Is Love an Outdated Amoresaurus?

Amrita Gupta-Singh, in an insightful review of Sudarshan Shetty’s latest works presented at the Bodhi Gallery, Mumbai, says that Shetty’s works are explorative in material and medium and the artist explores the trajectories of history, memory and desire, underscoring an eclectic post- modernist vocabulary.

A painter and avant-garde conceptual artist, Sudarshan Shetty’s, art language is a language of extremes, of incongruous assemblages, juxtaposed in an attempt to open up new possibilities of meaning. For the common viewer, Shetty’s art is often hard to comprehend, especially in its illogical associations and his position as an installation artist, which subverts traditional ideas and modes of viewership and underscores his aesthetic autonomy. As the artist puts it, “It’s not important to understand a work of art. What is more important is a sense of relationship with it, as uncomfortable as it may be.” Shetty also collaborates with assistants and carpenters, in order to question the idea of authorship. Art is one realm in which the most incoherent things are accepted and welcomed. Full of surprises, the artist deconstructs objects into bizarre situational schemes, denoting their mechanical cores. Explorative in material and medium, the artist explores the trajectories of history, memory and desire, underscoring an eclectic post- modernist vocabulary.

Untitled - Media: Feeding bottle with nipple: Rubber (Ed. of 120) Dimensions: 6” x 4.5” x 11”

Shetty’s visual components stem from the spoken language, a word or a phrase, allowing him to sidestep his role, as an image maker. In his new exhibition, Love, presented by Bodhi Art Gallery in Mumbai (till October 28, 2006) the artist explores the semantics and genealogy of this word, in a generic sense. To consistently define love is a difficult task, and often a subject of much debate, Shetty uses this term as a cliché, delving into the socially understated meanings, that reverberate beneath the surface of all object-human interactions. The idea of being ‘elsewhere’, the ‘presence of absence’ is a key element in his work. In an intriguing aesthetics, the juxtaposition of polarities creates object-relationships that seem almost pornographic, especially in the monumental, skeletal steel dinosaur (an amoresaurus) ceaselessly mating with a shiny Jaguar car, that dominates the vision of the viewer and sets the tenor of this exhibition. However voyeuristic this exhibit may be, Shetty obliquely amplifies the relationship between love-making and population explosion.

Along the stairs to the second level, the viewer encounters a digitized image of a heart changing from a black and white mechanical device to a red real heart found in biology books; This further morphs into a fluffy satiny-pink heart, found in popular culture and finally turns back to its first image of a mechanical device, pointing to the associations of heart/love as transportable merchandise. A type-writer perfunctorily types the word ‘love’ in brail, objectifying the loaded phrase “Love is blind”. Other intriguing works, which are very Duchampian in approach, are rows of fragile ceramic and glass vases, (symbols of love and fertility in ancient cultures), overflowing with ‘milk’ (regenerative) and ‘blood’ (violence) inside glass-fronted, wooden antique showcases.
In a combination of the representational and the abstract, accompanied by an underlying derisive humour, Shetty creates a subversive visual language that is exhilarating in its idiosyncratic variations. Animating things that are extinct, antiquated or mass-produced, through electrical motors, the artist creates works that are surreal, whimsical and robotic in nature, with repetition becoming a metaphor, alluding to mechanized gestures, even in the case of Love, in contemporary society.