ESSAY

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Pet Shop: Degree Xerox Culture

The new exhibition of project of Chintan Upadhyay, titled ‘Pet Shop’ presented at the Ashish Balram Nagpal Galleries, Mumbai created hue and cry amongst the art loving community for the provocative posturing held up by the artist. JohnyML visits the show and debates the issue of originality in the context of ‘xerox culture’.

‘Pet Shop’ by Chintan Upadhyay is all about the seduction of culture. Contemporary culture seduces the human beings to desire and illusion. Interestingly, with the erasure of the demarcating line between desire and illusion, culture poses itself before us not only as something to be claimed and nourished but also as a problem, which should be debated and if need be discarded. In this sense, culture is something that a contemporary human being can eschew for embracing reality. But again, reality has also become a cultural construct, mediated and negotiated by a recurring and omnipresent symbolic system that the very notion of reality too merges with the illusionary desire for truth and veracity. Destined to live within this context, the contemporary human being, using all his/her might, selects the best of truth (truth of the original) shunning even the biological instincts. There is a craving for the original where as culture and reality no longer offer any kind of original. In our ‘Degree Xerox Culture’ (as per Jean Baudrillard) the search for original turns itself null and void and what is claimed and gained as original too lead the selector to nothing but nullity.

Chintan Upadhyay poses this conceptual problem regarding culture and originality through the metaphor of genetic selection. In ‘Pet Shop’ we find eight smart alec babies (the artist’s signature style products), complete in plump and supple bodies decorated with selective miniature images, demonstrated in golden cages. The title of the project is a pointer here- it simultaneously attributes the children with the qualities of pets and it problematizes the work of art as a confined discourse that nullifies itself but claims a trans-materialistic value. ‘Pet Shop’ raises a social problem, an ethical issue pertaining to genetic selection for the production of ‘fittest’ superhuman beings. On the conceptual level, it debates the issue of original. Further, the artistic intention and the critical viewing together take it to a different plane where the cloned reality expressed through aesthetic objects becomes ineffectual in actually grappling with the problem.

Babies put in cages and displayed as potential commodities (not as loveable kids) have certain element of pathos in them. They like any other commodity in the market place are there to be ‘picked up’ and ‘used’. Potential parents, who would like to have their babies to be superhuman beings, could go for gene selection from the ‘gene banks’. In this, the parental body and mind become implantable wombs sans natural human sentiments and emotions. What becomes debatable in such selections is the rupture in lineage, history and identity. These babies born out of scientific choice could function as the carriers of a manipulative ideology, however beautiful and loveable they appear. The history and identity look as imposed graffiti on their bodies. While identifying with a particular historical lineage, they act as per ideological maneuverings.

‘Pet Shop’ is a critical metaphor. The caged babies are potential metaphors to emphasize the nullity of art, which seen in common perspective holds the power to debate any social issues. While keeping Chintan’s intention to raise an ethical issue through these works at ken, we can also see that they talk about the inability of art to be the vehicle of a social critique. Metaphorically speaking, art itself is caged here. The kind of freedom that we relate with a work of art and artistic expression in general comes to be limited and confined. The work of art loses its own claim to criticism and resigns itself to the status of a product. However, what gives them the right to be there and demand our attention is their unwillingness to object-hood. This is a paradoxical situation as we know that like any other commodity art too has become an object of exchange carrying no originality except the symbolism of desire and illusion. The viewer is expected to see them as entities presenting an original problem, perhaps even an original solution.

‘Originality’ is one of the notions that Chintan Updhyay has been debating for the last few years. He calls himself as ‘Chintan Upadhyay Unlimited’. He works in a factory scale where his assistants finish the works as per his directions. Though it is not a new thing that the contemporary artists use assistants to do the works, Chintan emphazises that the ‘original’ is already dead. To extend this argument, I would say that, the ‘original’ has never been there as reality as we know now has never been existed outside of the mediums that carry the notion of ‘originality’. Hence, these caged babies are objects sans originals. Even the conceptual original as proposed by Plato (a Godly original) is no longer there. The babies are mutant figures that reject the idea of original and remain copies of the copies; this is what exactly Baudrillard intends when he says the culture is ‘Degree Xerox Culture’.

Having accepted the Xerox situation in Chintan’s ‘Pet Shop’, the viewer is expected to ask one question: why does Chintan copy the miniature paintings (whose originality is verified) on to his baby bodies? Miniature paintings on these babies represent the post modern problem of identity. Fixation of identity in a globalized world is done through coalescing the local with the global. In the homogenized contemporary culture, distinction is maintained through the linkage with tradition. Projected identity connotes the fear of loss of identity in the global scenario.

Contemporary art speaks in itself about the lacks. Art finds it increasingly difficult to generate a new narrative, new form and new sense of direction. The raw materials have already been exhausted since the interventions of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Originality is a sepia-toned nostalgic notion. Contemporary art does recycling of ideas and goods. It converts garbage into aesthetic object. Garbage could be history and the present. Any recycling has to link up with the origin of garbage. Miniature on these baby bodies is a linkage with history. It is about the irony and impossibility of contemporary art. Extracted miniature images in this new context underline the lacks that contemporary art speaks about.
 
‘Pet Shop’ presented at Ashish Balram Nagpal Galleries, Mumbai, came along with some scandal and curiosity. An advertisement published in a major national daily showed a ‘preganant’ Chintan announcing his ‘delivery’. This scandalized and enthused the art scene in India; many were curious and many took it as a gimmick. Yet another lot took it seriously and went on to discuss male pregnancy in blogosphere. However, as I understand, it was one of the artistic ploys to invite attention to the idea of simulation. Through this advertisement (and also posters) Chintan wants to talk about the context in which the contemporary art functions. The context is that of simulations, where there are no originals.

Male pregnancy is a fantasy and fetish. It is about carrying a womb within a male body. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is the male’s ultimate desire and fear for the womb. Male pregnancy suddenly makes impossibility into a possibility and it throws conventional viewing into disarray. It is just a trans-aesthetic possibility; a kind of recycling the fantasy and fetish and giving it a material form. Contemporary art is all about self impregnation of ideas and egos. It is auto-eroticism and surrealism together. But it should be understood that this advertisement is one of the peaking points in an orgy of simulations. Is it a melancholic prediction of a sad future world? Is there any hope after this orgy?  I would like to close this essay with a quote from Baudrillard:

‘I forgot to say that this expression- ‘after the orgy’- comes a story full of hope: it is the story of a man who whispers into the ear of a woman during an orgy, “What are you doing after the orgy?”

‘There is always the hope of a new seduction.’