The Crowd, Radhakrishnan’s latest sculpture, is an assemblage of fifty figures cast in bronze. Without the base, they would be the same height as the sculptor but infinitely more slender and lithe. Each figure represents an independent walker with a distinct movement. Where do they come from, and what do we make of this group of fifty?

 

The Crowd is, in several ways, the opposite of the little figures welded together into a people. They represent two forms of the human collective. Their scale and materiality are different, and, therefore, their meanings. In The Crowd, each figure has a face. However, their faces are replications of two faces, that of Musui and Maiya, who are like identical twins separated by gender. Within Radhakrishnan’s work, The Crowd has its roots in the multitude of little figures of Maiya and Musui that peopled The Ramps. Anyone looking at them closely would notice that what looks like a wild dance of densely packed bodies has the possibility of being broken down into a series of smaller choreographed groups. If you zoom in as he did, you will discover more space than expected between individual figures. There was already a dialogue between individuality and sameness written into them. It is amplified and made more visible in The Crowd.

 

As soon as two figures are placed next to each other, the possibility of a dialogue opens up, and they cannot be then viewed as isolated individuals. Several modern sculptors realised this, and a small history of antecedents may be relevant to our discussion of The Crowd. The first in the series is Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884- 89), a group of six figures moving together, responding heroically and differently to a shared existential crisis. Closer home, we have the monumental open-air sculptures of Ramkinkar, especially the Santal Family (1938-39) and the Mill Call (1956-57), sculptures Radhakrishnan grew with as a student at Santiniketan. Ramkinkar replaced the pathos and human vulnerability we notice in Rodin with a celebration of human life and work. Finally, we have Giacometti’s The Square and Three Walking Men from 1948 and Three Figures and a Head, The Glade,  and The Forest from1950. The latter three demonstrated how a space is energised by a group of figures even if they are still and have minimum details. Following this, Giacometti (at the Venice Biennale 1956) and museum curators since then began to show even his heavily rooted immobile figures in groups to bestow them with an animation and a circulation of energy around them exceeding that of the individual figures. Irrespective of their styles, all the sculptures discussed above share several things: A non-hierarchical equality between the figures in scale and importance, physical movement and rhythmic interconnectedness between the figures, the creation of a space more energetic than the figures they hold, and multiple focal points (through figures moving in different directions in Rodin and Giacometti). Besides, they also had a similar attitude to the pedestal. Rodin wanted the Burghers to be placed on the paving stones without any pedestal, but he was not allowed to do so. Ramkinkar used very low bases so that the sculpture and the viewers were almost on the same plane. And Giacometti placed his walking men on a common base. We also notice these features in The Crowd.

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By eschewing the pedestal, Rodin hoped that his sculpted figures would mix with the town’s daily life, that “passersby would have elbowed them, and they would have felt through this contact the emotion of the living past in their midst.” Sculptures placed on the same plane as the viewers generate intimacy with their viewers irrespective of their  material, scale and style. Antony Gormley’s Hermitage project (2011), where he removed classical sculptures from their pedestals and placed them on the ground along with sculptures based on computer-generated structures of his own body, can be seen as an elaborate demonstration of this. Further, while encountering large sculpted bodies on the same plane, we have a bodily experience similar to engaging with natural bodies up close. It would be instructive to look at The Crowd with these antecedents and thoughts in mind. Let us begin with the base. Each figure stands on a base that looks like a miniature ramp. But they are curved, like threedimensional commas, with their lower end digging into the ground. The curved base adds to the movement and variation of the figures, and their front legs placed on the rising edge of the base give the forward-stepping figures an additional spring and swagger. All the figures do not have the same relation to the base. Some stride forward, following the axis of the base, and some move sideways, giving the body a second twist. Further, the large tows of the forward leg do not always grip the ground; they often extend beyond the base, as if they are about to step into the air, and often they are turned up, defying their role in maintaining the balance of the body.

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Some walk straight, and some lurch forward; others turn sideways, their shoulders sloping in rhythm with their turn. All the figures are walking, and their gait is fast and yet carefree, like that of a concert crowd swaying to the music. Their bodies are light, and an infectious ripple of fun and joy runs through them, making them a body of decorous revellers drunk on the pleasures of the body like little children at play. The space between them is inviting and broad enough for us to move through. They are not meant to be viewed from a distance but known from within, walking between them and through body contact as much as by looking. Our experience will depend on our body, our comfort with our body, and those of others in touching proximity.

 

The figures in Radhakrishnan’s The Crowd do not represent the rioting, destructing, and looting hordes or the protesting, revolting and revolutionary masses with which crowds are often associated; and are damned or hailed depending on the ideological position you take. Without a leader or a shared direction – two elements that usually indicate a common goal and subsumption of individuality – they appear to have gathered spontaneously. In form and spirit, they are a gathering of equals. And equality, according to Elias Canetti, who studied crowd dynamics, is a primary and defining feature of crowds.

 

As a crowd of absolute equals, like people at a station, crossing a street, or in a market square, they appear to have arrived from somewhere and are on their way to somewhere. Although they appear to be infected by the same mood as fans in a sports stadium or visitors to an entertainment park, these figures do not seem to have gathered for a specific purpose. Their togetherness and suspension of individuality are purely transitory. They are what Canetti calls an open crowd, by which he means a crowd that can be joined freely and can grow infinitely but into which its dissolution is also ingrained. Like the individual sculpted bodies assembled from fragments, they collectively point to a play of assembling and dissolving, of

losing oneself and reclaiming oneself.

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We are witnessing here a performative enactment by a determinate group of bodies, acting in concert through their gestures and movements. It represents a moment of togetherness and impending dissolution or scattering. It is a play of gathering and scattering unfolding in infinite time, enacted by a finite number of unchanging bodies. Thus though The Crowd might have its origins in the  Ramps, its figures do not have a direction (and perhaps a goal) as in the Ramps. Like welded figures in the small post-Human Box sculptures, it can also take different configurations as they are moved from one exhibiting space and reinstalled in another.

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Finally, a comparison with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s (1930-2017) Crowds would further help to grasp the import of Radhakrishnan’s Crowd. The figures in Abakanowicz’s many iterations of Crowd are headless humanoids. They are still, and with their individuality and humanity taken away, they face an existential anxiety or danger, unnamed but real. Dark, voiceless and poignant her Crowd grew out of her experience of living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Communist regime that followed and continued until 1989. Unlike the figures in Abakanowicz’s Crowds, Radhakrishnan’s figures are neither faceless nor humanoids. With similar faces, their individuality appears to be at least temporarily suppressed, but they have not lost their humanity or the right to express themselves. Their bodies are animated by pleasure and desire emanating from within, and their multiple directions suggest freedom and individual will. Unorganised and yet equal and free, they belong to a quasi-liberal society in which a collective festive celebration of life co-exists with the uncertainty  of life and collective struggles. Radhakrishnan responds to both; bodily and joyously to one and rationally and

thoughtfully to the other. Like the figures in The Crowd, Radhakrishnan, too, is in the midst of a journey, an artist’s journey. It is now fifty years since he set off from Kerala and arrived at Santiniketan, propelled by the dream of becoming an artist. An artist’s journey is always full of uncertainties, not only when he sets out but even after decades of exploration. It has to be so because chasing dreams is intrinsically adventurous. When one begins, an artist is almost alone, and a thick mist covers the path ahead. As he moves along, he may join others, or others may join him, and they would travel together for some time like fellow pilgrims and then part ways at some juncture. Artists rarely take the same road or travel towards the same destination.

 

For the last thirty years, Musui and Maiya have been Radhakrishnan’s companions on his journey, sometimes allowing to be led by him, sometimes leading the way. Though born of him, even this threesome may dissolve like his Crowd. Every new step holds the possibility of a surprise; therefore, neither the artist nor his viewers can foresee what lies ahead on this open road. They can only, from time to time, stand and look back and discern patterns in the road travelled.