Despite the implications of its name, Nature Morte has led a rich and active life. Born in the East Village during the neighborhood’s mid-80s artistic boom, the New York gallery died in 1988, only to be reborn nine years later, halfway around the world. The first Nature Morte was a 200-foot storefront space on East 10th Street, and the second emerged in 1997 as a roving exhibition program that held shows in various spaces around Delhi, India. Both galleries located themselves at the center of emerging avant-gardes, and both found remarkable success. Nowadays, Nature Morte maintains a permanent address in Delhi, while at the same time touring the big art fairs as a major player in the emerging international market for contemporary Indian art. Against a dramatically shifting backdrop, the gallery’s founder, Peter Nagy, has found himself playing a remarkably consistent and consistently self-divided role: while providing a forum for the development of countercultural art practices, his gallery has simultaneously fueled a level of commercial attention that threatens to destroy the context that initially nurtured its artists. Charged by this tension, the intrepid Nagy has navigated Nature Morte on a dynamic course that illuminates the paradoxical relationship between critical and commercial success.
When the gallery first opened, in 1982, it joined a wave of artists, musicians, and writers who were living and working in tenements and abandoned spaces across the then derelict East Village. Priced out of recently gentrified neighborhoods like SoHo, East Village artists created a homegrown culture that riffed off the neighborhood’s blend of ethnic diversity and creative subcultures. This new bohemia was quickly dubbed the next avant-garde, and as a 1983 Flash Art article by NicolasMoufarrege captures, the artworld was compulsively enthralled: “High and low art intermingle, causing a headiness in the streets and in the arteries and veins. From retina to grey cell the art emerges: personal, funny, provocative, reckless and ambitious.… Rife with vitalism, it gushes forth wildly with a kind of no-holds-barred intoxication.”[1] Taking its cues from the neighborhood’s legendary punk scene, the East Village art scene was anarchic and populist, embracing the entertainment value of art and riding roughshod over distinctions between high and low culture. Galleries such as fun and Civilian Warfare, for example, reflected the scene’s exuberant extroversion, while Gracie Mansion’s exhibition spaces, the “Loo Division” (the bathroom) and “Lieu Division” (the expansion), revealed its penchant for irony and play.
In a similar spirit, Nagy and fellow artist Alan Belcher established Nature Morte as a loosely structured cooperative exhibition space, where commercial ambition was secondary to experimentalism. Its name (“dead nature” in French, and the art-historical term for the genre of still life) fit somewhat with the East Village’s jocular aesthetic, but it also stood as a pointed rejoinder to the scene’s antiacademic bent. The gallery further distinguished itself from its neighbors’ Pop-infused street aesthetic through its program, which focused on more cerebral artworks. Nature Morte was very much the neighborhood intellectual, and, in Nagy’s view, “rather estranged from the rest of the East Village.”[2]
Despite its philosophical remove, the gallery was intimately connected to the East Village artworld, and like the rest of the scene, it landed in the spotlight almost overnight. Part of the neighborhood’s allure was its stark contrast to SoHo, which had by then become a high-end marketplace for painting and sculpture—traditional forms that a new breed of collectors, flush with cash from President Reagan’s tax policies, aggressively snapped up. As the gallery scene in SoHo moved toward the mainstream, journalists, collectors, and museums, drawn by the promise of an alternative, descended upon the East Village in throngs.
Predictably, success and the concomitant exposure also brought malcontents—scarcely a year later, Moufarrege had written a second, less breathless Flash Art piece that proclaimed the death of the East Village scene—but the attention also sparked a rapid artistic and commercial self-awakening in the neighborhood’s artists and galleries.[3] Nature Morte was no exception: its program grew more ambitious along with its business model, as single-artist exhibitions and focused collaborations soon replaced casual group shows. During the mid-1980s, Nature Morte’s reputation as a serious venue was also cemented by the caliber of the artists it exhibited: Vito Acconci, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Bloom, Jennifer Boland, Louise Lawler, Sherri Levine, Steven Parrino, Joel Otterson, and Keith Sonnier.
Critics, however, stepped up their attacks on the scene, depicting it as a fabricated, market-driven simulacrum of a subculture. Avant-gardes have two alternatives, the critic and art historian Craig Owens wrote in 1984: “Either they openly acknowledge their economic role—the alternative pursued by the East Village ‘avant-garde’—or they actively work to dislodge an entrenched institutionalized avant-garde production model.”[4] Nature Morte’s program lay at the crossroads of these two options, and as both an artist and a gallerist, Nagy struggled to maintain perspective in the middle of an art boom. After Alan Belcher decamped to Toronto in 1986, Nagy was running the gallery alone in an increasingly competitive climate. By 1987, blue-chip galleries were successfully luring the best East Village artists away, and to succeed, Nature Morte would have had to endorse the market over its critique by moving to SoHo.
Whether an upscale Nature Morte was ever a viable option is unclear. In retrospect, Nagy claims that Nature Morte’s closure, in July 1988, was a choice made to further his own artistic career. At the time, he was a reasonably successful artist making graphic, layered paintings that satirically captured the era’s booming corporate culture, and his logic suggests an attempt to succeed without selling out. However, Nagy is a keen observer of the mechanisms of the market, and he would certainly have realized the potential for failure in restaging Nature Morte in SoHo. So while he left himself open to operating a gallery in the future, “for the basic reason that I do not enjoy teaching and am not very comfortable within academia,” hindsight suggests the recognition that his gallery moment in New York was about to be up.
Peter Nagy, Lost, 1990. Courtesy Baron Boisante, New York.
Nagy’s move to India began unconsciously with a brief vacation in 1990, but over time he became increasingly attracted to the country’s remote otherworldliness and the complex sensory overload it provoked. Having visited Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Delhi, and what was then called Bombay, he returned for an entire year in 1992 and a short time later went back for good. He ended up in New Delhi by happenstance—a friend’s family owned several apartments there—and found that he preferred it to the more New York–like culture of Bombay. “The only thing I have against [New Delhi] is that it is too far away from the ocean.”
During his first years in India—Nature Morte’s “fallow years”—Nagy’s artwork was heavily influenced by the subcontinent’s spiritual culture. Religion in Delhi is an ever-present affair: public and private altars, shrines, and temples are ubiquitous, and the sacred sites are covered in ritual offerings, including food, flowers, incense, pictures, jewelry, and fabric. Nagy borrowed their formal composition for a body of work titled “So Much Deathless,” shown at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, in 1997, which translated the multiplicity of Delhi’s sacramental aesthetic into assemblages reflecting his personal history. The sculptures incorporated disparate two- and three-dimensional objects (decorative, functional, and sacred), artworks by other artists, and modernist furniture into pseudoceremonial sites that attempted to represent Nagy’s three identities: artist, curator, and tourist. As with earlier projects, Nagy used appropriation to get at his real subject matter: the role of context in the creation of meaning and value. However, the work also revealed Nagy’s difficulty in expressing his expatriate experiences without succumbing to cliché: in an environment so dense with new information, the tourist can easily get the better of the artist and the curator.
At the same time, Nagy was beginning to size up the contemporary art scene in Delhi. Where Mumbai boasted a thriving gallery system and a well-established collector base, contemporary art venues in Delhi were few and far between. In the late 90s, the majority of galleries in the city were showing conservative, representational paintings that depicted romantic scenes of rural life. Nagy found this work deeply unsatisfying and wrote with distaste that commercial painters shared “a flat-out refusal to render anything of the contemporary realities … not a speck of corruption nor pollution, of the struggles with industrialization and development, or the tensions between tradition and modernity.”[5] Art schools, more like technical schools for painting than their Western counterparts, maintained this static concept of art and produced new generations of painters to sustain the market without altering its ground rules. This “Indigenous Orientalism,”[6] as Nagy termed it, was starkly different from contemporary art in the West, and speculating on the situation, he wrote:
The West’s institutions, cultural and corporate as well as governmental, pride themselves on rationality, transparency, and efficiency. Hence, art… is called on by the society to provide the uncanny, the exotic, the metaphysical, even the transcendental.… The experience in India is quite the reverse. While one is virtually accosted by a profusion of material complexity on the street, engulfed with sensual stimuli of varying sorts, or surprised by random sightings of unusual behavior… the experience of entering an art gallery is actually limiting and specifically about control.…India’s contemporary art scene remains a deeply patriarchal structure, suspicious of radical gestures… and contemptuous of forms that strive to deny preeminence to a market based entirely upon painting.[7]
All of which is why Nagy’s recognition of an artistic counterculture was so intoxicating. Through word of mouth and occasional gallery-going trips to Mumbai, he began to observe a familiar phenomenon. He watched with interest as a wave of intellectual critique entered a subset of Indian artistic consciousness, noting that artists were grappling with some of the same issues—the politics of representation, strategies of appropriation, gender, sexuality, and race—that motivated art in the East Village a decade before. Nagy felt an affinity with their projects’ critical distance, focused perspective, and agitational character.
He also noticed a refreshing difference between the two cities: While the “alternative” scene in New York had become institutionalized and redundant, in Delhi it felt vital. In a culture that looked to the visual arts for a poetic assertion of traditional values, the interrogation of those values still had the capacity to shock. Artists in Delhi were already looking outside India for exhibitions, and Nagy, educated to engage art’s social potential, saw the opportunity to participate in the emergence of a rigorous and sophisticated avant-garde, one that was locally based but globally fueled: through Nature Morte, he could serve as a cultural conduit between the West and the subcontinent.
In 1997, the same year as his show in New York, Nagy reopened Nature Morte in Delhi as a nomadic exhibition space, dedicated to providing a forum for this emergent alternative movement. Nature Morte’s mission (aside from providing Nagy with a way to support himself in his new home) was to promote artists working in media that hadn’t yet been embraced by the conservative Indian art market. He sustained this project pragmatically, by selling paintings, a medium with a strong and diverse Indian market. The paintings paid the bills, but the multimedia work—installation, sculpture, photography, and video—gave it international visibility.
The gallery’s roster revealed the breadth of innovative practices obscured by the Delhi artworld’s orthodox façade. From Sheba Chhachhi’s photographs of female sadhus—Hindu ascetics—which blended photojournalism with traditional portraiture into a genre-defying new form, to Subodh Gupta’s provocative, faux-Orientalist found-object sculptures, Nature Morte’s early artworks displayed a self-conscious experimentalism as well as the desire to address India in the international language of contemporary art. Meanwhile, artists’ groups such as the KHOJ International Artists Association, a collective formed in 1997 with Gupta as a founding member, rounded out a reinvigorated art culture that promoted collaboration and the “empowerment of so-called third world artists and their cross-cultural bonding outside racial biases, and…an exchange of flow of information along alternative lines.”[8]
Much of what has subsequently emerged from India’s alternative scene has explored “progress” in the world’s largest democracy, and the inexorable friction between tradition and modernity, rural and urban life. Its artists join authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy in the push against growth driven by global commercial interests. They also use visual art to draw attention to the experience of the millions of Indian citizens for whom progress resulted in deprivation and violence. When Chhachhi describes her work in a war zone as an attempt to “bring the human back into the discourse,”[9] she was not far from Roy’s plea to members of the leftist Chhattisgarh Liberation Front that “humanity will have to be our weapon in times to come.”[10]
Such a position highlights a key difference between the artists Nagy showed in the East Village and those he shows in Delhi. The former articulated their anticapitalist project through an attack on modernism’s articles of faith: the autonomous artwork, the genius artist breaking from tradition, and the unchallenged preeminence of originality as a value. They often employed an aesthetic of icy detachment to heighten the impact of their critique, making artwork that not only challenged the tenets of modernism but investigated the complicity of a humanist view of art in maintaining the social status quo. Conversely, Nature Morte’s Indian artists embraced humanism as a method of promoting change and used emotional, expressive content—verboten in some strains of Western postmodernist art—to communicate empathically as well as conceptually.
Predictably, that same system of global capitalism is now propelling the success of some of its most vocal critics in the visual arts. The international audience asks for and encourages social commentary through art and has increasingly sought out the Indian avant-garde precisely because its artwork communicates something about the country that feels authentic and progressive. This exposure has led, as in the East Village two decades ago, to the movement of critical art practices from the margins of the international market to its center. Thus, despite the dramatic differences of contemporary Indian culture, Nature Morte’s Indian artists today face diffi culties that are strikingly similar to those of their American predecessors: What happens when a critique of the market is rewarded with the market’s highest accolades? And compounding this issue is the ever-present problem of exoticism: Does the international audience for contemporary art want authentic art from India, or art that looks authentically Indian? When asked whether, despite their ability to articulate this dilemma, Westerners are still caught in a veil of Orientalism
that propagates stereotypes, Nagy demurred, responding, “Curators are looking for a type of art that will look foreign or exotic to their audience, but also hip and similar to cutting-edge art from anywhere in the world. It’s a delicate balance that some of the best Indian artists have arrived at rather intuitively.”
Nagy has also grown adept at striking such a balance. Since grounding Nature Morte as a permanent gallery in 2003, in partnership with New York City’s BosePacia Gallery, he has become a spokesman on India for the international community. When we met in New York, Nagy had just arrived the night before from Delhi, having been in Hong Kong the previous week. We spoke over sushi, a favorite meal when he’s by the sea, and Nagy’s chin-length graying hair and loose cotton clothing looked vaguely shamanistic. He exudes calm self-assurance, and—like all good salesmen—he keeps the conversation focused. A formidable traveler, Nagy was heading to Miami for the ArtBasel fair a few days after our meeting, then back to Delhi, and then for a quick jaunt to mount a show in Australia. This year would also bring the Armory Show in New York, a fair in Dubai, Basel in Switzerland, then smaller fairs—FIAC Paris, Art Fair Tokyo, and the new ShContemporary fair in Shanghai. He was enthusiastic about the reception he’s received in Europe and Asia, and apologetically dismissive about America’s general lack of interest in his gallery’s program. At many of these stops, Nature Morte—with its visibly non-Indian director—is the only Indian representative.
Nagy’s centrality to his adopted milieu could be seen as suspect, given that he is white and from Connecticut. Yet it is his outsider status that gives him an insider edge on these international exchanges: from every angle, people are looking for introductions and interpretations, and Nagy flourishes in the role of translator between visual art cultures. Moreover, the vicissitudes of the still-tentative relationship between India and the international artworld make an argument for the relevance of his strange position, as was recently the case in Venice. Despite solicitations from curators and artists at home and abroad, the Indian government has been relatively uninterested in promoting its visual artists in large international art exhibitions such as the Biennale. In 2005, Nagy and a small group of like-minded curators decided to tackle the problem themselves. They selected fi ve Indian artists and one collective, whose work represented the diversity of current Indian practice while “keeping in mind the context of the Biennale and what would be of interest to its audience.” After failed attempts to align with the Indian government, the group secured funding from donors in the United States and ultimately presented the project as an unaffiliated exhibition of Indian art. It was a sticky situation all around, and deeply frustrating to Nagy personally. The miscommunications that plagued the show emphasized a dilemma of India’s contemporary art culture: in the absence of centralized support, the entrée of Indian artists to the international artworld is often facilitated by Western patrons, who bring their own ideological and financial interests to bear on the task of promotion. Despite renewed efforts, the 2007 Biennale is again without an Indian national pavilion.
There is wide supposition that the contemporary Indian market will follow the rocket-like trajectory of the Chinese art market, and spectators have again begun to wonder how exposure and commerce of this magnitude will affect the critical ambitions of India’s contemporary artists. Like New York in the late 1980s, the inexorable promise of change mingles with the uncertainty of sustainability, and artists, galleries, and collectors are pitching forward, forming alliances, and hedging their bets.
For the moment, Nagy is riding the wave. When the East Village collapsed under the weight of its triumphant and speedy success, Nagy relinquished his position as a gallerist and focused on his own artwork to avoid the fallout. Nearly two decades later, his role as an artist has been overshadowed by his ability to position Indian artists within the global sphere, where he is seen as a uniquely qualified market authority. But rather than lamenting the transition, Nagy is resigned for now to letting his art take a secondary role, and he reflects contentedly that, in the Indian artworld, he may already have “too big a presence.”
1. Nicolas A. Moufarrege,“East Village,” Flash Art, March 1983, p. 36.
2. Unless otherwise noted, quotations are taken from email exchanges between the author and Nagy, fall/winter 2006/2007.
3. Nicolas A. Moufarrege, “The Year After,” Flash Art, Summer 1984, pp. 51-55.
4. Craig Owens, “East Village ’84: Commentary, The Problem with Puerilism,” Art in America 82 (Summer 1984) p. 163.
5. Peter Nagy, “Subodh Gupta: Transitory Indecisions and Fluctuating Monuments,” Subodh Gupta, Nature Morte and Sakshi gallery, 2005.
6. ibid.
7. Peter Nagy, “Acts of Delicate Balance,” The Tree from the Seed,Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Oslo, 2002.
8. http://khojworkshop.org
9. Sheba Chhachhi in Barry Bergman “Transforming the‘Poison of Time,’” Berkleyan, February 9, 2005.
10 Arundhati Roy, “In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi,” An Ordinary Person’s Guide to the Empire, 2004, p. 80.