‘Appetite for Revolution’, a solo exhibition by the artists
duo, Manil-Rohit at the Art District XIII, Lado Sarai, New Delhi signals a huge
paradigm shift as far as the very idea of revolution is concerned. When the
bearded youth rolled into the streets of Havana from the forests, people were
literally thirsty and hungry for revolution. World emulated the rustic boys’
arrival both successfully and unsuccessfully in different settings and
scenarios elsewhere. Each time when revolution raised its bodies clad in olive
green uniforms from behind the bushes, rocks and forest hide outs, people safe
in their homes back in towns and villages felt the ‘hunger and thirst’ for ‘it’,
the revolution. In 21st century, with revolution becoming a thing of
social media and once in a while in some city squares, the parlance has changed
considerably. Now people have ‘appetite’ for revolution. As Sainath titles one
of his books, ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought’, in our present times everybody
seems to have a good ‘appetite’ for a revolution. It gives away the feeling of
a chunk of revolution, well marinated, grilled and sprinkled with salt and pepper,
also with some salad for dressing, served before a lip smacking group mildly
high on the best red wine available. The irony is sharp, salty and peppery, and
of course tasty too.
Manil-Rohit plays up this irony in its shrillest pitch
possible when they title their show as ‘Appetite for Revolution’ and serves before
an art crowd that is mildly high on its own fakeness and pomposity. The show
has works of this duo from 2011 to now and one could see how they have slowly
perfected their ‘appetite’ for the glittering and sizzling language of the common
and vulgar advertisements that we see right from the shop of the bone setter,
tiny little shops that sell pirated software, malls that keep decking themselves
up throughout the year like ageing street walkers who are about to be out of
business to the tent houses and marriage barat bands. I am very particular in
saying this because most of the people misinterpret the works of this duo as
having the language of the high gloss advertisements of the classy products
afforded only by the rich and the affluent only because one of these artists,
Manil (Gupta) has an educational background in the Applied Arts. There are
artists who hail from the applied arts background and do well in the fine arts
scene too; for example Tukral and Tagra. From museology we have L.N.Tallur, who
sticks to his educational training in the selection of objects and subjects.
(R.O.I, 2015)
Manil-Rohit has understood this catch, which I do not want
to call as ‘trap’. They have overcome this expectation of the art lovers or
curators by pushing the sophisticated language of the high gloss advertisements
to the local and the popular, which are jarringly decorative and crowded with
each element screaming out for attention. Except in a few canvases in rest of
them we could see the chaos of images but eventually making a sense of their
own following the logic of the erratic. Manil-Rohit gives intelligent clues via
the images and metaphors that they use within the painting; at times they may
be the sperm shoots with arrows, or tubular structures flowing out from the
surrealistic machines and so on. One could follow these clever directions to
reach the narrative epicenter, though there is logical narrative in them. What
we witness through these tracing of lines by our eyes is the worlds that
apparently look like chaotic in a glittering way have some kind of meaning to
make. The dominant imagery, which has erotic and sexual orientation, besides having
an affinity for the semblance of female or male genitals, comes to assume
certain meaning underlining very pertinent social issues.
One perhaps really does expect a social issue from this kind
of paintings that could be passed off as visual objects produced during the
times of global market and senseless celebration of success. But Manil-Rohit
moves slightly away from this generic view and the keen eyes could see how the
overtly sexual but equally comical imageries pointing at the female foeticide
issue in our country. There are little slogans, exactly like the bills pasted
on the electric poles in the streets that talk about the difficulty of a sperm
in reaching its egg and fertilizing and somewhere suddenly we come to know that
the artists are talking about the difficulties of a female child to be born in
this earth, especially in our country. As the artists are not using a particular
geography or topography to place their characters, we cannot say that the story
that unravels in these canvases speak about the people or things in a
particular country. It is as important as going from the local to the global
and coming back to the local from the global. In the case of Manil-Rohit, they
often come to the local from a global scenario using a visual methodology which
is very urban therefore global.
(The Rigged Lottery, 2013)
If you ask me whether Manil-Rohit paints these canvases and
ply boards with a specific idea of creating a meaning repertoire, I will definitely
say that their works are spontaneous in execution except for the figure studies
and the placement of those figures within the scheme and design of the
painting. The surfaces evolve in some sort of a play between these brothers who
in a way frolic and tease each other and at times outwit each other in throwing
the paints on the surfaces. Then one of them takes over the canvas and starts
with the basic placement of elements; then once again the play starts automatically
when the other intervenes with his contribution of figures. It is a very
difficult process and definitely the control is mostly with the senior of the
duo, Manil who basically performs not only as a collaborator but also as a
control knob. However, as the play goes on they find out the purpose and
mission of the painting at some stage and meaning starts developing.
The consciousness about the meanings that they create and
carefully hide (as if they just do not want to be seen as ‘serious’ artists) in
these canvases at times burdens these artists and they are forced to go for the
well balanced and symmetrically sustaining images and in these they are all the
more interested speaking about the kind of ‘intolerance’ that has been going on
in our country for the last few years. Though there is no criticism leveled particularly
against anybody or any political outfit, as socially and politically conscious
viewers we could identify where exactly their criticisms are leveled at. The Cow
Protections, Ghar Vapsi and the overt importance given to the mythological characters
etc become the points of references in their canvases. It is not quite right to
pin point each of such metaphors and elaborate upon their political as well
critical connotations. Rather I would limit myself in saying that they are
typically Manil-Rohit as they raise critical points through the language of a
contemporary folklore. One has to have intelligent visual training to discern
them. One of the paintings titled ‘The Chronicles of Sitafal’ (2013), which happened
to be a controversial painting at the Pune Biennale in February 2015, curated
by me. Perhaps, this is one painting in Indian history, which was banished and
transported out of a city of its exhibition fearing that it would hurt the
sentiments of the city dwellers!
(Manil Gupta with his wife Aditi Khurana)
In the present exhibition, Manil-Rohit profusely uses the
images of eyes and female genitals. While the eyes are directly referred,
female genitals are suggestions but really intended to be those erotic/sexual organs.
The predominance of the eye imagery, which at times assume the anthropomorphic
forms and walk erectly around, at times dart sperms at a vaginal opening, at
times become an integral part of the design of the painting itself and at times
constitute the body of the sculptures cannot be ignored. Eye, when read along
with the history of erotic art and erotic literature or rather its erotic
reference in secular literature and art takes us to the realm of too many
complicated psychological conditions. Eyes are liked to vaginal openings. Eyes,
titled and seen almost look like human vagina. When in 1866, Gustav Courbet
painted the ‘Origin of the World’, the imagery that he selected was a close up
of a hairy vagina. Perhaps, this was the first portrait of a vagina giving it a
very special identity (much before the feminist artists like Judy Chicago attempted
giving it iconic status) and it was an ‘eye’ opened towards the world. Georges
Bataille in 1928 wrote the ‘Story of the Eye’, a complete erotic narrative
delineating the sexual perversions of a few teenagers. However, in his study of
this work, Roland Barthes (The Metaphor of Eye- 1972) says that eye is not just
an eye, but many things including the thingness of eyes, which would transform
into various metaphors suggesting both erotic zones and zones of fear of
castration.
Though we can say that Manil-Rohit, when paints and sculpts
too many eyes in the latest body of their works, they are not only suggesting
all those erotic things possibly related to the metaphor but also the
predominant presence of the ‘big brother’ (as in George Orwell’s 1984) who
keeps watching all the subjects 24x7x365. We have to live with this big brother
watching and interestingly we all too replicate eyes of surveillance with our
mobile phone cameras. It is not just about the CCTVs present in the streets,
offices and even in washrooms (prophetically Chaplin showed it in his film
Modern Times- 1936) but more about our willingness to be passive eyes that
document but do not respond. This documentation becomes a sort of displaced
eroticism which amounts to cruelty and displaced cannibalism. Two incidents
recently reported cite how this cannibalistic eroticism has come to manifest in
our daily lives even without us ‘meaning ‘ it. Recently there was an army plane
crash in Delhi and the people who rushed to the accident spot kept on clicking
selfies with a burning plane behind and burning human bodies inside it. One of the
most horrendous incidents reported is the death of a scooter rider in a busy Delhi-Jaipur
highway where the dead body of the scooter rider was run over many times by
several vehicles, mangling it into several pieces while the cars in the other
lanes stopped to take pictures of this horrible incident.
(from Manil-Rohit show at the Art District XIII)
Manil-Rohit points their fingers at this kind of reality
that we are living today. The eyes in their works are to be seen with the ‘eyes’
of such discernment otherwise they also would be seen like the celebration of
eyes rather than the critique of it. In the name democracy and in the name of
freedom of using tools of communication and in the name of freedom of speech we
have come to develop a character which is lined with indiscretion and irresponsibility.
Manil-Rohit paints that world with due irony and sarcasm. I am not here a judge
to say whether they too are drunk by the power of their eyes; but as far as I
am concerned and my critical views goad me, I would say that their selection of
language and the critique are to be recognized in this context and read from
this discursive platform.
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