Facing East at the Tagore Gallery

On Friday night, Manu and I went to the opening of a new exhibit at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Chelsea. According to the webpage, the gallery is "devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures.... [and] focused on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that engage in spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues." All of the artists who had work on display had "deep roots in Asian culture," with the exception of one American guy who spent a lot of time living somewhere in Asia and studying Balinese music. There were going to be paintings, sculptures, photographs, and I wasn't sure what else, but I was excited about attending my first gallery opening.

This wasn't the set-up at the gallery, but it gives you an idea.

The first thing I noticed, before I even walked inside, were the gongs. There were three of them mounted above the entrance, and they seemed to be connected to some sort of mechanism that caused little padded mallets to whack them at intervals. It was a bit cacophonous, so I was relieved to get through the door, where I assumed I'd find a hushed, spacious series of rooms filled with people murmuring to each other occasionally as they gazed at paintings on walls. To my dismay, there were gongs everywhere, and they made such a racket that the mass of people packed into the small space were having to yell to make themselves heard. The din died down, however, as the intensity of the gongs waned; they seemed to be programmed to reach a crescendo occasionally, but in between the mallets didn't seem to bang as hard or as often, and the noise was actually quite pleasant when it was in the background instead of being center stage. I saw a guy in his late 20's wearing eyeliner and a maroon blazer with a swatch of kimono fabric sewn onto the back panel fiddling with the monitor that controlled the gongs. (This was Taylor Kuffner, the Balinese music protegee, apparently.)  

I liked some of the pieces on display. There were some tapestries that I wasn't wild about, and some interesting squares involving fading colors, which impressed both Manu and me until we decided that the artist had used an airbrush and were instantly disenchanted. On one wall, painted white, there were hundreds of white pieces of paper cut into identical wispy feather shapes and affixed directly onto the surface with straight pins to form a wavy sort of pattern. I didn't love it until someone walked by it and the feathers all rippled rather fetchingly. Manu particularly liked a series of photographs of bodies with cool designs superimposed over them. I liked a huge abstract waterfall done in black and white on two panels that occupied a back wall from floor to ceiling.


We were very literally cornered by Nhat Tran, an appropriately eccentric artist-type, when we wandered into a hallway with no outlet where one of her pieces hung. She asked us if we'd like to know more about it, and of course we said yes. We got a crash course in Urushi, a Japanese lacquer technique that she learned through a fellowship she won to study art in Japan. Apparently Urushi artists use sap from a particular tree that grows only in a certain part of Japan and can be collected only during the tree's 8th year of life - 7 is obviously too young, and 9 far too old. The sap must be mixed with pigments, and although it is very thick, it must be applied thinly. As it oxidizes (or something) the colors transform. She told us it took her about a year to produce the piece on the wall in front of us, a profusion of colored splotches covering a piece of wood about a foot high and three feet long. Goodness. Amusingly, after growing up in Vietnam and studying in Tokyo, she's set up a studio in Indianapolis, although she has not yet attended the Indy 500. She was tall for a Vietnamese woman, although I suspect she had some help from her heels, and had very long, elaborately curled hair and a slinky black cocktail dress with a Japanese-esque chrysanthemum pattern embroidered on it. She was quite exuberant, and after about five minutes of talking about her artistic training and commiserating with me about how small Tokyo apartments are, she began to gush about how beautiful I was and how handsome Manu was and insisted on taking a picture of the two of us posed in front of her piece (called, appropriately, "A Puzzling Statement"). Puzzled, we consented, posed, and said our farewells.

"A Puzzling Statement"

The artists and their work were obviously pretty fascinating to see, but my favorite part of the experience by far was the people-watching. I had dithered while dressing earlier that evening, not sure what one should wear to this sort of thing, but I saw as soon as I entered that my indecision was completely unnecessary. I could have closed my eyes, grabbed a hanger out of my closet at random and donned whatever was on it and I would have fit in perfectly. About half the people there wore jeans and sweaters or blazers and looked pretty average. The other were scattered somewhere along a scale between artsy and wacky. A woman in her 40's had thin colored feathers draped between locks of her hair but was otherwise normally dressed. A younger woman looked like blend between a salsa dancer and a mourner, her elaborate ruffles and layers all somber black. Feathers turned out to be not that unique an idea, because another woman turned up in a sequined tank top with a cardigan that reminded me powerfully of a butterfly net and a fountain of black and white feathers shooting upwards out of her hair and cascading down either side. My favorite patron, however, was a man in his 60's with a long-ish gray goatee and wild, mad-professor hair. His glasses had yellow tinted lenses and thick black rims, and his loose trousers were a faded brick red. He had on a white shirt, open at the collar, and set off by a brightly colored floral ascot tied jauntily around his neck, and he held an unlit, much-chewed cigar between the fingers of the hand that wasn't holding a glass of the free white wine available at the bar. (Did I mention there was free white wine? There was.)

Airbrushed?

Manu's dad had charged him with paying his respects to the man himself, Mr. Tagore, who owned the gallery. He is a short Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair and a luxuriant, jet black unibrow. We had to wait in a sort of informal line to get to him, and he and Manu chatted for about 90 seconds before he politely thanked us for coming, handed Manu his business card, and wandered off to mingle with some of the other patrons.

Although I was distracted from the art, which I'd thought was the whole point of the opening, I had a great time. Or maybe the art wasn't the point at all. Maybe it's about seeing and being seen, networking with other artsy types, and getting new ideas about fashionable uses for feathers. That and free wine.