FEATURE

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Fatigue is taking over…

Gitanjali Dang, Mumbai based critic and curator recently curated a show titled ‘Post Visual World’ at the Priyashree Galleries, Mumbai. She contends that the relationship between the image and the receiver has been severed due to visual overloading. In this essay she says, why this rupture has ocured.

In an age where the death of virtually every art practice has been announced, it would be scandalous to suggest the death of the visual. Postvisual world does not assert or imply the demise of the image. It merely postulates that fatigue is taking over.

The connect between the visual stimuli and its receiver has eroded and each image is received, if at all, as a dormant creature. Controlled environments, such as the one offered by a gallery could be – could, being the operative word – a possible exception to the rule.

The postvisual conundrum is particularly ironic since we are all habitués of a communications landscape, where glib visualities collide with the hope that new desires will be born.

The suggestion of postvisuality may seem paranoid to some, but paranoia is our double-edged sword, our great gift and Achilles’ heel. We need to extricate paranoia from its precarious position, as something perennially feared, and employ it to our advantage.

Paranoia, in addition, to being a rich asset in the exploration and understanding of the pictorial researches that comprise this exhibition, is also the key trigger to our rapacious living habits.
 
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In order to exploit the reserves of paranoia, we must implicate with vigour. Consumerism is often thought of as the lynchpin of the postvisual situation. In that the onrush of consumerism has been accompanied by a surfeit of visual stimuli, which are held responsible for the gradual stultification of our sense perception and our nous.

Jean Baudrillard writes in Hypermarket and Hypercommodity, “The objects are no longer the commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meanings and messages one could decipher and appropriate for oneself, they are tests, they are the ones that interrogate us, and we are summoned to answer them, and the answer is included in the question.”(1)

When summoned, our paranoia keeps us from resisting new interrogative spaces such as malls ‘n’ multiplexes. We delight in the inquisition, the gradual slippage into frenzy and the impalement of our senses by the brutish strength of the commodities.

By employing the services of implication one desires to create a situation wherein the gestures we loathe in the everyday consumer become an insight into what we love about our ostentatious lives.
 
The process of implication or tattling is often overlooked and occasionally derided. In postvisual world, the 11 photographers have endeavoured to give it new respectability.

The participant photographers have contributed a triptych each. Panel one, appraises the aesthetics of urban consumerist landscapes and in the process enables us to assess our fascination with a homogenously seamless consumer culture. Panel two, implicates the photographers as we encounter their auto-portraits. And in the final panel the photographers plunge their lenses deep into the megalomaniacal heart of the city. To draw final blood they incarcerate the city’s denizens in portraits.
 
With these triptychs one hopes to establish linkages, that will be startling in their visuality, and will explore consumerist landscapes as possible roadmaps to our future. With postvisual world,one intends to reach down to the imperfect aesthetic roots of burgeoning consumerism.

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Long before Doris Salcedo installed Shibboleth, a 167m-long crack in the floor of the cavernous Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, Leonard Cohen had sung, “There is a crack that runs through everything”. We are enamoured of the flawed; consumerism is our fallen hero. It equips us with the vocabulary of numbness. The rising bile in our throat and the sickness that slumbers in our guts, all seek to engage with the catatonic. This comfortable numbness and debasement of the senses is a part of our masochist culture. We want to be delivered from vibrancy to ennui.

“For if consumerism is like the plague, this is not just because it acts on large groups and disturbs them in one and the same way. There is both something victorious and vengeful in consumerism just as in the plague, for we clearly feel that spontaneous fire the plague lights as it passes by is nothing but a gigantic liquidation… The plague takes dormant images, latent disorders and suddenly drives them to the point of the most extreme gestures,” wrote Antonin Artaud in Theatre and the Plague. (2)

In these lines, culled from the essay, I have taken the liberty of replacing the word theatre with consumerism to establish their transposibility and throw into relief the thick connectivity they share. At the risk of sounding needlessly dramatic… consumerism is the new plague. Just as it has swiftly usurped our mental space, it has also subverted Artaud’s original contention. Plague and by extension the theatre of cruelty, as suggested in Artaud’s writings, are not about brutality but about the dissipation of false identities. By revealing their alluringly vapid pith, consumer goods expose their extreme gestures and draw us into their ambit.

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Within this exhibition postvisuality has a double theoretical framework: on the one hand, it assesses the cold, hysterical and hard-nosed aesthetic of urban landscapes; on the other hand, it hopes to follow the thread of postvisuality and observe how it splits its end – be it by way of appropriated and/or found image, performative photography or the purposefully mutated image.

The thought here is to do a Christo and Jeanne-Claude trick. Use postvisuality as a wrap that will starkly accentuate the formal values of urban spaces. This would enable us to read the fine print of our attraction for consumer culture.

NOTES
1 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Hypermarket and Hypercommodity’ in Simulacra And Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (The University of Michigan Press, 2005)
2 Antonin Artaud, ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in The Theatre and its Double, translated by Victor Corti (Calder Publications, 1999)