Blade runner

Shetty is not the type to throw a lavish party and celebrate. He would rather get back to work given he has another project in hand—a solo at Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad,the oldest museum situated in the Byculla botanical gardens,slotted for the moth of August. In between his two mammoth solos,he collaborated with Louis Vuitton for an installation titled House of Shades at the Milan Fashion Week this February. He was also one of the artists at the prestigious group exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum,curated by Nancy Spector this April.

“I am most excited about being part of a show conceived by Nancy,since she is one of the most critically acclaimed curators,” says Shetty. His three-day-old stubble and baritone drawl give him the airs of an old Bollywood star. But this J J School alumnus has moved beyond painting the film-inspired hoardings that marked his struggling days as a student. Instead he prefers mounting monumental installations that involve working with wood carvers from Bengal,carpenters from Mumbai’s Grand Road or designers from Bangalore.

Shetty’s studio—that has shifted from working-class Chinchpokli to suburban Chembur—is a hive of activity. One is likely to trip over a half-constructed boat,an inflatable airplane or a blood-spewing tuba if one is not careful. Sitting at his computer,Shetty orchestrates this theatre of the absurd—the message ranges from the sombre to the playful. “People think I am obsessed with death,but that is a simplistic translation of my work. One of my concerns is about how the objects that we surround ourselves with come to represent our own sense of mortality,” says the artist,who was born in Mangalore.

Puzzled? Shetty elaborates,“If you buy a bar of soap,you really are buying the promise of youth and not the function of getting clean. When we finally realise that the soap is not really going to make us any younger,there is a gap between that promise and the function. I like to explore that gap. It is the negotiation of the market that plays itself out in my work.”

Thankfully,Shetty is not the kind to sermonise about the evil of capitalism or simplify the argument on ‘big bad’ consumer goods; what he prefers is a gentle lunge-and-parry with the forces that propel our world. “The marketplace is a ground for negotiation with our perception of the world. I find it interesting how the complicated understanding of the biological heart is tweaked into a simplified Valentine’s heart that has come to stand in for something as profound and intangible as love…” says Shetty with a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

His take on love? A love letter written in Braille,a dinosaur copulating with a vintage car and the metal carcasses of two water buffalos mating—definitely not Archie’s card material. These works were part of his 2006 solo at the Bodhi Art Gallery in Mumbai called Love.
“I am not really taking a political stand here,instead I am examining these negotiations,I like to take things apart and see how they work,” he says.

That would explain why most of his practice involves disemboweling old machines like the obsolete Braille typing machine or the skeleton of the dog propped on stilts and crowned with the trophy horns of a dead bison for the more recent exhibition at the Jack Tilton. “In this work,I explore the concept of entertainment,how after the show is over,after the game is hunted and killed,it becomes redundant and static. I feel that about my artwork too,yet there is a compulsion to create and that is what keeps the world going,” says Shetty. Perhaps that explains why this has been such a busy year for Shetty.