Salt Field - Josh PS

Monsoon : Better late!

Abhijeet Tamhane

The monsoon show at Jehangir Art Gallery this July competed with the deceptive season that Mumbai experienced. Yes, the city did have its seasonal ‘Local Train Bandh’ to be attributed solely to the incessant rains for some hours, and then the clouds stopped raining for almost a month. As I write at the end of July, the suburban and city roads are wet with showers again!

The love and longing that a Mumbaikar has nurtured for a good, ‘normal’ monsoon is increasingly articulated after July 26, 2005- the day when this metropolis beat Cherapunji in the rain records for a single day. As you ride the local trains and overheard the commuters talk about the rains, you conclude that the city loves the Monsoon, but has its anxieties. This year, the buzz about the season was, ‘better late than never’.

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On the Mumbai art-scene, 1997-98 was the years when the Galleries in the city had a ‘watershed’ of good artists during the monsoon. Names like Shilpa Gupta, Riyas Komu, Justin Ponmany appeared on the Monsoon-Show rolls of Public/ institution-run Galleries before a decade.  Since then, we never had such good art shows during the monsoon. The longing continues this year, too.

Of course, one just cannot compare 1998 with the current scene. Private Galleries were handful, a decade ago and they were anyways not as thriving and as adventurous as they are now. If ‘Gallery collection on the walls in Monsoon’, was a norm, it is dyeing now. Goodbye Monsoon Shows, the galleries with a ‘corporate’ face now have ‘Emerging Artist Awards’ and a show of nominees precedes the selection (or atleast the brief states so). Some galleries show guts to have an all-new artist show that eventually includes artists that might have shown with some smaller Galleries. That’s the way for induction into the Gallery’s list of artists. This year also saw a maiden solo to a younger artist, though during Monsoon.

Bodhi Art Award is the case in Point. The award went to ‘the obvious choice’ from MSU, Baroda : Shreyas Karle. The runner-up, and the second runner-up, were all from the same institution. The same show could have been tearmed ‘Best of MSU Annual Display : 2008’  or could have a more fashionable title like ‘DIS/RE –PLAY’ with some exceptions included. An otherwise ‘interactive’ object (the fusion motorbike with a three-generation old bullock-cart seat) at the Bodhi show was muted to its visual charm and suggestion. The same object was earlier displayed at Baroda (MSU Campus, as a part of Annual Display) where as you touched it, it made a noise that was akin to cheap street-horns, and thus made you think of the popular culture of the vehicle-scene in India. The popular-culture reference was cut off in the Bodhi experience as (atleast on the second day of the exhibition), the object was not making its noise even as one touched it.

The Guild show that opened with their new space  (at Kamal Masion, Colaba: Guild is one of the three serious galleries in the same building!). They called it ‘The July Show’. It included some familiar names like Pooja Iranna and Balaji Ponna or Rachna Nagarkar. Yet, the inclusion of Kedar Dhondu, Lokesh Khode, Shrikant Puranik gave it the ‘Monsoon’ touch. The seemingly unconnected (and at a second look, really- really unconnected) paintings had an impact of some fresh breath, though most of them followed familiar idioms of image-making.

Pundole Art Gallery had a full-fledged solo show of a young artist, Parag Tandel. Insiders tell that the Galley was OK to have this maiden solo for the Mumbai-based, Baroda-trained sculptor in the high season last winter, but the artist backed up and said, ‘I’ll rather work more’. Parag then worked on to translate a blistered experience to the rubber floor, which made one of the five sculptural installations in his show, ‘The Pregnant Room’.

The buzzword is still the same: Better Late! The Monsoon Shows at the public Galleries are fast getting dry, and the private galleries would not turn to artists unless they have some good previous displays on their account. If Shilpa and Komu were spotted at the Jehangir, youger talents are to be spotted elsewhere, though after two or three years after their Bachelor’s degree in art.