ABOUT VIVAN SUNDARAM & HIS WORK TRASH
Vivan Sundaram came to installation practice from the late 1980s onwards, after having first made his mark as a painter. He was a student at the Slade School of Art during the mid-sixties (where he was taught by R.B. Kitaj), and the art that touched him the most was a version of Pop - not the playful attitude characteristic of the Pop sensibility as much as the political edge that some of Pop's destabilizing procedures could be made to yield. The collage/montage principle that he adopted early in his career - the juxtaposition of elements deriving from opposed aesthetic registers, the taste for quotations and fragments - inevitably put extreme pressure on the picture-plane, stretching the bounds of what could be contained within the frame. Minimalism would go on to break the self-containment of the mediums, and Sundaram's practice, too, would draw the conclusions from the breach in medium specificity, more to confer upon the phenomenological experience of form privileged by Minimalism, a distinctly civic inflection. Both Pop art and Minimalism paved the way, of course, towards a practice understood as situated in the expanded field, and Sundaram is the artist in India whose work has most keenly registered the political import of this deterritorialisation. He has, from the outset, occupied a liminal position, adept in situating himself on the edge. Sundaram's familiarity with the history of art has always proceeded in tandem with a consciousness of history as such - perforce an unhappy consciousness, and of which his work, in its multiple registers, is the allegory.
His current series, Trash develops a theme that has engaged him since 1997, and he explores the social implications and aesthetics of urban waste and second-hand goods. Vivan Sundaram's deployment of urban detritus, the result of the frenzy of global consumption, recalls modernity's fascination with recycled objects and the modernist procedure of bricolage.
Constructing a huge and fantastical cityscape in his New Delhi studio entirely with garbage, the resulting composite photographs re-imagine the dreams and aspirations of the architect as grand city planner while simultaneously poking fun at the folly of such utopian misadventures. The color and texture of industrial waste, dirty toothbrushes, plastic toys, tin cans, and a sea of empty yogurt containers create panoramas both astonishing and absurd. Using deceptive scale, Sundaram creates dislocation between real and imagined spaces. On closer engagement, the discarded objects become a metaphor for the landscape of contemporary life. The deeper signification of Sundaram’s works has to do with his concerns and critique of the excesses of modern life.