Looking at your body of works, it looks like you are a moortibhanjaka”, said a practicing artist to L N Tallur, a renowned conceptual artist and sculptor, whose collection chiraag-e-AI is a part of the ongoing exhibition at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru.
The comment was made during an interaction with L N Tallur following a conversation around his creations of art and creative process.
L N Tallur’s works of art — Recurrent Neural Network, (marble on cushion and oil), White Space (ink on marble), Hack Geek (bronze, glass and wood), Slaughterbots (bronze and glass), Data Mining (plywood), Chiraag the chatbot (black granite on cushion), Clustering (bronze) and a video installation labelled Swarm — are exhibited at MAP.
Moortibhanjaka in Kannada literally means ‘one who breaks idols.’ But it connotes something larger — one who breaks away from establishments, norms or forms. Though L N’s artwork borrows from and builds on objects, symbols familiar to us culturally, a longer look would reveal more than what is evident on the surface.
For instance, the work titled ‘Data Mining’ is based on a lamp with mrigapurusha in it. It is believed that mrigapurusha — a sphinx-like mythic character with human head and animal body — runs at the speed of thought.
When L N contextualises mrigapurusha to artificial intelligence, he uses it as a symbol for the speed with which computers operate. A character from mythology comes to emblemise technological achievement while also reinventing a traditional symbol to invoke newer meanings.
The genius of L N strikes deeper when one also focuses on the material used to create the artwork. A staple in most of L N’s art is plywood. A plank of plywood, explains L N, is made out of nearly hundred different varieties of wood. Every plank has the data of nearly hundred trees.
Like most of his work, in this piece L N engages with the mythological, traditional, historical, cultural but refuses to just celebrate any of them. He also breaks and recreates them.
The material, the symbol that L N employ are working independently but also collectively to achieve something larger. A video installation titled ‘Swarm’ is almost a revelation of this very aspect. In the context of AI, the term ‘Swarm’ means distributed AI working together on a task. In the video, this is depicted in the way individuals work independently, yet collectively, in unloading cotton from a truck.
In conversation, L N recollected an interesting episode that provides a glimpse into the intention and emotion behind his work. L N’s uncle, who was employed in the Middle East, wanted to get a cast made for a village deity. The temple would not let the smith measure the idol. The temple priest took on the task of measurement.
The cast that was made after the priest’s ‘endeavour’ turned out to be oversized. It also put the uncle and temple authorities in a dilemma.
In a playful manner, L N explains that the cost for making another
cast proved to be a more expensive option compared to getting a new idol made that would fit the oversized cast!
His approach to the incident signifies his playful nature, which has coloured his gaze towards life and everything he engages with. This quality is an undercurrent in almost all of his work. His work is not limited to being a quirky take at the factual, he makes this engagement philosophical.
The anecdote can also be a looking glass to understand L N’s work — God, who is invisible, is given a shape in the form of an idol, then to make the idol more visible, a cast is prepared.
It is through the material that God is accessed and achieved.
In L N’s work, interestingly, there is no mismatch between God, the idol and the cast. They all blend beautifully to provide an experience that is transcendental, one that journeys towards the invisible, the non-tangible.