Sudarshan Shetty .Exhibit from Love. 2006

IT IS THE SIGN OF THE TIMES THAT THE grand gesture, the larger-than-life image, the elaborately exaggerated setting in an art gallery, are making a sly comeback. Many works by Indian artists, shown at Biennales or exhibited in spaces abroad, seem to have been created, keeping in mind international standards of production and exhibition as well as the taste for bigger objects that most buying multi-national corporations and collectors have. This is not to disregard the fact that the desire to dazzle lies at the heart of many art initiatives. This is also not to insist on the illegitimacy of this desire. One must understand, however, that the use of the spectacle in art, at a time when the spectacle (as an economic, architectural, imagistic production) in real life has been mined successfully by unscrupulous speculators, fantasy marketeers, self-serving political networks and fascistic organisations, becomes an act fraught with tension. The spectacle needs to be engaged not only with care and caution but also with critical consciousness about its usage and abusage.

As you stepped into Sudarshan Shetty’s Love at the Bodhi Art gallery, Mumbai, late last year (the show was presented by Bodhi Art and Gallery Ske), you were witness to a bizarre scene: a tall metallic stegosaurus could be seen humping a Jaguar (the car not the animal).  Directly above this exhibit, on the first floor, was an exhibit with skeletons of two bovines (with the legs of the one on top supported by the legs of the one below). Even as you were amused by the flamboyant displays of affection in both the works, you wondered whether Shetty was trying to problematise the much-touted ‘naturalness’ of love. The desire to frame the obscene display of power in rapacious sexual acts, to present the ridiculously jubilant masculinism evident in acts of sexual conquest, did come through. However, the theatre of the absurd that Shetty created through his performing creatures, could not quite explore the idea of perversion (an idea that is indexical in determining what the civilized world finds threatening to its sense of order) with the adventurousness it required. The act of transgressing sexual thresholds and protocols suggested by the objects in motion could have given us insights into the secret life of objects. The coitus between machine and animal could have opened windows to strangely liminal worlds (like in J.G.Ballard’s Crash) that claw and cut into each other, infesting the interplay between Eros and Thanatos with terror and granting it a macabre location. One found however that, by far, the dystopic had been overwhelmed by the comic.

Sudarshan Shetty. Exhibit from Love. 2006.

If it was the un/easy equation between love and lust that came under observation in these two exhibits, the type-writer that kept on maniacally typing the word, ‘love’, in Braille, at the far corner of the first floor, got you to feel the word so that it could be read into existence. Shetty’s insistence on an inter-textural experience (the word made flesh – the word touched, spoken, heard, and experienced) led you to dwell on the critical encounters between blindness and insight (both qualities ascribed to love and lovers with “imaginations all compact”).

In exhibit after exhibit, Shetty used the idea of repetition (the Braille machine churning out the word, ‘love’ endlessly, a hammer hitting the metal udders of one of the skeletal animals at regular intervals, liquids bubbling and overflowing timelessly, the phallus of the dinosaur pushing in and out of the Jaguar’s chassis) to recreate the hypnotic spell that pattern-forming acts cast on us. The numbing of minds has been part of many great political enterprises: whether ideologically bankrupt or over-loaded, most parties in power have been afraid of alert mavericks asking difficult questions. Our contract with Consumerism stipulates that we continue to be in a state of inertia till we are acted upon by an external, unbalanced force that ostensibly gives us an array of choices, pushes us to buy, and lulls us into thinking that we exist so that we may consume and vice versa. Love, as a multivalent experience, threatens to disorient us, by making us aware, at the same time, of our debilitating insecurities and our enabling capacities, our desire to possess and our ability to sacrifice. Love gets reified when we are tricked into believing or we trick ourselves into believing that its expression can only happen effectively through consumer goods and services (the bigger and flashier your gift, the greater and deeper your love).