Contours of European late modernism lately and critically engage ‘Contemporary Art’ in India. Much abhorred in ‘late mordernist’ trends in Europe is ‘literality’ and much admired is a language of ‘object hood’. But there are some, especially from Asian locations, who can camouflage even the remnants of such deflective scenario inherited almost inevitably from their westernising situations and endeavour well into a different new world and its realities. Let that be Chinese or Korean or Indian artists, some of them can now predicate the future of ‘Art’ as institution from their own cultural contexts mostly by re-orienting late modern paradigms in a spectacular fashion. Thorough restructuring has happened in Indian Artist’s projection of identity in the international scenario. Looking ‘up close and personal’ at Sudarshan shetty’s life and projects becomes quite fascinating for the same reason. 

Shetty is one among the rare nerves of Indian Art today pulsating on himself into the rocking socks of mega collectors and mega projects. With multiple linguistic cues, he ponders on situations ranging from the macabre to the animated. He creates transformed (often theatrical) environment, surveying and tilting the subject-object relationships invested in museumisation. This makes him a major player, in spite of being an irreverent, idiosyncratic and ghastly critical voice in the market capitalism. 

It also now seems there isn’t any more room for lamenting on difficulties of a mega discipline like installation to sustain in an Indian context. Gallery majors are on their way to expand to the transformed spaces suiting to the dreams of their artist-collaborators. In the new scenario, some Indian galleries tend to achieve disciplinary specialisations for themselves through collaborative ventures with European ones and shetty is an inevitable part of this hi-end expansion. His association with Mattress Factory Pittsburg has undoubtedly placed him among the international artists who look at installation as a separate discipline to exercise their thoughtful acts by means of innovative objects and equivocating use of mechanisms. But this should not be simply exciting. One can see his willed negotiations with materials, languages and historical contexts all throughout.

His life in retrospect provides pointers to various taste formations and shifts occurred in Indian Art practices and pedagogies since late 1970s.

1

Desperate threads from ‘western orientation’

Son of a Yakshagana artist who migrated from Mangalore to Bombay just before Independence to make a living, Sudarshan shetty chose to study Painting in JJ School of Arts, Mumbai after a miserable stint with Commerce. In late 70s it was not a ‘career choice’ by any common means. Finding good at drawing and painting, believing naively in oneself as an artist was the only natural reason for going to the School of Art.  From a lower middle class background it was never natural for the family to know about J J school of Art either. But JJ as an institution critically marked Shetty’s later ventures in Art.

Shetty met lot of people there who were already looking outside. Curriculam in JJ was strange mix of Bauhaus spatial design and then on the other hand British portrait painting. People were really good in portraiture. Shetty was also good at representational work, good at copying from things and from models. On the other hand ‘voice of subversion’, as Shetty acknowledges was close to abstract painting. It was a kind of complete ideological anarchy going around, he says.

In 70s and 80s Indian Art scene witnessed institutionally supported and conditioned deflections in sensibility. Fine Arts Faculty of M S University in Baroda with a figurative / narrative ideology and J J School of Art with a verve for Abstraction in a major commercial hub in Bombay were the major pedagogic centres emerged at two neighbouring states of India standing with markedly different kinds of political lenience to ‘Indianness’ and ‘Internationalism’. Art languages, often understood in stylistic terminologies, were supposed to be literal carriers declaring allegiances and league of the artist. Discourses on ethical values of such allegiances were dominant to legitimise it. 

Painting a human figure was almost like a sin those times in JJ, Shetty muses. All were good at painting from life model but a strange moralist predicament was attached to the way one painted. ‘There was a huge opposition to Baroda school. They were talking about revivalism. The counter argument in that ambience was that ‘representation can not be only through figure painting’. “That exactly is one good thing I still carry in some ways. Representation can also be in terms of metaphor. I did paint human figure after leaving college but I was not comfortable with it’. Over a period of time I also avoided human figure consciously – my whole idea centered on representing a kind of human absence, a loss of body.” Shetty recollects.

‘Loss of body’ was there ever since classical modernist awareness. ‘Whereas renaissance picture draws you to a complex set of experience, the post cubist picture thrusts a sheet of pigment at you with an immediate force proper only to the realm of material sensations. I can not help regretting what has been lost but the regret is futile’ thus wrote Clement Greenberg, the God-figure of European Modern Art theory (‘Necessity of the old masters’). But a willful make over from sensuousness to sensations was quite a problematic for Indian artists. Except Prabhakar Kolte in JJ, there were no major practitioners of abstraction who could come to some standing, while the political claims of human body and narrative painting gained a typical voice of ‘Indian ness’ for quite a long time through many major artists of the time in Baroda. People like Jeram Patel or Nasreen Mohamedi stood different there with their takes on ‘sensational formalism’ and the ‘drafting of the non-representational’ respectively. By mid nineties there opens a different era altogether that gains a curious acceptance for the language of sensations. Stretching partly as the ghosts of ‘western modern’ brain and partly as the true carriers of the lived reality in a liberalized economy thrusting with futuristic attitudes, many Indian artists today masterfully practice material sensations with less regret.

Shetty has a different take on this situation as he observes that everything is governed by the fact that there is a kind of constant understanding of loss that we suffer from and also regenerate. If one takes market place as an analogy, everything is sold as a promise of youth. When you buy a bar of soap you really buy the promise of its function. But gap is there between the function and reality. There is lure. Assertion of youth is but very important function of our life and it comes from a sense of loss. Shetty’s works are in one way his own rituals to revoke a lost body and even to examine the futility of doing so by setting up the show. He seems to ask questions like, ‘who is your audience’ or ‘why would one as an artist do something like that’ etc. Lot of his works even earlier had the feeling that ‘somebody has gone away’. If it is dealing with monumental, it is also fragile under its own spectacle, like the horse standing on a rocking boat. If you touch, it may fall. It challenged the bottom heavy sculptural tradition that we came from.

It is not regret but examination of the regret that is happening through Sudarshan shetty’s oeuvre. And some tools used in the examination are much similar to the late modern Western ones, especially in a disciplinary approach to ‘objecthood’ in his Art practice. But much abhorred ‘literality’ is brought back almost ritualistically with a beaming futilitarian fallacy. Examination of futility takes on a humorous twist through mechanical animation and an absurd mimicry of the familiar metaphoric orders in a ritualistic community. Sudarshan Shetty is interesting today not simply for his mechanical exercises on spectacular objects but also for the thought / metaphor / literality it evokes in our sensorium. So even when he projects a loss of community, he evokes a different kind of population that is part of museumisation. It is not simply sensation of material that attracts but the visual rhetoric excites enough and it proves a futuristic exercise conveying indefinite fleets of sharing among people.
Where does this language of spectacles come from? Not a single route. It is a merging of so many rhetorical states of affairs that we face today. If one looks through it for the maneuvers of western Modern Art and thought, one can find many threads. One can find Indian realities of globalised living too, though in an allusive way. One can also read, gain and lose meanings in one single breath of mythic allusions, like ritual of ‘blood’ ‘bleeding’ or ‘demolition’.
It is not presence of objects but their befooling sensation that matters more in Shetty’s projects. They establish certain allegiances to not so mainstream instances in western Art history too.  Remember, in early decades of 20th century Michael Bakhtin had articulated the importance of ‘utterance’ - ‘Its not words but utterance that matters’- in all linguistic practices. The ‘hyper real’ Belgian artist Rene Magritte was the much mistaken ‘surreal’ but he had painted the possibility of transformed interior spaces and abruptness of ‘object hood’ in creating and destroying comfortable meanings. Marcel Duchamp had fooled the much objectified Art World with a holy ampule full of Parisian air (the reason being he had bought it from a Parisian pharmacist and literally emptied its ‘serum physiologique’) brought to New York as a gift to Walter Arensberg, the wealthy Art collector.

Instead of evacuated ‘object hood’ that was much argued in ‘modernist reduction’ (with historical references or allegory or illusion, all having been taken to a minimum as argued by Greenberg in ‘New Sculpture’), there existed such assorted routes of mockery projecting the dialogic nature of object-oriented communication.

Shetty pulls such desperate threads in western art history into facing his present. One can trip through both the presence and absence of objects to an enlarged situation of nothingness he creates. It is different from the way Indian artists (even international practices of Indian artists like Anish Kapoor, for that matter) generally practiced installation. Shetty’s objects are not positively brimming with metaphysical and ‘Indian’ connotations.

In 1990s Indian artist’s psyche was still not ready to lend itself to the flux of changes possible through incongruous juxtapositions and miss-matches of objects. It is true that simply as languages for art practice, ‘abstract expressionist’ veins and ‘installation’ were accepted in the Indian art scenario after an initial resistance for their western origin. Taken as one among the un-integrated western Art languages, Indian installations rested much within the parameters of natural/political/ritualistic and such intended meanings of images and objects for a long time. Indian installation Art was working through the ritualistic and imagined community feeling of performances especially in late 80s, when the Art scene was looking for options other than painting. The changing reality of disintegrating communities was not pondered upon. There is an imagined community in many Indian post-modern artists’ bringing in of traditions and rituals as such. The signals to practice Art with objects could not well be plucked out of metaphysical connotations in many instances. And practicing installation was almost like a white man’s prerogative. One can not forget that an artist like N N Rimzon had stepped with confidence into this scenario bringing sculpture into a dialogic space of both being and un-being. Man-centric spatial sense that Rimzon created often took low pedestal and fluid shape, be it ‘chalk circle’ or weapon arrangements. It was a route to negate sensationally aesthetic objecthood and to bring forth sublimated allusions to past. There is a definite gravity of approach in Rimzon’s works that could well settle down with meanings at a certain level. Baroda fine arts faculty was yet a place of dynamic polemics that could well accommodate such internationalist attitudes while the general ambience was nationalist. Even then, not really explored was the theatricity of ‘object hood’ integrating the viewer/visitor.
When passed out of the college, Shetty had no particular options left. Lot of his classmates went into advertising. From among them no classmate emerged as artist as we would know. Installation in late 80s talked in terms of west. They were told that one is being ‘western’ when one does installation.  Shetty started making works with motor mechanical devises in 94-95.

Western orientation appeared an irresistible evil, in spite of one’s recognition of one’s own milieu. Shetty seems to grapple with the very issue of western orientation for the last couple of years. Lot of our education centered on west, even in Baroda where people were largely projecting a nationalist discourse. But we are also concerned of life outside the museum and find that there is a barrier between gallery and life outside that one needs to cross. Shetty says he is equally concerned with life outside of gallery / museum space. In west, being in and out of Museum doesn’t make such striking differences. “Museum as an institution there has larger connection with the life outside. Here in India museum space is a kind of luxury. It is difficult crossing spaces. My Art should come from my own life space. My mother can not understand my works now. She should be able to understand it easily. Isn’t it?” Shetty raises the poignant question.

However, orientation to Western paradigms becomes almost like an institutional need for an Indian Artist today to practice as artist in galleries and museums while there are stark differences one experiences in being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of museum/gallery spaces. Community networks related to these spaces are in constant flux. Common grounds are constantly being destroyed.

2

'Non-place’ of languages and paradigms

There is an unstable state of affairs. Grappling with risks is inevitable. Mechanisms may work or may not work. The animated objects may communicate many things for some or may not communicate any of them and signal something else for some others. When one tries to examine all art objects of Shetty done till now, there is no single conceptual thread that can bind them. There is no sustaining and respectable artistic scheme except for the mechanical devises but working differently in different objects.  Familiar metaphoric ideas of ‘LOVE’ or ‘PURE’ (working on whiteness, utensils, milk, PVC pipes, trees, dripping liquids) are apparently worked out but stretched into absurd spectacles or belittled, assorted and comic objects, they are far fetched and the idea does not work as it used to be in any familiar schemes. Shetty is always on the move enumerating ‘the absurd’ in variable propinquity.

In his preface to ‘Order of Things’, Michael Foucault situates a passage in Borges, quoting certain Chinese Encyclopaedia that gives the division of animals. It gives a desperate taxonomy of meanings so that we encounter ‘the stark impossibility of thinking’ an animal, the thing we otherwise used to ‘apprehend in one great leap’. Foucault explains it thus, “The monstrous quality that runs through Borge’s enumeration consists in the fact that the common ground on which meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. The animals (i) frenzied, (j) Innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine Camel hair brush’ – where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it? Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language? Yet language can spread them before us, it can do so only in an unthinkable space”.  

It is from an Indian Artist’s uncomfortable existence in the luxuriously objectifying space of Gallery/Museum that Shetty’s ‘non-place’ strategy of artistic action sprouted. It is as if ‘Indian artist’ should not be apprehended in any giant rhetorical leap anymore. It is also a realisation that dissolving the line between ART and LIFE in a culture like Indian with many shreds and patches of history, is an act of transformation one need to exercise on both spaces. There is an enquiry of the possibility of museum from an ‘unthinkable’ space. One can not effectively transform a space while the other is kept the same. Changes claimed in Art in formal terms of definite stylistic predicament will only make symbolic changes in a simply ‘thinkable space’. Then it is difficult to counter those essential colonial / westernised meanings ascribed to societies, human bodies, materials and cultures of the world through the agencies of museumisation.
Shetty is aware that being ‘Indian’ is not in using Indian motifs in painting sculpture or installation. What is being ‘Indian’ should be in question. We should address the real dilemma of post modern multi-culturalism and present them as they are.  But shifting from the symbolic order, to a hyper realist’s order of sensations, would have ended as yet another swept junk of objects filling the gallery space had it not been for Shetty’s rigorous work of the visual with ‘the literal’. He finally makes it very difficult to get aesthetic paradigms in verbal form to even write about his projects! Catching at the very throat of language, he screws it to a strange shape. One can experience the similar pleasure when looking at Magritte or Duchamp. Interesting is that when one establishes seamless and abrupt relation of desire between a dinosaur and a car. Or a blind writing love in Braille! Waste and rusted TV set arranged with curious links to excretive outlets look so well arranged but there is something inevitable, like the act of purgation, in the whole projection!

Like an old classic brand of semiotician, Shetty shows up ‘the literal’ act (of love-making or of love-writing) only to sensationalise it to extremes so that one reaches at a gluttonous ‘non-place’ of meaning and hence that of language too! Sensation can never be a repetitive formal style because it demands spirit of new acts every time. On one level, it may feel that Shetty over the years have devised his own stylistic gestures. He is the first in India to use motor mechanical devises in almost all his works for a long time now. So the media reviews sometimes designate it as ‘Kinetic’ Art. But in effect, how belittling is that motor facility when literally embodying any of his objects. However huge or cute they seem to be….look at the teeth or ball of eye moving! If it is simply kept in a glass case, just like an old man's object it will be there. But how further belittled and ironic it looks when it animates. Motor is not a linguistic scheme of animation for its own sake but an analysis of the still inanimate condition of mechanically animated objects.

If one thought at any moment that the low-profile mechanical devise of simple motors is a political choice, one went wrong. This artist has now sufficiently processed the cue of motor that Irony is dealt as a fluid state of being. Nothing, not even mechanical repetition, is essentially conveying irony but the use of it within literal or metaphoric frame of references makes it capable of giving the sensation of irony as a state of being. (Repetition, mechanical reproductiveness and related philosophy of essential transience are boring issues that Walter Benjamin had already fetched it pretty far, according to Shetty. After Andy Warhol, idea of repetition is redundant, he says) He tries to do different kinds of work all the time with different set of technology, materials and people, thus increasing one’s own risk in practice.

Artists do work in collaboration when one can not individually gain all the expert skills to materialise the concept. Today not many seem to concern about the authorship of a work in limited terms of its physical labour. But still there is of course an idea of ideal communication between artist and those who work on materials for him/her without which these installation projects won’t happen. Collaborative ventures are usually supposed to be projects of shared conceptual paradigms. Shetty works at the very impossibility of it. The idea haunting ‘elsewhere’ (in artists mind) is conveyed in terms of measurements, sizes and shapes and one wonders at the uneven participations of each skilled personnel in the endeavour. But an Art project in a museum / gallery is a mix of many concepts. Many paradigms and oeuvre are exercised at the same time. Artist and the collaborators have different kinds of takes in the project.

Shetty had been moving from places to places, from Delhi to Bombay to Ahmedabad. There hasn’t been one single person he was working with. People do get excited at his explanation of the idea for material. Now that he can access more high-end technology since his base is getting broader. So he affords computer graphics people now. They provide ‘really fantastic facilities’ says Shetty. A ‘graphics friend’ makes things possible for him now in a project. They are making a building out of a drop of blood. If we drop three drops of blood, it will create a shape on a particular surface. Shape will be different on different surfaces. Shetty explains that how one connects all these acts philosophically in terms of one’s oeuvre, depends on where one comes from. It is a kind of meeting point. “I learn a lot. Whether he, the graphics expert learns a lot, I don’t know. I can not tell him always that this is my Art work”. Shetty explains the kind of shared labour he undertakes in an Art project.  “At he moment of contact with surface the blood drop splatters. It is a reaction. You can actually divide the stage may be twelve times...first impact...second impact..third impact...till it settled on the ground. We were just examining the drop of blood splattering and conceiving it into grids. Idea of museumisation is my interest in this endeavour. So I make institutional building out of that. The query is, whether it is possible to transform that splatter of blood in to a wire-frame drawing and then magnify it to twice the swimming pool size. There will be a space inside. It is like a momentary drop of blood. Each grid can be translated into a tinted glass. We will have many pockets.”

3

Examining the Institutional Behaviours

Creating a building with the digital ‘bloody’ affect is taken to the level of reality where it is possible to build one actually like that. If it doesn’t give that scope in the level of reality, this artist is not interested in the examination of blood (inspite of it providing ‘technological wonder’ and an act with a metaphoric essence) at all. Such a huge building out of drops of blood is shetty’s proposal for famous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. He presents this to some other museums also.

“Idea of institution and drop / loss of blood. Loss of manhood I am  dealing with.”

Blood has been used much in Art mainly for its formal material properties. As Cynthia Freeland observes (‘But is it Art: an introduction to Art theory’,) ‘One reason is that it has interesting similarities to paint. Fresh blood has an interesting eye cathing glossy sheen. It will stick to surface so that u can make designs with it. On the skin of aboregene youths its’ shimmering cross hatched patterns evoke the archetypal era of the ‘dream time’. Blood is our human essence. Blood has a host of expressive and symbolic associations’. Even Shetty cites one instance from his milieu, like the Hijada cutting their penis and allow it to bleed for hours to symbolically lose manhood. But in Shetty’s project, association with the trans-gendering acts of bleeding is not ritualistic in its communal sense of shared meanings. It deflects senses that are ready to settle down. Dipping a leather jacket in red liquid has eeriness while black coat dipping in white liquid mocks at false promises of market, may be. But who decides? What is special in dipping jackets in liquid? The viewers are such multiple origins that there is no definite meaning. Dipping cloth in a washing bucket half filled with water is the reminded activity from everyday life. But here it is a huge rectangular cabin with two transparent sides. Some kind of mechanical life is allured, may be. But the sheer horror, pleasure and access to dripping liquid have equally majored into a contemplative situation that would have otherwise slipped into simply metaphoric. In ritual, in the traditional sense, purpose and clarity of the act is central for the participants. Everyone knows the gesture and grasp similarly. In the ritual in a museum / gallery, everyone has individual takes. Projection of virtual real building out of ‘wire frame’ drawings of splattering blood is a spectacle in its own merit. Even in many other cases of collaborative labour in Contemporary Art, The artist, the digital technologist, the photographer, the carpenter, the mason, the electrician – each have one’s own oeuvre and expert skills to associate with the experience of a gallery act. There is no background reinforcement of a pervasive community belief to provide a cohesive metaphoric meaning in terms of catharsis, sacrifice or initiation.

The artist’s project in museum is a magnified projection of splattered metaphoric order into a sensation of reality. This twist applied to metaphoric / symbolic order of communication is the essential premise in any project of Shetty. Loss of community is actualized by various mechanisms.

A tendency toward ‘purity’ or absolute abstractness usually permeating ‘post-progress’ societies exists in his projects but it affects us not merely as a tendency now but as an aim and realization that virtually engrosses the viewer. Sometimes it reflects even the ‘viewer’ / visitor to the museum (the visitor being a particle of community immersed in heterotopias of multicultural fluid) as contained within the spectacle. One loses foot when sees oneself reflected on a T V screen that scans for the lost body of a dog on its skeleton. One gets conscious of being watched as a spectator in the gallery by the very Art Object, assuming the power of an institutional surveillance machine, a moving camera for instance. A psycholinguist contention is that abstract concepts like ‘affect’ are represented via the mechanism of metaphor. (Brian P. Meier and Michael D. Robinson, Journal of ‘Metaphor and symbol’ vol 20. Issue 4).

Shetty affects people by thoroughly examining their metaphoric situations. Voyeurism is now not simply a top heavy institutional surveillance apparatus but it is even a mainstream entertainment and a cultural norm through wide spread availability of new technologies. Citing Anna Funder’s ‘Stasiland’ (an account of meetings with those involved with the highly personalized surveillance state of East Germany)  David wood writes in an editorial of journal ‘surveillance-and-society’ that even deregulation of state surveillance encourages people to watch each other or at least pay someone to do it for us. Cameras are observed as part of the mechanisms functioning as power and its contemporary changes. As Martha Mourao Kanashiro observes in a study of surveilance cameras (in Brazil) and their strategies of exclusion, mobility regulation and the proposed new meanings of security, (journal of surveillance and society 5 (3): 270-289) Cameras for purposes as varied as security, care, fact finding, crime detection etc. actually take part in a process of urban gentrification and are related to new knowledge about security and its privatization. When Art lover/visitor’s gazes or glances are retroacted by the ‘art object’ placed in a curious surveillance dynamics, ‘voyeurism’ as a normative culture of pleasure is mimicked and joked upon.

Implication of this kind of art of surveillance is ‘the involvement’ or ‘lack of involvement’ of a heterogeneous set of players, both human and inhuman, now engaged in institutional practices. It is also an examination of high morbidity levels that can also make laughter possible at the face of violence.

Bringing down a building – Newyork’s World Trade Center – occurred as a horror and as much hated terrorism in 2001 and reconstruction of the building and stabilizing of a world economy related to it soon had become humanitarian news evoking pathos of distinct nature. Bringing down and redoing a building – a hotel in Paris – is now an artful event, a one day performance in itself worthy of a grand partying by their Art wing. Amusingly, Shetty participates with ten other international players in ‘the demolition party’, putting up six tables in a large room with black corridors where one finds neon letters saying ‘party is elsewhere’.

‘Seeing a structure collapse and its attendant emotions are conditioned by falling towers, imploded modernist follies, vandalized monuments, decaying, rain-soaked tenements, tattered urban relics, monuments of dereliction’, notes Vyjayanthi Rao in the catalogue text of ‘SHIFT’ a collaborative project of Sudarshan Shetty, Shantanu Poredi and Manisha Agarwal. The project worked on a push of a button. A building-structure curiously made in the project is brought down on the press of a button. It works like a mechanical toy. ‘The enigmatic empty shells of the building haunting a gallery space collapses to its basic structural footprint’. It is not a simple construct. It is a complex structure in itself. Sense of play involved in the animated rendering will suddenly give way to sense of loss of a meticulous laborious and precious something. But as Vyjayanthi Rao puts it, if we thought it was no longer possible to laugh at a collapse, SHIFT marks a subversive turn as it finally calls us up to enjoy ironic self-deprecations’’.

Shetty’s works are ‘Voluminous’. Further, it is a haunting rather than simply inhabiting occupation of objects. In India, even galleries were remaining as just buildings or rooms till the dawn of present decade, Shetty thought of only massive practices. It is not simply a matter of aesthetic space but a practical space. So, it was pushing the frontiers not simply of himself as an individual but of Art World in general also. While stating general economic boom as a common-sense cause for booming art market in India, very rarely people seem to be sensitive to the ways artistic interventions and creative demands also causing a widening of space for practice here.