The Empire Strikes Back

The Saatchi Gallery's The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today exhibition was extremely well thought out. Although the exhibition had great variety, it also managed to maintain cohesiveness in the message it sought to convey. Much of the artwork delivered an opinion on the Indian polity, but the majority of pieces provided cultural commentary. The prominent cultural theme was a sense of "otherness", as paintings and sculptures metaphorically screamed out against the "Orientalist" school of thought.


Jitish Kallat's Public Notice 2 recalls the speech delivered by Gandhi on the eve of the Salt March to Dandi in protest against the British-imposed salt tax. The speech, calling for complete yet peaceful civil disobedience, is recreated using 4479 bone-shaped letters made out of fibreglass. Contained in a cavernous room displaying no other works of art, this installaton is commanding and powerful, yet also haunting. The scale and isolated state of the speech do well to emphasise its significance.


From a reasonable distance, Veil I, Veil II and Veil III appear to each show a burqa-cloaked figure. Yet upon closer inspection, you'll see each image consists of thousands of small, unfocused pornographic photos of women. Rashida Rana's art serves to oppose culturally constructed stereotypes of women. He successfully illusrates his disapproval of the sexual objectification of women and the perception of the burqa as a political symbol post-9/11 simultaneously.


Ajit Chauhan's ReRecord consists of 162 erased vinyl album covers. The marketing tool that is the album cover is effectively undermined by his alterations, and familiar portraits are rendered abstract. The artist's way of playing with our sense of perception is lighthearted, but certainly effective; it was slightly unsettling confusing Bruce Springstein with Michael Jackson in one particular instance!


The title of Tushar Joag's installation, The Enlightening Army Of The Empire, refers to the bureaucracy, which has provided continuity from British rule through to the post-independence era. The dishevelled robots are connected at the feet by tangled wires, which gives the impression of a disorganised union.




















Reena Saini Kallat's Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases) is a series of portraits of Indian and Pakistani civilians. On the face of each is a Kashmir-shaped blemish, and underneath each is a case containing an assortment of weaponry - a lament of the conflict in the region of Kashmir.






The precariously balancing chairs of Mansoor Ali's Dance of Democracy symbolise the instability of the Indian political system. Moreover, the fact that the structure appears to stay upright due to luck alone is telling of the artist's feelings about democracy in India.

"Sex + Technology = The Future"

Last Friday I went to see the CRASH exhibition at the Gagosian gallery. For those of you that haven't read Crash by J. G. Ballard, the novel is essentially about car-crash sexual fetishism. Protagonist Vaughan fantasises about dying as a result of a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.

"For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, in the complex geometries of a dented fender, in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver’s crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fallatio. The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilised forever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass”

The artistic homage to the novel by J. G. Ballard is a bizarre mixture of pieces from a diverse set of artists, including Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Lichtenstein and Warhol. What supposedly unites the former is their collective representation of one of the key messages Ballard conveys in his general body of work, and particularly effectively in Crash: “sex + technology = the future”. The juxtaposition of erotic imagery and art depicting the built environment certainly makes for an extraordinary experience. I’ll highlight my favourite works of art from the exhibition, and my personal understanding of each of them.


Wayward Nurse is one of Richard Prince's nurse paintings, inspired by the covers and titles of pulp romance novels. The artist scanned the covers of actual books, transferred the scans to canvases, and added his own personal touches with acrylic paint. With a few brush strokes here and there, Prince has transformed the covers by giving a mysterious quality to them. The nurse paintings have become incredibly popular; Sonic Youth was even inspired by Prince's work to name a song on their album Sonic Nurse after his painting Dude Ranch Nurse.



Cyprien Gaillard's View Over Sighthill Cemetery seems to contrast life and death; the cemetery in the forefront serves as a constant reminder of human loss to the inhabitants of the post-war block of flats. Conversely, the block symbolises rebirth; the land that contains the buried remains of human beings now also provides for the living, by serving as the base for their home.



Carsten Holler only created Giant Triple Mushroom this year. The sculpture comprises of three different types of mushroom that have 'crashed' into one another. One half is based on the fly-agaric mushroom, which is poisonous and psychoactive, while the remaining half is based on two mushrooms that are comparatively harmless. I find it interesting that the benign mushroom parts are attached to the bigger, malignant chunk of the mushroom (you would normally consider the cancerous element to be the smaller one, latching onto the main entity in question).




Paul McCarthy's Mechanical Pig. The slumbering creature is so impressive that if not for the visible mechanical and electronic gizmos on which it lies, you would think it was real. It even has a puckering sphincter - attention to detail if ever I saw it! If you like art that is both obscene and hilarious simultaneously, it's worth exploring some of McCarthy's other masterpieces as well (e.g. Santa Claus with a Buttplug!).