It was probably Somerset Maugham who pointed out that there are only about half-a-dozen stories in the history of literature, and writers keep recycling them in different forms. In a world of finite resources, the imagination tends to run dry, so there can only be that many original ideas. It is understandable that art, like literature, must also draw its sustenance from an established repertory of images. This is one of the ideas behind Re-Claim/Re-Cite/Re-Cycle, an exhibition of works in mixed media at the Bose Pacia gallery until tomorrow.

The other, more obvious, kind of recycling that the show refers to involves the use of waste materials as the ‘new media’ for creating a ‘new’ avant-garde, which has suddenly hit the Indian shores. In 1999, Tracey Emin had placed her unmade bed, littered with used tissues, condoms and dirty linen, inside the Tate. Ten years on, Indian artists are finally discovering the hidden potentials of Kitsch, and are all agog with matchboxes, plastic bottles, Coke bottle-tops, and even refrigeration coils. (Chittrovanu Majumdar has used the latter to create a monstrous contraption that keeps repeating the tune of a popular Hindi film song played by street bands in full blast.)

Vivan Sundaram’s exhibition, Trash, at New Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery last year, re-imagined urban waste in darkly lyrical forms. Sundaram’s huge installations, fashioned out of mounds of garbage, looked vaguely menacing. The overall effect was uncanny — a Doomsday vision realized in kitsch.

The Bose Pacia artists who have used discarded everyday objects fail to make the grade. It is not as if they are clumsy in handling the new media; on the contrary, one can only admire their technical expertise. Sharmila Samant, for instance, has produced a metre-long saree with Coke bottle-tops, a project that must have taken her months of intense work. There is also every evidence that a great deal of ingenious thinking has gone into the works. Consider Prajjwal Choudhury’s cauldron-like device with an in-built pulley that transports a line of matchboxes in an endless loop — a fascinating contraption indeed, although you don’t have to be a connoisseur to get the tediousness of mechanical repetition it wishes to convey. That there can be no two ways of looking at this work becomes its drawback.

The problem with experimental art of this sort is the default tendency of the artists to rely on words instead of allowing the work to do its own talking. Such a mode of explication not only tries to help the viewer but also makes the task of the reviewer so much easier. In fact, a review becomes redundant since the artists go on to tell you what they exactly had in mind, how they went about realizing it, and what one should think about their work. (Samant’s saree is appended with her long-winded, and entirely dispensable, comments on the politics of indigenous handwoven sarees in rural India.) Starting with the trendy hyphenations in the title to the elaborate notes and descriptive captions, there is just too much clever talk circulating around this show.

The result, expectedly, is unmistakably middle-class art produced with so-called avant-garde media. In Atul Bhalla’s compilation of colour photographs, the slum-dwellers of Delhi’s Dhaula Kuan look far from miserable as they struggle against their daily water-supply crisis. The commentary next to it is full of dire warnings and just outrage. The images grow in size, then shrink again. This shifting perspective does not quite improve the pedestrian quality of the work. Mansi Bhatt’s photo-series, Involvement Polluted, is a recycled version of her earlier body of work, Involvement Diluted. Alas, the performance-art cliché of a body wrapped in plastic grovelling on wet streets does not quite stir the heart.

Rajesh Ram thankfully avoids literalism, although he is not beyond wordplay. His installation of a miniature house on legs, stuffed with paper, pencils, books and a toy gun, is called Jahan dhad wahan ghar. The work, on its own, looks arresting, but Ram is unwilling to let the viewer dwell on its mystery: he must explain the reference to urban migration. Prajakta Palav sticks to acrylic but ends up producing frightful clichés involving floral patterns, decorative frescoes and the urban jungle. Sonia Mehra Chawla, T.V. Santosh and Tushar Joag seem to be responding to the theme set by the curator, Bhavna Kakar, quite literally. Next to the post-modern finish of their fellow participants, they seem to be caught in a time-warp.

Manjunath Kamath and Vivek Vilasini offer the most sophisticated responses, in that they marry a cerebral awareness of art history with a distinctive style. Vilasini takes Holbein’s masterpiece, The Ambassadors, and replaces its Venetian emissaries with kathakali dancers in full regalia (picture). Pushapamala N. has already appeared in her self-portraits dressed as the Holy Virgin as painted by the Old Masters. Nevertheless, Vilasini’s work manages to shine with an understated wit. Kamath’s massive panel in mixed media, Overdose, playfully reinvents popular icons. From Superman to sadhus, his canvas sparkles with allusions to art history, entertaining the viewer with its humorous inversions. It is no coincidence perhaps that Kamath and Vilasini are the least garrulous about their work.