'Indian to International: stainless steel's impact on Subodh Gupta' - World Art - vol 1, no 2

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

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Figure 1. Line of Control, 2008, stainless steel and steel structure, stainless steel utensils 1000 1000 1000 cm # Subodh Gupta. Courtesy the artist, Arario Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

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Figure 2. God Hungry, 2006, stainless steel utensils, dimensions variable. E´ glise de Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, France. # Subodh Gupta.

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compact solidity of the vessels themselves, creating not only an awareness of the installation’s materials but a further amplification of its vastness. Although the shape of each utensil, whether a plate, saucepan or bowl, was unelaborate, the overall effect was highly flamboyant, the installation’s natural glint exaggerated by carefully positioned lights.

Understanding Gupta’s work in terms of its materiality is, I suggest in this essay, central to an understanding of Gupta as an international artist and helps us to account for his reception by the contemporary art world and his significant place within it. I explore why the artist’s trademark material signalled such success, principally enacted in international contexts, and has cemented his reputation. Also, whilst there has been analysis of his use of material and form, I would like to reclaim a post-colonial context for his work, grounding Gupta’s use of stainless steel within a specific narrative of the Indian nation.

Gupta was born in 1964 in a village in the state of Bihar, in the east of India, and trained in Patna at the College of Arts & Crafts. He is now based in Delhi where he has been working since 1990. Gupta is part of a group of artists originating from India who have become critically acknowledged and have exhibited internationally in the last decade. Some have, like Gupta, gained representation with leading European galleries, such as Jitish Kallat, or exhibited substantially at prominent institutions, such as Raqs Media Collective.1 Many of these artists cross genres by working in a variety of media. This is the case with Gupta, who makes installations, sculptures, paintings, video art, as well as performance works. He has, however, become renowned for works such as Line of Control which are formed entirely of stainless steel utensils, and it is these sculptures and installations (Figure 2 and Figure 3) which catapulted him into the global arena in a way that his peers have not been able to do.

1. Early works Gupta has not always based his work on the stainless steel utensil. The artist’s early works, made in the mid to late 1990s, used a particular artistic vocabulary, concerned with material rich in reference to the natural world and specifically alluding to his background. The materials used in works such as Bihari (Figure 4) and My Mother and Me (Figure 5) are completely removed, formally and compositionally, from the manmade objects which dominate later works. Bihari, a self-portrait where the artist focuses on the fashioning of personal identity, depicts Gupta’s head emerging from a background made of smeared cow dung. The

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Figure 3. Five Offerings for the Greedy Gods, 2006 2008, stainless steel utensils, dimensions variable. Arario Gallery, Beijing; Galleria Continua, San Gimigano. # Subodh Gupta.

pure, unrefined nature of the material is emphasised by the way Gupta has coarsely applied it; the artist’s hand is clearly visible, making this approach stand somewhat in opposition to the impersonal nature of the factory-made metal objects used in later works. This is also underlined by the hand-made paper on which the painting has been composed.

During this period the artist also made My Mother and Me (Figure 5), a structure comprised of cow-dung pats, which was installed in India over 14 days; a video work entitled Pure (1999, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, London), which involved the artist covering himself in cow dung, exploring meanings attached to this ‘sacred’ material in Hinduism; this was also the theme in the performance work Untitled (1999), Khoj International Artist’s Association, India) in which the artist lay, unclothed, covered by the ground.

Critical acclaim These works from the early stages of Gupta’s career were exhibited in arts institutions in India and Japan, and whilst they are now recognised

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Figure 4. Bihari, 1999, handmade paper, acrylic, cow dung in PVA solution, LED lights with timer and transformer, 127 x 96 x 8cm. Private Collection, Japan. # Subodh Gupta.

as critical to Gupta’s oeuvre (signalling his artistic transition, if nothing else), works such as Line of Control (Figure 1) and 5 Offerings for the Greedy Gods (Figure 3) are those which made Gupta renowned in Europe and America, and consequently within the art world at large.

The artist has been participating in the international exhibition circuit for just over a decade now, but it is only in the last five years, due to European and American interest, that he has become recognised worldwide. He is now arguably the most successful Indian artist working today, as I outline below. Critics writing about Gupta always tend to stress his importance within the art world and how successful he is, assessed by his participation in numerous international group and solo exhibitions and the rising price of his work at auction. For the first time, in 2008, Gupta featured in ArtReview’s annual ‘Power 100’ list, which details the art world’s most important figures, entering at number 85; the art magazine Frieze has described Gupta as a ‘superstar artist’ (O’Toole 2009, 36) and, in February 2011, Gupta was invited to contribute to Absolut Vodka’s art collection. The prominent drinks

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Figure 5. My Mother and Me, 1997, cow dung cakes and ash, 368 x 368 x 368cm. # Subodh Gupta.

brand has collaborated with artists over the last 30 years, including Andy Warhol and Louise Bourgeois; Gupta was the first Indian visual artist to be asked to participate. The result was a 4-foot version of the well-known Absolut bottle crammed with stainless steel utensils (Figure 6).

Whilst Gupta is necessarily aligned with his contemporaries, he is the only Indian artist who has been termed as an international, rather than as an emphatically Indian, artist. This has transpired largely in two ways: beginning in November 2008 Gupta was the first Indian artist to be sold not only within the South Asian Art sales at Christie’s, but also in the Post War & Contemporary Art sales, alongside European and American artists.2 Even today there are only two other Indian artists, apart from Gupta, to whom this situation also applies.3 The artist was also included within the Contemporary Art sale held by Sotheby’s in New York in May

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Figure 6. Absolut Subodh Gupta, 2011. # Absolut Vodka.

2008, and in this sale Gupta was the only Indian artist to feature; other names included Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter.

Secondly, and perhaps of more impact in relation to Gupta’s reception, many contemporary Indian artists have gained exposure by being

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placed within their (Indian) peer group and exhibited accordingly; prominent group shows to have been curated in this manner include ‘Indian Summer’, E´ cole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2005); ‘Indian Highway’, Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); and, most recently, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010).

Gupta, however, has primarily succeeded in gaining attention by existing outside of this system. Significantly, he was one of the first contemporary Indian artists to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, participating in ‘Always a Little Further’ (2005) the international exhibition staged in the Arsenale that shows artists who are not represented by the permanent national pavilions. In this show he was the only Indian artist to be invited to exhibit. That Line of Control was exhibited within a major exhibition at Tate Britain indicates the prestige attached to Gupta in the contemporary art world and market. The prices of Gupta’s works have, from 2005 2008, increased 52 times within the international auction-house circuit (Kilachand 2008) and, since the end of 2008, Gupta has been represented by Hauser & Wirth, a highly revered and high-profile European gallery with branches worldwide. The inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s Zurich space, which opened in September 2010, was, in fact, a show of Gupta’s work, consisting of both old and new sculptures and paintings. Gupta has secured 23 solo exhibitions around the world since 2004, as well as numerous group showings which have ranged from surveys on contemporary Indian art to exhibitions that have specifically not used concepts of nationality as a curatorial foundation, such as ‘Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).

The year 1997 can now be considered a seminal year in Gupta’s career as it marks his transition into the international arena. That year the artist took up an international residency at the Gasworks Gallery in London which enabled him to further his ideas about his background, and resulted in works aesthetically similar to My Mother and Me (Figure 5) in the way that they comprised of organic materials native to India, such as kum-kum powder and turmeric, and were informed by his spiritual experiences of tradition ‘past and present . . . touching myths, rituals, personal and abstract aspects of my everyday life’ (Gasworks Gallery 1997, 38). After this residency, Gupta began to be noticed in New York, exhibiting in the group show ‘Points of Contact’ at the Shirley Fiterman Gallery, obtaining another residency at the Triangle Artists’ Workshop and, finally, winning the Bose Pacia Gallery’s Emerging Artist Award which culminated in a solo exhibition. Although Gupta was now

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exhibiting internationally, continuing to participate in programmes worldwide, such as the ‘Negotiations’ exhibition in Se`te, France (2000) and ‘Post Production’ in San Gimignano, Italy (2001), it was only in 2002 that he started to gain recognition and attention from prominent art dealers and galleries, but had yet to find an audience in India. Gupta is intensely aware of this irony: ‘Art is a long journey,’ he said in 2008. ‘So I’ve been working for 8 10 years almost for European galleries and at that time nobody in India knew about it’ (Kilachand 2008, p. 33). The works that first gained the West’s attention (and then, consequently, India’s approval) were the stainless steel sculptures and installations that Gupta started making in the early 2000s. Gupta’s installation The Way Home (II) (Figure 9) is important precisely because of its introduction of stainless steel, and works such as Curry (Figure 7), and then Line of Control (Figure 1), develop the handling and usage of this particular material even more, so that it ultimately dominates the entire sculpture or installation. Robert Huber, a distinguished art dealer from Switzerland whose gallery, Art & Public, in Geneva represents some of the most critically acclaimed minimalist and conceptual artists in the Western canon, including Sol Le Witt and Sigmar Polke, came across Gupta’s work in the late 1990s and then invited the artist to display an installation at the Armory Show, New York in 2002. When asked about Gupta’s work, Huber has commented that he ‘spied in them something different something I had seen in American and Chinese artists much before either contingent became appealing to European collectors’ (Kilachand 2008). This possibly suggests that the ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ of the works was obscured and had to be

Figure 7. Curry, 2006, five stainless steel cabinets and stainless steel utensils, 360 x 279cm. Europe, Private Collection. # Subodh Gupta.

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subtly interpreted (‘spied’) by a (Western) connoisseur. The stainless steel works therefore possess a certain quality that Huber recognised as having a particular appeal to put it crudely, the quality Huber saw in them was marketability to the West. It was only after Huber had strategically placed the artist’s work in a series of exhibitions, including the group show ‘This Side is the Other Side’ at his own gallery in 2002 and then the Havana Biennale in 2003, that Gupta’s status in the art world became more substantial.4 It was at the Frieze Art Fair, London in 2005 (represented by Art & Public) that Gupta shifted from existing within an international periphery to becoming established on the international main stage.

On this occasion, a critic from The Art Newspaper declared (with bold reference to the materiality of the works) ‘in a metallic flash everything changed’ (cited in Harris 2009). Given this giant leap a transition that surprised even Huber, who said ‘We’re not used to an artist in Europe going from nothing to what happened with Subodh’. What is imperative to examine are the works that allowed Gupta to gain entrance to such an exclusive arena; particularly so for a non-Western artist. The artist exhibited 10 works at Frieze and they were all medium-scale sculptures made entirely of stainless steel utensils. Works shown included Curry (Figure 7) and Thing (2005) a variation on Pink Chimta (Figure 8).

Certain key works dominated the space: apart from the stainless steel bucket, Untitled 3 (Bucket), which measured over two metres in height, a series of three works entitled Feast for Hundred and Eight Gods were the most significant, similar to Line of Control (Figure 1) in how intensely precarious they are in aesthetic. A carefully constructed mound of goblets and stackable, miniature tiffin box containers (‘the kind in which 90 percent of India carries its lunch’5), each work gives the impression that it might collapse into a less organised heap on the floor at any moment. Contained both neatly and haphazardly within a stainless steel round tray acting as a foundation, Feast for Hundred and Eight Gods preempted the (much) larger-scale works that Gupta went on to create, such as Five Offerings for the Greedy Gods (Figure 3), using the same structural tendencies and the same materials. It could therefore be concluded that it is Gupta’s stainless steel works that have ultimately garnered success for him, whether in terms of exhibitions, high profile collectors or auction prices.

It would seem that these works, and not earlier works in Gupta’s oeuvre, allowed the artist to participate in a different sphere6 the upper tiers, as it were, of the art world. The issue of ‘Indianness’ consequently comes to the fore.

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Figure 8. Pink Chimta, 2008, steel structure, plastic and stainless steel pincers, 218 x 228 x 58cm. Private Collection, USA. # Subodh Gupta.

Indianness The sculpture Curry (2006; Figure 7) is a work that perhaps demonstrates most strongly how slippery the notion of ‘Indianness’ can be in Gupta’s work. Consisting of five identical hollow stainless-steel

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cabinets positioned in a row on the wall, lined up immaculately with appliances from the Indian kitchen, Curry depicts a diametrically opposed image to the one that is usually conjured up when thinking about the national dish of India. Gupta deliberately subverts a stereotypical emblem and, in the process, edifies it. Instead of presenting content, the actual stuff itself a combination of colours and textures formed in an inelegant heap on a plate Gupta’s work offers a new possibility of (national) representation. The allusions we have about this dish an essentially common food (balti cuisine), unrefined due to its simplicity and availability, commodified (curry sauce) and cheap (take-away) are upturned. The stark simplicity of each cabinet produces a clinical, ‘clean’ effect which the meticulous arrangement of the utensils mirrors. Instead of invoking in more obvious ways the vibrancy we conventionally associate with Indian curry, Gupta presents us with the complete opposite. In doing so, the artist elevates the status of an Indian emblem, transforming it into something that is now presented as stylish and complex, indicated by the range of devices that are required to produce and complete the meal certainly a contrast to the single jar bought in the Western supermarket. What is most significant about this work is that all of the comments I have made about it stem essentially from its title, Curry.

Using that as a basis has allowed for it to be read in terms of its ‘Indianness’. If one was to look at this sculpture, without being aware of its title, it is quite likely that one would not associate it with an Indian kitchen. Even if the utensils are recognised as originating from India, due to the composition of the work and its monotonous aesthetic, comprising of geometric lines in repetition, this work could be representative of any kitchen worldwide. It is this lack of clarity that makes it a complicated work to define in terms of its ‘Indianness’.

Commenting on Curry, Gupta confronted this paradox head-on: ‘It’s straight out of any Indian kitchen, but it’s still universal’ (The Telegraph 2007, 12). Another sculpture entitled Pink Chimta (Figure 8) inhabits the same space as Curry in terms of its resistance to being interpreted as an emphatically ‘Indian’ work. Distinct from Gupta’s other work, particularly those made of stainless steel utensils, the work’s colour could be identified as being a particularly Indian visual trope due to its vivid pink hue. Bright pigments are often associated with religious (Hindu) ceremonies and are an image that we have come to relate to Indian life, particularly quotidian culture.7 This sculpture is displayed on a wall and consists entirely of the chimta (a long, thin, flat piece of folded stainless steel used as tongs

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when cooking chapati bread). It is as common in India as any of the other steel utensils found in Gupta’s other works. Had they not been painted pink, these tongs may have been recognisable as instruments from the kitchen, but Gupta’s addition to this basic utensil transforms it into an object that seems unrelated both aesthetically and functionally to the original. The image of the chimta changes from a flat and relatively insignificant object, to its opposite: a large bulbous object, as voluminous as it is rotund. The sparseness of each individual tong is emphasised by being situated next to many more and, combined together, the overall effect changes from austerity to sensuality. From a distance, in fact, Pink Chimta gives the impression that it is soft to touch, akin to a giant ball of tinsel. The utilitarian nature of this Indian utensil is replaced by something that is distinctly un-usable.

Stainless steel a material history Stainless steel has a very particular and important relationship with India. After cutting all colonial ties from the British Empire, Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister and ‘architect’ of independent India, set about structuring a new nation (Sinha, Sinha, and Shekhar 2004).

A significant part of his proposals involved state planning and economic management, and Nehru’s first Five Year Plan in 1951 mapped out the government’s commitment to investing in business, taking control of industries such as mining and electricity. Along with this, India’s new government initiated projects to enhance structural systems, building dams and canals. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 (a modification of the earlier plan from 1948) promoted new industrial policies, encouraging the growth of diverse manufacturing and heavy industries. Industries were categorised into three groups, in order of how close the relationship would be between industry and state. The first category, within which steel was situated, grouped industries under the exclusive responsibility of the state. The role and status of steel in this period were therefore of great significance, playing a crucial part in the formation of a planned industry in a now ‘sovereign democratic republic’ (Sinha, Sinha, and Shekhar 2004, chapter 5, p. 83.). Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay has encouraged comparison between the importance of stainless steel in post-imperial India and the use of aluminium by Futurist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.8 Declaring a reverence for all things new technology, industry, high-speed travel futurist artists advocated the use of metal bolts to transform men into machines; for them, such

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values were epitomised in the recent invention of aluminium. Whilst the purpose of stainless steel in both 1950s India and Gupta’s work may not be as sensational, the contextual and political significance of both metallic materials is certainly equal in terms of their marking of newness, manufacturing and mass production. Stainless steel, then, becomes a definitive marker of modernity of India’s modernity a sign of a newly industrialised state having arrived. In negotiating modernity, India creates a substance that becomes the signature for a new mass culture. Gupta’s use of this material consequently enables a denigration of tradition and a likening with the project of India as a modern state: a move away from the rural and unsophisticated; a rejection of the non-industrial; and a development from Bihari through to Line of Control. By doing this, the artist presupposes his location in India’s artistic history.

However, it is not merely materiality that is of concern here but, very particularly, objecthood. And the specificity of the forms employed only emphasises the political and historical significations.

Gupta could have utilised tubes or columns of stainless steel, or moulded the material to create new shapes on which to base his sculptures. Instead, he has taken traditional objects that already reverberate with meaning. In their original Indian context, these utensils are associated with domestic and religious realms, used in the kitchen or to carry out parts of a Hindu ceremony. They are essentially mundane viewed as a marker of the vernacular; signifying the cheap and mass-produced. Yet, as Curry and Pink Chimta demonstrate, Gupta does something very specific with these forms he takes a traditional object and then estranges it. The concept of de´ tournement, created by the Situationist International movement (1957 1972), is helpful here. De´ tournement to divert or distort; in essence, to turn something aside from its normal course or purpose applies to the way in which the stainless steel utensil can be viewed in Gupta’s work, as the main impact of de´ tournement relates to a different scope emerging from a new context, whilst corresponding directly to the conscious or semi-conscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.9 Gupta’s work is inherently difficult to define, despite the powerful and immediate impact of his gleaming and often immense sculptures. They are ‘hybrids’, in the sense of the discourses of post-coloniality. Whilst Annie E. Coombes and Avtar Brah have noted the difficulties in the use of this term, in that it has acquired the status of a common-sense word both within and outside of academia, these writers have also shown that critical readings, which

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take into consideration the social, cultural and political practices within which it is embedded at any given time, can reward us with more nuanced accounts of post-colonial culture (Brah and Coombes 2000).

Hybridity can be a positive sign of the emergence of new cultural forms which have derived from what could be seen as shared ‘borrowings’ and exchanges across national ethnic boundaries (Brah and Coombes 2000). Gupta’s ability to take an Indian object and renew it, whether by doing something to the object itself (Pink Chimta; Figure 8) or by manipulating its meaning (Curry; Figure 7), is not simply a case of Gupta producing art that is formally Western from objects that are Indian, but rather that the merging of the two produces something new. Gupta’s utilisation of the stainless-steel utensil ultimately signifies a crossing of national boundaries and suggests new ways of not only looking at and thinking about a familiar object but also questioning its place within Indian history past and present.

Figure 9. The Way Home (II), 2001, Fiberglass, stainless steel utensils, aluminum, chrome and sun film, variable dimension, London, Hauser & Wirth Gallery. # Subodh Gupta.

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Acknowledgements Thank you Dan Rycroft, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Alice Sanger, Robert Maniura and Patrizia di Bell0.

Notes 1. Solo exhibitions include: The Wherehouse, Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2004); The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1, Museum of Communication, Frankfurt (2006); Oracle and Heirophants, Ikon, Birmingham (2009); and Lightbox, Tate Britain, London (2009).

2. At this time, the only other South Asian artist who this situation applied to is the Pakistani artist Rashid Rana. Information obtained from Farah Rahim Ismail, Specialist of Contemporary South Asian Art at Christie’s, London, during a telephone conversation, July 2009.

3. Jitish Kallat and Bharti Kher are now also sold in both categories at Christie’s.

4. It was Huber who obtained representation for Gupta from the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, which culminated in Gupta’s first solo exhibition in America, in 2008.

5. Quote by Subodh Gupta in Mooney (2007, 54).

6. To date, Gupta’s highest-selling work has been the sculpture Untitled (2007): a circular stainless steel tray measuring just over two metres, containing a range of stainless steel tiffin utensils, which sold for £601, 250 at Christie’s in London, June 2008. The artist’s lowest-selling work is Untitled (Cotton Wicks) (1997) a wooden box containing cotton wicks often used in Hindu ceremonies which was sold for £15,000 in the same lot at Christie’s in June 2008.

7. Diana Vreeland’s comment ‘Pink it’s the navy blue of India’ is still quoted today and sums up the colourful nature of Indian life (particularly on the street) whether literal or otherwise. See Donovan (1962, 30). Gallery owner and art critic Peter Nagy has written on contemporary Indian culture: ‘By simply walking down the street, by visiting bustling markets and houses of worship, one encounters constructions, assemblages and actions which, to western eyes completely unaccustomed to such things, resemble nothing other than a wide variety of experimental art forms produced in the West during the past fifty years’ (Nagy 2002).

8. During conversation, January 2010.

9. See Debord (1994) and Knabb (2006).

Notes on Contributor Allie Biswas holds a BA in English Literature (King’s College London) and an MA in History of Art (Birkbeck College). Her research interests include contemporary Indian art and interdisciplinarity in twentieth century art, particularly in relation to sensory perception and the environment. She works in the Research Department at Tate Britain, London, and recently undertook the Fall Internship Program at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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References Brah, Avtar, and Annie Coombes. 2000. Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture. London: Routledge.

Debord, Guy. 1994. Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere. In The Society of Spectacle, trans. David Nicholson-Smith, pp. 129 48. New York: Zone Books.

Donovan, C. 1962. Diana Vreeland, Dynamic Fashion Figure, joins Vogue. New York Times, March 28.

Gasworks Gallery. 1997. Gasworks Exhibitions: 1996 1997. London: Gasworks Press.

Harris, Gareth. 2009. Indian Art’s Bumpy Ride in the Market. Financial Times, August 29, Editorial. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67decb86-9362-11de-b14600144feabdc0.html (accessed September 6, 2009).

Kilachand, Tara. 2008. The Economics of Being Subodh Gupta. Livemint, September 6. http://www.livemint.com/2008/09/05235028/The-economicsof-being-Subodh.html (accessed April 26, 2011).

Knabb, Ken. 2006. The Situationist International Anthology. California: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Mooney, C. 2007. The Idol Thief. Art Review, December, p. 54.

Nagy, Peter. 2002. Delicate acts of Balance. In The Tree from the Seed: Contemporary Art from India. Oslo: Henie Onstad Kuntsenter. p. 33 O’Toole, Sean. 2009. Where in the World. Frieze, issue 120, January February, p. 36.

Sinha, P.R.N., Indu Bala Sinha, and Seema Priyadarshini Shekhar. 2004. Trade Union Movement in India 1950 Onwards. In Industrial Relations: Trade Unions, and Labour Legislation, pp. 83 102. Delhi: Pearson Education.

The Telegraph, 2007. Editorial, August 19, p.12.