Critique.

In one of the classes we were told to visit the NGMA in Bangalore and see a specific school's artwork in the exhibition put up there and later critique on it.

In the process, i saw a new wing which had Amrita Sher gil's works exhibited on there. i found them much more interesting, eye grabbing and intriguing than the artwork we were told to observe. Her work mostly consisted of portraits and human body study which i thought to be brash and straight forward combined with a sense of mystery. 

There was a description of the concepts and her life story put up in the center which actually shined through in her work if you looked closely and patiently. The lighting, i noticed, was very subtle with earthen hues on the walls which i thought merged with the artwork quite well.

The artwork that we were supposed to see turned out to be quite disappointing in my opinion. The thing that bothered me the most would be  the placing of the art pieces. The artworks adjacent to some of the art pieces were of a completely different look and feel though interesting. there were some brilliant artworks in some rooms but this particular school of art had really lazy, light and undefined lines mixed with really light, almost submerging into each other, colors. There was also no texture as such to the paintings with little to no shading.  

Third class

The third day we learned all about performance art and went through the journey of actually doing the performance in front of the masses outside our college. The performances ranged from people standing on a wall with their hands joined, to having post its stuck on your bodies of expectations of the people around of the person sitting there, and then, finally tearing them off their body and chewing and spitting them out.

Our performance was about our identities and how we go through life adding a piece of someone else’s personality to yours in the process of growing. The Concept Note was:

Final Installation.

My final installation was done in a public space, on a terrace. After having a horde of ideas coming from completely different aspects of study, we finally came up with an immensely refined version of an initial rough idea. We planned to put text, a sentence, spread out an A3 sized sheets with normal daily household items hidden under separate white sheets of cloth. the text read 'What is behind the image is concealed' in bold white text with a black background.

After the initial idea, the process of the installation was a tough task with minute necessary details coming every every time you move forward in the process a little. If i am honest even after we were done with everything and looking at the installation with another perspective, I found many very minor and often unnoticed details that could help improve the overall feel of it. I learnt that the process itself is art in itself. it is an experience that is a leaning process for any artist that, in the end, adds to the final piece in a huge way.

Concept note:

This attempts to play with the concept of sight and image. Every setting before our eyes can be considered an image, a snapshot, a photograph existing in that moment in which we see it. Our every day lives exist in the form of memories and those memories are often retrieved from what we have seen. Yet what is truly to be considered is perhaps invisible - it is beyond the visual. The image often is simply a veil, behind which something of importance may lie.

Here we try to compress a lifestyle underneath white sheets; every day objects that perhaps sum up a day in the human experience - an experience hidden by white. The image is a visual, but the visual is not clearly recognizable. 

This installation addresses one to look at living as an image, and then imply that there lies an entirely different meaning beyond that image existing as a realm we may explore. The realm that is concealed behind the image.  

Documentation:

Second Class.

The second day was a debate class where Narendra put us into groups to discuss different topics after watching the movie, never sorry, of the controversial artist Ai weiwei. The concept of art and an artist was put to question and if it was necessary for an artist to be an activist or not. During the discussions there was a lot of internal conflict in our group as everyone’s notion of who an artist, and how to differ between the both, was really contrasting.

During the debate, the discussion collided between concepts of morality, installations and art itself. Each of the three groups had to construct a sentence which defined the topic of their group discussion perfectly according to the debate. After the debate a lot of new perspectives on how people actually see and consider art flowed through my mind and made me wonder who an artist really was. My answers ranged from philosophical  views about art and artists, the technical aspects of art to soul searching and personal expression to, finally, a vague feeling you get after doing a piece that gets you a kick out of it.

First day

The first day of the installation art course I’m doing was spent searching for a space in the college which could be an installation, big or ant sized, and make something out of it without manipulating any object in the space itself. It could be a story, a piece of writing, a performance or even a movie. In groups of three we set out to find a space. While doing this we kept options of choices which mostly included windows or the outer covering of the building which was a kind of reflective glass. 

In the end we decided to make a vague story on the space we selected which was a wall with a sign of ‘men’s toilet’ on it and a switchboard with faulty switches. The short story took some time to as it was a hard task to come up with a story on a wall with minimal design and chipped paint on it.