• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Lights, Camera, Action

Mumbai based young artist Dilip Dhore lives a life of mediatized, glamorized and commoditized metro life. He is a participant and a critic of it at once. Dr.Vaishali Sharma analyses Dhore’s works in this essay.

A recent cohesive collection of artistic expressions conceived by Dilip Dhore is an impression of his odyssey through the maze of public domain and inner trajectories. The artist takes cognizance of the discourses centered on the mind to produce a memory of the context in which his work originated and found its possibilities. The gratifying imagery leads his audiences into the personal universe of the artist and indirectly to the shared universe of the society. The artistic vitality arises from the pervasive influence of media and cultural traditions competing with globalization.

To proclaim a place in the pantheon of popular culture, the ordinary youth attempts to mirror the tempting images advertised in mass media. The media treatment on the self that breeds hybrid personalities catalyzes others to consciously or subconsciously emit epithets. These descriptors recruit the person into a subject position of language and cultural codes and in turn create a sense of a new identity. This process bears connotation to the deconstructive and perhaps irreducible annals of postmodernism, wherein identity is regarded as a process; a continuing response to external stimuli.

The protagonist's own bohemian life style and impressions portrayed during social interactions provoke not only his family and peers, but also Adam teasers and fun pokers, who like snails leave behind a trail of epithets, an amalgam of items like hero, villain, tapori, aashik, ladki, etc. Though this trail has the potential of being slimy, yet the artist proudly imbibes it. These descriptors trigger the integrated action of his visual system and the sensory homunculus or 'little man' residing in the brain. In this state of flux, consciousness shifts at a vertiginous velocity across 80,000 synaptic endings in one half of the brain alone. The artist's imagination chamber, like a magnet, with all its power of attraction, draws the encountered cultural codes of the external world within him. The epithets thus get captured in the image of the inner alchemist.

The artist's idolatrous behavior of introspective philosophizing forces him to step into the role of a foreigner, as it is the foreigner's gaze that puts us in touch with the truth of the world–a gaze that is able to imagine what is, and also what is not. This reflective pause enables the artist's subjective self to interpret the perceived view that others have of him during the course of his interactions and to construct a significant symbol of the labels he had been hailed with. Thus, each time the artist gets interpellated into the subject position, he exploits it to create a new image. As a European folk saying instructs, “Call a man a thief and he will steal”.

The synergistic logical corollary of actions and reactions enhances the artist's communication and interactions with others. The underlying ideology of the artist's imagery wherein strategic interpersonal behavior is used to shape or influence impressions formed by an audience, draws an analogy to Shakespeare's crafted sentence “All worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players”; Plato spoke of the “great stage of human life”, and Dilip Dhore calls it “Lights, Camera, Action”. The artist now takes a reverse shot and like an active and creative actor engages in the performances of the self to advertise the deciphered symbols.

With the use of his own body as a representational effort aimed at personification, the artist seems to be getting at a notion of the Individual body inscribed, carrying the weight of collective ideas, rather than the individual engaged in self-expression. Paradoxically, in this effort the artist's body is depersonified by becoming the target of male and female gaze, encouraging male objectification in contemporary society. His body becomes a direct and poignant symbol, resonant with the severe urban phenomenon–the hegemonic commodification of the art object.

For further understanding the matrix of the artist's recent works it is indispensable to take a ride into his background. Dilip Dhore was born in a small town of Maharashtra, Achalpur, where he was raised in the agrarian environment that instilled in him the value of hard work and the importance of community. As a keen observer of life, he has always delved into the process of metacommunication for better understanding of events, places, people, relationships and above all 'self'. In a quest to satisfy his voracious appetite for facts and to learn the language of art to express his inner experiences, such as thoughts and desires, the artist came to Mumbai–a city that sells pieces of dreams. To soak in the culture of the local people the artist always carried his camera. The fascination of transferring his built-in sense of observation to Camera Lucida has flourished to the extent of becoming a part of his work technique.

During the metaphysical speculation of metropolitan Mumbai, a city that buzzes in the glare of neon lights and cinema screens, the artist acknowledged the dreams of “the atomized individuals of mass society”1 who have lost their souls to the phantom delights of mass media. He recognized the 'irrational victims of false wants' that are thrust upon them through advertisements in media and through the individualistic consumption culture it promulgates.1 The artist also became interested in the punch lines catered to by advertisements for effective communication, the influence of which is evident in his previous work titles like ‘karlo duniya mutthi me’, ‘dobara mat poochna’ and many others.

According to cultural theorist Jean Kilbourne, "advertising performs the same function in industrial society as myth performed in ancient and primitive societies." It provides the narratives that shape much of our social behavior. Enlightened by this fact the artist succumbed to the language of advertising to record his various life experiences. The demonstration of 'metrosexual' traits through advertisements in newspapers, cinema, television, hoardings and billboards made the artist himself conducive to the love of grooming, fashion, style and aesthetics. He started consuming everything from piercing to shoe styles, for self-reinvention.

On the initiation of his professional career in fine arts, he grew his hair down to his shoulders. It was a mark of liberalization that again deeply resounded through his works. The artist still shares an intimate connection with his hair and considers the long locks falling over his neck as an emblem of power. The artist exercises styles and patterns of hair as metaphorical instruments, packaged in the language of advertising, to manifest the intellectual, emotional and spiritual variables of communication process. Consequently, in his recent oeuvre, to customize the body according to the need of the character locked up in a semantic trap, the artist retreats into body art. The kaleidoscopic mixes of traditional practices and new inventions serve as a powerful tool to convey the complexity of own personality and at the same time reflect the ricocheting epithets. Sporting an assemblage of funky gestures and informal colorful attire and accessories bought from the flea market, like frayed jeans and t-shirts, capris, rubber bands, folk jewelry (necklaces, arm bands, rings, waist bands), belt and shoes inscribed with the brand name 'Nike' and 'Reebok', goggles, scarves, caps, satchel, etc., the artist mirrors the dress and demeanor of the ordinary youth under the spell of media. The protagonist's bright regalia is subtly echoed in the artist's own bohemian attire. Besides these, the use of other paraphernalia for spicing up the characters, including Pepsi bottle, rubber snake, Indian flag, mike, walky-talky and head phones, skates, fake gun and hand cuffs, flute etc., makes the artist a patron god of consumer culture in modern world.

Paint on the body has been used to experiment with new identities. Paint creates a second skin that serves as a bridge between the image of the self and the image perceived by others. Long hairs with unique styles still play an important role to truly depict a character. For instance, in the work entitled 'Yani', the artist has used disheveled hair as a symbol of spirituality and power. This is also evident in Hindu iconography wherein disheveled hair is characteristic of Shiva, a deity associated with power; the texture of the universe is woven from Shiva's hair, identified with spatial orientation. In yet another work titled 'Ladki', the depiction of ponytail tied with a fancy rubber band and pink underwear has aided him to transgress the boundaries of gender. In the work titled 'Hero', to conform to the stereotype, the artist depicts his sleek, toned body flanking a hairless bare chest. In one hand he holds a Pepsi bottle and in the other an opener as if modeling for the promulgation of the unseen.

The body becomes a living billboard advertising cultural trends, obsession with fashion and overt expressions of feminity. The artist's transfigured body gets ready for the immaculate performance in front of the camera to create prototypes. Lights, Camera, Action! With muscle flexing and twitching, billboard becomes cinema. The brilliantly choreographed repertories of emblematic gestures truly set the tone for the roles played, be it the arrogance of 'Hero', the rebellion of 'Tapori', zeal and energy of 'Jackson', meditative trance of 'Yani', or reverie and style of 'Aashik'. The oozing interrogative gaze and semantic traps entice the audiences into the ontology of actions. In this attempt the artist's body is always ephemeral, it does not stay in a fixed role; it is contingent, after each performance it walks back into the artist's life.2

The artist has been efficient in his pragmatic orientation, and now transcends that orientation to reach the sphere of contemplation where he transposes the generated photographic imprints to the photorealistic paper works. The artist's brush spanks the parched paper with watercolors, and then languid waves of the hand pare away the color from the figures. The figures are recuperated by injecting colors till they pulsate with life of the persona envisioned by the artist. The multiple textures and clashing rhythms of the background are dexterously interlocked with the depth, texture and tonal colors of the figures to emanate radiance. The fleecy and translucent rendering of the images give them ethereal beauty. These polymorphous images are perceived by the artist as a montage of 'attractions' rather than discontinuous pictures. Though the images appear bright, clear, joyous, optimistic and life-affirming, yet the artist's instrument forces him to do more than that, and his medium entices him to communicate to his records the reverberation of his own sensitivity.

For the liberalization of experiences, the artist raises them to the heights of expressivity by immortalizing his body and technologization of communication.  The procreated human surrogates in fiber echoes and reinforces the emotional blow provoked by the photorealistic images. The tiny prefabricated effigies are decked out in simulated hair, and real clothes and accessories. They stand on the moving podium like heroes, waiting for their luminous resurrection. The artistic forces that premiered are reunited for this performance. By ingeniously juxtaposing video, the photosensitive effigies morph into human forms and back again. This course of action unmasks the artist's longing for resonances of the brute realities (the experiences from the social and historical beds) from which the male objects have been alienated by enthronement. The artist satisfies his nostalgia for a return to 'the real' through flickering images on video equipment, thereby reconstructing the brute realities as further commodities that one might consume. The media treatment makes the installation appealing, dramatic and desirable; the heroic aura of the models would make them into icons to be imitated.

The synthetic, organic and cyclic protocol used by the artist draws a parallel reflection on postmodernity's “discreet concept of time where moments can be isolated, held static, examined and let go”3 through exploitation of technology, including photography and video camera. The powerful heroic overture of coherent ensemble not only immaculately exposes how media pressures shape private experiences and permeate individual identities, but also encapsulates the artist's intensity of feelings and felicity of gestures for the enduring desire, “….an attempt to live like a human”.4 The captivating magic of the artist's recent prodigious and contemporaneous body of work thus lies in its superb quality of universality and of perennial freshness that “age cannot wither, nor custom stale”.

References
1. Mander, Jerry: “The Tyranny of Television”. In: Resurgence, No. 165.         
2. Warr, Tracey: “The Informe Body” http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/documents/traceywarr.doc
3. McComb, Jessie F.: “The Art of Andy Warhol: Anticipating Male Objectification”.
    In: The Pamphlet Project, Issue 1.1. Red Earth, N. Delhi, Oct. 2005.