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Perish if you don’t love, and if you love too

Manil Gupta’s latest solo show at the Palette Art Gallery tells how the crass commercialization has made the human beings just desiring machines. In this process they get wounded. Despite the sympathy that Manil shows for the hapless creatures called the ‘masses’, the show turns counter productive, JohnyML observes.

Manil Gupta’s latest solo show at the Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi comes as a surprise to those people who have been following Manil’s work for sometime. Last year Manil had a solo show at the same gallery and it was titled ‘Encode/Decode’, where the artist tried to portray a world of mechanical beings, surrogate human beings as if they were living in a matrix, devoid of emotions and passions. All the aspects related to these beings were mechanical and supremely efficient. Manil had envisioned a world infested with strange creatures and it was a warning from the artist’s part that one day these beings of the metropolis would invade the earth and replace the human beings and their real desires, emotions and passions.

When we come to ‘Love or Perish’, the latest solo of the artist, the focus seems to be shifting slightly. Manil has become more real in his thinking but a lot of pessimism has crept into his imagination. Here we have a set of human beings, single and paired up, but lost in a world of metal tentacles which hold them and render them helpless. They are designer human beings with striped bodies, voluptuous and passionate in posturing but deeply wounded in body. Are these wounds symbolic externalization of the mental wounds that they have received in due course of progress?

The artist seems to be too much sympathetic towards the lost future of the human beings. They are very much alive, however the mechanized beings from his previous show are not completely avoided this time as their presence is affirmed by the mechanical devices present here and there in the pictorial surface. Then is it a vision of the ‘future futuristic world?’ The androids have taken their positions and they are the ruling people. But the human beings are not totally obliterated. They have become designed beings destined to live their bruised lives. Could be or could not be.

Manil has, however got a different idea about his works. As he says (and himself knows that it is a cliché) his concerns are with the plight of the human beings. So he quotes from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Mikey Pandey. Manil’s attempt is to shed light on the growing depletion of environment and human values. He makes a critique of commercialization (of anything and everything). Quoting Mikey Pandey, Manil says that we destroy the environment for producing gold. But how much gold one can eat? Obviously a relevant question and it has to be raised at this stage of all consuming global capital economy.

The artist is in a mode of resistance. But the resistance gets subsumed by the very system that he is critiquing. Look at the language that he is using. The surfaces are smooth and clean. All the paintings look like done with a cold (not cool) attitude. There is precision and detachment. Does the artist play a role of the commentator? Then where does he position himself in the whole scheme of things? That is not clear. The works are too sophisticated to avoid. The human pathos is glorified in flat colors and decorative backgrounds. The helplessness of the human beings portrayed is evident in their looks but the kind of resistance that the artist wants to convey is not seen anywhere. If at all there is a suggestion, it gets absorbed in to the flat surfaces. Where has the existential and expressionist verve gone from the minds of the artists? Why there is no aggression in the paintings? Why do they look like acquiescing figures?

Predictability has started haunting the Palette Gallery. There seems to be a compulsion for the artists to present a few paintings, photographs, sculptures and couple of video projections. In the Palette Art Gallery, one knows well, if you are a regular there, where to look for what. This tradition started last year with Pratul Dash. Then it moved on to Kriti Arora, Gigi Scaria and now Manil Gupta. There was a time when artists used to say, “I do realistic works, landscapes, portraits and modern art too.” Now a days the artists seem to say that they do painting, sculptures, photography and videos.

This reflects nothing but the change in the international art market. There is a huge demand for photography, alternative sculptures and video works. There are many artists who have been experimenting with these mediums even while they were continuing as painters. But the new crop of artists, God alone knows why, also indulge in all the mediums, whether their subject matter or concerns demand it or not. So we have also a sculpture work by Manil Gupta. Who knows what clicks when? Is it the attitude? I don’t accuse Manil alone with this charge. There are many, who think that photography and video add to their intellectual/international profile. But most of them do not know art history beyond Van Gogh and Picasso. It is a pity.

Manil’s exhibition is all about commercialization. If it is against commercialization, I should say that Manil should be looking for alternative methods to generate the anti-commercialization debate and also should know that such a debate too would be co-opted by the mainstream market. Kriti Arora’s exhibition at the Palette was a scorn raiser as it talked about the road workers in Leh and Ladakh but presented in such kitschy way. Manil’s show also brings the same scorn from the viewers as it flattens the masses (the nebulous enemy and dearest bedfellow of the capitalist market economy) into two dimensional hapless creatures with zebra lines and wounds that obviously they don’t deserve.

Here is a bowl of water. It could be Ganga Jal or Yamuna Jal. Or even the water used by Judge Pilate to wash off his hands.

Now I invite Manil Gupta to dip his hands in the bowl. Then I invite Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khann to come forward to wash their hands. Finally I too wash my hands. For none of us can help it. It is going to be in the market and before raise a whimper of critique (that it is made for) it would end up in some collector’s wall (if not in chest reserved for resale).

The show was all about the masses (the stinking, consuming, mindless public) and we are a few people who have taken the responsibility for talking on behalf of the masses. Who has given us this right? Who has given us to do the rebel sell in the market place? I wanted to dip the feeling of seeing this show with the masses. So I went to the no man’s land between Delhi and Haryana called Badarpur Border where the stinking masses commute between these two states, zebra lined and wounded, and bought a bottle of beer and drank it standing by the roadside along with so many wounded youths with faces that ‘we the people’ refuse to acknowledge and preach on behalf. Manil is a young and upcoming artist. But he needs to work on the critical side of the issues that he converts into visual statements in public.