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Lot 51

 

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Reflecting on the nuances of stainless steel, and the consequences of Subodh Gupta’s adoption of the alloy and its images in his work, Peter Nagy says, “Steel is its own strange doppelganger. Polished it acts as a mirror, tarnished it is opaque. It can be both weapon (sword) and protector (shield), Resistance and Establishment. Piled into accumulations as Subodh treats it, it is coinage and currency, the glittering allure but also the solidity... Reflecting on the nuances of stainless steel, and the consequences of Subodh Gupta’s adoption of the alloy and its images in his work, Peter Nagy says, “Steel is its own strange doppelganger. Polished it acts as a mirror, tarnished it is opaque. It can be both weapon (sword) and protector (shield), Resistance and Establishment. Piled into accumulations as Subodh treats it, it is coinage and currency, the glittering allure but also the solidity of capital in its most primal form…Used for a work of art, it communicates a seductive pleasure but also a bankable dependability. To transplant it from the corner of a mud hut in rural Bihar to the top floor of a glamorous art gallery in Bombay questions how any society constructs the meaning and value of anything, how context determines content, and how geography is in fact destiny” (“Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime”, START.STOP, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated).

In the present lot, Gupta presents the viewer with a string of polished buckets and pails hanging outside a trader’s store in old Delhi where used stainless steel vessels and other goods are weighed and bartered for new ones. Through this image, the artist brings into focus the multifaceted nature of the material that Nagy speaks of, and, by extension, the multiplicity of experiences in India following the country’s dramatic economic liberalization in the 1990s. Elaborating on the artist’s adoption of this imagery, Kavita Singh notes that, “…over the past ten years, Gupta has developed an astonishing capacity to abstract and amplify everyday objects from middle class life. In his works from the last decade, vessels and vehicles undergo transformation in materials or scale, or are massed together into abstract forms that are pleasurable and discomfiting, familiar and strange. What evokes familiarity and what evokes strangeness alters according to the viewer’s location” (Where in the World, Devi Art Foundation exhibition catalogue, 2008-09, p. 7, 8).

Using this striking visual of the exterior of a trader’s stall, garlanded with pots and pans to bring it luck and business, Gupta pushes the viewer to question the notion of value, and the unique ways in which it is translated from traditional to contemporary contexts. A common practice in India, this scene foregrounds the importance of outliers and departures from the flattening norms of globalization, and the immense significance of the local within the ascendant global matrix.

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