BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke to the artist half an hour to find out more about the artistic concerns he addresses through the show.
Well, I think postmortem has now many meanings, and if you google it, you’ll see the results are all connected to business. I was amazed. It was all about re-examining your business, questioning the parameters of what things are, and at the end of it to make your administration efficient. I was quite taken aback.
In one sense it is about a re-examination, questioning what one did, of turning things inside out. I felt that since trash and the found object has been part of my thinking for the last 20 years I should then go back to the found object as art. Because there was a crossover from art to fashion and I would call what I created “sculptural garments.” The word garment was at the end of the word sculpture.
Here there are sculptures, and the interest in this inanimate, neutral mannequin, which is not supposed to have any aspect of desire. It’s the human body, greatly modeled, of course, on the Western body type. But it’s about how a throwaway object — because these are all, as you can see, rejects from fashion studios — can become a piece of a sculpture.
This kind of transference to the human figure, which has been crafted and based on certain types that come from art get discarded and now return to become sculptural objects. The cutting up is an act of desecration, destruction. But the point is always to hover on that line between destroying it and then bringing it back into the domain of art.
You start from a certain level of dismemberment on the ground floor of the gallery space, when you go up, it becomes a more interior kind of dismemberment, where you’re creating sculptures using models of human organs. But when you go up to the top, you have the only “whole” figure, a woman representing “Liberty.” Was that deliberate. What was the rationale?
I thought that the first room would have works that have a symbolic, classical refinement about them; minimalism. Then as you move to the ends of the room, the thematic emerges. So when you come up to the first floor, the idea was to turn this aesthetic into a counter aesthetic, of the studio space, of the whole room becoming an installation. The one on top, the room with the single figure, has a soundscape around it. So, there is a movement… from the macabre, from death, to liberty.
Was there a dialogue you were having with surrealist art? Or is the resonance incidental?
Of course. Surrealism and the collage very much came together. I think in some of these fantastical juxtapositions, the scale is part of the surrealist aspect.
Somewhere, people cross over from postmodern to theoretical art. I felt the need to, because actually, what I’ve been saying is that I’ve returned to studio practice after more than 20 years, because “Gagawaka” was a fashion-designer’s studio with two assistants and a tailor. I felt the procedure of being involved wasn’t as much. I would do a sketch, work with material, so how the artist works with their hands was there, but here it’s much more. This work you see in front, I mean, this pair of legs was cut off from something else, so it was lying there. I’m an untidy artist, everything is in chaos. Suddenly I see this spectacular head. Then I tried to work in another leg, but it wasn’t working. It’s amazing that this head, that the two ears fit into the heels like as if the heels were meant to block the ears. Then it seemed too obvious. I felt the pose could be more poignant, so I propped one ear up… That’s so much of modern art, you lift something, place it in a certain context and it becomes a work of art. So these procedures have a whole century of its history. It’s a cliché, but I felt I rejoined the studio practice of the artist constructing the image in this very direct way.
How much of a departure is this from “Gagawaka?”
It raises many more questions and many more issues that are more personal and subjective — like my relationship with all this that is evoking sexuality and desire and dreams and death and mortality — in a much more frontal way than “Gagawaka” would have; because it references the body that would have worn the garment and walked the ramp.
So “Gagawaka” was what brought you to this point?
Yeah. I mean, “Gagawaka” was a big crossover. So in one sense, it sort of needed me to take that step forward, and obviously, I wasn’t going to, every six months or one year, do a new collection. There’s no doubt about that. But I was interested in bringing it into the domain of fashion. In India not many people were interested in what I was doing because a lot of the garments have to do with a certain craft, and the idea to really experiment comes from the fact that fashion in the West is at least 200 years old and you have institutions that support the Alexander McQueens…
What do you think this will take you towards?
Well, the other thing is the sound work, the idea of collaborating with sound. The sound work upstairs [created in collaboration with Bettina Wenzel and Ish S.] has a 3D quality to it. I think when you tune your ears to it, it’s not a stereophonic sound, it’s a 3D kind of sound that is traveling from speaker to speaker.
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