World Art Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2011, 197 214 Visual essay
Indian to international: stainless steel’s impact on the success of Subodh Gupta Allie Biswas* This essay examines the success of contemporary Indian artist Subodh Gupta, exploring how his international acclaim has been based on the use of stainless steel in his work. Whilst form and material in Gupta’s sculptures and installations have been explored, I ground stainless steel within a clearer post-colonial setting and relate this specific narrative to the artist’s usage of the material, thereby raising new questions about the relevance of stainless steel in Gupta’s oeuvre/career. Keywords: Subodh Gupta; Indian; international; stainless steel; utensils; post-colonial; success
Line of Control (2008, Figure 1) is a work by the artist Subodh Gupta. It is perhaps his best known work. The installation formed the centrepiece of the fourth Tate Triennial, Altermodern, which took place at Tate Britain, London, in spring 2009. Made entirely out of hundreds of stainless steel kitchen utensils soldered together, Line of Control ascended over 100 metres from the floor to the ceiling of the central exhibition space, the historic Duveen Gallery. What resulted was a formidable mushroom-cloud structure. The sense of scale was intensified by the work’s composition: the highest and most substantial section of the installation, densely compressed with the greater proportion of stainless steel objects, was held up by the middle component the part of the configuration that looked the least robust. Not only, then, was Line of Control imposing due to its size, but also because of the way in which its weight was distributed, as though the work was made out of parts that looked as if they were merely balancing on top of one another and might, at any moment, collapse. It was, perhaps, this precariousness that inflated the work’s theatrical dimensions. The monumentality, however, was not only generated by size and composition, but also by its materiality. The smooth, untarnished stainless steel objects diffused light, a contrast with the *Email: biswas.allie@gmail.com ISSN 2150-0894 print/ISSN 2150-0908 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2011.602710 http://www.tandfonline.com