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Monica Arora
Opaque Emblems is a group show by six artists — Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Louise Lawler, Isamu Noguchi, Dayanita Singh and Hiroshi Sugimoto — all of whom have deployed “pre-existing objects” or “found articles” in their myriad creations.
The exhibition is an ode to the ‘readymade’ concept of the early 20th century, conceived by French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. It is an amalgam of paintings, photographs and sculptures, representative of how an object displaced from its original surroundings and placed with other objects or viewed from a different perspective even in its place of origin ceases to remain just that object.
Subodh Gupta, who has been depicting items from our socio-political milieu in his art, showcases an ordinary sewing machine. On that is placed a box of mangoes, which have been cast in bronze and oil painted in such a realistic manner that they become a painting and sculpture simultaneously, while also crossing the bridge between the tangible and the intangible. He calls it Another Fucking Mango. Similarly, Knitting Memories, his sculpture made of brass utensils and wood, is like a collection of memorabilia from a regular factory workers’ home.
Dodiya displays two cabinets of objects, a part of his ‘7000 museums’ series wherein he has used self-portraits from childhood and early years. He juxtaposes these with works by artists such as Lucio Fontana and On Kawara, besides some old objects. The idea seems to completely turn the conventional associations between the collector, artist and curator and how objects are evaluated and classified by museums. Perhaps the most striking feature of these twin cabinets is that they have a watercolour by Dodiya hanging at the back, each carrying a poem by Arun Kolatkar from his Kala Ghoda series, ironically an area in Mumbai known for its galleries and art hubs.
Louise Lawler’s Traced Works are fine line drawings in stark black and white, literally outlined from some of her own photographs. Her works seem to trace the journey of a work of art right from the artist’s drawing board to a gallery or a collectors’ home or warehouse.
Japanese photographer and architect Sugimoto’s work from the Mechanical Forms series shows visuals of industrial tools as a prelude to the moving parts in a larger machine, again drawing references from Duchamp’s readymade concept where the object sometimes is a sum of its parts, rendering it as a piece of art.
“I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products,” stated Duchamp and Dayanita Singh’s photographs seem to be an extension of this. Time measures-Sequence 1 comprises three photographs showing red cloth bundles containing official documents, reminiscent of how records are traditionally stored in India. At the same time, this deftly depicts of how an object becomes a picture, an idea all at once. Also included are Dayanita’s recent black and white photographs, imbued with fine grey paint and mounted on aluminum, delicate and effervescent, wherein both the final photograph and the object shown within get radically transformed.
On display are three photographs by Noguchi shot by the artist during his travels in Indonesia and in the Northeast. How a common object fascinates the artist and how his photography elevates them into art is an interesting study in the concept of the readymade.
Interestingly, even Duchamp was unable to define the concept of readymade and opined, “The curious thing about the readymade is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me.” Eventually, it is the way the concept has reformed conventional notions of creating and studying art and has been able to allow artists to veer away from conventional art forms and challenge the audience to decipher an existing or readymade object with a new outlook.
On till January 5
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