A group of Indian citizens has come upon a unique way of showing its support for public art - with help from what must be a newly sensitized police force. A large Styrofoam cow had been sent up into the sky on a hot-air balloon by two fairly well-established artists. This was to be their contribution to the Jaipur Art Summit had it not been for a bunch of cow-worshippers, who took offence at the use of their object of maternal devotion, got the police to bring the cow down, worshipped, garlanded and sang to it, and made sure that the artists were subjected to protracted harassment in the hands of the police. The artists even had to explain to the police, at some length, that making the public aware of how cows choke on plastic was the message of their artwork. There is something brilliantly Dada - in the Swiss sense - about this event. John Cage would have found it a piece of Happening, and got something out of the I Ching to go with his appreciation.
It would be heartening to hear that this is also the spirit in which the artists have taken the fate of their once flying, and now grounded and worshipped, cow. There is really no point taking it more seriously, or even feeling victimized by such stupidity. If artists decide to put their work out in India's public - or, for that matter, private - spaces, then they have to be prepared for anything these days, from the fatal to the banal. The best way to prepare themselves for this might be to track the public words and deeds of distinguished and ridiculously powerful Indians like the Union culture minister and the human resource development minister, or the chairperson of the censor board. Their collected statements would make the Indian Dada Manifesto, and the prime minister could take it with him on his travels for the like-minded. The Riefenstahls of the 21st century might soon have a bunch of prolific cronies to sit up to; and art, in any case, is nothing if not global. Besides, it is good to be made aware from time to time that the unwittingly comic can also be dangerous.
