Starry, starry baby-maker

Chintan Upadhyay continues to be provocative with his holocaust babies, but perhaps he needs a new leit motif.

Competitiveness and politics in art are hardly new "" and Chintan Upadhyay would be among the first to admit it "" but two senior artists I'm conversing with soon after I've met Upadhyay for the first time are excoriating when I refer to him as an "artist". He works on a computer, says one. He regenerates the same images again and again, the other thumps a table.

Upadhyay, earlier that day, has admitted as much to both. "But can he draw?" an artist whose bold, deft strokes define his work, asks, "Have you seen his draftsmanship?" It is not always possible to see an artist's drawings (unless it is a retrospective of an artist's works, and not often even then), but I do make it a point to get artists to sign catalogues.

Often, they will draw in them, or doodle; certainly, they will write a message, or address it to you. Upadhyay, instead, chooses to put his name to an earlier catalogue; it could be a corporate signature. There is little about the artist in it.

His persona, on the other hand, could be manufactured to suit the artistic temperament. He has kept us waiting for over an hour. His shirt is ice candy pink, the glasses are blue Fendi.

The salt and pepper hair is trendily long. His exhibitions, similarly, draw on controversies that Upadhyay articulates less surely, and which, despite his insistence, appear merely provocative instead of commentative.

For those of you more familiar with his work than his signature, Mumbai-based, Baroda-educated, Partapur (in Banswara district of Rajasthan "" about which more later)-born Upadhyay is the artist who makes replicas (and then more replicas, on canvas and as sculptures) of malevolent babies as his reflection on a skewed society. "It is," he keeps saying again and again, "my role as an artist. I like to hold up a mirror to society."

He keeps coming back to this: the role of an artist in society, his pivotal position that pits him against a "they" who "don't want people to ask questions". He speaks of "censorship" in art, the worse if it is self-imposed, based on a flawed morality. And his babies become his voice against the abstracted world of politics and manipulated/manipulative society.

The origin of the nude baby, male, multiplied several times over, is a telling comment on many things "" on foeticide and female infanticide, for one; on the quest for perfection on the other through a glamorous ideal; more horrifically, on organ trade too, perhaps.

Therefore, terms like "mutation", "commodification", "metaphysics", "designer babies", "neobreeds", "hybrids", "duplicity" et cetera pepper a conversation with him at least as often as they appear in his catalogues.

What Upadhyay does "" and which annoys other artists, particularly of another generation "" is that he renders his babies on the computer, in Photoshop.

These are then projected, Upadhyay draws them out, and his assistants then proceed to paint them "" whether the ornamentation over their nude bodies, or the flat ground colours. "My work," he says, "is very clinical, it's very boring."

Put quite like that, you couldn't agree more. The ornamentation, which has its genesis in miniature painting traditions, is often unrelated to the gestures being made by the babies, who have by now traversed a huge distance from the "cute" stage to a point where they are "brash", "violent", "rude", crude"...

Certainly, in the current show on at Gallery Espace in New Delhi, they appear to be making "obscene gestures". The ornamentation provides his work a "cultural specificity" in the global marketplace, so even though he rails against "the business of art", he clearly succumbs to the pressure and the "demand for the exotic" from Indian artists.

In the end, it is Upadhyay himself who is the more interesting subject, a cauldron of complexities spun out of an autobiographical process. It is a process learned at art school in Baroda which, he insists, churns out "thinkers, not painters".

Upadhyay's effort, though, strains. It is a creation of the market for the market, replete with shock value, and indifferent to its immediate environment, despite his protestations that he has a role to play in manoeuvring society.

What does his father, a painter of the ornamental, "seductive" school in Jaipur, think of his work? Upadhyay does not know, he says, he has never asked.

Back in his village in Banswara, where he runs an artists programme and residency such that "the artists are exposed to contemporary issues", has his shocking commentary on female foeticide sensitised the women of the district to the issue? Upadhyay says he does not know, but yes, a number of colleges in the region have added art to the courses they teach.

It is a measure of perhaps his vaulting ambitions that he looks for broader rather than macro issues. "I will not succumb to somebody else's ideas about painting," says Upadhyay, "about art." That could be interpreted as arrogance, you tell him.

"That's not arrogance," he retorts, "that's confidence." "It's what Bollywood stars say too," you remind him, to break the impasse. "I live close to Bollywood," he shrugs, then: "I'm a star too."

For all that, you can't help feeling he needs a fresh leit motif. You might tell an artist that "" but will the star baby-maker listen?