Untitled
1999
Video
Materials:
Collection: Courtesy of the Artist .
Gupta’s video experiment Untitled looks, in a certain sense literally, at the mass media of television. Two television monitors on plinths stand facing each other, and on each is a still image of a sofa on which we see edited on top several depictions of the artist staring directly ahead. Six or seven twenty-something-year-old Shilpa
Guptas share a sofa, and they stare directly opposite at another six or seven twenty-something-year-old Shilpa Guptas. Sculpturally, both sets of multiple Guptas and the two monitors observe each other, creating a feedback loop of sorts. It is telling us that we see and we are seen. Television’s role in cultural influence and propaganda is Gupta’s core interest here, in particular, the propagandistic appeal of technology as all-pervasive in the policing of thought and behaviour. We receive messages through the medium, and we are observed to see if we conform to them.
