My frequent travels to Mumbai gave me an opportunity to choose my flights, and by conscious choice, it was via the “new” (not anymore) Terminal-2, Mumbai, principally only so that I could get to engage with Jaya-He a little more every time. Jaya-Hey, the GVK museum of Indian art & non-art locates itself in the function-less residual spaces created at the intersections of curved geometries evolved due to the X-shaped morphology of the Mumbai Terminal-2 airport. The art-space exists within the (sub)liminal “here-and-there” space, neither clamoring for attention nor disappearing into the amorphous whole firmly contained by its glazed boundaries. Intelligently placed alongside passenger travel routes it blends within the somewhat ubiquitous volumes of airport-ness. What began as a photo-essay, has flowed into this essay, which attempts to verify the self-proclaimed “museum-status” of this space, by investigating into the qualities which could attribute and confirm its “museum-ness”.

Does it merely function as an expose, and is it called a “museum” only to valorize the cluttered non-space? The intent would be such a shallow gesture then. Is it just another Exhibition space or Art Gallery? The need to make sense of this space was hanging over me like a cloud which simply refused to go away until I did something about it. The question of whether the space is a museum as is claimed by its patrons keeps raising its head up, amidst the experiential enjoyment of the moment of viewing an artifact. Why does the question bother me so much as to keep lurking on the fringes of my mind? Being an architect, the training of defining spaces according to their correct typologies, has something to possibly do with this deeply ingrained obsession. For me, meaning of a space is always primary.1

The central question this essay poses is – Can the Jaya-He be called a museum? To answer this question, I propose to take this discussion forward by further posing the basic question - What are the three most important things that make a museum, a museum? By inspecting the Space, the Collection, and the Viewer Experience, I attempt to provide a framework for an analysis of Jaya-He to be considered as a “museum” based on these three simplistic parameters, in a preliminary survey.

Phenomenology of The Space: Enhancing Engagement

At the Jaya-He, since it is located in a space of transition, it is by default that one encounters it, and the choice is limited to the areas of the airport one is allowed to visit. In this sense, is it devaluing the “cultural institution” status of a museum? How is a museum space different than an exhibition space? One needs to study the changing form of the museum through the times, and differentiate the traditional concepts from new emerging trends. Principally however, a museum in theory, is a space for deep reflection, learning and attempts to represent stories of history. National museums are invested in image-building for projecting impressions about identity, culture and Nationhood. In this sense, museums of all kinds are politically motivated.2

Scholars situated museums as agencies of liberal governance which, through their capacity to represent and construct imagined communities, are involved in molding citizens who are informed and able to take part in modern democratic life … The new museology was influenced by postcolonial theory, cultural theory (identity politics), and the “history wars” of the era … Boosted by a post‐1989 surge in scholarship concerned with the public sphere, the new museology became popular in the 1990s because of its contention that the political work of museum extended to the capacity of these institutions to represent the interests and concerns of disadvantaged and minority groups to the broader national community3.

The peculiar location of Jaya-He further questions the appropriateness of the placement of the artworks. I cite five different locational conditions present in Jaya-He. One is in the waiting lobby of the departure lounge. Two is next to an escalator which traverses two floors between departure lounges. Third is in the arrival lounges of the domestic and international terminals. Fourth is alongside the travellators of the arrival lounges, and fifth is hung from the ceiling on top of the baggage arrival carousels. Organizing art along mobile transitional spaces is seemingly trivializing art, unless the curator was thinking of – a brush with Indian culture – as a thematic wildcard to passengers. In the age of instant coffee and instant gratification, instant artification seems very appropriate!

Again, where it differs from a museum typology is the way in which the artifacts are organized. The decision taken to organize art upon art in such close proximity, as to look like a cut-and-paste collage, may perhaps have been a negotiation between the sheer numbers of artworks procured, and the space available for display. Or was it simply breaking tradition to evolve a new contemporary display style? My first reaction was - commodification of art, and with it the imageability of India as a cultural powerhouse, has been taken to a new low. Is this space a “crafts-mela” (crafts-fair)? For museologists would this be an anathema, a place to cast your eyes away from? If there are only differences and no similarities to the idea of a museum, then why call it one? Is that because a “museum” has an elevated status compared to that of a “gallery”? Funnily enough spatially, in Mumbai, interstitial spaces are referred colloquially as “gallery”! Here the gallery refers to anything from a balcony, to a verandah, to corridors. From this standpoint it most certainly is a “gallery”.

Eighty million eyeballs graze the surface of this art every year making it the most visible art space in the history of galleries. Art has always been hung on the walls, and from the ceilings of airport spaces. But to make a concerted decision to dedicate a contiguous space to display art is commendable. But again, how is it different from the typology of a gallery? The first departure is that the well-established theory of a “white-box” for a museum/gallery space has been done away with. Secondly, it has an almost permanent collection on display. Thirdly, curatorial themes are permanent too, and fourth is that the art is not for sale. The materiality of this space can be compared to the new-media culture of today, where total immersion in a static frame, is not the norm. Could it be a “hetero-museum”, after the “heterotopia” of Michel Foucault? The mobility of the viewer mirrors the current trends of watchability. To frame the “lived-experience” of Jaya-He with reference to Heideggerian phenomenology here, “being” is the continuously moving body with “no rootedness”. “Time” is the hyper-awareness of baggage retrieval, further transitions into the city towards one’s destination, and several other considerations - while watching fleeting pictures of the cultural array of India. Jaya-He therefore, responds admirably to the philosophical frameworks of the non-linearity of Indian “time”, and the cyclic nature of its historical self-assertion or the “being-ness” of India.

The Collection and its narrative: Scratching the surface, peeling the layers

Engagement with semiotics of Indian culture prepares one for encounters of an exotic kind. The artifacts it holds, do not necessarily possess historical value attributed to found objects from the past, in the sense of factual time. They are recreations of traditional patterns, and are made in contemporary India by artisans whose past-generations have been steeped in the history of making this art. Rajiv Sethi, scenographer and primary curator,4 worked with several hundred artists, crafts-people, architects, and executors for over six to eight years to martialize the Jaya-He. Commissioned contemporary works of art suggest thematic approaches were curatorially driven and not necessarily the effort of an artistic expression emerging out of the creative pangs of an expressionistic endeavor. The point of departure (literally, and metaphorically) here, is that a space unlike the normative cultural space of a typical museum or gallery has been created. It houses an ambitious art collection (claims vary between 3000 to 7000 artifacts). The first question which jumped in my mind after I came to know that there are 7000 pieces of artworks is, why so many? Who defined the number and has mindless capital accumulation transferred itself to culture? A whole lot of people get fascinated by the sheer number of artifacts and their cost. Its brilliance however, lies in its contextualization of Indian cultural scenarios. The expose is most certainly well-conceived, covers works from the length and breadth of India and admirably executed.

A dominant curatorial theme – Portals – occupies a significant amount of space and engages the visitor because of its sheer numbers of intricately carved traditional Indian doors. Doors are portals which symbolize the temporal space between “inside” and “outside”, and are thematically appropriate to be represented at an airport, which is a threshold of international boundaries (FIg. 02). The designs represented are also portals between “today” and “yesterday” as if the patterns echo a dastak, a knock, on the doorway of awareness seeking to take one back in time when these patterns were first created, as one is poised at the dehleez (threshold) to take a “flight” into “tomorrow”. For many it is the beginning of a cultural investigation into an exotic Eastern society which claims to have existed seamlessly for several thousand years. With that lure in mind, the Doors do their job of the first/last (hopefully lasting) impressions, beckoning the entranced culture-vulture into the arena of global explorers. Looking at the vast overbearing hall-space of the terminal, watching the coffered grids blend effortlessly into column capitals, and harmoniously pinching them to fit the geometry, it occurred to me that the square grids on the paneled doors in Jaya-He, might have had a kind of déjà vu moment during its inception period. Slapping too many doors at too little distance from each other also tends to give eye-fatigue. It is as if a giant hand has sprayed a wall with what appears to be artifacts dripping with timelessness. A balanced view suggests that the doors have come under the pressure of excess accumulation. The fact that in India today, traditional arts still breathe and live through its crafts-persons, is a matter of great pride, and this art rivals the art created with new-media, video and photographs, and both ultimately reside in perfect symbiosis at the Jaya-He.

Indian art is mostly depicted and venerated through representations of its ancient and medieval past, which in terms of its continuity, goes right back to pre-historic times. The collection also addresses the thin line between Colonial & Post-colonial art in India through the contemporary imagery of National figures of the Indian freedom movement. The historical moment of the Colonial period, (Fig. 01) and what modernism brought to a horde of Indian artists of the Bengal School, seems absent. The contemporary art scene has its representation in a list of substantial names who gave the overall creation several anchors. To name a few, Vivan Sundaram, Anjolie Menon, Andrew Logan,5 contributed their own creations as if in an “aahuti” (Ancient Hindu ritual offering) towards Nationalism.6 Considering that the main intent of this museum was to provide a window into the soul of India, does it satisfy the idea of informing the visitor about the culture of India? If time is on your hands, all in all, it is surely a one-stop-shop for window-shopping Indian art.

Gender equity, social equity and linguistic sensibilities have now made the artist, an artisan, and the craftsman, a craftsperson. It would be unfair to say that they tried to construct the entire cultural canvas of India across time and covering all geographies. The exhibits however seem to be selected as they would appear “exotic” to the foreign visitor and Indian intellectual’s taste, reoriented to look through Western eyes. Is it an attempt to play to popular gallery? Is it an attempt to sell India to the international visitor? Was making it a “spectacle” necessary? Couldn’t the artworks be trusted to create their own aura? The collection as I could figure out, has some very broad categorizations, and visually blend well in their showcasing, with respect to the overall concept. So, there is the artifact, there is the crafts ensemble, there is found art and there is commissioned art. Is there coherence in its representation of Indian culture?

Viewer Experience: The body, and the Body of Work

Primarily, a visit to the museum is a pre-meditated choice. Simplistically observing, choices of all kinds, from learning about the history of a place, to studying its art and culture, play their part in deciding the kind of a museum one wants to visit. The story of a culture therefore has to be carefully constructed to provide the viewer with an adequate sense of its history and a convincing sense of authenticity as a “take-away”. Archeological methodologies would help in improving user-experience.7 In “Exploring the Exotic Other”, Elliot Gaines observes;

Discovering identity is a continuous communicative cycle between expression, perception, and interpretation—the continuum between human consciousness and the signifying capacity of the world of intelligible things. Interpreting the communicative nature of the exotic Other involves a continuous process through individual and community perspectives that optimistically reaches a consensus of an idea of truth.

Is the museum only about “pretty pictures”, or is there is deeper meaning? Upon first glance, appearances are enchanting. It captivates one to engage with the artworks rather than with the ubiquitous shopping areas. However, every subsequent encounter with this parody of a museum raises questions beyond the immediate agency. There is a popular concept in the majority of the Indian populace that art ought to be beautiful - which is a perfectly reasonable expectation from art. The recognition that art has moved away from the concept of beauty as popularly understood, is the appreciation of few intellectually oriented individuals, whose awareness levels are fed by their international viewing of modern and contemporary art. This departure came about in the late modern period when it broke away from its typecast mold, and flowed into the space of abstractions, concepts and statements and embraced every perceivable media,8 with the advancement in technology. The intellectualization of art which thus took place, removed the conditionality of the idea of beauty to which it once clung. Here one would fear entering into the conundrum of reflections upon beauty as a quality inherent in the object, or in the implicit universal acceptance of the viewer, simply because the debate is only an ever-expanding intellectual engagement. About beauty, Ananda Coomaraswamy says;

It is affirmed that “beauty relates to the cognitive faculty” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol., I, 5, 4 ad 1) being the cause of knowledge, for, “since knowledge is by assimilation, and similitude is with respect to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause” (ibid.). Again, St. Thomas endorses the definition of beauty as a cause, in Sum. Theol., III, 88, 3, he says that “God is the cause of all things by his knowledge” and this again emphasizes the connection of beauty with wisdom. “It is knowledge that makes the work beautiful” (St. Bonaventura, Dereduction eartiumad theologiam,13). It is of course, by its quality of lucidity or illumination (claritas), which Ulrich of Strassburg explains as the “shining of the formal light upon what is formed, or proportioned,” that beauty is identified with intelligibility: brilliance of expression being unthinkable apart from perspicacity. Vagueness of any sort, as being a privation of due form is necessarily a defect of beauty. Hence it is that in medieval rhetoric so much stress is laid on the communicative nature of art, which must be always explicit.

The changing relationships between subject and object, artifact and theme, sensitive curation and impetuousness, radically affect the perception of the assemblage. The overall ensemble and its over-ambitious spread give no recourse to avail breathing space or the chance of an escape mode. The speed of mobility attracts selfie addicts and an occasional art lover. However, to elevate the overall intellectual level of the exhibition space, and make learning a possibility, state-of-the-art digitally operated engagement devices need to be provided for art buffs seeking to delve into the cultural scenario of India adding depth of knowledge to the visitor’s experience, which they planned but have not installed yet.

Conclusion

About one thing there is no doubt, that it has created a larger-than-life experience in the world of art. In fact, the Independent Digital - UK an online magazine, in its article dated Friday 29 March 2019 16:58, has headlined this as ‘the only art gallery in the world to have its own airport’! Is it a sliver of a space, a slice of culture, or an interstitial moment? Whatever it is, it remains a challenge to the conventional norm of a museum and in that it has made its presence felt and impact generated. Opinions can flow from the strongly positive (comprehensive exposition of Indian culture) to the extreme negatives (an entertainment spectacle trivializing art) but it certainly cannot be ignored. There can never be an end to conversations around art and the space in which they exist, but in terms of taking art to the people it seems to be attending to its intended function.

Calling it a museum, would be a tall claim, since it fails to be a convincing typology on all three accounts. I would not like to denigrate the efforts of the artists, crafts persons, curators, and executors of this creation, and undermine the good intentions of the promoter. Does it transcend the fictitious boundaries we ascribe around the various “isms” and typologies? In this age where the difference between the physical and virtual has successfully disappeared, the responsibility of defining categories may be a redundant exercise?

Its brilliance lies in its “presence”, which impresses upon the viewer the sheer diversity of the cultural canvas of India, by communicating its cultural heritage in the most affective manner. The exposé certainly answers the need to foster global cross-cultural understandings, and herein lies its biggest strength. Experts in the field of art, design and architecture have been interviewed to understand their views for the purposes of an all-rounded enquiry. In the ubiquitous-ness of an international airport space, where well-known brands of fast foods and luxury brands jostle for attention, the panorama of Indian art marks its presence, holds its own, and reframes the question – Is this a museum?

• 1. Monod, Emmanuel, Klein, Heinz K.- A Phenomenological Evaluation Framework for Cultural Heritage Interpretation: From e-HS to Heidegger’s Historicity.2872. - Heidegger, in Being and Time (1953, 1996) also takes issue with the objectivist view of history. What are the public requirements that it needs to meet? Starting with the issues raised in the Computer Applications to Archaeology (CAA, 2004) conference, one of the first questions to ask during the evaluation of the system is: does it “translate (Heritage) into a story, even into an experience or a learning tool?” (Plentickx 2004, p. 14). Also, does it “enhance the visitor’s experience and stimulate his interest for Heritage” (Leboeuf 2004, p. 14)? These probing questions can be detailed further and answered by the supporting current shift in the theoretical debate in archaeology from ‘processual’ (positivist) archaeology to interpretive archaeology. The phenomenological mission of historiography is to “disclose the silent power of the possible” (p. 360) in order to reveal the possible existences compared to the one that finally occurred. Historicity understands the past “in terms of its possibility” (p. 360). According to Heidegger, “Understanding signifies self-projection” (p.357), it is aself-projection towards its “potentiality of existence” (p. 360)
• 2. Message, Kylie; Witcomb Andrea; Introduction: Museum Theory, An Expanded Field, p. 37.
• 3. "Museum Theory: An Expanded Field." In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy. Wiley, 2015. DOI: 10.1002/9781118829059.wbihms100
• 4. Extracted from “Mint” web-link - https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/oP1DXgYt63n6hMzJN0xBYK/The-museum-of-departure.html
• 5. Extracted from “Mint” web link - https://www.livemint.com/Multimedia/sBVhAuE1VFJEsfvb3al3oK/The-extraordinary-artworks-at-Mumbais-GVK-international-air-20.html
• 6. GVK Reddy, the promoter, mentions this particularly.
• 7. Archaeology as a science in general shrinks from interpreting isolated facts in a larger context, which would necessarily involve many speculative elements reaching beyond established “historical artefacts”. One of the reasons for this hesitancy is that the methods of archaeology are not grounded on its most natural and pertinent philosophical foundation, i.e., the interpretive philosophies of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Once interpretivism is accepted as a solid foundation for archaeological upstream research, it would only be a small step to point out how this could help to meet user expectations for interpreting archaeological findings for a broader audience “downstream”. Good downstream interpretations in turn are then the prerequisite for developing computer applications that make sense to both archaeological experts and a generally educated public.
• 8. The evaluation of art through the Heideggarian framework of Being & Time, inspired a lecture which I was invited to give in an architecture college in Mumbai, in February 2020, where I cited examples from the contemporary Surreal art of N.S. Harsha.