Whether the altered dynamics of site and context will make a difference
to the experience of 'The Last Supper' evocation of The Table is Laid,
to
its idea-image as 'shelter', remains to be seen. What is fairly certain
is that the installation will serve to interrupt accepted modes of seeing
as the work's references chase one another through various levels of codes.
While the situating of plates on the floor for instance-perfectly in order
as per Indian custom-playfully reverses their rightful. position on top
of the table as per western table etiquette. things can get much more serious,
as when a prosaic piece of furniture, the chair, gets ideologically charged.
As the seat of privilege, it can become a powerful purveyor of meaning.
Is Sundaram setting up a situation where' the viewer is expected to react
to the act of representation and not the representation itself? It could
also be a desire on his part to explore off- centre or discrepant territories,
that fertile space between concept and reality between idea and object.
that resists the predictable, where the familiar turns strange or playful.
Be that as it may The Table is Laid stages an ordinary everyday
event in an extraordinary way-there is some kind of paradoxical logic here
that can be taken to imply that the images are more than what they seem,
to imply some essential, invisible aspect of the work which needs to be
discovered by each viewer individually hence the open invitation to the
party or if you like the game. At a more down-to-earth level-not that the
tip-tilted table and chairs ever touch level ground-the work represents
the artist's love for materials, for stretching the intellectual and conceptual
tone of the piece. It becomes a semiotic/conundrum at one end, with every
possibility of a whimsical, somewhat Carrollean (as in Lewis Carroll) tea-party
perhaps at the other, where everybody meditates on the tip-tilted unreality
of reality.
VS:
All the objects included in Shelter
are made dysfunctional, multifunctional.
The boat is propped up on railway sleepe
