Friday, February 25, 2011

Not just art for art’s sake

The first thing that strikes you about “Animated Oxymoron,” the art exhibition at the Alliance Francaise by newbies Vandana and Dinakaran, is the sheer honesty in their work. Sure, their youth culture theme has been conceptually done to death, but what stands out is the lack of pretence with which the two former architecture students capture it.

Essentially, the duo has looked at paradoxes and conflicts that the urban youth encounter every day and plays with these ironies in a series of expressive frames. Vandana’s exhibits are sketched with exaggerated proportions, which do not indulge in much color apart from grays and the occasional reds.

This, I discover, has much to do with the dark themes in youth culture that she deals with.

‘Drowning in Ecstacy,’ for instance, is a comment on the rise in alcohol abuse among twenty-somethings, the fallout of the stressful work lifestyle. The sketch shows giant symmetric cocktail glasses with stick figures grabbing at their bases. A woman in a red dress raises a toast, while she is trapped in a large alcohol bottle. This one, Vandana said, was dedicated to a lot of her friends and colleagues.

It takes you a few seconds for ‘Deafening Silence’ to register as the bird’s-eye-view of a living room. The frame shows a pair of feet, dangling from what is presumed to be a ceiling fan. A shoe from one of the feet has fallen off and heads for the vortex that swirls on the room floor. Suicide, Vandana tells me, is one of the biggest problems within the student community, especially as a result of examination pressure.

Dinakaran’s work is a shift from dark social commentary to amusing observations about young people and what makes them tick. While his frames are mostly graphic art, they are cleverly captioned with a number of pop culture references.

“I think films and modern literature are my biggest influence,” he says, as he talks me through ‘Romeo Must Not Die,’ an ode to Shakespeare, Jet Li films and college romances. ‘A Fine Mess’ and ‘Instant Classic’ delve further into the teenage psyche, while using several witty puns to make a subtle remark on the culture of instant gratification.

A lot of these ideas, Vandana tells me, came from a questionnaire they circulated among a random cross section of Bangalore’s youth. Over the course of two months, the duo turned the responses into an art display which is clearly intended to provide social commentary.

But does their work say anything new?

“Well, there have a been a whole lot of people who came and looked at our work, including parents of young people who say this helped them get a perspective on their children,” Vandana explains.

Clearly, this is not snooty art meant for elitist interpretation, but a stripped-down look at the different faces of Bangalore’s youth culture.

While Vandana agrees that aesthetics are what define art, she thinks that a strong social message should form the bedrock of any work. The theme, she tells me, was first conceived before either of them began any sketching. This duo unapologetically ally with the ‘art-for-a-social-cause’ school of thought—something that a number of the city’s art ‘purists’ have recently begun to disagree with. What is refreshing is that these rookies are making no excuses about it.