Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on artistic impulse in times of tumult

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Switch on the television set or enter the virtual world of Twitter (now X), Google or Instagram, where information is provided in an instant — the terrifying conflicts that have erupted in almost every sphere of life are playing out. The world that one believed in has vanished. It leaves behind a debris of memories and regrets.

Surrounded by pain and destruction, with a collapsing social system and injustices, one searches for a way to live. In this dystopian world, what can one do? What does an artist do? Does he fiddle like Nero? Or distribute cakes like Marie Antoinette? Or create art out of chaos by giving it shape and form?

The most disturbing interpretation of chaos is the famous painting ‘Guernica’ by Pablo Picasso, which embodies all the agitation, panic and physical movement of chaos. “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction,” said Picasso. As creativity gives birth to new forms, chaos becomes an inevitable part of the process. This notion of chaos stems from Greek mythology, which regarded creative chaos as a creative principle through which everything emerged. The Greek believed that chaos jump-started the manifestation of creativity. Impulse does not follow any roadmap. It emerges from the deepest layers of one’s being, instinctive memories and the skill to express and amalgamate them, and makes an entry into creative spaces.

To create something new and fresh, we must be willing to let go of worn-out templates, both tangible and intangible. At its core, the quote of Picasso suggests that before something new can be created, something old must be broken or set aside.

It brings to mind the interdisciplinary experiment ‘The Fall of the Slab’ (2016), an art project conceptualised by artist Vivan Sundaram (1943-2023). He amended what could have been a moment of mourning into a celebratory experience.

Let me start at the beginning. Kasauli, a small hill town in North India with colonial-era homes, is where Ivy Lodge, Sundaram’s home, exists. Slanting, corrugated red roofs and running verandahs with luscious bushes of hydrangea flowers, looking like giant pompoms, is the defining feature of this house. In 1987, an extension was required and a row of annexes was built. Despite best efforts, a leaky roof made the annexes unlivable and a solution was found by adding a concrete slab to the roof. Vivan turned the slab into a stage and the magnificent valley and floating clouds became the perfect backdrop for staging performances. Many years later, the cantonment board decided that the slab did not adhere to the building norms and needed to be demolished.

Sundaram, as an artist, had always been a provocative innovator and seized the moment of chaos caused by a leaking roof to create an unusual event. A performative event was visualised around the blasting of the slab. It was decided that a section of the slab would be drilled as part of the performative act and at a predetermined time, it would crash downwards. Every minute detail had been worked out and very little was left to chance. But chance does not always obey. Instead of falling slowly as imagined, the concrete slab came down with a dramatic thud. It had been held by pulleys, chains and weights before an invited audience that sat agog on ledges carved from the hillside. Every member of the audience, who had waited with bated breath to experience something unusual and unfamiliar, got it in spades.

The dramatic ‘falling of the slab’ saw plumes of dust rising like a phoenix; a dust storm whirring with dancing particles pervading the atmosphere created its own counter-narrative. The gaping hole after the slab crashed and the rubble below evoked feelings of loss and decay and the inevitability of mortality. While watching, I had a feeling of two opposing forces. Thanatos, the Greek personification of peaceful death, and Eros, who represented the forces of creativity and love in the same mythology, played out as reminders of human transience.

The issues of time and temporality, permanence and impermanence, all seem to come together in a different register in an installation performance titled ‘Indelible Black Marks’. Kulpreet Singh from Patiala is an artist who dares to go where eagles fear to tread. His work has an unnerving scale and magnitude and lends itself to multiple readings with interpretation that is both insightful and unsettling.

The materiality of his work is land, and the grinding labour required to ensure its endless cycle of despair and joy, fecundity and sterility, exploitation and marginality. Ash, mud and burning stubble tell an epic tale of rejuvenation, regeneration and destruction.

The burning field and a massive white canvas embracing it haunts and invokes multiple images. The canvas placed vertically and also horizontally conjures up metaphors that are disturbingly ambiguous. Is it death of land or the death of humanity, or both? In an instant, it transforms into a series of hieroglyphics and gives an impression of cave paintings. On decoding it, we see human forms and shapes emerge. Are they corpses? Prayer mats? Or an installation made up of arranged white sheets? Be at liberty to make your own narrative!

I realised that the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known. What artists do is to investigate and ask questions that reveal something about ourselves and our habits.

The work of Vivan Sundaram and Kulpreet Singh made me recall a chance meeting with a nomadic poet somewhere in the deserts of Rajasthan. I asked him what the role of a poet was in culture. He replied that the job of the poet is to remember where the water holes are. This set me thinking. Hope perhaps depends on a few water holes scattered around the desert. When people forget where the water holes are, the poet can lead to them.

The artist hopefully tells us that art is not something to only look at or listen to. Rather, it is a challenge, a dare, a protest to make sense of the world we live in, and what it is all about. This is not only to satisfy the core of one’s heart but to confront, intervene and subvert.