Subodh Gupta and the True Meaning of Things

- Vishal Tondon

 Three Cows, 2003

Subodh Gupta has been proposed by many writers as an important contemporary Indian artist. Arshiya Lokhandwala places him within the ambit of a new world order, where art has become yet another transportable commodity, this time one which might have the potential to legitimize national identity. Peter Nagy has his own insight; he says that through his work, Gupta alludes to the ostensibly banal themes of migration, consumption and commoditization by constructing “anti-monuments” that “portray the hopes, dreams and struggles of a common Indian today.”

These acceptable readings apart, I would on my part like to emphasize on the realism in Gupta’s work. The approach of realistic work is more pronounced in his drawings and paintings.

To begin with, no artist refers to their work as unreal or anti-real. Even non-representational art has always claimed to ‘represent’ a kind of reality. So why – after conceptual art became the norm and is still a highly preferred mode of expression – do artists like Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville and Subodh Gupta, to name a few, return to the realistic mode of representation on canvas?

Once Husain was asked why he did not paint abstracts. It has always been fashionable – at least it was until the early 1990s – for alumni of the Sir J J School of Arts to gravitate towards abstraction. In his answer to this question, Husain had said, “In a country with sixty crore people, how can I go abstract?” I think it is the same logic that validates the realism in Gupta’s work more than any other.   

In the kind of realism that Freud, Saville and Sudhir Patwardhan use to depict the human figure, the physical reality of the subject is emphasized with such insistence that it becomes impossible to disregard the primacy of the physical. The physicality of the subject is crucial and comes before any other considerations of the subject. The opacity of the body or figure makes it tangible, and all other aspects of the subject are contingent upon the existence of the subject as a physical reality in the first place; the body as an existentialist trap, perhaps? It is the same kind of realism we find in Gupta’s paintings. Consider his canvases ‘The Cow’ for example. The bicycle is loaded with cans of milk. The technique of painting may be described as ‘realistic’ or ‘hyper-realistic’ or even ‘new mediatic realism.’ At first glance, it may appear to be an innocent and witty representation of the mundane observed in everyday Indian life. But it is in the process of selection and omission – in his paring down of the subject matter to the essentials – that Gupta makes his mark. As Georgia O’Keeffe has said elsewhere, “Nothing is less real as realism. Details are confusing. Only by selecting, omitting, and emphasizing do we advance to the true meaning of things.”

Subodh Gupta’s realism, as I see it, is an attempt at getting to the true meaning of things. And the objective behind the representation of everyday objects in his art is to express their place in our lives; to depict them with poignancy as manifestations of middle-class aspirations and increasingly materialistic needs. 

A common thread in realist art is a commitment to the modern world and to things as they are. While the academic style of realism is still popular with many art schools in India – especially the ones with a colonial legacy – the onus in professional and political circles has since independence been on ‘revivalism’, ‘indigenism’ and even ‘modernism.’ But with a barrage of mediatic images since the 1990’s, visual expectations and visual memory and vocabulary has grown wider, and a new kind of realism has become acceptable in Indian art now. A ‘new mediatic realism’ – a term coined by Nancy Adajania – became a mode of expression for artists like Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Chintan Upadhyay, Shibu Natesan, Riyas Komu, T V Santhosh and Subodh Gupta amongst others. The technique, which would until then have been incongruent with Indian life, was suddenly validated by the center stage media images took in our lives and consciousness.

It is under these circumstances that Gupta took to his own kind of realism; one that speaks of ownership, identity, migration and aspirations all at the same time. 

In his depiction of inanimate objects such as utensils, vehicles and even animal waste, Gupta’s subject is essentially the human being. It is here that the words of John Berger ring true yet again; “Realism is not a manner, but an approach and an aim.”

The tautologies of photo-realistic painting apart, the turning of many Eastern artists to realism is a landmark occurrence in world art history; a landmark in the sense that it reflects a change in the visual landscape of emerging economies, shifts in value systems, the triumph of capitalism, and the persistence and sometimes even worsening of the woes of the lesser privileged classes.

Gupta’s works like the series ‘Saat Samundar Paar’ and ‘Doot’ reflect another kind of reality; the approximation of the modern and the vernacular in everyday Indian life. To me they also reflect the attitudes in popular Indian culture, especially in the movies and festivals, where incongruities are seen between the elements that make up an event. The music, the rituals and the ritual objects so incompatible with each other yet exist side by side; the inappropriateness of Bollywood music being played in a procession for the gods and fashion at these religious events being dictated by the movies. Hence, we see that the person with common desires and aspirations oscillates between the old and the new, the ‘highbrow’ and the ‘lowbrow’, the past and the present, and the personal and the political. This is the India where there is imbalance and chaos, and Gupta’s realism reflects this well.

 Saat Samunder Paar, 2003