Demolished old buildings, an odd tree, piles of bricks, and colonial style abodes skillfully arranged in beautiful artistic shapes are the recognizable motifs for a few contemporary practitioners of new age ‘land art’ from the West who have opted to make India their muse.
The movement began in 1968 in New York with a group show, entitled ‘Earth Works’. The genre was coined by Robert Smithson. It was practised by many leading post-modern artists, including Andy Goldsworthy, Alan Sonfist, Constantin Brancusi and Hans Haacke.
Land art or Earth art is a movement in which luscious landscape and peculiar artwork forms are inextricably and skillfully linked. It’s also a form of art created in nature, utilizing natural materials like soil, rock, organic media, and water with an array of introduced materials like concrete, metal, mineral pigments etc. Instead of placing sculptures in the landscape, the latter is the chosen means of their creation. Many of the works of art, created in the deserts of Nevada, Utah or Arizona were mostly ephemeral in nature and only exist as photographic documents or video recordings now. They pioneered a form known as site-specific sculpture, designed for a specific outdoor location.
Sebastian Cortes, a Fashion photographer, has documented Puducherry in his extensive project ‘Pondicherry. It’s a series of images plus a book on this quaint Indo-French cross-cultural landscape of. The artist, who works between New York and Milan, settled 10 years ago in Auroville in Puducherry with his yoga-instructor wife.
The city with a distinct historical layering with its intriguing French, Indian, especially Tamil traditions alongside Catholic influence gripped him, prompting Cortes to put the dazzling diversity in astute architectural panels and deft designs bordering between the present, past and the future. He was influenced by Aurobindo ashram’s obscure rituals, its ordinariness of life jelled with the colonial past that found a resonance in the well-planned frames of ‘French-style villas, Aurobindo's shrine, an old pier, Hindu icons, the people there and serene sea.
The movement began in 1968 in New York with a group show, entitled ‘Earth Works’. The genre was coined by Robert Smithson. It was practised by many leading post-modern artists, including Andy Goldsworthy, Alan Sonfist, Constantin Brancusi and Hans Haacke.
Land art or Earth art is a movement in which luscious landscape and peculiar artwork forms are inextricably and skillfully linked. It’s also a form of art created in nature, utilizing natural materials like soil, rock, organic media, and water with an array of introduced materials like concrete, metal, mineral pigments etc. Instead of placing sculptures in the landscape, the latter is the chosen means of their creation. Many of the works of art, created in the deserts of Nevada, Utah or Arizona were mostly ephemeral in nature and only exist as photographic documents or video recordings now. They pioneered a form known as site-specific sculpture, designed for a specific outdoor location.
Sebastian Cortes, a Fashion photographer, has documented Puducherry in his extensive project ‘Pondicherry. It’s a series of images plus a book on this quaint Indo-French cross-cultural landscape of. The artist, who works between New York and Milan, settled 10 years ago in Auroville in Puducherry with his yoga-instructor wife.
The city with a distinct historical layering with its intriguing French, Indian, especially Tamil traditions alongside Catholic influence gripped him, prompting Cortes to put the dazzling diversity in astute architectural panels and deft designs bordering between the present, past and the future. He was influenced by Aurobindo ashram’s obscure rituals, its ordinariness of life jelled with the colonial past that found a resonance in the well-planned frames of ‘French-style villas, Aurobindo's shrine, an old pier, Hindu icons, the people there and serene sea.
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