With Love from a Cement Company
R Dhanya
A few years ago the BBMP (Bruhat Bangalore Mahanangara Palike)
took upon the task of painting a large part of Bangalore’s public walls in
blue, with historical ethnographic and cultural visual platitudes as a way
of brightening up the city. Two years ago a cement conglomerate based in
Hyderabad came forward to sponsor sculptures in six traffic junctions and
BBMP sportingly accepted the offer and in early 2012 the sculptures were
unveiled with much hoopla.
If you pass by the erstwhile British cantonment area towards the railway
station, in between a matrix of traffic signals a number of cement animals
morphing into one sculpture comes to your notice. This happens to be an
elephant atop which an animal belonging to the cat family is sitting on
its head while a rhinoceros is perched on its back. A turtle sits atop the
rhinoceros and a vulture crowns it, looking out from the elephant’s profile.
The vision is of an elaborate circus stunt carried out collectively by various
wild species.
The animal circus at cantonment happens to be one of the pieces
sponsored by Bharathi cement. An abstract geometrical structure near
Chalukya Circle, four galloping horses at Race Course Circle and the most
figurative and violently hypocritical one at Mekhri circle, a cement tree
circled by a human chain of cement children in life size have all taken
public life due to the private-civic partnership. The other two sculptures
have not been unveiled and understandably so. The culturally prominent
citizens, particularly artists have expressed wrath at these said attempts to
beautify the city. Many newspapers carried interviews of eminent artists
who altogether dismissed the whole deal as grotesque ‘non-art’ disguised
in the name of public sculptures.