A Fistful of Sky: Review

The Ambanis are India’s modern Medicis, I thought as I wandered the Nita and Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre. Art may be born from struggle, but it must be raised and brought up by luxury.  

To make art, you must give space to an idea that is usually not given space. And in giving space to something you give people an opportunity to look at it with a newfound sense of reverence. Space is a prerequisite for art. In the case of Subodh Gupta’s A Fistful of Sky, it is physical space we’re talking about. Four floors, looming white walls and towering white ceilings. Who but the Ambanis could have afforded such space — in the coveted BKC neighbourhood, no less — for art, of all things?

 

We paid Rs 800 for admission, at a kiosk, under the grand, tall doors announcing the name of the exhibition: A Fistful of Sky. To make art is such an endeavour in arrogance — first to give space to something the world deems insignificant, and then to have the audacity to be selective about who can see this object of insignificance.

Titles are important: the title is the first flash of imagery, and its colours will bleed into every stroke or sentence that follows. Jeff VanderMeer called his ecological horror novel Annihilation, and it lent a sense of creeping ominousness to even the most innocuous description of a shrub. A Fistful of Sky is imbued with child-like wonder and simplicity, recalling the toddler’s whims of capturing the moon between their fingers, of chasing a cloud, but also something more adult and less twee, a sense of grasping, grasping for something better.

 

The heavy doors were opened for us, and we stepped into the first floor of the exhibit.  

I am immediately struck by its brutality. It is an exercise in harsh repetition. Rows and rows of seating, each in brutal symmetry. Mosaics from pots and pans so used they cease to be recognisable objects, merely meaningless metal exercises in topology. Even the solace of this room is found in labour — a Buddhist stupa made of metal utensils beaten into metallic discs through overuse. Flashes of red in the form of drapery and a painting gape like open wounds. The first floor is a memorial to the back-breaking labour that is still much of India’s livelihood and it buzzes with disquiet and pain.

 

We walk out of the first floor through a passageway and a set of stairs. These liminal spaces serve as a place for the artist to meditate, and on them in blue are his reflections on his attire and journey. The artist’s words are the only directional forces in these white passages. The physical immediacy of climbing the stairs pushes us to recognise the artist’s social and intellectual journey: his ascent from poverty, his sojourn through mediums.

 

The second floor is a dream. Objects of rural India — a plough, a well — lie in thirteen individual tents, tents of hazy, soft brown netting. The fabric has a magical quality. Through it, the harshness of the first floor is compartmentalised and blurred, becoming a bad dream of yesteryear. The centrepiece of this exhibit is a television, broadcasting scenes from rural life. A thing, a life, is inextricable from how we present it. The shots and angles presented to us become the angles we notice, and the angles we photograph in turn. We tuck and trim our memories to fit the patterns of our stories. If the first floor was the artist facing poverty and labour, the second is him recalling it from a distance, with the numbing effect that distance provides.

 

Next is the third floor. The third floor is the clear visual highlight. It is high and lofty, centring a series of Ionic columns of an awe-inspiring scale, painstakingly assembled from chipped tile, utensils, and bare concrete blocks. It takes the raw materials of the first floor but renders them unrecognisable. Where the first floor highlighted the history of material itself, the third floor underscores its potential, what the material has become. It feels like a fever dream of a Greek temple, shimmering white and silver. White sculptures drift among the pillars: an ostrich, a rhino bone, adding to the surreal nature of the third floor.  

At a point in every artist’s life, they leave their roots and explore something new. This is apparent in all the influences of the room: the Grecian pillars, African tribal masks. Thus, the third floor hums with electricity and possibility.  

But in so clearly ignoring its roots, one cannot help but think it is an escapist fantasy, somehow.

 

The fourth and final floor looks out over the third floor and invites reflection. It is the most compact floor; it has neither the size nor the grandstanding quality of the third. Brightly lit, it is crisper and clearer than the dreamlike second floor. The centrepiece of the fourth floor is a moving mechanical garden, tiffin boxes stacked in gleaming columns. By an elegant mechanism, the columns move across the table ceaselessly and seamlessly, a constant mechanical whirr that calls to mind the buzz of life and work, of the ceaseless migration from village to city. It is a clear-eyed, but more kind, rendition of the labour of the first floor. You can almost see them, the people for whom these lunches were packed by a loving family member to nourish their son or daughter’s quest for work and vitality. It is a celebration of youth and vibrance.  

Yet, on the walls, in contrast to the gleaming metal, are portraits of rot and decay, dying flowers and rotting weeds. But they are dignified, even lovely in their slow death.  

The fourth floor is perhaps an acceptance of the duality of life. That all movement is in constant service to death — and that it should be celebrated anyway.  

The fourth floor brings to mind that incomparable last line of The Great Gatsby. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”