Toys and teasers for those who want to grow…

(Catalogue text for Narendra Yadav, Solo Show with Sakshi Gallery)

“Far from suggesting a literal or even symbolic representation of social (as against national) identities such as those of gender/class/caste and region, new art in India needs to suspend any direct address towards the social"
- Geeta Kapur, November 13, 1998 [1].

The sense-making strategies for an artist from India have changed, and India has been watching the change. Before Narendra Yadav took a studio space he had seen the upheavals around the millennium and its 'new age' ramifications on people's lives. Anyone who lives in a fast-growing district of the commercial capital of an emerging superpower must have taken some lessons from what one saw as the play of time. Narendra's lessons included a critical study: are people really thinking of themselves differently? Are the notions changing, or do they exist under a changed garb?

In a country whose father taught "indriya nigraha" by pointing to the three wise monkeys [2­­] , the attack on senses is imminent. Narendra does not lament on loss of nigraha. He does a monument to suit the changed situation, instead. A viewer might identify the monument with the crowds in Ginza of Tokyo since the 1960s or, more apparently, the mall-pub metroculture of Mumbai in recent years. The iconography is satirical and of course referential, but it does not pooh-pooh the Japanese or the Gandhian reference. The work owns a calm emotional tone, a wise smile on ourselves, wrapped in a most neutral-looking title.

The task to scrutinize and polemicize the self-illusory hedonism that surrounds the air of capitalism and consumerism has been taken up by artists before [3] . The strategy of subversion first emerged as a successful one, as if subversion is the most-sought attribute for turning your artists into heroes, a game that curators and catalogues and 'big' shows often play. In a scenario where an artist-observer is expected to take on the role of an entertaining agitationist, there are artists who, wittingly or accidentally, take up the task of subverting the game itself. They blur the borders of persuasion and polemics. One can sense these blurred borders in Narendra's work.

In his analysis as a participant-observer of purposeless hunger and self-indulgence (read, 'wellness'), Narendra suspects a Pavlovian conditioning. An ever-changing, ever-increasing association of stimuli and responses, that sets the rhythm of everyday actions. We all get to our cell phones when the bell rings, he observes in a temporal, performance-based work; and moves on to enquire whether an image of moving fan - video projection on the ceiling, brings some comfort and some sleepy feelings to the audience with eyes wide open. The foot that relaxes itself through a concrete pillar in ' Dust particles suspended in the air to perform pranayama' , annotates the enquiry with pathos and formalizes the empathy for the observed.

The systems that affect the values of a glocal mind in India are many: Bollywood, News Channels, IT… to name a few. Narendra points to the mediated feelings of being loved while you compete at the ‘Abhisarsthana’, or playing nemesis with ‘Stress-release toys for quick justice‘, while you are only bringing down some symbols of the so-called evil . The two works seem communicative to the brink of getting obvious, say their visual clues. But the problematique is sensed in their suggested or hand-driven movement. For the less obvious, seemingly 'complex' works, Narendra assists the viewer with his own titles, like ' Partially elevating apparatus based on a dogma requiring intervention'. The works retort values, and yet have an essential playful, interactive quality.
\nThe play element in Narendra Yadav\'s art is, to me, his reverence for the time. His works demand a chunk of your time in the gallery. They ask for your engagement, persuade you off the \'eye for art\' dictat. His approach is comparable to that of \'integrative arts\' as professed by educationists, to help them learn. Sarcasm or subversion is not the raison d\'être of Narenda\'s works. Nor does he want the viewer to be baffled and feel powerless for not being a thinker otherwise. The invitation to think is open, though; with titles that carry out their task to invite in a rather proactive manner. Narendra also looks back at the common reverence for text, and his titles like \'enery created by fluttering logic in the mid-air\', would invite to drill the text in favour of the matter.\n\n \nThe common audience to India\n\'s contemporary art is not only the uninitiated lot. It also consists of the formalist \'old art\' lot, over-initiated by the colonial art-teaching methods coupled with feudal inertia for artistic enquiry. I would like to imagine their reactions to Narendra\'s work. For instance, among his revolving works, Nelson Mandela toy/monument (colour blender) a stubborn formalist who would still see the \'treatment\' that Mandela\'s ears have undergone, but would be driven to the action of \'blending\' the what s/he has always seen as opposite colours. The reason for using Mandela (and not the usual Ganpati idol that 55 per cent of India\'s sculptors seem to incorporate in their shows unmistakably), lay not in having to do away with the ears, s/he would (hopefully) reveal, and be driven to think why Mandela is put as a mascot of blending opposite colours. Similar situations may occur for at least half of the works shown.\n\n",1]
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The play element in Narendra Yadav's art is, to me, his reverence for the time. His works demand a chunk of your time in the gallery. They ask for your engagement, persuade you off the 'eye for art' regime. His approach is comparable to that of 'integrative arts' as professed by educationists, to help them learn. Sarcasm or subversion is not the raison d'être of Narendra’s works. Nor does he want the viewer to be baffled and feel powerless for not being a thinker otherwise. The invitation to think is open, though; with titles that carry out their task to invite in a rather proactive manner. Narendra also looks back at the common reverence for text.

The layperson with reference to India's contemporary art is not only the uninitiated lot. It also consists of the formalist 'old art' lot, over-initiated by the colonial art-teaching methods coupled with feudal inertia for artistic enquiry. I would like to imagine their reactions to Narendra's work. For instance, with his revolving Nelson Mandela toy/monument called ‘Colour Blender’ , a stubborn formalist who would still notice the treatment that Mandela's ears have undergone, but would be driven to the action of 'blending' what s/he has always seen as opposite colours. The reason for using Mandela (and not the usual Ganpati idol that 55 per cent of India's sculptors seem to incorporate in their shows unmistakably), lay not in having to do away with the ears, s/he would (hopefully) reveal, and be driven to think why Mandela is put as a mascot of blending opposite colours. Similar situations may occur for at least half of the works shown.

There are three works which might pose Narendra himself as a formalist-poetic exponent… the most eye-catching 'Amniotic continents' has a definitive formalist bend, a more poetic 'Droplets drifting to unknown' is almost magical in its structure and spiritual in its suggestion, and the bread-slices with ‘designer’ egg yokes that flaunt streaks of colour. Confront these with his witty "kibosh" on art criticism, a conceptual work that knows how to keep the formalist instincts in their place. The artist's field of enquiry- human values and behaviour – may seem distant in these works, but they outline Narendra's broader spectrum of activity.

Narendra has a handful peers in his story so far. His efforts in exploring the substance of his sculptural works, in understanding the mechanics so as to outdo its spell, and in addressing newer issues that haunt a local as well as global audience, are certainly directed to shape the new sculpture from India.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane,
Mumbai, June 2006.

[1] Concluding remarks, quoted from a lecture : "What's New in Indian Art : Canons, Commodification, Artists on the Edge" at India International Centre, New Delhi; a part of ResArtis 6th General Meeting. Later published in the Marg volume: 2000 : Reflections on the Arts in India.

[2] The Nikko Toshogo Shrine, also known as the Sacred Stable, in Japan has a carving of three wise monkeys. Many scholars believe the monkeys were carved as a visual representation of the religious principle, "If we do not hear, see, or speak evil, we ourselves shall be spared all evil."
http://web-japan.org/atlas/architecture/arc05.html

[3] Barbara Kruger, 'I shop therefore I am' is one of the favorites.