Vivan Sundaram
Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India
Although inspired by Hugo Ball and Alexander McQueen, ‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, at New Delhi’s state-run Lalit Kala Akademi, drew only modestly on Dada’s oddball antics and the late fashion designer’s Saturnine fantasies and edgy theatricality. Its self-restraint – perhaps in deference to the conservative Indian context or the result of the artist’s own inhibitions – resulted in a somewhat earnest and ambiguous statement around art, fashion, and environment.
‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, comprised 45 dresses constructed from waste and ready-mades by the veteran Indian artist Vivan Sundaram, in collaboration with a New Delhi-based fashion designer, Pratima Pandey. Its fluffy title – which invoked Lady Gaga’s outré chic and the folksy globalism of Shakira’s South African World Cup Football anthem Waka Waka (2010) – was a studied, even middle-brow and populist, attempt to funk up an art show by playing down the underlying art-historicity, and the class associations and glamour of fashion shows.
Both professional models and ordinary people drawn from the artist and designer’s circle of friends and colleagues walked the ramp in a series of live performances that took place during the exhibition. The dresses were marvels of design and ingenuity. It took a second glance to realize that the sleeves of the knitted trail gown, Cleopatra (2011), were made from truck tyre-tubes or a wedding outfit for men from sanitary-pads; that a dress complete with a Dervish-like hat had been made from an orthopedic support or a jump suit created from surgical masks; a pair of yellow men’s dungarees made with discarded plastic sheets that revealed the model’s derriere through its transparent back; sleep masks sewed together into a tiered, padded-shoulder short black dress; a toga made from tampons; or a short black dress with a matching Pharaoh hat was styled from bicycle tyre-tubes. Most of these incorporated architectural elements, like Aztec Deity (2011) a sculptural dress made with loofahs. Assemblage was suggested in costumes including one built with iron mesh masking the entire upper body, head included, that recalled Dadaist Marcel Janco’s mask dresses.
During the show, models broke into a wildly expressive dance that alluded to a post-environmental-apocalyptic world like that imagined by Cormac MacCarthy in his book The Road (2006). The mood was intensified by a Constructivist-inspired stage set created from stacks of tin trunks and iron grills and frames that served as props for the performances. However, the Russian avant-garde utopian aesthetic was ironically deployed to create a dystopia where rubbish is the only raw material left – ubiquitous, abundant, yet invaluable. In the accompanying, rather jaunty, text Sundaram’s wife, Geeta Kapur, a noted art critic, describes the exercise as an ‘assault on a commoditized civilization’ and ‘the erotic entangled with death’.
‘Making Strange’ is a natural progression for Sundaram’s practice that seems to have been built around the question: what is worth keeping or throwing away? This investigation into the intrinsic value of things manifests in his art as an affinity with revaluation through recycling thereby questioning the value of the original and authorship. However, the supposed radicalism of ‘Making Strange’ lacked bite. Making clothes made from recycled material is not a new idea and designers such as McQueen, Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela – who Sundaram cites as inspirations – relentlessly push fashion in new directions.
The couture of Sundaram’s dresses overwhelm their status as art, making them hardly stranger or any less wearable than high fashion. They had none of the impact of similar examples by other artists who have explored the intersections of fashion and art, such as Atsuko, whose 1956 Electric Dress – an armature covered with tangle of live wires and light bulbs – imperiled the artist’s life every time she put it on. However, Sundaram did manage to create a crossover between the art and fashion worlds: collectors sat in the front row of his show taking notes like well-heeled fashionistas. Yet, these neat correspondences between fashion and art dulled the edge of Sundaram’s Dadaism that seemed to serve the very conventionality it started out to assault.
Hemant Sareen
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