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Seeing, Consuming and Obscuring of objects

Gallery OED, Kochi recently presented a group show titled ‘Obscure Objects of Desire’ curated by JohnyML. . This show seemed almost as a defence of ‘object’ as a philosophical condition at the verge of getting recognized for its sheer physicality of experience, says Kavita Balakrishnan.

‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, an all time haunting film made on desire by Auteur  Luis Bunuel entered as a fleeting remembrance into mind as came to know of the show called ‘obscure objects’ curated by Johny M L and currently available on view in gallery OED, Kochi. However, this show indeed projects a broader and self reflexive framework on desire. It is not simply sexuality under introspection but the very sense making mechanisms and materials of charm and allure. This show seemed almost as a defence of ‘object’ as a philosophical condition at the verge of getting recognized for its sheer physicality of experience.

Often some ‘not easily definable things’ occur to our daily life as artists. Those shapes and things further prove to have an inevitably haunting appeal for the senses but with no particular reason of common consensus. For the artist each time repeats the shape/ object, he/she houses the shape with some new fancy of experience though not always charged with particular meanings and sign systems. So much so that the artist very enjoyably gets soiled in his ‘much occurring shape of charm’ that obscures definitive systems. Some who worked on painting for this show engaged in this route.  

Hariharan’s charcoal drawings had earlier chanced on some shapes of ‘no- thing’ and now he uses it so luminously and fancifully to insert some humanitarian rhetoric signalling through diminutive bodies in heroic postures still pertinent in our political memory.

Kajal Shah also dwells upon some shapes of absurd mass on which to forge an existential hanging of ‘houses’. The discreet allure of soft white gradient forms is explored by Medha Prabhakar. Seen are lovely, those unseen would be much more and it is but held in promises so that the viewer is supposedly all the time hypnotised for a great creative experience of recognising a form out of nothing. That is a poetic masquerade gaining the advantages of a charmer for the artist. Raj Mohanty titillates the eye with soft transparent ‘tissue-ed’ suggestions evoking a microbial world of love, smells, colours shapes and fragments involved.

Work of art in the age of graphic designs can make a generic ‘designer’s world’ of feelings and memories as Rupa Paul makes, or like what is done by Pramod, ‘work of art’ is made into arbitrary shapes with multiple allusions to things of sorts like kidneys or beans or genitals. Holed and sensitive to lights and shadows they are. This is fleeting sensation of whiteness towards gradations of varied kind. Rupasree also sports with her designing skill on the canvas. Pushkin works in the similar designer veins for this show but strikingly showcasing some definite, stark, personal and nostalgic allusions.

Objects are often strongly linked with issues of ‘usefulness’. The passive, inanimate existence of it is supposedly ‘the scope’ sought in the physicality of the object by the subject of pleasure. So ‘love for the useful’ is a pleasure derived from expectations evoked by the object’s gratifying presence. In the parochial daily concerns of life, object is often overlooked and the love for its physical being is not necessarily acknowledged. Or when done otherwise, it looks very strange. That is why Pushkin’s meticulous arrangement of rim-beads, lever and strings of an umbrella with striking sensitivity to the colour of its body parts becomes a careful tribute to an object at the verge of its ‘usefulness’ and ‘uselessness’. But in another work in the similar black scheme he makes some symbolic takes into time, space and self. Satyanand Mohan composes literally on the ironic takes of human desire for tasteful ideals and knowledge that will never escape its critical undercurrents.

Simrin Mehta has almost designed painting as a tabula of curio-images. Actually, painting (desirous objects) on canvas, the work of Art by itself, has further claim into an object status.

Oli Ghosh designed the most striking and lovely objects for this show. Design, like in Oli’s work can rarely be absolutely witty political statement. She designed a pair of almost archetypal night dress for ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’ in satin velvet and fur cloths in rich black and red colours. They look almost like objects encountered in one’s obscured experiences of a ‘window- shopping’ spree. The viewer’s subject position here is clearly intended as that of an insatiable voyeur. It is discomforted by nothing but a butterfly in bronze body and satin wings all hung on a designer hanger on a golden-yellow painted wall.

Mahesh Baliga’s ‘tool box’ is also a powerful work on ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ of objects. Surekha’s head’s with stuffed desires and Vidya Kamat’s images of oral splurging definitely try to embody the aspect of desire in palpable states.

Seeing is not simply ‘believing’ but it is also a sort of consumption as there is every chance of ‘seeing’ getting converted into ‘possessing’ and ‘consuming’. Objects of desire (including the works / concepts of Art in an Art Gallery) are often projected for buying or for simply ‘seeing’. Art also is partly about making / showing objects of tasteful desires so that one buys it or sees it. Of course one can desire to assume both these subject positions- the buyer and the viewer of art - that may fetch high pedestals.
However, as these striking works in this show suggest, there are many intersecting points between desiring, seeing, transacting, buying, communicating, gratifying, consuming, legitimising (something as desirable object) or to put in short, between the very acts of production and consumption of objects in a scheme.

Objects when acknowledged for their discreet charm are often exhibited out of reach. Even when placed within reach, it simply stirs up the latent craze for the ‘still unreachable’. Desire all the time guides one through objects even when one is made aware of its distressing mazes.
Interestingly, the other day, i chanced reading ‘the elements of style’ in a soap-journalistic column on life-style and fashion in a newspaper that prescribed some points to guide people how to get attractive and desirable. It tells “learn to modulate your voice. It will help your communication. Remember that avant-gardism is closely linked to the subtle. Refined shapes and varied fabrics from a forgotten or unrecognized past coupled with your personal touch make up an identity – a signature. And that is your personal style quotient”.  This seemed to expose a telling truth behind the philosophical situations that objects often inhabit.

There are subtle modulations that discreetly project object as ‘Art’ while it frankly acknowledges in this show its status as an object of production and consumption.

This show commendably works out that ‘discreet charm’ ( Oops! Once again thrown into yet another moving Bunuelian expression ) of itself as a show of Art.