Love

A steel dinosaur fornicating with a Jaguar car. This is the work that took centre stage in Sudarshan Shetty’s 2006 exhibition Love. In this installation, Shetty makes clever use of two iconic symbols: the fibreglass cast of a 1972 Jaguar car which is the symbol of luxury, and a relic from the past, a dinosaur, made of steel plates. The willing car has its rear cranked up, and the dinosaur has an exaggeratedly large phallus. By adding motion Shetty makes the act of fornication something the viewer cannot avoid seeing. The work’s largeness and the visibility of its mechanical devices add to the viewer’s discomfort.The brute emphasis on the act of fornication declares the artist’s delusion/ disillusion with ‘love’. However, Shetty’s dinosaur is an enlarged toy, not a recreated skeleton from a natural history museum. Is it the element of play involved in the act of love that prompts this decision? Or is it to show that the two animals, jaguar and dinosaur, are both reduced to boy’s toys? Is Shetty lamenting a paradise lost by invoking the extinct dinosaur? Or is he saying that there is no ‘real’ love in the age of consumerism, when man’s ultimate turn-on is a car?Sudarshan Shetty’s Love series of 2006 explored the phenomenon of love as comic, ironic, absurd, complex, perverse. In this overblown installation of a T-Rex ‘making love’ to a Jaguar, the perverse physical act does not seem threatening because it is rendered comical. Sudarshan’s unlikely juxtapositions bring disparate worlds into a shared frame. Unlike the facsimile of the Jaguar, the T-Rex is literally stripped to the very bone. The mechanics of his ‘humping’ can be clearly observed. The giant ego-affirming phallus enters the backside of the car, articulating the pure carnality embedded in the act of love. This is nowhere better reflected than in the way the ‘heart’ of the dinosaur moves in tandem with the phallus, both acting on a single mechanical impulse. The conventional hierarchy that places love at a higher level than sex seems to be dismantled here.The phallus itself is scythe-shaped, reminding one of the Grim Reaper and his scythe. Love and death seem to be placed in a circuitous relationship via the heart. Does one read life in love or death in sex? Nothing is given to the viewer easily. The artist seems to be contemplating love and poking fun at it at the same time. It is left to the viewer/ voyeur to construe meaning or non-meaning in this installation.