The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Atul Dodiya is a central figure in recent Indian art. He draws on politics, art history, folklore and myth, as well as Indian and North American popular culture by deploying a range of images, icons and appropriations of both global and personal relevance in his work. His famed series of paintings on roller shutters, evoking the doors of small Mumbai shopfronts, features Hindu gods, figures from South Asian history and Bollywood villains, together with references to Euro–American art masterpieces. In addition to these paintings, Dodiya produces assemblages comprising vitrines filled with a host of objects, images and appropriated art works, inviting material connections and provocative recontextualisations. Dodiya’s cabinet assemblages came about after 1997, following his visit to the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, a recurring figure in his work. Noticing a cabinet of Gandhi’s personal effects, documents and photographs, Dodiya found a way of expressing his fascination for how such a personal collection of belongings can shape lives and become part of collective memory. Conceived specifically for APT7, Somersault in sandalwood sky 2012 is an installation of nine wooden glass-fronted cabinets, containing painted images, sculptures, found objects and photographs. A creative response to the documents, images and working history of the 20-year-old Asia Pacific Triennial, the work is archival both in character and in appearance: framed photographic images atop and inside cabinets are joined by fragments of painted images on canvas, paper, metal and other materials. Dodiya’s working method involves responding to an original image through another image, sign or ‘stain’. This is interwoven with references to art history, regional sociopolitical issues and autobiographical narratives, building image by image, object by object, through a process geared toward excess. 1 Though densely packed, Dodiya’s cabinets are also artfully and tidily arranged, so that their disjunctive signifiers and competing planes converge in singularly pleasing compositions. Indeed, the organisation of these various components belies a distinctly surface-driven logic, a sensibility best described as painterly. Coupled with the repeated framing device of the cabinets, mimicking both the rectilinear form of the picture frame and each other, such aesthetic unity produces an assertive and authoritative visual and spatial presence, as well as a tension between the cabinet’s attractive presentation and the, at times, incongruous objects they contain. Postmodern bricolage is, of course, one precursor to this technique, and Dodiya has long cited the influence of such artists as David Salle and Haim Steinbach on his work, particularly as his paintings evolved in the 1990s. But, as intricately researched and deeply embedded in art history as they may be, Dodiya’s cabinets reference cultures of display that extend well beyond visual art — comic strips, religious dioramas, small museums, movie posters and advertising billboards. The embrace of a certain strain of kitsch, of crude jokes, handmade signs and Bollywood movies, is a defining characteristic of Dodiya’s practice, especially as it sits alongside his aesthetic sublimations of refined poetic, literary and theatrical circles of Indian life. His work has also been noted for its affectionate recreations of the texture of Mumbai street life, both in the direct incorporation of visual elements — his canonical roller door paintings — and, more broadly, by internalising its various contradictions as its method, which, as critic Ranjit Hoskote has noted, operate loosely around a duality of internationalism and locality. 2 Equally important to Dodiya’s work is a sense of mischief. The artist’s historical references are often punctuated by jibes at his peers, many of whom are close friends, while others are known only through media notoriety, existing in other commercial spheres entirely. These relationships are important to his work for APT7 — given the central participation throughout the history of the Triennial of Dodiya’s artist friends, who constitute a veritable who’s who of contemporary Indian art. A particularly important motif is the work, and the persona, of Dodiya’s friend and mentor, the pioneering Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003), whose playful irreverence and position as an influential teacher and charismatic outsider in bourgeois Gujarati society remains a deep and abiding influence on generations of Indian artists. Khakhar’s subversive humour and sensitive treatment of social and sexual issues finds its heir in Dodiya’s work. Eluding the earnestness for which postcolonial art is often accused of embodying, Dodiya possesses a wit that is at once sophisticated and humble, and whose warmth also dissolves the pretensions commonly associated with pastiche and esoteric referencing. The unlikely combinations of objects in his cabinet creations reflect Atul Dodiya’s most substantial juxtaposition — which Hoskote suggests extends from the artist’s treatment of his city 3 — that of pathos and irony. It is a unity that can only be sustained by friendship, the governing tenet of these cabinets of possibilities. Reuben Keehan 1 Atul Dodiya, ‘A basic proposal for The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial 2012’ [unpublished], 9 April 2012, Queensland Art Gallery Research Library artist file. 2 Ranjit Hoskote, ‘LABYRINTH/LABORATORY: Manufacturing Bombay, Atul Dodiya-style’ in Atul Dodiya: Bombay: Labyrinth/Laboratory [exhibition catalogue] The Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo, 2001, pp.76–83. 3 Hoskote, pp.76–83. ATUL DODIYA The art and politics of friendship 108