Bill Henson

An Australian photographer that I wrote feverently about while living in Sydney. He's being accused of sexualization of children in the name of art.

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An accomplished Artist in India and Europe but an Object of Mockery in Singapore
What happened when a Tabloid reported on an Art Event

Mr Theegulla Venkanna has a Masters in Fine Arts in printmaking from M.S. University of Baroda (2006) and a Bachelors in Fine Arts in painting from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (2004) where he was awarded a gold medal. He has held solo exhibitions at Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy and  Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, and  group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, London, UK and Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, to name a few. His works are in the esteemed Burger Collection, Charles Saatchi Collection and Hervé Pedriolle Collection. His contemporary painting, Man Playing with Two Pipes (2009) sells at Rs 800,000 (SGD23,000). All these backgrounds of the artist are missing in the report, Artist poses nude at Marina Bay Sands art event” (The New Paper, 14 January 2011). The front page of our bestselling tabloid featured the topless Venkanna with the caption: His naked body is his art: Expression or exhibition? Report follows on the next two pages with a near full-page photo of him posing naked with a an embarrassed female reporter in front of a print of Frida Kahlo’s painting, The Two Fridas. “It’s not pornography” – the quote of Gallery Maskara’s owner, Mr Abhay Maskara, who represents Venkanna, spreads across the pages. In the main story, reporter, Benson Ang, questions Venkanna’s bare necessity and ridicules his artistic expression (“But all he does is sit there, dressed in a smile”); in his adjacent comment, he praises him for his naked endeavour (“It certainly takes courage to “bare” yourself for art. Even more when you know you are breaking boundaries).

For the relatively unknown 30-year old artist from Baroda, India, the report has certainly made him infamous in Singapore. Asiaone, an online news portal operated by the same media giant, Singapore Press Holding that also runs The New Paper, claims that Venkanna charges SGD250 for a photograph with him – in the room where Kahlo’s The Two Fridas is hung. One of the readers commented: “It’s “worth” paying $250 to take photo with an ancient caveman. What missing is a club in his hand.” While both reports acknowledge that Venkanna’s naked body is not the only exhibit at Art Stage Singapore, Marina Bay Sands, there is only a brief mention of his other displayed works in The New Paper; even then it reads like a mockery (“Mr Venkanna, and all his bits, are on display at the ongoing Art Stage Singapore…they looked like charcoal sketches on cardboard”). Asiaone “overlooked” their presence. To see a young, consummate artist belittled in my country makes me feel ashamed of the reporters’ ethics. I’m sure they’d done their homework like me. But I’m also sure they know that facts don’t contribute to a sensational story. It’s sad to read a report on an art event that puts an artist down to drive readership up.

For those who’re curious enough to find out why Art Stage Singapore had allowed Gallery Maskara to exhibit Venkanna’s works or Venkanna (as Ang describes him as “the art piece himself”) at its premise - if the exhibition’s highlight is a naked Venkanna sitting behind a famous Mexican painting (which is not even his works) - you’d have googled him and known that Venkanna’s dalliance with the theme on sex is evident throughout his past works. Among his early works from 2006 are sketches of naked men and women. His 2009’s works, Surviving depicts a cartoonish creature atop a vagina with untrimmed pubes, and Man Playing with two Pipes shows a naked man blowing a pipe against a collage of girlie magazine covers. Venkanna is unabashed about his provocative expression in arts. “I like to use the sexual imagination to say many things,” he tells Mumbaimirror.com. In his most controversial exhibition, Sacred and Profane (2009), prigs are warned to stay away as genitals and copulation between animals are interspersed in his works.  His reputation precedes him; if he’s just an ersatz artist masquerading his prurience as art, Art Stage Singapore would not have included him as one of their exhibitors. “We took extra precautions with this exhibit to ensure our visitors did not feel uncomfortable,” Mr Jose Tay, its deputy director tells Asiaone. According to him, permission was sought from the Media Development Authority, our gatekeeper of the media industry which issues art entertainment licence but not to commercial art galleries. Although Venkanna’s exhibition was given the green light, a lawyer interviewed by The New Paper said that it is an offence to pose nude with members of the public in public places. So far, there has not been any report of police’s interference. And I doubt there’ll be any since today is the last day of the event.

While having a lustre resume backs up Venkanna’s credibility as an artist, posing naked with visitors and holding their hands with an unrelated painting in the backdrop remains a questionable way of proving his point. “Mr Venkanna is using the painting to convey the idea of healing. He is reaching out to people through the gesture of touch, which is the most basic gesture of communication,” Maskara explains. But his articulation is beyond the fathom of a layman like Ang, who finds Venkanna’s nudity a newfangled attempt to break boundaries and wonders if he’s an exhibitionist. Our famous drag performer, Kumar, whom Ang has accredited as someone who “knows all about boundaries”, thinks he is. “If the man is standing naked in front of the painting, it is not art…he is just pushing the boundaries unnecessarily.” One reader interviewed said Venkanna’s way of expressing art is an insult to Frida Kahlo. Whether you agree with Maskara’s articulation or not, it is common of Venkanna to speak philosophically of art in his interviews. The Saatchi Gallery bought his exposition, making him the youngest Indian artist to be cherry-picked by one of London’s prestigious contemporary art galleries.

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