Peter Nagy is an artist and co-founder, with Alan Belcher, of Nature Morte, one of more successful galleries in New York’s East Village during the 80s. Anyone not dead, tied down by cheap rent or enslaved to a job fl ed the Big Apple in the early 90’s after the city collapsed into a miasma of corruption and crack. Peter went to New Dehli, and eventually reopened Nature Morte there. Afterart News recently asked him a few questions about life after the East Village. Here’s what he has to tell us.
fterart news: You say Delhi reminds you of the early 80’s in NYC. What makes you say that? It’s hard to imagine the same potent mix of drugs, sex, music, art and money.
Peter Nagy: The Indian art scene is reminiscent of that of NY in the 1980’s as it is, at present, full of potential energy and artists are, in general, quite optimistic. In many ways, a scene that accommodates photography, video, installation and experimental mediums has only coalesced in the past four to fi ve years and both young artists and more established ones are taking advantage of the opportunities currently available to them. Of course, one can’t compare the struggling and nascent market of here to that gonzo animal we knew in NYC twenty years ago.
AAN: In some ways all art, like politics, is local. Do you ever show artists from Europe or the States? How aware/infl uenced are Indian artists by western culture? Do they care what goes on over here?
PN: This segues nicely into your second question. India as a whole has opened itself up to the world in the past decade, the decade that I have lived here. This means in Delhi we can order in Domino’s pizza, have the BBC, CNN and WWF on television, drive Fords and BMWs and shop at Bennetton (all for better and for worse). Indian artists have greater access to information of what is happening around the world, though in terms of contemporary art this mostly comes through the Internet. The younger generation is more clued in to what is happening in different parts of the world, more attuned to the possibilities within a globalizing art scene. But, mind you, their focus may be just as much on what is going on in other parts of Asia or in Australia as it is on New York and Europe. We’ve been deluged by foreign curators (mostly European though not exclusively) coming to India in the past few years and we’re starting to see contemporary dealers sniff around. I’ve shown some work by New York artists here in group shows and have worked on some projects with European artists, but as the market does not accommodate work by non-Indian artists its rather diffi cult to rationalize and afford.
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runo Serralongue’s artist book Rapport de Forces, a collage of photographs taken by the artist and selected journalists‘ texts, starting in the 80s and including very recent work, introduces an open narrative about the union workers’ struggle in Korea and calm but unambiguous use of violence by global capitalism. From the beginning the reader is launched into the story, from recent news about big dismissals in Daewoo Motors in Piping during the process of “reconstruction” of the company, through the personal story of Yu Man Heyong, which has a role of subjective frame that opens a larger picture: “Caricature of the Korean worker as Europeans would imagine him, highly disciplined, works even while on strike … never taking off his union vest … having offi cial working day time 3-4 hours longer than his colleagues in Europe … working 14 years in factory…not married … recently fi red … on strike in a front of factory gate for a fi ve months without success… he is struggling not against liberal! Capitalism, but to save national pride and prevent selling of his company to the nasty Americans”. This personal story is not only a comment on yellow emotionalism in the bourgeois press, but also a personifi cation of working class destiny in countries in transition. The “colorful” reality of a Korean transition is portrayed from the uniformed offi ce skyscrapers and shopping malls to 24 gravestones of workers who committed suicide as a closing chapter of the book. In the portraits of novelist Kim Sung Ok and movie director Park Kwang Su, whose art was often related to worker’s movements, we should maybe look for elements of artist identifi cation and artistic statement. Combining history, news, observations, archival and new material, Bruno Serralongue is creating another way of disseminating information. It is less about chasing the facts and endless reconstruction of truth, and more about the art world adopting different tactics in order to challenge its social sphere. In an environment marked by overwhelming news industry that fabricates “objective” facts and images, artist Bruno Serralongue creates inevitably “subjective” and imperfect, but nonetheless r eal, reports that move the emphasis from the production to exploration of mechanisms of observation of images and stories.
