When You Find Your Wife Pregnant in Your long Absence
On the first week of August 2006, Mumbai based artists Sanjeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar presented show of installations titled ‘Tits Clits N Elephant Dick’ at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. Hosted by the Ashish Balram Nagpal Galleries, this show raised furor amongst certain section of the public that considers itself to be the protectors of public morality. The state police played into the hands of this moral police and booked both the artists under IPC section 292 (a) and forced them to close down the exhibition. The case is still in judicial court. The book currently reviewed here is a documentation of the controversial show and it functions both as a catalogue and a documentary evidence of a set of aesthetical objects which were taken out of the context and posited into the realm of pornography by the vested interests.
Between the actual show and the publication of this book, Indian society in general witnessed a few incidents that questioned the validity of aesthetic expressions that tried to expand the limits of social mores and ethical values. Against this backdrop, this book of documentation and theoretical presentation provides us with certain clues in order to comprehend and testify the reality of aesthetics which is psychologically and intellectually driven in a mediatized society. Reality, in our times, is testified not for and with the palpable parameters of temporal understanding, but it is understood as a frame of experience in which the real and virtual times collapse into each other. In this collated time frame, lies can engender truth and truth can engender lies. Not only the shifting of focus and perspective but also the willing suspension of disbelief on things around us, could interchange the roles of truth and falsehood. It is the poetics of our wired up times.
The idea for this project was germinated, as Sanjeev Khandekar reveals in his introductory essay, from a poem written by the artist himself in Marathi sometime in 2004. Having the same title as the show, in this poem Sanjeev had dealt with a peculiar situation of a married couple. The husband returns home after a long business trip and finds his wife pregnant. To an agitated and offended husband the wife tells that she has been conceived from him and to prove the point she shows their communications through emails and chats. Through this poem Sanjeev was telling his readers how the real and virtual times collapse in contemporary times.
Taking Slavoj Zizek’s formulation on virtual reality as a space to act out what is suppressed in the ‘normal’ daily lives and to live a ‘real’ life, as a cue Sanjeev Khandekar in his essay talks about virtual gaming using sex as the predominant metaphor. Like dreams, virtual sex games and death games also invert ‘realities’ and in the reality of these illusory games the player can assume the ‘vacant spiritual position of God’ with powers to procreate and annihilate in the virtual space. In this scenario he raises two pertinent questions: what does all this mean? Where does all this leave us? The installation project of Sanjeev and Vaishali is an attempt to flag out these questions.
The main essay written by Gitanjali Dang is a well studied one. Using facts, data and metaphors from virtual gaming, Gitanjali substantiates what Sanjeev proposes through Zizek and the installations. “Khandekar and Narkar have shaped works that strives to address a range of anxieties- the most prominent being the extant world of sexuality. The maquillage of outrage, helmed by erect penises and dilated vaginas, creates a discursive space. By choosing to crowd gallery with pornographic iconography, the artists herald a process of disambiguation, whereby they endeavor to present a laconic view of the erroneous arguments that shapes our lives,” observes Gitanjali.
Published during a time when ethics of aesthetics is debated only when the art forms are attacked in public spaces, this book should provide the Indian art scene with a platform to discuss the moral-ethical values of art further. We are passing through a time when even the pornographic titillation is derived not from the representation of a sexual act but its clinical deconstruction into body parts, thereby shifting of pleasure from the total experience to virtual abstractions. This book on the works of Sanjeev and Vaishali becomes interesting as it tries to detail how clinical the sensual experiences of pleasure can go and excite the ‘real’ human beings in the coalesced zone of truth and falsehood. The husbands can do nothing but own up their children in the real space even if they are conceived through an innocent lie made into truth at the zone of virtual encounters.
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