THE BURDEN OF MEMORY
Subodh Gupta’s first retrospective in Paris is a reminder of the artist’s preoccupation with the accoutrements of middle-class life. How a remembered Bihar is at the heart of his art
Subodh Gupta’s first retrospective in Paris showcases 30 of his works spanning two decades and his preoccupation with middle-class life
THE LOCUS OF RESISTANCE IS THE
GLEAMING skull in the centre. He christened it Very Hungry God in 2006 when it was first unveiled. Pots and pans were welded together to form the forbidding sculpture, its hollows and frozen grin (grimace?) representational of a god that devours, an insidious god. The steel defies corrosion and so is, in its way, an almost immortal work of art. The artist, meanwhile, is all too aware of his mortality. No stranger to hunger, to upturned and empty pots and pans. All too aware of the ironies and relentless inevitability of this moment, his epic work celebrated with a retrospective in a temple of European high culture. And his presence at a gilded dinner he plans himself, feeding rich and important Parisians—Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, is here—with Bihari staples, the hyperlocal made universal.
Monnaie de Paris, an 18th century neo-classical building, is the palatial site of ‘Adda/ Rendez-vous’, the first French retrospective of the work of Subodh Gupta, 54, arguably India’s most important, certainly most famous, artist. It opened on April 13 and will run till the end of August, showing 30 pieces, picked by curator Camille Morineau, that chart his artistic progression over two decades, or rather the lingering power of his catalysing idea, his insight into our nostalgia for the lives we leave behind. Two of the works being shown, the titular Adda and Unknown Treasure, are new. The site, next to the Seine river, is also the world’s oldest governmentowned mint. Bearing this history in mind, Gupta cast souvenirs, shaped as medals, in gold plating measuring 100 mm in diameter. He calls them Garam Masala. Embossed on the souvenirs is a blend of spices—black pepper, cumin, cardamom, coriander, and cinnamon— an extension of his work with objects of the Indian kitchen. And a reminder of the use of spice as currency and of the European lust for spice as a spur for
colonial adventurism.
Back at the dinner, Gupta enthralled his guests with dishes cooked up from these spices, with Bihari comfort food that showed them where he came from, revealed his formative influences. First it was cheela, eggplant pakoras, khichdi with yoghurt and crushed papadum, aloo bharta. And then fish, lamb, and a dessert of curd, bananas and saffron.
The food performance is nothing new. When he created and showed the Very Hungry God at the English Saint-Bernard in Paris in 2006, he cooked soup for hundreds of people in memory of the siege of ‘sans papier’ (undocumented) immigrants. “In June, I will feed the common people in France,” he says. Gupta was about 11 or 12 when he first began to notice the steel being used in ordinary Indian households, churned out by Nehru’s ‘temples of modernity’ in Bhilai and Bokaro. Gupta remembers the call of the bartan-wala, a Muslim man from Moradabad on a bicycle piled high with brass and steel utensils that he’d exchange for old clothes. The traces of memory, the references to a largely-disappeared middle class, small town life, imbue his large-scale work, all sheen and bright metal, with fragility, vulnerability, so precariously welded together that you can imagine his pieces dissembling themselves into the constituent parts of the mythical kitchen to which they once belonged. In Gupta’s factory-like studio, in Gurugram, there used to be an installation on the wall in the space where visitors wait. “Maa ki daal”, it said in Devanagari script. It’s a Proustian prompt, typical of Gupta who seems always in search of the sensations of his past. “Remember the dhibriya,” he said suddenly, over dinner one night not so long ago. The dhibriya is lost to aspiration, change, consumerism. And to translation. How do you translate a memory, a culture, a sound? You cannot.
But it doesn’t stop Gupta seeking. In 2004, he had made an installation of cast aluminum called Ab Bakri Ki Mimiyane Ki Awaz Nahin Aati,
“I never said no to any work. If someone asked me to make decorative gateways for weddings, I would. But I knew where I was going,” he says
a culture-specific piece where he works on reincarnating an object and fusing it with his memories. He comes, he says, from a village and misses the bleating of goats. In Across the Seven Seas (2006), he used baggage trolleys to express the reality of migration from Bihar. Since he first caked himself in cow dung for a performance called ‘Pure’ (1999) at Khoj, and rinsed it off, a commentary on the role of ritual in Indian life, Gupta has made a certain kind of nostalgia, a kind of rustic ‘innocence’, his calling card. He is undoubtedly India’s most maverick contemporary artist, often anointed as a desi successor to the likes of Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Damien Hirst. He doesn’t fight the urge to define and categorise, though he allows that European critics might not understand how much of his work is propelled by affection for the village rather than disdain.
He seeks everyday reality through found objects. It’s not original, but it celebrates small town life, makes it epic, a worthy subject for art. He isn’t providing a tour to his background, though, he isn’t seeking to explain. He wants instead to evoke. To remember where he came from, easy to forget given the hours he put in to get away, the years he toiled in semi-obscurity. “I never said no to any work,” Gupta says, “if someone asked me to make a decorative gateway for a wedding, I would. But I knew where I was going, where I wanted to go and so I never lacked for confidence.” He grew up in Khagaul, a small town that, he remembers, had two
swimming pools. He grew up with rations. “When we ran out of curry, we would improvise,” he says. “We were six siblings. I was the youngest. We took mango pickle, mixed some barbecued red chillies in it and added garlic pods. It would taste divine with chapati.
It was those kinds of improvisations that emerged from the ‘not-enough’ situation at home that fascinated me. We can never leave our childhood memories of food. I started cooking as a student in college in Patna. I’d make my own recipes like poached egg curry where I’d break four eggs as the curry came to boil.” Gupta is now working on a recipe book. Like Dali, he points out. Food is a constant inspiration. “I am painting in water colours,” he says, “the process of making food like dal pittha, a Bihari dish of lentils and flour, what we would do at home with leftovers and how we would improvise. I’m documenting the process in art. It is all coming from my middle class upbringing. We are never far from where we started. It is those original thoughts, the food of home and what we did out of adversity, the lingering taste that I’m now painting. I want to preserve it all.”
Steel vessels remain a reference point, literally a receptacle for his nostalgia, for his interrogations of ordinary Indian life. In one corner of the studio, piled high, are the used utensils of street vendors. “I spend hours,” he says, “looking at the corrosions and erosions and think of how many people must have eaten in them, cooked in them and whether they were crying or laughing as they cooked and ate. How many hands have these vessels been passed through? I can conjure a whole universe. Look closely and you will see it all reflected in the patterns of these utensils. These are the stories of people and their food. Together, they make up this cosmos. Food makes for memories. We pass memories to each other. That’s how this world survives. Like a memory box.”
Gupta seems to live in a constant fever-dream of home and family. He references the work of the filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Andrei Tarkovsky as examples of leaving home but being imprisoned by the memories you take with you. Imagine him as the mythical Atlas from another culture, another time, carrying the weight of the world. That’s how much the memories weigh. He knows the past is another country, more real perhaps than the country we inhabit in the present.