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Lot 98

 

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The Guardian called him the "subcontinental Marcel Duchamp." Like the French conceptual artist, Subodh Gupta utilises "readymades," ubiquitous, everyday objects, to create works of art that brim, in this instance, with cultural complexities and ritual associations.

In the present lot, Gupta returns to a familiar subject-stainless steel utensils, objects of mass utility found in every Indian middle class home. According to... The Guardian called him the "subcontinental Marcel Duchamp." Like the French conceptual artist, Subodh Gupta utilises "readymades," ubiquitous, everyday objects, to create works of art that brim, in this instance, with cultural complexities and ritual associations.

In the present lot, Gupta returns to a familiar subject-stainless steel utensils, objects of mass utility found in every Indian middle class home. According to critic Gayatri Sinha, stainless steel, initially a product of the Nehruvian era of industrialisation, soon "became a mark of middle-class aspirations and tastes." (Gayatri Sinha ed., "Subodh Gupta: Object World," Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, p. 174)

In a sweeping arch, Gupta fuses together ordinary utensils of consumption, such as stainless steel glasses, bowls, thaalis (plates) and the dabba (tiffin box)-every working man's necessity, with objects of ritual association, such as the lotaa or the kalasham, between two baltis (buckets). The result suggests a metaphorical spill-over between the prosaic and the sacred, consumerism and religion.

"In its shiny innocuity, the stainless-steel utensil signifies middle-class ritual exchange, as for instance in the wedding dowry or as gifts for Brahmins during shraadh or death ceremonies. Whereas Indian modernity has followed the paradigm of flattening social differences and gaining the broad features of internationalism, Subodh's strong formal language and the dramatic staging of the isolated object brings the question back to region and class aesthetics. Even as the world identifies India with software and hi-tech, Gupta draws us into low-tech objects; symbols of the heroism of the domestic and the everyday." (Sinha, p. 174)

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