The Egg, Mixed Media on Canvas

Prolonging it for Added Pleasure

Sanjeev Khandekar’s recent twin shows in Mumbai come out as a critique of the finanialized society. JohnyML looks at his works and says how the artist brings out the pornographic pleasure of the society in his works.

Sanjeev Khandekar

The more you prolong it the more pleasure you derive from it.  That is about sex. With the cervical muscle contraction exercises otherwise known as the Kegel exercises, the human beings could prolong their sexual pleasures. Between the starting point and the destination there is a journey. In the sexual act, by practicing Kegel exercise you postpone the arrival or in other words, the destination is postponed or displaced for the time being and you enjoy only the journey.

In the late capitalist logic of a finacialised society, pleasure, the journey itself becomes the destination. Shopping has become a pleasure in itself, not the consuming of the purchased goods. The malls that sprung up everywhere in the urban landscapes have become a labyrinth, which one has to pass through to arrive. But the very shopping experience deters the arrival; the perpetual postponement of the destination and climaxing is achieved.

For an artist like Sanjeev Khandekar who ideologically places himself against the logic of a financialised society, this perpetual postponement of climaxing appears as pornographic and ironic. For him, shopping or going through the pink papers for knowing the ups and downs of the stock market is like a pornographic experience. Pornographic experience is something that makes a social being anxious. It is pleasurable in several ways at the same time the certain social mores make them feel like deviants. Watching pornography demands a special alertness from the person who watches it. If he accesses the pornographic material through a computer he needs to keep certain other windows open to camouflage the sites that he is watching. At the same time, clicking on the pornographic links, involuntarily opens many other sites that renders the watcher helpless at times as they refuse to shut down at the given commands.

Finacialised societies promote desire in a pornographic way. The greed that drives one towards the stock market indices demands a certain level of anxiety from him and he needs to cover up this anxiety with something which is called culture. A pink paper could be covered with a page from the Times Literary Supplement but the anxiety forces the person to peep beyond it. However the desire to prolong the pleasure of watching the stock market indices is like the pornographic and shopping experience. It actually does not allow one to experience the destination.

‘The Kegel Exercise or Ashwini Mudra’ and ‘Acquire, Merge or Collaborate’, the twin solo shows by Sanjeev Khandekar at Pundole Gallery and Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery, Mumbai respectively deal with the peculiar situation of the social beings who are caught in the conundrum of prolonging the pleasure and not arriving. In the Kegel Exercise, Sanjeev Khandekar monumentalizes this desire for the prolonged pleasure through marble inlay works, which in many ways simulate the feel of the paintings exhibited at the Ashish Balram Galleries.

The abstracted images are the micrographic pictures of genitals and fornication. Sanjeev reverses the rules of viewing in these works. For enjoying pornography one has to keep certain distance from the screen or surface. The more you get closer to the screen the more abstract the act becomes. Contrary to this visual negotiation, for understanding the visual codes created by Sanjeev, one has to go closer to the images to recognize that they are the micrographic transference of genitals in fornicating positions. Interestingly, they are interspersed with the distorted images of stock market tickers, which in a very satirical way replaces the ‘ad columns’ abundantly seen in the pornographic sites or in shopping malls.

Marble is an unusual medium to create ‘paintings’. Sanjeev deliberately uses soft white marble sheets for inlaying the colored and customized marble chips. This marble is generally used for making idols of Gods for popular worship. They are seen both in shrines as well as in normal Hindu households. The ingredients of a finacialized society have taken the shape of the real gods and they find very prominent space in our lives, Sanjeev seems to comment.

There is a wash basin and a western commode carved out in marble and they stand witness to a video piece where a horse is seen defecating. She moves her muscles in certain ways and these same movements are adopted by sexologists and yoga masters for advocating the prolongation of sexual pleasure. The stark and mundane act of a horse defecating plays the counter balancing role, the filthiness of the market place in Sanjeev’s works.

In Aquire, Merge or Collaborate also Sanjeev uses the same idea for forwarding a critique of the financialized society. One may doubt, why this artist, while enjoying the fruits of late capitalism, taking a holier than thou attitude. But Sanjeev has a definite answer for this. “You are in a sea and you cannot say that you hate water. But you can negotiate with the waters around you.” Critiquing the late capitalist desires obviously is a negotiation and the artist’s job seems to be flagging these points of negotiation for the public.