Bestiality of Market Place
Controversies follow Sanjeev Khandekar for his works do not conform with the norms of aesthetic hegemony. ‘Acquire, Merge or Collaborate’ at the Ashish Balram Nagpal Galleries and ‘Kegel Exercise- Ashwini Mudra’ at Pundole, Mumbai are his twin solos that open on 16th August 2007. Prior to his shows Sanjeev spoke to JohnyML about the concepts behind these twin shows. Excerpts from the interview:
Sanjeev Khandekar |
JohnyML: Sanjeev, your shows carry very interesting titles. This time it is ‘Acquire, Merge or Collaborate’ (AMC) at the Ashish Balaram nagpal Galleries, at Courtyard and ‘Kegel Exercise- Ashwini Mudra’ at the Pundole. You have always provoked the audience with your works. Are these titles too form a part of this provocation?
Sanjeev Khandekar: I am a visual artist and a poet; a painter and a writer. It is therefore, that titles become a integral part of all my works. In fact many a times they are part of my works too. Titles are like windows, sometimes they introduce a concept; sometimes they mean some association; while at times they are abstract symbols to aid the visuals. Sometimes, they may be mere sounds or music or just another segment of your work. Provocation is not always my aim, unless it becomes a requirement of the work. It all depends on what one intends to do on the canvas or in the given space and also beyond that.
JML: You have been using the stock market tickers since All that I wanna Do (2005). With Acquire, Merge or Collaborate, these stock market tickers have become monumental and iconic in your works. How do you explain this formation of imagery?
SK: The market ticker is an interesting object. It sucks. Doesn’t it? It has a peculiar, ephemeral quality and it presents a new metaphor of the ‘financialised’ new world of the global man. The genesis of my works this time is evanescence of stock market blossoms and the hormonal gatherings of intimate personal politics, which to me are key factors of the present political situation. I reverted to the ticker this time to distort it further, to squeeze it again, to attempt its abstraction, you may say but this is to understand the internalization of society’s obsession with money, power and consumerism. In other words this is to understand the sexuality, the culture and the people around us. More importantly I think this is for me to understand my self better.
JML: Could you please explain ‘Kegel Exercise- Ashwini Mudra’?
SK: Kegel exercises restore muscle tone and strengthen the pubococcygeus muscles in order to prevent or reduce pelvic floor problems and to increase sexual gratification. Although Dr. Kegel contemporized and popularized this practice, it is by no means new. The Yogis of India also had a similar practice in Hatha Yoga known as Aswini Mudra (the horse gesture) that is taught and practised till this day.
I have used ‘Kegel Exercises’ as metaphor to represent a few social phenomenon of today’s time. The first in this list is the ‘New Gym Culture’, the ‘exercise mania’, the ‘muscle body syndrome’. The second is the futile and unnecessary simplification of spiritualism- sort of ‘spiritual anxiety neurosis’. The third is the market adrenalin that is pumped in with every rise and fall of the market. It is also about the new performance oriented emotional life that an individual is subjected to. A basket full of images, isn’t it?
I found Kegel, quite humorous. This is one strange exercise which has a mysterious character and has something to do with the basic desire of an animal to have sex, rather to have more sex. With human beings, unlike other animals, it is not just about having sex but it is the sexuality that matters. The want of ‘more’ has many more dimensions; it has aggression, hegemony and a constant desire to acquire more. It is very interesting to see that our democracies readily allow acquisitions even if a kind of monopoly is achieved by an individual or by a group of individuals.
JML: As you have mentioned elsewhere, a viewer can find a strong connection between the sexual prowess of an individual going up and down with the stock market indices in your works. It is rather painful and ironic. Could you please explain the sexual connotation of this connection?
SK: That is precisely what I am trying to explain. Capitalism and not communism, has changed the world. Capitalism itself has undergone transformations. What are these transformations? It has unleashed the ‘Unconscious’. As Slovez Zizek defines, ‘today's sexuality is under the sign of the superego command to enjoy’. As Zizek rightly puts it, superego designates the point at which permitted pleasure turns into ordained enjoyment. ‘Take Vigara and fix it’. ‘Enjoy’. Market performs the role of the super ego, a kind of a ‘Big Other’ one can say.
JML: Though you are known as a Marxist and a critic of Marxism, you sound more Freudian when you speak of sexuality of human beings in relation with the market place. Marx talked about the desexualization of human beings in the centers of production and Freud talked about the repressive desires. I think you try to negotiate the Freudian thoughts in your works. Could you please elaborate?
SK: I must make one thing clear, I am not a Marxist. I have respect and curiosity for the Marxist thought. Few thinkers whom I like and read happen to be left. I read Freud, I read Lacan because I think psychoanalytical perspective is necessary. In the last few years, market and technology have spearheaded a distinct change in society and that is reducing political life to personalized intimate politics of individuals. This is a recent phenomenon that can be negotiated with the help of psychological interventions. The more the politics becomes intimate and personal, more ‘the desire’ will be at the helm of affairs.
As a responsible human being one has to therefore examine the very grain of ‘the thing’ called desire. Malcolm Bull in his recent writings has talked extensively about bare life, while leading a debate on bio-politics. In the introductory volume of ‘The history of sexuality’, Foucault remarked that whereas ‘for millennia, man retained what he was for Aristotle, a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence….., Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’. The biological life of man has now ‘passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention. Here, Foucault talks about development of disciplines of human body. He talks about ‘the optimization of its capabilities’. He talks about a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. My journey is to examine this bestialisation and processes to which human body is subjected to, both the individual body as well as the collective body. Do you get my point on Kegel and market now?
JML: Yes. Your works have been provocative. Many people have taken offence on your imageries especially in the last show, Tits, Clits n’ Elephant Dick (2006). How do you perceive this social reaction?
SK: Last time when we discussed this I had mentioned about ‘short circuiting’. Slovez Zizek has elaborated on this in his series of books called ‘short circuits’. He poses, “Is it not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic and read it in a short circuiting way through the lens of a ‘minor’ conceptual apparatus, (here the minor means marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology or dealing with a lower less dignified topic)? Such viewing can lead to insights which can completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. In a way, yes, I believe in a movement of short circuiting. Therefore my works can be perceived by some as provocative or shocking. It has happened with my poetry too.
JML: Interestingly, all of your shows simulate a market place, which you yourself criticize. Is it a deliberate attempt?
SK: I don’t criticize market, I just flag it out. I portray it to understand it in all its possible dimensions as an artist. It’s an interesting abstract object, and huge too. A kind of super nova or something that engulfs overtakes and swallows everything around you. It has created a new set of parameters and new sets of challenges. With the growing globalization, new discoveries and application of science and technology, market is equipped to lead the human society in a new direction all together, hitherto unheard of. One of the most disturbing factors is about personalized intimate politics of an individual, having global consequences. It has changed us from top to bottom; sex and spirituality both have lost their fine grain in market movements.
JML: La Peau de Chagrin (2005) presented a man with deconstructed self. The continuous breaking down of one’s self was very palpable. However, the imageries you developed in this exhibition was apocalyptic. There seems to be tremendous anxiety for the human body. Could you please explain?
SK: I did tell you earlier, what interests me are appetites, desires, and senseless urges of the body, in a politically void world of our times. Increasing longitivity on one hand and diminishing philosophical life on the other hand is a painful predicament. If you have a closer look at my work titled ‘in the state of priapism’, you will understand what I want to say. In normal life, erection of penis does two good things, one is it reposes the confidence in triumph of human imagination and two; it gives a pleasure signal to body and mind. In priapism an erected penis can not return to its normal size and a person suffers from acute pains. It’s a tricky situation. The late capitalism takes away the power to imagine by supplying a large menu of similar choices and high tech porn that is available today does all the imagination that one is expected to do on his own. Interestingly, pl. note that the way one loses his power to imagine and erect, he also gives away his ability to deplete it to lead normalcy. As explained in my earlier discussions with you, here ‘sexuality is under the sign of superego command to enjoy.’
JML: In one of the exchanges between us, you have mentioned that had the women been given penis, they too would have asserted power. Doesn’t it sound a bit chauvinistic? Or are you intending at the inescapability of power hierarchy in a given society?
SK: Oh! Let us not get into a new controversy there. I was telling you about Lacanian concept of ‘Woman doesn’t exist’. I was telling you about ‘being phallic and having phallic’, we were talking about how the (Male) desire, that includes aggression and war, greed and lust is common today among males and females when they are in shopping malls.
JML: I understand that you look at women’s role in the society in a very positive way. You have been part of several social movements in Maharashtra. But some imageries that you use in your paintings look like reducing the women into the level of mere vulva. Why is it so?
SK: Well, let me first make it clear that I respect every living being and love them too. I wouldn’t even like to think that an image of a nude woman represents some kind of sin or temptation or perversity. I do get pleasure in painting women and sometimes also get lured in painting them. I love to collect good nudes, that includes, both the sexes. One more observation that I have had is that when I look back at my nude works of women (and men), I find all of them strangely burdened with something. Some psychological burden or some sort of weight they carry with them.., sometimes even the breast that I paint has an abnormal weight to it. Women are a mystery. The anxiety that we live with in our contemporary life sometimes gets associated with women in my works. My men are rather fragile, shapeless, and timid. They do not have any great role on canvas most of the times. We will talk about them when we talk next time.
JML: You have always liked the philosophy of Albert Camus. I remember you talking about ‘choice to live’ and ‘jumping into the void’. There seems to be a sense of liberation and a faith in the unknown leading you and your works too boldly declare this philosophy. Could you please elaborate?
SK: Hmm.., Camus? I read a few of his writings when I was very young and it also impacted me that time. However, I don’t carry that impact anymore though I do refer to him once in a while, even now. In fact, he is the father of the personliased intimate politics of an individual that we experience today.
JML: I see a lot of faith in social change and at the same time an ironical view on the same in your works. Where do you position yourself vis-à-vis your works, for social change or the skepticism on it?
SK: I believe in change. Humans are different than animals because they bring changes; they change the nature and they change themselves. The entire history of human beings is a story of change. The question is what kind of change? Is the change in climate that we discuss so often these days, any change that we intended ? My works are political in nature, they examine and sometimes even dissect the change. They are rather acidic in nature.
JML: You like a shopper in a mall, shop for materials. I mean metaphorically shop for materials to produce your works. Why do you indulge so much in materials?
SK: I have a curious mind, I love experimenting. I keep trying new roads and experimenting new options. Like ‘Camus’ I love leaping in to darks. Therefore I keep using various mediums and materials. My studio is housed with all new stuff that an art supply company introduces at any point of time. Some of them are gimmicks and tricks. But many of them are real cool stuff. I use them to bring in new dimensions, like the falsely colored micrographs of some inner organs’ micro structure.
JML: Some of your works are collaborative in nature. I know that Vaishali Narkar is your co-artist. What is her role in your works?
SK: We had one show in collaboration and she also has assisted me in many of my major works. My works, especially my installations are huge and complex and they need special skills. Besides, we have a good working chemistry; we discuss ideas and their executions. We have a few projects ahead where we are going to work in collaboration. She has great capacities as a visual artist and her paintings, murals and conceptual executions have been admired in past. She is my fellow artist in couple of projects and also has her own independent projects.
Collaborations are possible if you have good chemistry and if you are convinced with the work that you are going to produce. Its not always easy, egos and self interests can ruin the project. Collaborative or collective work is a conscious decision.
I am a little undisciplined artist. I work on many ideas simultaneously. Many a times I don’t even bother to finish them. A good writer needs a good editor. And I have several of them around me fortunately.
JML: Do you enjoy fame and controversy?
SK: No one likes controversy, it takes away time and peace and one needs both as an artist. Both are important. And who doesn’t like fame? Praise and fame are tonics, they add to your good health … provided the dose is right. |
