Postmodernism has come to mean a movement since the late 1960s that represents a rejection of what is called modernist art. A chief characteristic of which is that it is a name of a style which is pastiche in that the artist himself moves away from a purely formalist movement and back to some form of a figurative/narrative stance. It is intrinsically anti-authoritarian in outlook and negative in tone: as it is concerned more with undermining the pretentious theories than putting anything positive in their place.

Jean-François Lyotard, the well known French philosopher, who first spoke of embracing scepticism and a culture which promotes dissent. It demonstrates just how controversial the modern movement has turned out to be a makeover landscape of the late twentieth century which meant a return of paganism since it has no criteria to validate its theories proceeding as it does from event to event, on a case by case basis for making judgements. Its truth is that which works. The result is that meaning itself ends up with different shades of meaning because each language posits a different set of objects and maps the world in different ways. Hence the emergence in the late 1960s of what is called Installations - art as performance, in which art is displaced as explorations of spatial, social and political networking.
This rather long overview is necessary for putting Bela Gupta’s works in a historical context, a semiology of Coca Cola as a postcolonial phenomenon, is adopted. It is built up genealogically, looking for a meaning shift capturing the mindset of its first step towards consumer culture. As a most successful form of a corporate threshold of an all-pervasive knee-jerk irony, Coca-Cola has come to mean a symbolic icon of snobbery by one-upping each other, acknowledging trivia as if in a TV reality show.
Her critique of sign is constructed along a tactically oriented narrative. As Jacques Derrida argues in Grammatology, there is nothing outside the text and language is open to myriad interpretations that continually defer meaning, so does Bela, though not exactly on Derridian lines. She rejects the very notion of Subject, the absolute truth of the surface in painting. The truth of the subject is not fixed by a transcendental signifier, but one that wears an objective representation of the camera truth. The world of hyper-real in which image and reality implode, Coco-Cola stands for the consumerist essence of the market; it is as if world of a magical space; between a Baudrillardian choice of Disneyland and a third-order image which masks the absence of the real. In Coco-Cola, the real is masked as desire for somewhere else associated with middle class modesty and humbleness. The site between Disneyland and the real is indexical sign of Coca-Cola, and Bela interpretes it as a double-faced sign.
It is a sign of what is absent: what is presented is a photographic relation which preceeds a link between surface and the painted surface. The site is without any marks of identity: it could be anywhere as a sideshow, it is characteristic of gloss, of focus and of what have you in a simulated painting. The camera and photographic representation are as much a part of the hyper-real as desire connected with Pop culture. But there is something uncommon about the way Bela makes use of the conventions of conceptual art. This is partly because she is committed to documentary nature of her sources of iconography. Maybe because she is well aware that we do not have in India what passes as Pop Art, and Coca-Cola in itself is as much of pastiche. The desire to disclaim the linkage with photographic realism is explicitly indicated. Only the site is mediated by the truth of a photographic image and its documentary nature reserves its status as evidence. As much is true about Bela’s painted surfaces. As a semiotic reference, surface is part of the communication technology, structurally speaking.
For a structuralist, a word is made up of a material component such as a sound or a mark which is signifier, and a mental component, the concept, signified. The emergence of poststructuralism towards the end of 1960s meant a shift in emphasis from the signified to the signifier. In the works of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, the links between signifier and signified were broken and replaced by the intertextual free interplay of signifiers. Structuralists had sought to find the meaning of texts; post-structuralists revel in multiple meanings, none of which can be allowed priority.
Postmodernism has taken this process a stage further. For Jean Baudrillard, modern society is so saturated with signs that it is no longer possible to distinguish between signs and reality; that is to say, between commodity and sign in order to form a self-referential loop within a closed ‘object’ system. Such is the impact on the collective psyche that sign refers to something real and solid outside the system: this is an illusion. What is being generated is a ‘simulacrum’ which acts as the external referent by which it justifies its functions. Talking of external referent, the postmodernism’s basic dictum is, ‘I shop therefore I am’. What happens to those who cannot shop and are therefore excluded from the basis of social identity!
In seeking the original meaning of a word, Bela lands up with the iconic lettering of Coca-Cola, and gives the impression as if she has discovering its truth. She almost appropriates the Pop icon COCA-COLA. As image it takes on the sense of appropriation which is supposed to express its being’s own way of occurring - not in the sense of ‘to be present’. It is suggestive of being as an event, for iconic image of lettering coalesces with the spatial projection of parts. It is the dimension relation fusing the present back into the past and forward into the future; it is a relational structure of difference. The links are always partial and tenacious, geometric in appearance. Bela takes the sign-word COCA-COLA which refers to post-industrial cultural imperialism that has eroded all self-sufficient localities as in a simulated space of the videogame.

K. B. GOEL