It’s easy to spot an artist in any gathering. All you have to do is enter the room and pause for a minute to look around. Among the sea of faces that you encounter in that sweeping glance, there will be that one visage that refuses to blend in. The attire, the hairdo, the shoes, the opinions on a subject being discussed — it could be anything at all that draws your attention and screams ‘out of sync’ loud and clear, but there is no way you cannot identify the nonconformist.
Even in this breed of unconventionalism, there is a certain hierarchy that exists. There are those who manage to survive the normalities of life, and then, there are those whose eccentricities have intrigued the world as much as their artworks have. Think of weird antics, and the first name to pop up on one’s mind has to be the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali. Whether it was his signature waxed upturned moustache, his belief that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother, or walking with an anteater in Paris, the man was known to shock people with his stunts. But Dali reached a new level of abnormality when he filled a Rolls-Royce Phantom II with tonnes of cauliflower and drove to Paris to give a lecture. While we may gasp at the audacity of it all, Dali intended to make a statement about wealth and the transience of life by stuffing a symbol of luxury with a common vegetable.
American artist Andy Warhol needs no introduction. Known for his troubled life, there have been a multitude of puzzling stories out there about the pop iconoclast. He is known to have documented his life with an eerie obsession, storing everything from copies of bills to even a slice of cake on a plate. It doesn’t stop there — a mummified foot from Ancient Egypt was also found in his storage box!
Artist Chris Burden went a step further by hurting himself through his shocking performances by putting himself in grave physical danger to convey his messages. In 1971, he gathered people in a gallery and instructed his friend to shoot him in his arm. No one intercepted, thus proving his point that we show the same passivity when conflicts and wars happen around the world. In another outlandish performance titled ‘Trans-Fixed’, the artist stood on the rear bumper of a car, leaned backwards, and made his attorney nail his palms onto the roof. Thus crucified, his assistants rolled the car out of the garage, alarming the viewers.
Art history is replete with many more stories of peculiar artworks and unorthodox artists. Bornali Bhattacharjee, who turned bacteria into art pieces, Sandy Skoglund, who made an art installation with a room filled entirely with raw bacon or Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, whose works with gunpowder were his way of communicating with extraterrestrials, may all seem crazy in a world so contented with falling into defined patterns. But, how can humanity push the boundaries of imagination without departing from what is ordinary or expected? Allow art to challenge your perceptions with its eccentricities.