Orange Thing. 2014. Steel, copper tongs, plastic. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
Subodh Gupta is having an identity crisis. Depending on which critic you read, the artist who famously turns kitchenware into elaborate sculptures is either Damien Hirst, Marcel Duchamp or René Magritte. Headline writers have their own extended versions of these names — they love to call Gupta the Marcel Duchamp of the Subcontinent, or the Damien Hirst of Delhi, a title used as recently as two weeks ago by The New York Times. Implicit in this language is the idea that artistic genius ripples out of the West, a stone dropped in France, England, America. Those artists in the far reaches of the planet who detect the rings in foreign waters, who catch the dispersed energy and reflect it back to Western audiences are the ones we like to name: the so-and-so of so-and-so.
There’s plenty of irony to all this because Gupta, arguably India’s biggest art star, is also its least scholarly. This isn’t due to any kind of innate inability, but circumstance. He comes from India’s poorest state — Bihar — producer of precisely zero other world famous artists. Bihar is something of a national joke, mocked for everything from the accent of its people to the crookedness of its politicians. To rise from the impoverished Bihari countryside to the center of the art world is a big deal, akin to Bill Clinton swapping a frame house in Arkansas for the White House.
Unlike Clinton’s family though (presumably), Gupta’s still doesn’t understand quite what it is he does. India’s artist of the moment is forever “the railway boy,” as he puts it, born to an alcoholic father who died when he was only 12. It was presumed the son would walk the right side of the path shown him, working a stable government job with Indian Railways as his father did, and as his brother and brother-in-law do today.
Instead he is a bonafide art star. The metrics artists hate and chase, cash and fame, Gupta has had on lock since 2008, the year he became the youngest Indian ever to break into Christie’s “million-dollar club.” Since joining the auction house’s varsity team, he has seen multiple works sell above the million dollar mark, including one to François Pinault, the French billionaire married to the actress Salma Hayek.
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Gupta’s calling card is to imbue the mundane with grandeur, as in Imperial Metal, a piece made in 2014 of steel rebars plated in 24 karat gold. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.
In the back room, a moment is recalled. Gupta’s co-guide for the tour, the legendary critic Germano Celant, had ceded the floor one notable time during the walk, while discussing “Pure,” an installation based on Gupta’s dung experiment. Celant had been reminded of a famous depiction of memory. He took a few minutes to pull up an image on his smartphone of the painting, titled “Reckless Sleeper,” and indeed there was an uncanny visual resemblance in both pieces’ treatment of objects. In the painting, a hat, a candle, and various assorted items are depicted below the sleeper, embedded like treasures in the ground of his subconscious. Meanwhile, Gupta buried objects for “Pure” — all donated by villagers, including a hookah and a shoe — into a packed field of clay and dung transplanted to the gallery.
Gupta admits to having never seen the painting before. It is a Magritte. The similarities do not seem to disconcert him. Nor does it bother him now, he says, to be called the so-and-so of India, the image of the pipe, and not the pipe itself. “They are masters,” he says. “If somebody finds that close to me, I feel good.”
Subodh Gupta’s “Seven Billion Light Years” will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York City from February 10 to April 25, 2015.
