Learning about our surroundings through brut art
Most of us have watched Shershaah, the 2021 movie based on Captain Vikram Batra of the Kargil War fame who was posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra. I loved it. Among many aspects that caught my attention in the film, one was the Rock Garden of Chandigarh that was featured in it. It is a massive piece of artwork by Nek Chand, a self-taught Indian artist who won Padma Shri in 1988. The Rock Garden is a huge playhouse replete with sculpted monkeys, ducks and horses, huge waterfalls, bridges, tunnels, rocks of strange shapes, mammoth walls and more. I have often wondered about what this art form is all about as well as its origins. My curiosity and my study on the Internet made me realise the place where this all began is France.
In the decade of 1940s, Jean Dubuffet, a French painter and sculptor coined the term Art Brut to refer to the art created outside the boundaries of normatively defined art. This was the period of the World War II when people were suffering more from mental turmoil than physical pain. Dubuffet’s study of the artwork created by children and the psychologically challenged, made him come to the conclusion that their 'masterpieces' qualified as expressive art. Often this art depicted one's state of mind which reflected their despair and their cries for help. Art Brut simply translates into raw art of the so-called ‘unprofessional’ artists emerging from their conditions rather than creativity. As I learnt more about this concept, I discovered that this style was looked down upon by many artists, who were critical of the unorthodox methods used by these artists. In 1972, British writer Roger Cardinal coined the term 'Outsider Art' as the English equivalent to the French term Art Brut.
This is how Dubuffet explained the term. “These artists derive everything…from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to the completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists' own impulses.” In 1949, Dubuffet, the founding father of Art Brut, displayed five artworks of a psychologically challenged person named Adolf Wölfli in an exhibition in Paris.
The impact of Dubuffet's 'œuvre' spread far and wide. In the Indian context, we can see this influence in Nek Chand’s work when he created his massive masterpiece, the Rock Garden. In 1951, he was hired as the road inspector at the Public Works Department (PWD). It was during his work that he envisaged the idea of Rock Garden.
For his masterpiece, Nek Chand chose the buffer forest near Sukhna Lake. In his leisure time, he would collect rocks from demolished sites, broken glass bangles, tiles, mosaïc, and what many of us would call waste material or garbage, broken pottery, electrical fixtures and more. Soon, he started working with these unconventional articles of everyday use. Nek Chand was self-taught, his methods were unconventional and his sculpture garden, a secret. this project was his secret. This is because the forest that Chand had selected for his dream project was marked as a no-build zone by the government and it was classified as a conservation area since 1902. However, authorities didn't notice this sculpture park until 1975. They attempted to demolish Chand's work but had to stopped due to popular public support for this artistic miracle.
The key question is why should one have an in-depth knowledge of art forms like these. To know about the history of something is to look at its soul, its source, and how it expanded to become the roots of a tree, bearing fruits of art that we glare at fondly in praise. Artists like Dubuffet and Nek Chand inspire us to create art with what we don’t just have around us, but within us. The Art Brut form spreads awareness and confronts environmental challenges of today and how the term 'garbage' can be expanded to include sustainable solutions.
Ridhi Kulshreshtha is a student of Ahlcon Public School, Delhi. Views expressed are personal.