When I first met Sudarshan Shetty, in December, the sculptor and installation artist had a lot on his plate. His show Shoonya Ghar (Empty Is This House) was to open at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi on 15 January and then travel to the 20th Biennale of Sydney, which began on 18 March. In between trips to New Delhi and Australia, Mumbai-based Shetty, the curator and artistic director of the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, managed to attend the Marrakech Biennale, which also began in March.
The next time I met him was two months later. We sat in his two-storeyed studio in Chembur, where the artist explained nirgun poetry to me. His NGMA show Shoonya Ghar, steeped in this philosophy, had just ended. It included Shetty’s first feature-length film (also called Shoonya Ghar), a multi-channel video installation and large-scale architectural elements made of wood that resembled palatial ruins.
Nirgun poetry, which originated over 900 years ago, belongs to the Bhakti tradition, a strand within Hinduism that argued for a mystical, passionate and personal relationship with God instead of ritualistic idol worship. For Shetty, nirgun poetry is more than a vehicle of spiritual awakening; it marks a milestone in his artistic journey.
The first floor of his studio has a bookshelf with a set of ceramic and wooden vases from his 2014 show Every Broken Moment, Piece By Piece arranged neatly above it. A narrow balcony overlooks a leafy lane, and a well-equipped kitchen sends out batches of black tea regularly to his team, which is working on the logistics of the Kochi biennale. The second floor, where Shetty has his meetings, is stacked with boxes and older sculptures. With a five o’clock shadow, Shetty looked tired, but didn’t lose his train of thought even once.
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Art editors and critics have already declared 2016 the year of Sudarshan Shetty. Delhi’s cognoscenti attended the opening of his exhibition at the NGMA; Shetty has been commissioned to make a piece for the prestigious Rolls-Royce Art Programme; the film Shoonya Ghar, and a scaled down model of the architectural elements of the show, are being exhibited at the ongoing Sydney biennale that ends in June; and he is also in the process of finalizing the list of artists for the Kochi biennale—Chilean poet Raul Zurita is the first name to have been announced.
To be fair, the past decade and a half has been good for Shetty. He made his first sale during a 2003 exhibition, and his works have been acquired by reputed art institutions such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and private collectors like the UK’s Frank Cohen. The artist has exhibited at the Frieze Art Fair’s sculpture park in London and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. His installation Flying Bus, which came up at Mumbai’s tony Bandra Kurla Complex in 2012, was commissioned by real estate developer and art collector Manish Maker. It reportedly cost Rs.1 crore. A ballpark range for the artist’s sculptural installations is $20,000-200,000 (around Rs.13.3 lakh-1.33 crore) depending on size, scale and medium.
But the story of Indian contemporary art is not just one of high-profile exhibitions or iconic works that have fetched astronomical sums at auctions or otherwise. The story of Indian contemporary art is also a story of how artists have responded to, and articulated, the India of the past few decades. In Shetty’s case, this involved a search for a world view that was grounded in his own milieu, cultural expressions and history, rather than the Western history of art taught in most art schools. His interest in nirgun poetry reflects this.
“There is a difference between the way we are taught art and where we come from. I don’t want to create binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but how do you say it without saying ‘us’ and ‘them’?” Shetty tells me. His obvious discomfort with a monolithic Indian tradition is visible. In October, around the time Sahitya Akademi awardees and National Award winners were returning their awards in protest against the perceived stifling of dissent and intolerance towards cultural practitioners, a group of 350 artists released a statement asking that the right to “exert difference in life choices, including culture and religion, be ensured”. Shetty, a believer in multiplicity, was one of the signatories. Yet, the 54-year-old is hardly the sort who will take to the streets and create a work of art based on the day’s burning issue. His approach is more slow-burn.
Shetty’s journey then is as much about a changing India—liberalization, increased communal tension, the rise of religious fundamentalism, an art market that bloomed and burst, unapologetic urbanization—as it is about his search for his own artistic language.
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Shetty was born in 1961, the third of five children and the only son of Vasu and Jaji Shetty, who had migrated to Mumbai from a village on the outskirts of Mangaluru.Vasu was a renowned artiste of the yakshagana folk tradition, a theatrical form from Karnataka. He became fascinated with this art form as a teenager and watched every performance each time a yakshagana troupe visited. Vasu became an artiste of talamaddale (also known as koota or gathering), a variation of yakshagana in which artistes do not dance or wear costume and make-up, but act sitting alongside musicians. The artiste’s skill lies in explaining his character’s point of view. He does not simply render a character from an epic; he must become it so that he can argue his point with other actors.
Shubha Shetty, a Mumbai-based journalist and the youngest of his five children, recalls the surprise she felt when she saw many people attend her father’s funeral in 2003. “I didn’t know he was that well-known,” she says.
Vasu migrated to Mumbai along with several young men from the Bunt community—many opened Udupi restaurants—before independence. He tried his hand at several things (a tailoring unit, a restaurant), but it was his art, not business, that flourished. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any money in that. When the time came for his son to choose a profession, Vasu was clear—he couldn’t afford to not make money.
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Atul Dodiya, an internationally renowned 57-year-old artist based in Mumbai, was Shetty’s senior in art school. They both lived in the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar and would often meet after dinner at the municipal hydraulic pipeline, an old landmark. They would share a cigarette and talk till the sky turned starlit. “We would convert everything into a laugh,” says Dodiya. This was in the early 1980s, and Shetty, then in his early 20s, was leading a dual life. He had enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in commerce at his father’s insistence. In the third year, he also enrolled himself at the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai’s coveted seat of art education. Those were heady times for Shetty, who initially didn’t tell his parents he was studying art. “He went without lunch for years, because he would use up his money to travel,” Shubha says. The artist was hungry for other things.
At the JJ School, Shetty would read about the modernists in the West. He was particularly influenced by the 1960s artist Robert Rauschenberg, who was known for his “combines”—simply put, found objects on canvases. Shetty began to make similar works and in 1983, at a student exhibition curated by his professor, Prabhakar Kolte, and held at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Shetty exhibited the combines. This was also the time when he developed an interest in Hindustani classical music (he had grown up listening to Carnatic classical music at home) and, in particular, Kumar Gandharva, who sang the nirgun poetry of Bhakti poet-saints Kabir and Gorakhnath.
Shetty describes Dodiya as one of his early gurus. Dodiya introduced him to the world of Gujarati poetry, and the duo shared a love for cinema. They were members of Amrit Gangar’s Screen Unit, a film club that introduced film appreciation to cinema lovers. Every Sunday at 9am, they would watch the works of masters such as Robert Bresson, Akira Kurosawa and Ritwik Ghatak. “It opened up the world for me,” says Shetty.
This search for a way of looking at things is integral to any artist’s journey, and Shetty is loath to define the choices that confronted him as a set of binaries. This is evident in his latest show, Shoonya Ghar, which juxtaposes opposites in a manner borrowed from the lexicon of nirgun poetry in which opposing ideas are posited in a doha (couplet) to make a larger, composite point that is, ultimately, mutually inclusive of the polarities.
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The JJ School, with its bias towards abstract art (Mark Rothko was a favourite at the time) gave rise to a lot of confused artists, says sculptor Ravinder Reddy, who was one of the first guides at the Kanoria Centre for Arts that opened in 1984 at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University campus in Ahmedabad. The Kanoria Centre was meant to be a space where freshly minted art graduates could live and develop their own idiom.
“Initially, Sudarshan painted, but he was unhappy. Then he started painting on wooden surfaces that he would sculpt on, like wooden relief work, but he was not sure where he was heading. But you could see that he was desperate to find his way,” Reddy recalls.
For Shetty, this was another phase of learning. He taught a part-time course in drawing at the National Institute of Design and made friends with the architects studying at CEPT. He also engaged with other artists there, including printmaker Walter D’Souza.
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Riyas Komu, one of the two co-founders of the Kochi biennale and also director of programmes, says that among the many reasons Shetty was chosen to curate the forthcoming biennale, his excellent multitasking was an important one.
This has been true of the artist even during his hardest times— such as in the aftermath of his breakthrough solo exhibition, Paper Moon, in 1995, when he was moonlighting as an assistant director on a television show and working with a designer friend on making logos. He continued to make and exhibit art. Some of these works were shown at Consanguinity, a 2003 solo exhibition organized by Nature Morte and Bose Pacia Modern in New Delhi. “For the first time, I sold works in an exhibition. Three pieces,” says Shetty. Art collector Anupam Poddar bought one. By this time, the Indian contemporary art market was beginning to burgeon, and Shetty’s reputation as “his generation’s most innovative conceptual artist”, as anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao put it, was being recognized.
Even before his 2006 Mumbai exhibition Love, which became famous for the installation of a skeletal stainless-steel dinosaur having sex with a car, previous exhibitions such as Home (1998), For Here Or To Go (2002)—some of which formed part of the permanent collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan—and Party Is Elsewhere (2005) had already showcased deep artistic engagement and technical prowess. The exhibitions that followed Paper Moon included do-it-yourself mechanics, where the pumps, pulleys and hydraulic systems that were devised by Shetty and animated the installations were not hidden.
His gallerist, Sunitha Kumar Emmart, points out that the older Shetty has become, the more open he is to taking risks. Some of his later works are qualitatively different from those that brought him success earlier. For instance, in 2005, after Consanguinity, he collaborated with architects Shantanu Poredi and Manisha Agarwal on Shift, a set of computer drawings on which he used watercolours and pencil.
Emmart, owner of GallerySKE, recalls the first time she saw Shetty’s works. She was a student in Mumbai. “I walked into the exhibition Paper Moon and thought, ‘I have never seen anything like this before’,” says Emmart, who opened her gallery in Bengaluru in 2003 and started a branch in Delhi in 2013.
Since 2005, Emmart has shown Shetty’s works, not just in her galleries, but also in collaboration with other galleries and at international art fairs.
“Nothing is random. It’s not like he just had an idea and went and batted it out. This NGMA show joins a lot of dots of his preoccupation over time,” she says. We’re sitting inside her Delhi gallery, where a poster of Shoonya Ghar hangs on the wall of her office. “His interests, from music to cinema to performance, come together in this work. His isn’t an anti-Western discourse, but a parallel discourse that acknowledges that we come from something else and it is difficult to either articulate this or defend this in light of what is Western art history and thought and ideas,” says Emmart.
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“If you look at the idea of the doha, the proposition or image presented by the first line is followed by a seemingly counter-image in the second line. You cannot really deconstruct it. The two lines have to remain together to be able to say something more than those two images. This opens up a cosmos of meaning, and you can take away what meaning you want to,” Shetty says.
Shoonya Ghad (Empty Fort) is a poem written by 12th century-poet Gorakhnath, who was known for the simplicity and depth of his poems, which preached humanism and a love for God that soared above religious divide. There is a YouTube video of Hindustani classical doyen Kumar Gandharva singing this song.
The installations in Shoonya Ghar resemble grand ruins, but inside one of them is a poor man’s room. The film shows the making of these wooden structures, even as it depicts the story of a family mourning the death of an elder. At one point in the film, workers are shown assembling the installation and a full-length mirror catches the reflection of an assistant director checking her mobile phone. These seemingly opposite images don’t cancel each other out, but co-exist and create a whole new set of meanings that bounce off and amplify each other like reflections in a chamber of mirrors.
Indeed, one could look at Shetty’s art to answer some of the burning questions that contemporary India faces: What does it mean to be Indian? Is there a way for seemingly polar opposites to co-exist? And, most importantly, what is the price that we pay when we forget the philosophy of humanism and love propounded by poets and saints who lived several centuries before us?
FINE IMPRINT
Five memorable works by the artist:
u PAPER MOON, 1995
The installation of a horse balanced on a boat with a house on its back is one of the most enduring works of Sudarshan Shetty’s breakthrough show, ‘Paper Moon’, held 10 years after he graduated from the Sir JJ School of Art. It was nothing like what Shetty had done before; it signalled the artist’s move towards sculpture and object assemblages that was to later become one of his idioms. However, Shetty was unable to sell even a single piece, and many works were destroyed because of a lack of storage space. This one survived and was bought by an Indian art collector at a Sotheby’s auction in New York some time ago.
u CONSANGUINITY, 2003
Shetty has fond memories of this show—it was the first one in which he managed to sell anything, he says. One piece depicted scissors snapping open and shut inside a bathtub. It was bought by an Indian art collector and has a certain playfulness on edge. Consanguinity means blood relations, and this piece gives the title of the show a whole new spin.
u LOVE, 2006
The installation from this show of a dinosaur having sex with a car could well be the iconic piece Shetty will be remembered for. The show came at a time when the contemporary art market in India was booming, but installation art didn’t particularly have a thriving buyer base. What’s more, this piece was large. The dinosaur, made of stainless steel, was 5m long and over 2m tall. The car placed in front of it was over 4m long. Yet this piece was bought by an art collector and is iconic in Shetty’s oeuvre, which had begun to incorporate fluidity and mechanics.
u THE FLYING BUS, 2012
Commissioned by Manish Maker for Maker Maxity in Mumbai’s tony Bandra-Kurla Complex, ‘The Flying Bus’ is Shetty’s paean to the city he has grown up in. A double-decker bus, once a common sight on Mumbai’s roads, has been given stainless-steel wings. A plaque nearby states: “Sometimes when we travel we forget who we are.” The installation took 248 days to make and, including its cantilevered wings, weighs 9,000kg.
u THE PIECES EARTH TOOK AWAY, 2012
For his latest show, Shetty has made a feature-length film that reflects on memory, repetition, loss and death. Some of these concerns are also visible in the nearly 16-minute video work he did for his 2012 show, ‘The Pieces Earth Took Away’. The show took as its starting point the image of a man holding an earthen pot and throwing it above his shoulder, mimicking a ritual of Hindu death rites. This video, however, overlays several attempts by this man to juggle earthen pots and keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat (watch the video at Vimeo.com/69462038).
Shoonya Ghar, the film, will be screened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a venue of the Biennale of Sydney, till 5 June.
