MANASH BHATTACHARJEE - This Is the Way a Culture Dies
If those cave paintings where human beings drew
representations of life marked the beginning of human culture, this mob and
police intimidation of art is surely the death of it
Art is our integral and spontaneous response to the
contradictions of life. This is what brings heterogeneity into our world. On Saturday, two artists at the Jaipur Art Summit at the
Jawahar Kala Kendra, Anish Ahluwalia and Chitan Upadhyay, faced police
questioning, for a work of installation art, ‘The Bovine Divine’ by
Siddhartha Karawal. The installation was of a cow made of styrofoam, suspended
by a balloon, to raise awareness about “how cows consume plastic and
die due to its consumption”. But the police acted at the behest of people
complaining about cows being displayed “inappropriately”. The artists, their
protests coming to no avail, were forced to bring down the cow, which was then
forcibly taken away by the police, duly garlanded and worshipped by the
protestors.
The flying cow, used as an artistic symbol for spreading
awareness of an environmental problem concerning the health of the cow itself,
belies the angry sentiments of the protestors. The religious minded cow
protectors had got it wrong. To see the whole event, however, as a proof of the
difference between rational versus irrational mindsets would be missing the
deeper issue. It won’t be enough to read the flying cow as a symbol of ‘secular
art’, trying to draw attention to a problem that is ‘scientific’, pertaining to
the cow’s health.
Even if the artists have stated their “message” was raising
awareness, art is not simply its message, or to put it another way, art cannot
be reduced to the singularity of what it signifies. An object of art is many
things at once, and any good art will revel in the multiplicity of
interpretations. The title of the installation does not appear to be
necessarily ridiculing of the idea of the bovine as divine, though one can read
a satirical provocation intended in the phrase. In the context of the
installation’s attempt to point people’s attention to a material problem the
cow is ailing from, the title plays at irony.
The relationship (and difference) between art and religion
lies at this interface where the former can satirise the latter. If art cannot
take place, if artists cannot play with symbols and meanings that some may
consider ‘religious’, and if such gestures and events are open to public
harassment and intimidation by law, then the government should declare that we
are living under the diktats of a religious state...
