Sure it’s the end of the world, or near enough, we all need to do our bit, although seeing as our local council don’t bother recycling most of the paper, card and plastic we carefully place in their specified bags each week, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. But asides that, asides the human race trashing the whole world, junk can be fun.

My dad is a hoarder of the first class, his knees are going these days, he has to wear rather Victorian-looking straps and clamps just to walk a few feet, but in his younger days he was a fantatic when it came to collecting rubbish. He still has a few metal detectors lying around, his shelves are lined with scrap, as well as at least a few hundred old medicine bottles, the odd gas mask or Military Police helmet, a pile of abandoned accoustic guitars, postcards from strangers, pub ashtrays, old shop and road signs, you name it, somewhere in his flat you’ll probably find one.

When I first started at Brighton University I took Marcel Duchamp’s principle of the ‘found object‘ a little too much to heart, I’d trapse around abandoned buildings, rubbish tips, derelict industrial sites and the like, hunting down anything remotely shiny in true magpie fashion. I’d wheel my highly subjective treasure back to college and proceed to stick it all together and call it ‘art’. I soon learned that everything I made contravened some kind of health and safety law and soon solely moved on to painting, printing, installation work and photography. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Subodh Gupta didn’t. His incredible sculptures are constructed from all manner of refuse, and not only does his art harbour a wealth of beauty and a perfectionism of technique and form, it also points both towards a new ideology for waste and recycling, transforming public opinion and raising the stakes for the ecological argument.

Born in 1964 in Bihar, India, he is now mainly based in New Delhi, though most well known across the world for his recycled sculptures, he is easily as comfortable in a wealth of other mediums including painting, traditional sculpture, photography, video and performance. I first came across Gupta’s work when reading up on a new sculpture at the Venice Biennale entitled ‘Very Hungry God‘. Created in 2006 for the Nuit Blanche annual all-night festival in Paris, this giant silver skull is formed from hundreds of soup cans, meticulously constructed to rather impressive dimensions.

"Outside the church I served vegetarian daal soup as a form of ‘prasad’ (in India when you go to a temple or a guduwara you are offered food with the blessing). I liked the mix of the Catholic church and my intervention using a symbol that many artists have used before – the skull – and its many connotations."

He has used the same construction techniques in other works such as ‘Spill‘.

Line of Control is yet another in the same mould… in this case depicting an atomic mushroom cloud.

However as mentioned earlier the comparisons made between Gupta’s pieces and Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ have been coming thick and fast, especially with works like ‘Common Man‘ which renders a Duchampian classic featuring a depiction of Mona Lisa with moustache in three dimensions as a bronze statue. Yet Gupta continues to return to his love of the found object in far more challenging pieces, and asides the intellectual debate that may incur, many are indeed visually stunning such as ‘Everything is inside‘ and ‘There is always cinema‘.

However I personally find Gupta’s readymades or found objects most the appealing if not fascinating. Tracing back to the very origins of Post Modernism, where one man, Marcel Duchamp, a genius if ever there was one, stood up to the autocracy of the arts establishment and declared a new avenue for creative exploration. Following his lead with works such as ‘Gandhi’s three monkeys‘ Gupta continues to raise the lowly, extricate the mundane, heighten the everyday, and encourage debate regarding both the purpose and result of artistic endeavour – as well of course the ultimate fate of our ecology and hence fragile society as a whole.

Catch more of Sudoh Gupta’s work at Galleria Continua, Hauser & Wirth, Jack Shainman, Saatchi Gallery and even bid on his works at ArtNet.com.

This post is tagged Eco Art, eco sculptures, ecology, found art, Marcel Duchamp, readymades, recycled art, sculpture, Subdoh Gupta