Light Tank

Light Tank 48" x 26" x 30"

Rope lights, wood, motors and lots of electrical relays

The device with a spout has these strings of light coming out of it. It has a rather complicated mechanical circuit attached to it and comes on when a switch is pressed by the spectator. All the lights do not come on at the same time but works in a pattern controlled by the circuit.

"Re-visioning Materiality", 19th December 2007 Gallery Espace, New Delhi

Nancy wrote beautifully about the work :

Artworks seem to have an inflated ego today, big enough to burst, glossy enough to fall into place in an interior designer’s manual. And of course, they unfailingly make a specious nod to international politics or national crisis. Hoping, presumably, that the grimness of the political catastrophe will make up for their lack of imagination and integrity. As more and more packaged and branded art circulates with assembly-line precision, imagine works that are differently abled. That blink nervously and pull your leg even as they themselves limp into action. Artworks that are guided as much by the DIY ethic of the hackers and the thrifty innovations of the scavengers who service the recycling economy; that solemnly adopt poor materials only to take the piss out of them Dadaist style. Mukhopadhyay’s extended sculptures are marked by a deviant materiality sourced from the rejects of high art.

In this show, Mukhopadhyay who is in the habit of overturning all seats of power (recall his split and splintered chair thrones, 2000), topples a stool and places the rudiments of a tank on it. A nest of wires lie tangled between its legs while a bare wooden dome unleashes a gun fashioned from a handy piece of PVC pipe. Rope lights anticipating a festival swirl around the stool and stream out of the PVC spout. A switch activates the complicated and rather precarious circuitry put together by the artist. When the tank is ‘fired’ light gallops through the serpentine tubes and rebounds. Mukhopadhyay paradoxically invests light with the properties of darkness, a light that carries the threat of a graveyard but projects the look of a luminous Diwali or Durga Puja.

This phallic toy is a comment on the devastating military games played by cretinous little men. Imagine Bush rocking on a hobby horse, hurling ‘smart’ bombs at unsuspecting villagers in Afghanistan. The artist shoots his absurdist fantasies at us, at the speed of light. But wait for the quintessential Mukhopadhyay breakdown, communication is not as simple as switching on a light. Especially so, in this world of negative vibrations where an artist has to make a strong effort to transmit his energies to a viewer.

Nancy Adajania