Encounter with American art at Guggenheim and New Museum in New York made me aware of a new dimension in contemporary art, which is spiritual and otherworldly. I realised that painting is no more executed on a canvas with colours and displayed on the wall, neither the sculpture in stone or bronze.

French painter Marcel Duchamp had already proved the evanescent quality of art to be real. He relied heavily on his “ready-mades” such as Bicycle Wheel (1913), Bottle Rack (1914), in Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), Comb (1916) and Fountain (1917). He almost demolished the idea of the uniqueness in art.

After him, Andy Warhol did everything possible to produce art in a factory. He believed in mass production and not in uniqueness. Warhol said: “Why buy a work of art paying several million dollars? Why not hang those dollars on the wall, which might give a greater satisfaction?”

With such aggressively absurd ideas in mind, when I approached James Turrell’s works in New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, I was taken aback by the serenity and uniqueness of the pieces displayed on the wall. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the art on the walls had no material existence but were ephemeral to the extent possible. Was it the evolutionary phase of Duchamp’s display of a urinal under the title ‘Fountain’ or the Buddhist idea of Nirvan?

From the late 1960s, James Turrell conceived a wide-ranging, yet a remarkably consistent series of installations that explore perception and the materiality of light. With their refined formal language and quiet, almost reverential atmospheres of introspection and reflection, his works revel in the optical and emotional effects of luminosity. Building on his early research into sensory deprivation (particularly the Ganzfeld effect, in which viewers experience disorienting, un-modulated fields of colours), Turrell pursues a state of reflexive vision that he calls “seeing yourself seeing”, in which we become aware of the function of our own senses and of light as a tangible substance.

Turrell’s work has no material existence. It is a patch of bright or grey light focused on the wall. Turrell considers his long-standing interest in perception, light, colour, and space, giving special attention to the role of the site specificity in his practice. A major project created by the artist, especially for the Guggenheim, recasts the museum’s rotunda as a volume of shifting natural and artificial light. Experienced for the first time only from below, the rotunda appears not as a void but an ever-shifting mass of light that expands and counteracts above the heads of the visitors.

In India, we have been told that art here, in contrast to the West, is spiritual. This assumption is perhaps true because art is mostly linked to and the icons required to be installed in the shrine for worship follow specific instructions from the “shastras”. These instructions are in the form of Sanskrit mantras that are transmitted into artistic practices and therefore the result is consider sacred and spiritual. The interior of such a shrine with an installed image bestows a feeling of serenity.

But Turrell’s non-material installation has the ability to transform an ordinary ambience into a state of meditative contemplation. Moreover, most of the time, the Indian images exude sensuousness and their well-proportioned youthful bodies do not exhibit a feeling of non-attachment and renunciation.

The images of Jain Mahavir and the tirthankars, meant to instil in us a sense of otherworldliness, impress on us a sense of material belonging with their beautiful limbs. After witnessing Turrell’s fleeting images of pure light. I felt what we had been taught about Indian art being spiritual had no logistics.

Western and American contemporary artists could evoke serenity and un-earthliness in their artistic creations. The credibility is not because they are American, but the transformative attitude is due to the spiritual base of contemporary creations in the field of visual art.

Let me give you another illustrative artistic manifestation of an Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor, who has built a public sculpture out of stainless steel at Millennium Park in Chicago. Said to have been inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture, which occupies an illusionary space, is consistent with eastern theologies shared by Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism as well as Albert Einstein’s views of a non-three-dimensional world.

Anish’s sculpture, which is named Cloud Gate, reflects such dualities as solidity — emptiness or reality — which in turn alludes to such paired opposites as flesh-spirit, the here-the beyond, east-west and sky-earth that create the conflict between internal and external, superficial and subterranean and the conscious and the unconscious.

This is not a figurative sculpture, but a mirror-like reflective surface which images the Chicago skyline dotted with skyscrapers. It also reflects the onlooker’s own image and therefore denotes a fluid space which is evanescent and non-existent.

Cloud Gate is an antithesis of Indian classical figurative sculpture and yet has the ability to inspire weightlessness and non-materiality. Like James Turrell’s installations which produce and invoke qualities of radiance, Anish’s Cloud Gate is a luminous abstract space that expresses.

Normally, we do not attach spiritual significance to the works of contemporary artists and treat them with disdain. At times, we equate contemporary art with “pop” and weigh this in exchange of money. The quality of contemporary artists is openly judged by the amount of money their work fetches in the market. In most of the cases, contemporary artists thrive on cheap publicity. Their careers depend more and more on advertising, promotion and good public relations.

I was overwhelmed to hear of the store of an artist in New York. He was Albert Pinkham Ryder, a lonely, reclusive artist who lived a hundred years ago and cared nothing for money, social prestige or comforts. Rider lived frugally on thirteen cents a day and slept on a carpet roll. At night, he wandered the bridges, ferries, and water fonts of New York, “soaking up the moonlight” and watching the shadow a boat’s sail made on the water.

“The artist,” Ryder wrote, “must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord and a costly studio. A rain-tight roof, frugal living, a box of colours and God’s sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one’s daily work.”

This self imposed austerity that is mildly eccentric and certainly out-of-date, inspire James Turrell’s and Anish Kapoor’s spiritual art.