Lot 3: Smart Alec

Chintan Upadhyay (b. 1972)
Smart Alec
fibreglass, acrylic, oil and varnish
37½ x 26½ x 18 in. (95.2 x 67.4 x 46.5 cm.)
Executed in 2005

Mumbai, Ashish Balram Nagpal, Clone Vitthala, January 2006

Clone Vitthala, exhibition catalogue, Ashish Balram Nagpal, Mumbai, 2006
Mutants (Sorry Does Not Matter Any More) Chintan Upadhyay, exhibition catalogue, Sarjan Art Gallery, Vadodara, 2006, illustrated, unpaginated

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, MUMBAI
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
In this work, titled Smart Alec, the artist depicts the baby coated with imagery from Rajasthani miniature paintings. Explaining the use of traditional Indian imagery as a "second skin" of sorts, Upadhyay states "I remove the narrative context of the miniature and it becomes a skin or body suit. I rip elements of the miniature out of the original and create a mould. So originality, which is lost, is also being questioned." Playing with media, Upadhyay mixes disparate cultures and styles similar to the way a DJ fuses songs. (Ananya Sen, 'Clones might take god's place', DNA India, 13 January 2006, www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1007338)

The dictionary meaning of Smart Alec is an impudent person, obnoxiously self assertive. Smart Alec is his new real, a copy of the copy, without an original, it stands for a symbol of 'New Man', his biology and his sexuation entails a logic of deprivation of material languor. Smart Alec is predicament and a dilemma, his desire and death. Smart Alec is new myth that Chintan is building, predicative of outmoded utopia of renewal of perception. (Excerpt from an essay written by Sanjeev Khandekar on Chintan Upadhyay)