탈루의 작품들은 유럽과 아시아, 아프리카 등 어느 나라에서도 근원을 찾기 힘든 극단적으로 이국적인 시각성으로 보는 이의 관심을 유발한다. 수 차례 현대미술의 모티브가 된 아프리카 민속 미술의 전통은 물론, 이제는 우리의 눈에 익숙해진 중국을 위시한 동북아의 현대 미술과도 구분되는 탈루의 작업은 부분적으로는 인도 조각과 건축 양식의 정통성을 기반으로 하고 있다고도 할 수 있다. 하지만 탈루의 작업이 보다 확연하게 이국적으로 보이는 이유는 그의 작업이 인도의 전통 도상을 다루는 방식이 전혀 새로운 차원의 것이기 때문이다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Lamp(deepa_sundari)_청동, 콘크리트_140×100×60cm_2010

탈루는 인도에서 회화와 박물관학을 수학한 후 영국의 리즈Leeds 대학에서 컨템포러리 아트를 전공하고, 8년째 한국과 인도를 오가며 작품 활동을 하고 있다. 오랜 타지 생활로 자연스럽게 인도의 전통문화로부터 거리를 둘 수 있었던 탈루는 인도 민속 공예품을 재료로 삼지만, 자국(인도) 문화의 우상을 파괴하고 전통을 부정하는 것으로부터 작업을 시작한다. 하지만 그러한 파격이 관람객에게 불편함을 자아내는 것만은 아니다. 그는 불상에 콘크리트를 붓고, 머리를 잘라내거나, 때로는 기계장치를 덧붙이는 파격을 선보이면서도 유유히 농담과 말장난Wordplay이 섞인 제목으로 관람객에게 말을 걸고, 짖궂은 농담의 공범이 되기를 제안한다. 이 방식을 통해 작가는 서구에 의해 다져진 오리엔탈리즘을 뒤틀고, 글로벌리즘에 의한 세계 권력의 재편이 어떻게 개인의 일상생활에까지 침투하고 있는지 유머러스하면서도 동시에 허무적인 시선으로 표현해 왔다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Digesting system_이중모터, 실리콘, 철_가변설치_2008

2008년에 일어난 미국발 경제 공황 이후의 세계에 그 외연이 확장된 작가의 관심을 살펴볼 수 있다. 작가는 2008년에 일어난 미국발 경제 공황을 목도한 뒤 영원히 전진할 것 같았던 신자유주의의 물결이 순식간에 물거품이 되는 것을 목도한 뒤, 그러한 비정상성을 '크로마토포비아Chromatophobia'라는 신경증에 비유한다. 돈에 대해 비정상적인 공포를 느끼는 증상을 '크로마토포비아' 라고 하는데, 이 증상을 겪는 사람들은 "모든 악의 근원"이라는 돈의 악명에 붙들려 살게 될 것을 걱정하며 비이성적인 불안을 경험한다. 작가는 이러한 증상의 병인病因을 분석하며, "가속Momentum에 대한 갈망이 속도Speed에 대한 쾌락적 탐욕으로 변이하면서 결국 '격변Turbulence'의 상태를 만든다."고 설명한다. 그의 이번 전시는 일종의 처방전인 셈이다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Chromatophobia_나무, 청동 동상, 동전_500×200×300cm(approx)_2010_부분

* 주머니에서 동전을 하나 꺼내십시오. * 이 숭고한 행사를 위해 준비된 망치를 손에 드십시오. * 숨을 깊이 들이쉬고, * 마음 속에서 모든 걱정, 추한 생각 그리고 나쁜 행동을 몰아내십시오. * 망치를 사용해 동전을 '소원 나무'에 박으십시오. * 망치질을 하면서 "깨끗하고 산뜻해진" 마음으로 소원을 비십시오. * 며칠 후, 소원이 이루어질 것입니다!

「Chromatophobia」는 두 개의 '인도(India)적' 불상에 '소원 나무Wish Tree'라는 이름의 길고 두꺼운 통나무가 걸려 있는 설치 작품이다. 관객은 작가의 안내문을 통해 직접 동전을 꺼내 못질을 하게끔 유도되고, 그렇게 해서 반쯤 썩은 통나무의 표면은 동전 한 닢 짜리 소원들로 뒤덮이게 된다. 관객들은 '두들김-소리'의 단순한 의식Ritual을 통해 소원을 빌지만, 그 행위는 결국 결국 화폐로서의 가치를 상실한 동전이라는 상징을 희화화하는 이중성을 띄도록 디자인 되어 있다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Apocalypse_자기 연마기, 철창, 동전_가변설치_2010_부분

이러한 탈루의 개념은 쇠우리 안에 자기 연마기를 가둬 놓고 관객이 동전을 넣어 직접 연마할 수 있게 만든 설치작품 「Apocalypse」에 이르러 보다 본격화 된다. 'Polished'라는 단어의 두 가지 의미를 익살스럽게 중첩하면서 동전은 연마(Polishing)되어 우아함(Polished)의 경지에 이르는데, 결국 연마된 동전은 사용할 수가 없다. 여기에 작가는 '세계 종말Apocalypse'이라는 제목을 붙여서 자본주의가 추구하는 가치의 실없음을 날카롭게 풍자하고, 인공적으로 촉진된 마모의 결과에 '세계 종말Apocalypse' 이라는 제목을 붙인다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Man with holes_청동, 실리콘_250×10×80cm_2010

또한 탈루는 인간의 육체를 고의적으로 부정하기 위해서 그것을 익숙한 형체로 묘사한다. 육체를 일종의 감옥으로 보고 육체로부터의 탈출을 궁극적인 목적으로 하는 종교적 모티프를 아이러니컬하게 해체하는데, 조각의 과정 (갈아냄, 조각, 주조, 모델링, 못 박기, 코팅)을 통해 고행하는 육체와 에너지가 성스럽게 변화하는 과정을 그려낸다. 참수, 질식사, 십자가형, 자살과 같은 폭력을 상징하고 그 통증의 감각을 극대화함으로써 궁극적으로 육체를 유기하고 그 안으로부터의 탈출을 도모한다.

탈루 L.N Tallur L.N_Genetically modified landscape_실리콘, 병원침대, 가습기, 히터_ 210×205×88cm_2010

설치작품인 「Genetically modified landscape」은 산 모양으로 쌓아 둔 실리콘 쌀을 중심으로 습기를 뿜어내는 가습기와 습기를 말리는 히터를 마치 태양과 구름처럼 배치하여 작은 생태계를 이루게 한 작품이다. 마치 동아시아 산수화처럼 보이는 형태, 조각에서 설치로 확장되어 가는 그의 위트, 유전자 변형 농산물에 대한 사회적 코멘터리까지 탈루의 작품이 이제껏 선보였던 작품의 중층적 의미가 좀 더 세련되고 심플한 방식으로 구현되고 있다. ● 그의 작품을 마주하는 순간, 물질적 소재의 풍부함이 가장 먼저 강렬한 인상을 남긴다. 음울하게 버려진 선박 표현하기 위해 목재에는 광을 내고, 그을음을 묻히고, 기름칠을 한다. 청동은 물기를 머금은 채 번들거린다. 콘크리트는 이끼와 썩은 꽃으로 뒤덮여서 동물 같은 생식력을 얻는다. 금속은 부식 처리를 거치며, 극적 효과를 위해 석유 찌꺼기가 뿌려지기도 한다. 이러한 다양한 소재가 모여서 오페라 같은 하모니를 연주하는 가운데, 관객들은 마치 패션 디자이너의 살롱이나 연금술사의 작업실에 와 있는 듯한 착각에 빠지게 된다. 그의 작품은 유사 역사학과 동양주의적 패스티쉬 예술의 퇴폐적 경향에 과장된 열광을 보냈던 19세기 유럽 미술계를 상기하게 하는 일종의 반-디지털적 경향을 보인다. 그는 현대인들이 각종 커뮤니케이션 기기를 점점 더 많이 사용할 수록, 본능적이고 육체적인 것, 즉, 개인의 손에 의해 직접 만들어 진 것을 간절히 탐닉하게 된다는 것을 지각하고 있다. ● 끊임없이 변화하는 사유가 담긴 무거운 짐, 즉 예술작품을 부여 잡고 높이 매인 팽팽한 밧줄을 횡단함으로써 탈루는 "우리의 영웅"이라는 칭호를 부여 받을 자격을 갖추었다. 또한 작품 세계 속에서 "즐거움"과 "유머"를 모두 잃지 않고 있으니 탈루는 오늘날 가장 담대하고 성공적인 예술가 중 한 명이라고 할 것이다. ■ 아라리오 갤러리

The Acumenical Pursuits of Mr. L.N. Tallur ● The hero of our story is a seemingly unassuming young man, small in stature and of a dusky complexion, whose methodical demeanor is tempered by a very jocular approach to art and life. He hails from the state of Karnataka in southern India but has been living in Korea for the better part of the past eight years. He is a craftsman but also a philosopher, concerned with the making of things and the nature of materials while also displaying a strong affinity towards the conundrums of hermeneutics and an enthusiasm for the linguistic and symbolic ambiguities inherent in all types of communication. ● Mr. Tallur's art works (primarily sculptures but also veering into the expanded terrain known as "installations") have as their foundations an eclectic approach which includes the traditional techniques of modeling, carving and casting but also the more radical gestures of assemblage and appropriation. This polyvalent facility enables the artist to explore both ancient and contemporary dilemmas simultaneously, an astonishing feat in actuality. Throughout his production run the durable threads of well-considered content but also an astonishing discernment in regards to formal attributes. So we, the viewers, must consider any number of possibilities when encountering his creations: history, theisms, concrete manifestations of the divine and ephemeral expressions of human desire, silhouettes, patinas, the transformation of forms through migratory paths or the inevitable decay of organic substances, even noise and tonnage as sculptural components, packaged with a particular legerdemain that has come to be the artist's nom de plume (to pit metaphors against one another, a Tallurian trait). ● One is initially seduced by Mr. Tallur's luxurious involvement with material stuffs. Wood is burnished, scorched and oiled to produce brooding hulks and gleaming strides; bronzes glisten with humidity; an animal fecundity is coaxed from concrete, acquiring a skin of lichen or putrid blooms; metals are polluted with corroding salves while the pitch of petroleum is used as theatrical makeup. We are in the salon of a couturier or an alchemist's lab, with multiple materials usually combined into a single work for an operatic effect. Mr. Tallur knows what he is doing. His art is reverently anti-digital, harking back to the grandiloquent expressions of the 19th Century, when European art extolled in a decadence of faux-historicisms and Orientalist pastiche. Mr. Tallur is aware that as we spend more and more of our time with phosphorescent communication devices we will crave the viscerally physical, longing to indulge in that which has been molested by an individual's hand. It is as if Richard Serra sits down to dinner at El Bulli with Gustave Moreau, forced to discuss the pros and cons of Salvador Dali's most autobiographical painting, "The Great Masturbator," exactly equidistant from each other in time. (Yes, we are trapped in just such an over-determined historical moment when confronted with the works of Mr. Tallur and Mr. Tallur knows he has us trapped, like rats in a maze, so it is good to be in Catalunya with such marvelous company and sustenance.) ● Our hero's not-so-small feats of prestidigitation are the outcome of his unorthodox education. Mr. Tallur studied art-making as a more-or-less traditional idiom in both the Indian city of Mysore and later in the English city of Leeds. In between, however, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Museology at the esteemed Faculty of Fine Arts in Vadodara (also known as Baroda) in the Western Indian state of Gujarat. During this time, it seems that Mr. Tallur paid as much attention to the Muse as to the Museum! One constant to his research is the investigation of the nature of value, how it is attributed to works of art and consequently transferred through a social nexus. Of primary importance to this inquiry are the tropes of presentation and display, how the art work is both addressed and framed, in order to control the viewers' perceptions or to manipulate the audience's expectations. The study of Museology has led Mr. Tallur to possess a heightened awareness of the internal relationships of a work of art (the multiple parts to the whole as well as how materials inflect upon one another), the placement of art works within a space and how the context in which the art work resides can influence its perceived meanings. ● Value is a mercurial phantasm that lies at the very heart of the consensus we call "the art world" and its attributes can be discerned only through the judicious employment of both smoke and mirrors. In several works (such as the two versions of Chromatophobia and the singularly iconic Unicode) Mr. Tallur literally embeds coins into the surfaces of the works, providing a bling of happenstance to comment on the vicissitudes of liquidity on which investors' anxieties feed. Exchange value, use value and symbolic value enact a perverse ménage a trois in Mr. Tallur's works, often wearing their own (usually counterfeit) pedigrees on their sleeves. In the work entitled Apocalypse, the artist creates a ritual bath of sorts for hard currency, washing it of its sins and releasing it back into the world, fresh as a baby's bottom. To polish means to beautify but also to cultivate, to bring sophistication to something. Mr. Tallur dances a jig around our sordid and sad devotion to money, well aware of the religious significance we have imbued it with, the commanding role it plays in all our pleasures and fears. ● Here the artist also connects to a particularly Indian neurosis about money and, by extension, value in general. Darshan is an important concept within Hindu philosophy, meaning to literally see the deity who is resident in the temple but also for one's self to be seen by the deity. The visual trade route is two-way and reciprocal. This concept then extends itself on to other types of visual materials (traditionally calendar art and later posters of Bollywood film stars) and, eventually, to luxury goods and money. The value of visuality itself is amplified while the ego of the viewer is acknowledged. This leads us to a situation where the very sight of cold, hard cash is corruptible and almost sexualized, concomitant with the attributes of shame, embarrassment, stimulation and bacchanalia that come with such territory. ● The artist's own moral position on all of this could be said to be "glottal," (referring to the glottis, the space between the vocal chords which affects voice modulation through both expansion and contraction) so carefully does he lay a trap for the unsuspecting viewer to fall into, then implicating him or herself in these very processes of iniquity and retribution, ideally so as to gain both distance and reflection on one's own involvement (ideally, but not necessarily so). The artist's role, then, is to create and exploit this space in between, those that we encounter in our day-to-day lives (between the rigidly defined spaces of home/work/play but also our multiple identities which inhabit these particular spaces) which is then manipulated by the ebb and flow of friends, strangers, lovers and family. Considering his oeuvre to date, one realizes that Mr. Tallur conducts an elliptical tour through the interstices between capitalized disciplines: Science, Religion, Industry, Philosophy and Psychology. Art being the catchall term to accommodate the activities of such a Polymath. ● In other works, Mr. Tallur pays particular attention to the site where heaven and earth converge, the corporeal shell that acts as a cipher for both mind and spirit (for we have scant methods to actually picture mind and spirit). In sculptures such as Man with Holes, Deepa Laxmi, Man Carrying Hole, 0+0=0-0, Deepa Sundari, Enlightenment Machine and Blessing, he employs the human figure as a site of familiarity so as to comment on its willful negation. All schools of spirituality view the body as a prison and escape from it as the ultimate goal. Our hero harnesses the processes of sculpting (grinding, carving, casting, modeling, nailing, coating) to illustrate the mortification of the flesh, the transubstantiation of energy. There is an inherent violence here, with even decapitation, suffocation, crucifixion and suicide inferred in some works, the better to arouse the senses to their ultimate abandonment. Mr. Tallur transposes ancient forms into a contemporary context while acknowledging the long history of the destruction of art (usually by religious zealots or the mentally disturbed) that is a parallel art history of its own. (I think here of not only the unfortunate encounter between the Taliban and the Bamiyan Buddhas but also the incident at St. Peter's Basilica in 1972 when the geologist Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo's Pieta with a hammer while shouting "I am Jesus Christ," removing the Virgin Mary's nose in the process.) "All must not be art, some art we must disintegrate," said the punk rocker Patti Smith on her album Easter of 1978. Mr. Tallur's clever innovation is to create forms through their defacement or partial obliteration, often making brand new, store-bought sculptures into pseudo-antiquities, again playing with our notions of what constitutes value in art works and skewering our aesthetic preferences. ● Mr. Tallur manipulates found figurative forms from the diverse categories available on the Indian subcontinent: classical bronzes from the medieval Chola and Vijayanagara empires, rigid Tirthankaras of the Jain religion, monolithic meditative Buddhas, carved wooden animist examples from tribal cultures, and the kitsch reproductions made for the nouveau riche urban market. Certainly, we can surmise that the artist's objective approach to these indigenous forms of his mother culture is due to his years living outside of India and he has been particularly courageous to use religious iconography in his work while most of his peers within India shy away from such subject matter (the primary reason being that a plethora of ghastly, religious kitsch "contemporary art" can be found in abundance). Yet Mr. Tallur's transmogrifications of his found figures hit just the right note, allowing the original source to still be discerned while disguising them enough so that they become more globalized and less Indian. By doing so he traces the long journey of Indian figurative forms across Asia, both to the north across Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and into Japan but also across the southern route to Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. Mr. Tallur posits History as one of his sculptural techniques, acknowledging its force to build up, break down and modify forms, forms being the concrete symbols by which man records ideas, movements, conflicts and resolutions. ● Yet, as if our hero had not taken on enough already, there is also the subject of Science which catches his attention and feeds his imagination. He has a certain fascination with the mechanics of industrialization and the residual byproducts that it generates. At times, the sculptures can resemble laboratory experiments with materials subjected to certain processes and the observation of these transformations being the actual subject of the work (positing the convoluted trope of empiricism as interpretation). There are also the leitmotifs of medical experiments and surgical procedures running through some of the works, lending a Mad Scientist's air to Mr. Tallur's persona, introducing the disturbing connotations of organ theft, terminal diseases, and birth defects to his practice. ● You may ask if this is truly Heroic, Mr. Tallur's omnivorous appetite, his seemingly insatiable thirst for novelty and even spectacle. Today, with the unlimited possibilities available to all artists and the countless number of spaces (both physical and virtual) for them to display their creations, the profession of being an artist requires just as much saying "no" as thinking "yes," demands that the artist edits himself and makes hard, even ruthless, choices. In spite of the wide range of subjects which Mr. Tallur's art addresses, he has done so by creating an identifiable style, a rather cohesive vocabulary of forms and materials. Art-making is also brand-building and a career trajectory is predicated not only on growth and expansion but also consistency and focus. Mr. Tallur deserves the moniker of Our Hero by traversing this tight rope strung on-high while balancing prodigious packages whose contents continually shift. Considering that he has retained a firm grip on both Pleasure and Humor while doing so certainly nominates Mr. Tallur to be one of our most intrepid and victorious artists working today. ■ Peter Nagy

Vol.20110506h | 탈루 엘엔展 / Tallur L.N / sculpture