DIRECTIONS – IN NEW NARRATIVES – Rahul Bhattacharya

Probir Gupta’s artistic practice has always found its edge by
producing art which is a constant subversion of the fashionable, in the
manner that medium, form, motifs are chosen, rendered and images
presented. Yet Gupta’s subversion does not take the direction of the anti
aesthetic. In fact, his dialogue is deep rooted in the linguistic structure
of form, line colour and space (in fact, they become tools for expressing
a Jamesonian lament about the postmodern celebration of surfaceciality).
Since the postmodern collapse (fragmentation) of ethics, there
has been a deep philosophical and social disregard for humanism.
Staying in an troubled and changing post colonial situation, somehow
it has been extremely important for Gupta to hold on (to search for)
a certain notion of ethics . Over the years his works have shaped up
as an intervention in post-secularist and antifundamentalist
philosophy of affective alterity.
It attempts to reconstruct the philosophical
tradition of affective alterity and to construct
a discourse though one’s own artistic journey.
‘Contemporary Panchatantra at Ambedkar
Nagar’ is a significant contribution to this
newly evolving post humanist discourse.
The pockets of concrete chaos studded
across the landscape of India (called cities),
have historically been linked to the rise of the
middle class, and a lot of the cultural discourse
of early modernity has been around the lived
experience of the middle class in these urban
centres. This class, which was previously
central to the imagination of modernity, and the
cornerstone of culture formation, increasingly
has become marginal in the global imaginations
of urbanity, which is increasingly centred on a
late capitalist, neo liberal representation of the
urban as the cosmopolitan. It is this marginal,
and its aesthetics that Gupta cherishes. For
him the middle class is also a class that is
privileged and cursed to have to constantly
role-play in terms of class identity, thus any
individual (agent) from the middle class
carries layers of experiences. The lived cultural
memory of the middle class is layered between
journey towards growth and development, yet
somehow never ‘forgetting’ an empathy with
the proletariat and the poor. I somehow feel
that this picture of the middle class, informs
his relationship with the materiality of artistic
production, and choice of subject matter. The
artist has a knack for the low tech, though he
is extremely comfortable experimenting with
high technology and that comes in his material
bamboo, wood, video, thickly layered canvases,
and fibreglass sculptures (sometimes all of
them coming together in a single assemblage).
The architectonic, layered, assemblages
that now begin to dominate Gupta’s artistic
production strongly work within the notion
of narrative compositions as understood in
the Buddhist narrative sculptures, Mughal
miniatures, the murals of Binod Behari
Mukherjee and works of artists like Bhupen
Khakhar and Gulam Sheikh. There is a highdensity
motifs, postures, texts, video, and
objects one needs to decode as the viewer is
invited into the narrative. He is one of the rare
artists who have taken the idea of a culture far
beyond the domains of the iconic, and by doing
so has managed to consistently propose a new
meaning for the sculptural form within the
practices of Contemporary Indian Art.