ever was a poet.

The fools who harangued Husain will fade into the obscurity of the footnotes of art-history text books as miserable examples of what a society should never do to artists. Among them will be people like a cardiac surgeon (Dr. Togadia, of the VHP) who saved fewer lives than he helped take away, a third rate painter of sentimental kitsch (Raghu Vyas) who stoked the early protests against M F Husain at Arpana Kaur’s gallery in the Siri Fort Institutional Area in Delhi (perhaps as a means to offload ballast from the sinking ship of his artistic career) , and the geriatric cartoonist-turned-cartoon (Bal Thackeray) with a reported taste for lukewarm beer (never trust a man who can’t take his beer cold!)

Behind them will be the entire massed ranks of the Sangh Parivar, as faceless and featureless as figures in a Husain painting. Their contribution to culture, their addition to the sum total of intelligence, amply representable by the great Bharatiya contribution to Mathematics – Zero. Paradoxically, In bidding farewell to M.F. Husain, we are also saying good riddance to those who baited him. Now that their object of hate has left the building, they don’t quite know what to do. Their harrumph and bluster has turned into a deflating whine. Some of them have even appeared on television to express their contrition, pretending that they meant him no harm, actually, while filing hundreds of cases in courts across the country. No, it wasn’t terrorism-by-court-notices, it was just a rash of art criticism, wrapped in the language of legalese.

Central to their enterprise and their discomfort was the fact that Husain deployed a visuality and an iconicity that was instantly processable. Whether it was the vigorous Gaja-Gamini on the walls of the Azad Hind Dhaba on Ballygunge Circular Road in Calcutta or the murals on the interiors of an Airport, Husain’s images were never very demanding. They did not need much work to be done to be read by their viewers. They were deceptively simple, straightforward, often striking, sometimes banal. Even a fool in a pair of khaki shorts and indignation leaking from his groin could (mis)read them, easily.

Unfortunately for the Hindutva with a hard-on brigade, contemporary art in India has moved on from where Husain Sa’ab stood, and stayed standing. This was more than evident in the last major survey exhibition of contemporary art from India featuring Husain’s work – the Indian Highway roller coaster that began its journey at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2009. There, Husain was represented by work that seemed both monumental and dated. Around him, was a plethora of work, some exceptional, mostly interesting, some indifferent, but all of which, spoke a language more reticent in terms of figuration than did Husain.

The knikker-critic can neither get this language like he thinks he ‘gets’ Husain, nor is he capable of being provoked by it. It will seem way too distant and cold to him. Not enough images, not even gods, not even much by way of nakedness. Which is why, in a minor footnote to the Husain saga, we have seen a sad Sunday-painter called Dr. Pranav Prakash exhibit a set of embarrassing and cringe-worthy paintings featuring images of a ‘naked’ Husain, to the great delight of the fringe of the Hindutva warriors. (Some even rallied in support of his right to ‘freedom of expression’). Lest I be misunderstood, it needs to be said here that I would never grudge fools the right to express themselves, freely. How else would we know who they were? Prakash’s naked Husain painting is a strange mirror-pastiche of Husain’s style, revealing in all its mediocrity, how much in awe and debt it is to the very object of its derision.

Contemporary Art is way too distant and aloof from the knicker-critic’s world. Husain got his goat, because in a sense Husain spoke his language, even if to turn his world upside down and inside out. Husain was his secret self. The one who actually enjoyed and loved the world of the puranas and the epics, rather than the one who merely took sterile pride in them. The Hindu far right hated Husain, because most of all it hated the delight of what it meant to be an inheritor of the Hindu worlds it ran away from. It hated its own humanity. Husain was a far better claimant to that magical legacy of a universe of colours, enigmas and stories than any Pracharak or Sarsanghchalak could ever be.

Today, Husain has attained what the Sanskrit scriptures sometimes call ‘Kaivalya’ - that unique freedom, that exceptionality, that carries with it a tinge of isolation, a shade of autonomy, a sliver of loneliness. A trace of this radical autonomy is visible in an early photograph of Husain taken by the critic Richard Bartholomew, which came to light for a generation that had never known it in the exhibition of Bartholomew (Senior’s) work put together by his son, Pablo. In this photograph, Husain can be seen on a rooftop (is it the rooftop of the Naaz Hotel in Old Delhi?) with the domes of the Jame Masjid in the background. It seems to be a clear, Delhi winter morning. Husain is in his prime, a man possessed of his delight in what he is doing. In the company of a friend (Richard) in a context he loves, but somehow, detached, distant, at a slight remove. Like an angel on a rooftop, absorbed in Kaivalya.

Who can touch that space ? No bigot can ever hope to grace a foothold in that sunshine. He is free of the bigot, but the bigot will be haunted by him, until his movement dies its necessary death. And yet, without him, culturally, the bigots will be rudderless. They can never taste the Kaivalya, the radical autonomy that is Husain’s by right. They will no longer know what to hate, whom to harass, whom to harangue. And without being able to hate, harass and harangue, they will be nothing, mere shadows of their petty fitful selves. Husain never needed them, but they needed him. They needed him, ever so badly. That need will erode them like nothing else can. That is why Husain, our ever youthful bridegroom of many forms and colours, lost the battle, but won Karbala. Yazid is only a decrepit wall for pilgrims to throw stones at forever in a little known corner of Damascus. There will always be a conversation that you can kick-start with a Husain horse, just as soon, there will be a time when people will ask “Togadia? Who?”

And now that we are no longer required to sign petitions to defend M.F. Husain, an honest and long overdue critical assessment of his work may actually begin. Now will be the time to think about how artists are trapped by repetition and the endless affirmation of themselves in their work. Now will be the time to understand and reflect on how a ‘star-system’ in matters of culture reduces even the most interesting artist to a cardboard cut-out. Now will be the opportunity to think about how and why we have elegies and obituaries aplenty, but so little by way of discursive and critical engagement. Now will be the time to remember that too great a proximity to power can distort the perceptions of even those who appear as the most innocent and playful of artists. Now will be the time to recall the irony in the fact that Husain, who himself fell victim to the shenanigans of a fascist mindset, had at one time, during the nightmare called the Emergency, saw it necessary to paint Indira Gandhi, its architect, as Durga, the victorious goddess. Now is the time to understand that Husain’s innocence was not innocent. Now is the time to remember that Husain loved cinema, but made two incredibly bad feature films (‘Gaja Gamini’ and ‘Meenaxi’). Now is the time to reclaim M. F. Husain as a grandfather, as uncle, as the stranger you make friends with on a long train journey, as the man who tells you the most wonderful stories and then stumps you with the narrowness of his world. As the angel and the buffoon, the faristha and the funtoos, all at once.

Now is also the time to remember that he was not the only Indian artist who felt compelled to leave India because of the images he had made. Few people, especially the kind of cultural liberals who signed endless petitions on his behalf ever remember that the coteries around the Indira Gandhi who Husain painted as Durga made it virtually impossible for the Nirod Mazumdar who painted her astride a donkey to live and work in India for many years. Now is the time to acknowledge that when it comes to the humbug of censorious intentions, the RSS and the Sangh Parivar do not have any monopoly. The Congress, the Left, Gandhians, Muslim and Christian zealots have all made calls for bans and harassed artists and writers.

Perhaps it was this realization that ultimately made Husain choose the bleak freedom of exile over the fulsome humiliation of continuing to hold on to the fetish of Indian citizenship. He said it was because of ‘logistical reasons’, because of the way his work needed to be done, but no one could mistake the fact that what drove Husain away ultimately was not just the hatred of the Hindu far-right, but also the opportunistic and cynical indifference of the so called liberal centre, which in time honored Congressi fashion chose to buckle and prevaricate rather than take a clear stand. In doing so, it revealed a malaise that is deeper than the fissures of political divisions. The sickness of the compulsion to play safe rather than fair.

In a delightfully mischievous poem called ‘Duronto Asha’ (Audacious Hope) another white haired, white bearded eminence, the other gaunt Santa Claus of my bilingual boyhood, Rabindranath Thakur, speaks of his impulsive desire to stop leading the sedentary, safe life of those accustomed to too much self-affirmation of their own identities. Rather than content with being a milksop bhadralok Bengali, Rabindranath, suddenly and impulsively declares his true desire by saying - ‘were I much rather an Arab Bedouin – lost under the desert’s open skies’. I am reminded of this as a way of squaring the circle of how we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that Husain, in his final years, in choosing to base himself in Qatar rather than Delhi or Mumbai, was perhaps exercising elements of the ‘were I much rather an Arab Bedouin’ option.

The only time I ever met Maqbool Fida Husain (spotting him from the window of DTC bus number 408 turning the circle of India Gate at the age of ten doesn’t really count as an encounter) was a few days before the opening of the ‘Indian Highway’ exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in the early December of 2008. A large mural sized painting by him was being installed. He sat, with a tall thin paint-brush in his hands, adding the very last finishing touches. People went up to to him and made polite conversation. My comrades and I in the Raqs Media Collective, were installing not far away from him. We were introduced. There were ‘adaabs’, a few smiles. I took the pictures you see with this post. We went back to our work, he went back to his. Our fishing boat signalled to his ocean liner, like ships that cross each other in the ocean’s night. We acknowledged each other’s presence and drifted apart, as ships navigating entirely different courses must. Still, it was good to have seen the lights glitter on this nearly century old vessel. It was good to have sensed the rattle of its engines and turbines, to see its tall mast and take one’s bearing from its prow.

A little later, his daughter, who was looking after him, asked us, and several others, whether we had seen him. Husain had disappeared. A search party was quickly put together, and a little while later he was found, under the open sky of Kensington Gardens. His daughter was relieved. She told us, as a ninety something man, Husain was in good shape, sharp in all his responses, lucid. The only thing that worried her sometimes was the fact that he would sometimes get up and start moving, as if in a straight line, and walk as long as he could without getting tired, without stopping, and that this worried her about him getting lost, or hurt while absently crossing a busy road.

When the news of his death sunk in, I was reminded of his walk-about ways. He just got up, left. Stretched his canvas. Sorted his paints, started working, stopped, and then got up and left again. The pettiness of nations, the smallness of the minds of those who speak loudly on behalf of nations, could never hold back his final moves. Or, as he said laughing, playfully invoking and twisting Iqbal in an television interview not so long ago when the interviewer painfully and persistently asked him yet again, why he had chosen Qatar over Hindustan, – “Hindi hain hum, vatan hai, sara jahaan hamara’.

The canvas of the open sky was always waiting for the bedouin with the paintbrush in his hand.

Liz in Iran

2011-03-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

Who Are We? Who Are We Not?

2011-01-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

Pakistan’s Palette of Blood and Tears

2010-12-18T08:51:00.000-08:00

Abdullah Syed’s “Flying Rug,” made of United States $1 bills shaped like American drones and arranged in carpetlike patterns

The feminist sculptor and painter Naiza Khan, who curates the exhibition, said her aim was to show the coming of age of Pakistani art.
Both photos by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

KARACHI, Pakistan — In this chaotic city of 18 million people, an exhibition of works by Pakistan’s most significant contemporary artists shows just how imbued with violence daily life here is: on the street, in the air and in the debate about the future course of the nation.

Installed in the elegant rooms of the Mohatta Palace Museum, a confection of Mughal architecture in pink stone, the exhibition, “The Rising Tide: New Direction in Art From Pakistan,” includes more than 40 canvases, videos, installations, mobiles and sculptures made in the past 20 years. Its curator, the feminist sculptor and painter Naiza Khan, said her aim was to show the coming of age of Pakistani art, which blossomed when censorship was lifted after the death of the American-backed Islamic dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq.

Violence was not an intended theme. “I wanted the works to reflect the many strands of the urban condition,” Ms. Khan said in her light-filled studio in an upscale neighborhood here.
But the corrosive impact of Pakistan’s struggle with Islamic militants, its tortured relationship with the United States and the effects of an all-powerful military pervade the show.

The artist Abdullah Syed, for example, assembled a fleet of drones — the pilotless American aircraft that fire missiles at militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas — constructed from the blades of box cutters, the very instruments used by some of the 9/11 attackers. They float on wires just above the viewer’s head, the silvery blades shimmering menacingly in bright light.

A second fleet of drones is constructed from dollar bills folded into the shape of the planes and stapled together in circular patterns that resemble those of an oriental carpet. Called the “Flying Rug,” the paper fleet casts an ominous shadow on a nearby wall.

Mr. Syed, one of several artists in the show pursuing a career abroad, teaches at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “I’m always navigating ideas between the West and here,” he said, perched on a ladder as he hung his killer fleets. The “Flying Rug” takes sides: “I’m saying, ‘To hell with Uncle Sam.’ ”

Though in the West the drones are often seen as an essential element in the fight against terrorism, in Pakistan they are considered imperial interference by the United States, he said. In the show’s catalog Mr. Syed notes that according to one estimate, drones have killed more than 1,000 Pakistani civilians since 2004. Many more civilians have fled the tribal areas and settled in Karachi to escape the attacks, an influx that has sharpened the city’s political tensions.

In recent years work by Pakistani artists has begun appearing in museum shows outside the country — in Paris, London and Dubai. Ms. Khan wanted to bring them home, to show the strength and variety of their projects. Among her choices are Rashid Rana, whose “Desperately Seeking Paradise,” a huge metal cube covered in photographs of the dilapidated residential buildings of Lahore, appeared at the Musée Guimet in Paris recently; and Imran Qureshi and Anwar Saeed, whose works appeared in “Hanging Fire,” a survey of Pakistani art at Asia Society in Manhattan last year.

Mr. Qureshi is a leader in the modern school of Pakistani miniature painting derived from the court painters of the Mughal era. But rather than paint delicate images of princes and princesses, modern miniaturists have expanded their vocabulary. Ms. Khan chose a Qureshi miniature of a missile, painted after Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998. Also on display is a large-scale triptych panel by Mr. Qureshi of drips and splotches executed in a lush pomegranate hue. Or is that the color of blood?

Part of what differentiates this exhibition from the recent shows of Pakistani art in New York and Dubai is the inclusion of young people fresh out of the country’s growing number of art schools.

Sara Khan, 24, a recent graduate from the art department at Karachi University, is from the Pashtun ethnic group, whose traditional homeland is in the turbulent tribal areas in northwest Pakistan, where the army is embroiled in fighting militants. To escape the lack of development in the region, many Pashtuns have moved to Karachi in the past 30 years, among them Ms. Khan’s relatives.

Ms. Khan, who was born here and has never been to the tribal areas, doesn’t even speak Pashto. “They call me a fake Pashtun,” she said in an interview.
In her work Ms. Khan uses emblems of Pashtun culture painted in the style of a children’s primer on pages sized to resemble a school exercise book. Among the images: an AK-47 rifle — the standard-issue weapon of the tribal zone — a bullet and a series of domestic items, including bread, milk and eggs.

“Pashtuns are very strong, but I am showing emblems in a soft way,” she said. “I am saying, ‘We are not exactly what you think we are.’ ” A simple two-part work by Risham Syed reflects the violence that many urban, middle-class Pakistanis feel. A red wall lamp similar to those that hang in the homes of the well-to-do in Lahore, in northeastern Pakistan, is juxtaposed with a tiny 4-by-6-inch canvas, painted in a brutally realistic style. It shows a lone man in Islamic religious garb futilely trying to damp down a wall of flames that engulf a building.
Ms. Syed, who teaches art at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, seems to be edging close to the question some Pakistanis are raising gingerly about the responsibility of extremist clergy for the wave of suicide bombings in the nation’s cities.

Ms. Khan, the curator, took a year away from her studio in Karachi to put the show together. She felt strongly, she said, that even though fear and violence emerged as central themes in the art, Karachi should be seen as more than just a city of gangland killings and ethnically directed shootings.

“It means a lot to me to bring art center stage at a time when so much is denied in the country,” she said.

- Jane Perlez for The New York Times

PAGES FROM VINOD DAVE'S BOOK ARTS

2010-11-19T07:36:00.001-08:00

Vinod Dave, in a frenzy of creativity, has started working on several giant projects of book arts since June 2010. Making several series of editions of book and countless unique books, he has turned what people throw away as trash into book-art-works worth the higher pedestal. Above are some pages from the projects.

Anthony, Susan Brownell, 1820–1906

2010-11-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

This Day in History
Nov 5, 1872: Susan B. Anthony was fined 100 for trying to vote in the presidential election (she was trying to vote for President Grant).

Anthony, Susan Brownell, 1820–1906, American reformer and leader of the woman-suffrage movement, b. Adams, Mass.; daughter of Daniel Anthony, Quaker abolitionist. From the age of 17, when she was a teacher in rural New York state, she agitated for equal pay for women teachers, for coeducation, and for college training for girls. When the Sons of Temperance refused to admit women into their movement, she organized the first woman's temperance association, the Daughters of Temperance. At a temperance meeting in 1851 she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and from that time until Stanton's death in 1902 they were associated as the leaders of the woman's movement in the United States and were bound by a warm personal friendship. Susan B. Anthony lectured (1851–60) on women's rights and on abolition, and, with Stanton, secured the first laws in the New York state legislature guaranteeing to women rights over their children and control of property and wages. In 1863 she was a coorganizer of the Women's Loyal League to support Lincoln's government, especially his emancipation policy. After the Civil War she opposed granting suffrage to freedmen without also giving it to women, and many woman-suffrage sympathizers broke with her on this issue. She and Stanton organized (1869) the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 this group united with the American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Anthony was president from 1892 to 1900. In 1872 she led a group of women to the polls in Rochester, N.Y., to test the right of women to the franchise under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. Her arrest, trial, and sentence to a fine (which she refused to pay) were a cause célèbre; other women followed her example until the case was decided against them by the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1869 she traveled and lectured throughout the United States and Europe, seeing the feminist movement gradually advance to respectability and political importance. The secret of her power, aside from her superior intellect and strong personality, was her unswerving singleness of purpose. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, she compiled Volumes I to III of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–86), using a personal legacy to buy most of the first edition and present the volumes to colleges and universities in the United States and Europe. The History was completed by Ida Husted Harper (Vol. IV–VI, 1900–1922; Susan B. Anthony contributed to Vol. IV).

Read more: Susan Brownell Anthony — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0804198.html#ixzz14TTbJ1Vs

Something Else

2010-05-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

-Rick Moranis for NY Times.

એક અછાંદસ

2010-04-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

અંધકારમાં અકથ્ય એકાંતમાં
નીરવ સમયમાં તરફડતું એક પક્ષી છું,
તેવા કથનમાં તો માત્ર અને માત્ર
વાગ્મિક અલંકાર રચાયો.
તે રચનામાં હું નથી તેની મને જાણ છે
પણ હું શું અને ક્યાં છું તેની અને
શા માટે છું તેનીય મને જાણ નથી !
મારા કોઈ ભાષિક કથનમાં
એક વાર પણ મેં મને જોયો નથી,
પ્રચંડ જુઠ્ઠાણાં મારાં છે
પણ રે તેમાંય હું નથી.

-લાભશંકર ઠાકર

A Lonely Marg

2010-04-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Art is a lonely exercise. There is very little you can explain to others. And if you choose to, each one is bound to read it in his own way or bypass it. But this process is diverting to watch; and to a large extent rewarding. It opens out to you, various vistas you had not so far taken notice of.
-K.G. Subramanyan

હરિ ૐ

2010-04-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

શ્વાસ ખુટી જાય અને ઈચ્છાઓ બાકી રહી જાય તે મોત, ઈચ્છાઓ ખુટી જાય અને શ્વાસ બાકી રહે તે મોક્ષ !!

You Were My World

2010-03-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

"You Were My World" - a sensuous work from Adele Todd's 2008 series called the Places that Scare Me. ":It is about a look at the emotional issues in personal life that genuinely affect moving forward", she says, "I used thread in performance, and thus, call this work performance embroidery.

રમત

2010-03-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

આપણે એવી રમત રમવી નથી જેમાં સતત,
અન્ય હારી જાય એવી કામના કરવી પડે.
- કિરણકુમાર ચૌહાણ

Douglas Brin

2010-02-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

"When an observer refers to any artwork as "interesting," this is the certifiable kiss-of-death. It denotes that the viewer either fails to comprehend its meaning or value, or worse, hates it."

This what Douglas Brin believes. [This is posted right above Gallery 307's guest and comment book (307 Seventh Ave, NYC) where Brin exhibit is on at present (February 11 - March 12, 2010).] What can be truer? In this world full of hyped gimmicks as art works, this artist brings refreshing vibes. I am sure no one wrote "interesting" as a comment about the show!

Splintered wood, hundreds of discarded museum buttons, the Sun Maid Girl and an obsession with all things George Harrison make the collages and constructions of artist Douglas Brin the kind of work you want to sit with for a while.

Reminiscent certainly of Joseph Cornell or Kurt Schwitters the “things, the “stuff”, the “bits and pieces” Brin incorporates into his boxes and constructions can’t help but take you from the piece, to the “stuff” and your own memory of it (is that an old Breyers ice cream sign?). Then inevitably we are drawn back again... and again to the beauty and elegance of the work-sometimes spare, sometimes so impenetrable that to stand before it for more than a minute becomes an exercise in resolve.

The palest perfect blue, the untouchable journal that means more than its thousands of words and drawings and Brin’s 30 year excavation of his life allow us the opportunity to think for a few minutes about the “stuff” of our own lives and what we might make of it.

કાં સુદર્શન, ને કાં અડાયું!

2010-02-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

શ્રી સવા બારણે લખ્યા કર તું

શબ્દથી બીજુ શું સવાયું છે

સત્યને કોણ ધારે એ જોયા કર

એ કાં સુદર્શન છે, ને કાં અડાયું છે

- મનોજ ખંડેરિયા

To read the whole Gazal, click on title.

Our Boredom, Ourselves

2010-01-25T08:48:00.000-08:00

If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying, regularity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving. Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in 2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.

This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring. (Trust me on this one.) Rather, boredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest — is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader. As a general state of mind, boredom is morally suspect, threatening to shine its dull light back on the person who invokes it. “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”

And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore” dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun “boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to be bored, or worried about becoming bored.

Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries. In her ingenious study “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (1995), Patricia Meyer Spacks describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”

In Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator — a writer who spends the “final Eisenhower years” trying to write the definitive treatise on boredom — describes it as “a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, . . . accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.” But boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.

Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek relief in doodling or daydreaming.

It’s common to decry our collective thaasophobia, or fear of boredom, manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking. One cellphone company has even promoted the idea of “microboredom,” which refers to those moments of inactivity that occur when we’re, say, stuck waiting in line for a latte without our BlackBerry. But novelists, for all their own fears of being dismissed as boring, continue to offer some bold resistance to the broader culture’s zero-tolerance boredom eradication program.
In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown & Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro: “He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”

For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we’re idling. Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. “Bliss — a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” Wallace wrote in a note left with the manuscript. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

It remains to be seen whether “The Pale King” will break through to the ecstasy beyond boredom, or just put readers to sleep. (Or perhaps cause serial brain injury, like the unreadably dense experimental novel that keeps laying waste to readers in “The Information,” by Martin Amis.) But if Wallace’s last work turns out to be unbearably dull, perhaps we should be grateful. After all, if it weren’t for all the boring books in the world, why would anyone feel the need to try to write more interesting ones?

-Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times Book Review.

Making Art Out of an Encounter

2010-01-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

I first encountered Tino Sehgal’s work under ideal conditions: total ignorance. Happening to be in Berlin in 2006 at the time of the city’s art biennial, I heard from an art-dealer friend that there was one exhibition not to miss. “I won’t tell you anything more,” he said, as he walked me to the site and bid me farewell. I trod up a creaking staircase in a building from the turn of the last century and entered a decayed ballroom, its ornate moldings and gilt mirrors testifying to a more glorious past. Lying on the floor, a man and a woman, fully dressed, were embracing languidly. There was no one else in the room. My presence went unacknowledged. In a state of mounting confusion and embarrassment, I stayed until I could stand it no longer, and then I retreated down the staircase. Out on the street, I sighed with relief, because I once again knew where I was.

Had I remained longer, I might have recognized that the two were re-enacting the curved-arm caressing gesture of Rodin’s marble statue “The Kiss,” as well as poses from other osculatory works, some less widely known but in their own way iconic, like Jeff Koons’s ceramic sculpture series “Made in Heaven.” And eventually I would have heard one member of the intertwined couple speak these words: “Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002.” But I didn’t need that information for the piece to linger in my memory and arouse my curiosity.

I knew the name of the artist, and I watched for him. Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.

If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run, thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.

If the overall response to “This Situation” at the Marian Goodman Gallery is any guide, even some who expect to hate Sehgal’s work will leave enthralled. “I often see shows I don’t like, but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, judging “This Situation” to be the best exhibition he encountered in 2008. Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”

At any time of day, Sehgal, who is 33, looks as if he has just tumbled out of bed. His tousled hair is innocent of exposure to a brush. His overcoat long ago parted company with its lining. In the six months since we first met, I have usually seen him in the same black jeans, black one-button pullover and white sneakers. My initial impression was that this was a man who was completely careless about his appearance, but I eventually concluded that the scrupulous inattention to wardrobe and grooming was of a piece with his refusal to fly on airplanes (visiting America from his home in Berlin, he travels by ship) or to carry a cellphone. More to the point, this conspicuous avoidance of unnecessary consumption conforms to the credo that underlies his work. Sehgal makes art that does not require the transformation of any materials. He refuses to add objects to a society that he says is overly encumbered with them.

It’s his rigorous devotion to an art that vanishes instantly that Sehgal and his curators emphasize. “There’s a purity to his approach,” says Catherine Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at the Tate Modern in London. “There are a few artists who are making live action that is based in sculpture, but what sets him apart is his purist insistence on the immateriality — or ephemeral materiality — of the work, so it crystallizes and disperses again, so there is no trace left at all.” Fifty years ago, Yves Klein sold empty spaces in Paris in return for gold; the buyers received a certificate of ownership. In the conceptual art that flowered in the late 1960s and early ’70s, artists like Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Lynda Benglis performed before a camera; the videotape documented that action and became a commodity that could be sold by an art dealer. Around the same time, Michael Asher and Daniel Buren were staging interventions in art museums, removing panels from the building facade or paintings from the wall and calling attention to the change; if you are interested, you can check out the installation photographs. Then and now, the gallery that represents Ian Wilson will sell you the right to have a discussion with the artist; once it has occurred, the conversation is commemorated with a certificate that belongs to you. In their flight from the object-based art market, these Conceptualist and post-Minimalist artists left behind them, like bread crumbs, objects that provided a path back in.

In contrast, Sehgal is an absolutist. He does not allow his pieces to be photographed. They are not explained by wall labels or accompanied by catalogs. No press releases herald the openings of his exhibitions; indeed, there are no official openings, just unceremonious start dates. All of this can engender skepticism, but the aspect of Sehgal’s work that his detractors find most irritating is the way the art is sold. First of all, there is the fact that it is sold, just as if it were made of, say, cast bronze: in editions of four to six (with Sehgal retaining an additional “artist’s proof”) at prices between $85,000 and $145,000 apiece. Unlike some of his Conceptualist predecessors, Sehgal is totally unapologetic about the fact that his work is commercially traded. “The market is something you can’t be outside of and you can’t want to be outside of, if you are doing anything specialized,” he told an audience last May at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought “Kiss” in 2008 in a transaction that the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, deemed “one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we have ever made.”

As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,” says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. “If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”

The act of going to a logical extreme can have illuminating results. Yasmil Raymond, who worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years before becoming a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, says that the Walker’s acquisition of a Sehgal work, “This Objective of That Object,” was the most contentious in her time there. In the piece, five interpreters surround a visitor, turn their backs to her and declaim, “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” If the visitor says nothing, the interpreters will eventually crumple to the floor; but a response will reanimate them, and one of them will cry, “A comment, a comment, we have a comment!” And at that, with the visitor’s comment as a starting point, a conversation begins. What is curious is that the purchase of the work generated its own passionate discussion. “At the Walker, they have six board meetings a year, and this was the most difficult one I ever was at,” Raymond says. “It was the only time someone on the acquisitions committee voted against an acquisition. There was a small insurrection. Three people abstained, and one voted against it. It was a polemical reaction. Then all the other board members had to defend and insist on why they were voting for this. They were really articulate on why the Walker had to acquire the work, about supporting unsafe ideas, on the risk of creativity and artistic practice.” It was exactly the kind of conversation Sehgal hopes to provoke.

Over the course of a career barely a decade long, Sehgal has produced two kinds of art. The earliest works, like “Kiss,” are silent and sculptural: a viewer encounters a piece in a museum or gallery just as if it were a marble statue. Sehgal is adamant that he is producing a work of art, not theater: unlike a performance, a Sehgal is on display for the entire time the institution is open, and the human actors are identified no more precisely than as if they were bronze or marble. (They are, however, paid.) But because the piece is formed of people, not of metal or stone, the viewer is aware that, regardless of how absorbed the models seem to be in their activity, at any moment they have the capability of turning their gaze on him — as, indeed, they periodically do in “Kiss.” That potential for interaction is explored extensively in Sehgal’s second line of work, the “constructed situations” (like “This Situation”), in which the visitor is drawn in and becomes a participant.

Residing in the ether of spoken instructions and ephemeral enactment, these pieces can misleadingly appear to be slapdash or freely improvisatory. In fact, Sehgal supervises his work with painstaking care, in the unremitting state of anxiety of a control freak who has opted to work in an uncontrollable milieu. “These pieces are very delicate,” Raymond observes. “The human being is such an explosive material. You have to treat it delicately and sometimes put pressure on it. We’re dealing with the most fragile of all material — the human mind.”

In the Guggenheim show, “Kiss” will be on view on the ground floor, but the main work is a constructed situation that dates from 2006 and has been installed twice in Europe. At Sehgal’s insistence, and for the sake of allowing a visitor to experience the piece with something like the Edenic innocence in which I fell upon “Kiss,” I won’t divulge what happens other than to say that on the spiral ramp of the rotunda, each individual or group will be engaged in conversation by several different interpreters of very different ages. To install the work, Sehgal must enlist the interpreters, train them and, finally, cajole them into showing up regularly and keeping up their enthusiasm.

First comes the recruitment. For older candidates, many of whom are college instructors, Sehgal relied on recommendations and then held lengthy personal interviews during the past year. The younger ones he and his team had to find in casting calls. If you regard Sehgal as a 21st-century sculptor who abjures digging stone out of a ravaged earth, then the interviews that he conducted of grade-school children and teenage college students throughout the city were the ecologically informed equivalent of the scouting missions that Michelangelo made to the marble quarries of Carrara. The small children he sought were between ages 8 and 12, while the teenagers were typically college freshmen. Like the older interpreters, the teenagers would be required to converse in an interesting and intelligent way, but the children had to be able chiefly to encapsulate what they were told in a summary form. They also needed to be outgoing enough to chat readily with strangers. In November, I watched Sehgal, accompanied by a Guggenheim assistant curator and professionals from a New York-based casting agency, interview groups of little kids and teenagers, usually eight at a time.

One sample of children came mostly from St. Ann’s School, a private school in Brooklyn. “I’m just going to ask what your name is and how old you are and what you like doing, and then after we’re going to play a little game,” Sehgal announced, as he would say in pretty much precisely those words at every audition of children. An 8-year-old boy with a piping voice and charming self-possession said, “The last thing I’ve done is create a litmus solution.” An 8-year-old girl favored musical comedy. The others had equally enriching extracurricular activities to report.
Then it was time for the game, which Sehgal explained would begin simply and become more difficult. The game consisted of listening to the answer to a question and then repeating what was said. Taking suggestions for a question from the children, he chose, “What is a stool?”
A young woman from the casting agency said: “A stool is a piece of furniture that has four legs and usually is taller than a chair. You can sit on a stool, and sometimes you can climb on a stool to get something.”

The children raised their hands to offer their recaps. Like the blind men around the elephant, they would get different parts of it. Sehgal listened. From those who did not volunteer, he tried to coax a response.

The game escalated to “What is a computer?” and then “What is a democracy?”
“A democracy is a system of government where the citizens of the country elect their leader,” said another casting agent. “The United States is a democracy. The hope is that in electing a leader, the voice of the people will be heard through that representative. The opposite of a democracy is a dictatorship, where one person has all the say and all the power.”

Now we were in deeper waters. Most of the children had trouble pronouncing the word “democracy,” and their capacity to recall and regurgitate the disjointed bits of information varied appreciably. With the final question — “What is an abstraction?” — things became more challenging still. Forget about pronunciation or any comprehension of the term. What they came back with was a mixture of things they remembered and things they made up. Those whose recollections outdistanced their imaginations were the preferred ones, so long as they were not incapacitated by shyness.

Afterward Sehgal reviewed the young contestants with his associates, each of whom had written down ratings. He compared the students with ones they had recently seen at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem, where he found a higher proportion of promising candidates adept at reciting back what they heard.

“The thing about these St. Ann’s kids is they’re socially very able,” he told me. “The Thurgood Marshall kids are put in the world to receive — they are there to pay attention. It’s not that the St. Ann’s kids are not intelligent. They are. They are already in the mind-set of ‘What can I bring into the world out of myself?’ ”

For the Guggenheim exhibition, such qualities would be more appropriate in the teenage interpreters. The artist’s quarrying continued.

As a youth, Sehgal was attracted to the study of dance (how people move) and political economy (how society works). His father, now retired, was an I.B.M. manager from India, his mother a German native and homemaker. Sehgal was born in London and raised primarily in Dusseldorf, Paris and a town close to Stuttgart; he has a younger sister, who grew up to become a philosopher specializing in Alfred North Whitehead. Their father talked with them in English, their mother in German. Sehgal speaks fluent English with a faint German inflection.
When he was an adolescent, Sehgal says, a direct encounter with the political process disenchanted him permanently from parliamentary politics. Friends asked him to speak at a hearing in favor of a transportation initiative in Stuttgart. “I remember seeing the minister of transportation dive and dodge,” he says. “All he could do was administer what the public opinion was, or else he would be voted out in the next election.” If electoral politics could not produce fundamental change, why bother with it? “It’s much more interesting to change the values,” he says. “I was never interested again in parliamentary politics. I became interested in culture.”
This political awakening strengthened his attraction to dance. Aside from its physical appeal, dance, in his eyes, had the virtue of creating something that disappeared at the moment it was produced. “My work comes out of my experiment with myself,” he says. “As a person in the first world, you’re quite heavy as a person in what you use up. Can I actually solve this for myself? Can I have something to do, keep myself interested and not be somebody who is situated outside society, and can I do this without transforming lots of material?” He moved at age 18 to Berlin, where he studied political economy and dance. After a few years he relocated to Essen, again taking classes in both subjects.

Through friends in Berlin, he became friendly with the experimental choreographer Xavier Le Roy and later with another avant-garde dance artist, Jérôme Bel, who were challenging the preconceptions that audiences brought to dance performances. In 1999, he took a job in Ghent, Belgium, at Les Ballets C. de la B. dance collective. At the same time, he was developing his own work. His first noteworthy piece was called “Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century,” in which he performed by himself, naked, on a stage decorated with only a work light, calling up signature movements in 20 styles: Nijinsky, Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, down to Xavier Le Roy. (Notwithstanding its title, the piece was approximately 55 minutes long.)

He presented “Twenty Minutes” in a festival at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where one appreciative spectator was a curator of about the same age, Jens Hoffmann. “Afterward I told him it was like a museum of dance,” Hoffmann recalls. “He said, ‘This is exactly what I was trying to do.’ ” Sehgal was more of a conceptual artist than a choreographer. “I always felt closer to Marcel Broodthaers than I did to Martha Graham,” he says. He loves the intellectual discourse that surrounds contemporary art; it’s absent from dance criticism. (He carries these preferences into his private life. His partner, Dorothea von Hantelmann, is an art historian who has written extensively about “performativity” in visual art; they have a 2-year-old son, Nalin.) Hoffmann encouraged him to present his work in art venues, not dance theaters.

As a curator of the Manifesta biennial art exhibition in Frankfurt in 2003, Hoffmann brought “Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things” (2000), a piece that Sehgal had devised specifically for a contemporary art museum, the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. As its unwieldy title indicates to those in the know, it is a gloss on pieces of conceptual art of the early ’70s by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In those earlier works, the artist or a friend of the artist performs a series of stipulated movements, which are captured on a videotape for display in a gallery or museum. Sehgal selected 16 gestural moments from those videos and asked a performer to stitch them together with slowed-down, unaccented motions. He got the S.M.A.K. to agree to show the work nonstop during museum hours for a week; as one performer’s shift was ending, a successor would appear and writhe alongside him for about half a minute, and then the first one would depart. In a blatant way, human beings were filling the role that sculptures occupy in a museum.

“When I saw the visitors’ reaction, I was clear that this was it,” Sehgal says. “Their reactions were so much stronger than I expected. They couldn’t believe it was a person. They thought it had to be a robot or a puppet. There was such an expectation that in a museum something must be an object.”

Once he decided to transform choreographic material into sculpture, Sehgal needed to find a way to keep a piece going continuously. The silent interpreters in the early works perform in a loop, and the only visible connecting hinge occurs at a shift change, when one actor relieves another. That was relatively simple.

With “This Is Good” (2001), the first of his constructed situations, each new arrival of a visitor triggers an activity of limited duration; it is as if the piece were a kinetic sculpture powered by a push button. When someone enters the gallery, a guard begins windmilling his arms and hopping from one leg to the other and then says: “Tino Sehgal. ‘This Is Good.’ 2001.” Calling attention to the usually unnoticed employees in a museum, the piece plays off Sehgal’s mission to make people, not objects, the material of his work. But the payoff is limited. Things got more interesting with “This Is Exchange” (2003), in which the visitor is enlisted as a co-producer of the piece. At the entrance to the museum, a ticket taker asks the visitor to engage in a conversation about the market economy; after five minutes, if a ticket buyer who agreed to the request is still gamely playing along, she receives a partial refund of the admission fee. For many visitors, especially those who argued that they detested the market economy, it came as an unsettling surprise to receive this reminder that whatever their opinion of it, they were nonetheless immersed in it. Which, of course, was one of Sehgal’s aims.

Although Sehgal sells pieces to private collectors, his work seems to function best in a museum or a gallery, where its subtraction of a material object is made visible by the institutional surroundings that give shape to his void. “My work definitely needs this framing as art, and the stronger this framing is,” he says, “the more works of mine are possible.” Because the activity in his work is so close to the routines of everyday life, he has found ways to emphasize its artificiality. One signature device is the removal of all emphases in movement; his interpreters proceed in a slow trancelike state. “The most important thing is you don’t see an accent,” he said at a “Kiss” rehearsal I attended. “In everyday life, basically, in whatever we do there is an accent. Here, there is a continuous flow.”

Eliminating the object has opened a seemingly limitless number of possibilities for Sehgal. At the C.C.A. Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Jens Hoffmann, who became the director in 2006, has been presenting an ongoing series of Sehgal pieces. Usually visitors to this small contemporary art museum realize fairly soon that they are in the presence of a Sehgal work. But not always. In one piece, a visitor would arrive to find the museum apparently empty of all people. “Once when a person thought there were no guards around, he started stealing catalogs,” Hoffmann recalls. “The guard came up and said: ‘Would you please put the books back? This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.’ ”

Is it possible to be both playful and profound? Sehgal is wagering yes. The moral earnestness that underlies his work would be ponderous if unleavened by humor; the games would be just child’s sport if they did not illuminate serious matters. The mixture can confuse people. At a meeting that Sehgal, on one of his human-quarrying forays, held last May with the administrators of a Harlem after-school program, he was pressed to explain what he aimed to accomplish in the Guggenheim piece. “The real deal is what happens there,” he said. “The real deal is the conversation.” For an educator who was trying to wean children from the cycle of poverty, this was palpably an unsatisfactory answer. He asked Sehgal again what was his goal. “It’s a structure to have a conversation about people’s values,” Sehgal said.

A little later in the discussion, the man returned to his theme. “So I guess you’re saying your ambition is to change perception,” he said. “Is that correct?” And this time, Sehgal took the bait.
“That’s a very simple way of saying what I’m doing,” he said. “For the last two or three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed also over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.”

This time the man nodded in understanding, with an expression I recognized. He was seeing things from another perspective, as he participated in a conversation within a framework constructed by Tino Sehgal.

-ARTHUR LUBOW for The New York Times Magazine

Though the Magazine article was accompanied by some photographs, I choose not to post those images in order to truly adhere to Sehgal's philosophy behind his art. Those interested in seeing omitted images, click on the post title.