Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Aakash Nihalani : by Avinash Rajagopal




Street art is alive and kicking in Brooklyn. It writhes and pulses along the walls, singing along brick tenements, screaming across the doors of auto garages and warehouses. The artists are rebels who are supposed to be in hiding, but who operate under famous monikers and nicknames. Street art is invariably a statement about the urban landscape: Who holds power here? Who is allowed to express themselves, and who isn’t? It is a very rare kind of street art that operates just as well within the formal space of the art gallery, and that actually loses very little by this transmutation.
Such is the work of Aakash Nihalani, whose most recent exhibition opened at the East District Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, he operates under his own home grown Indian name: no fancy monikers like PosterBoy or Gaia. And his fluorescent pink and green outlines of isometric boxes are very comfortable on the bare white walls, forcing me to do a little jig as I move back and forth and to and fro, finding new ways of looking at them.




A gallery allows me to place my work within the history of art”, he says, “It also allows me to show what I can do given a white wall.” It is this sort of informed comment that gives away his formal training in art, and his background before he came into the art world. Aakash began by studying Political Science at New York University, with the aim of becoming a lawyer. Born to Indian parents, growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in New Jersey, this was the respectable career path to take. But Aakash admits he was always something of a rebel. He first started painting on clothes when he realised, that he not only wanted to make art, but that he wanted people to interact with it. Now all he had to do was to convince his shocked parents that their son wanted to shift to art school!

Aakash’s tryst with street art began with an exhibition he put up while studying Printmaking. He was taping his prints to the wall, and idly began to trace the outlines of a table’s shadow with the tape. The idea excited his teachers, and Aakash had found his medium. His work before this was abstract expressionist: a preoccupation with surfaces and textured backgrounds. He had already hit upon the device of creating a little enclosed space on the canvas for contemplation using an isometric cube: the basic unit of space. All that remained now was to replace the painted background with surfaces in the real world; and the cubes began to serve just as well to highlight the beauty of the mundane, to force passersby to stop and think a little.




To Aakash, this is the raison d’ĂȘtre of his work: watching people engage with it. In the street, people see sidewalks and staircases in a whole new way through his taped outlines. In the gallery, he uses mirrors with his taped boxes to reflect the viewers or their surroundings in intriguing ways.  And he photographs this endlessly. To me, these photographs are the final work of art: freezing the moment where the art and its audience are in conversation. Aakash explains, “It is a visual cue that cannot be fabricated. It is a function of reality.”

He uses a clean medium (the tape comes off the walls pretty easily) and therefore his work is legal: he hasn’t had a run-in with the cops yet. This consciousness is the most telling aspect of his work. It raises a very important question about street art: If it is really all about using public space creatively and about beginning an open dialogue, why are the artists in hiding?

 Aakash Nihalani is now extending his ideas from street art into other domains: the gallery wall and the internet. But the fact remains that in his work, and in the work of others like him (such as the Wall Project group in India), street art has begun to shed the baggage of secrecy and illegality that has dogged its steps from the beginning. And in doing so, it may finally realise its goal of being not just a serious mode of artistic inquiry, but a real and valid form of public self-expression.

For more images of Aakash's work, visit his website and flickr.

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Avinash is an aspiring design critic/teacher, currently pursuing a Masters in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He studied to be a product designer, and his heart also beats faster for Indian art, textiles, crafts, social responsibility, mythology and history. 

4 comments:

  1. Great piece Avinash! Also love this video of Aakash's work: http://bit.ly/c9uFVG

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  2. Pavitra:
    You're back! Yay!! :)

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  3. @Meena: that video is fabulous! It's been a year since I met Aakash, and I'd forgotten about that nonchalant air he has :) That attitude turns his work into a performance! thank you.

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  4. clean. interesting. engaging. love it.

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