My recent body of work departs from earlier works, where my engagement was with notion of love, separation and desire. Although love as a grand theme is an anchoring point to explore my own implications within the local dynamics, within the state of Assam, of process of accumulation and dispossession, visible yet invisible to dominant sections there. Assam as such has a long history, especially in the wake of partition of Indian subcontinent and later partition of East Pakistan from West Pakistan. Assam being a border state has witnessed influx of refugees which comprises Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims. Support of Indian state at that time to settle these sections without foreseeing the demographic change and fault lines it would create. In the course of time, in the absence of State just mediation, contestation around resources surfaced in divisive forms. In the course of events, one can say without going in their individual detail, different sections of indigenous, self-reliant communities are being pushed into laboring market. Myself being part of the dominant section of Assamese society puts me in the arena of questions, where my presentation and re-presentation on such subject stands where, to whom it is addressed. Working on these subjects, my own subject hood too is part of these contestations, set as a force field by marginalized communities. In other words, in first impression, resented voices from marginalized communities worked as a mirror, in which we could see our own self with our deeds simultaneously as inflated and deflated. Dominant at one place being dominated at another remind me our double bind relation in the image of Sade and Masoch. My engagement in this body of work is not with the figure of Sade and Masoch, but the figure of Fuhrer which is looming large on the horizon of present.
Of Love and Other Demons:
In one of his seminars, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan notoriously declared that “the sexual relationship does not exist.” He was most certainly not suggesting that sexual acts do not take place, but was rather drawing attention to the fact that every such encounter is inherently marked by failure.
For Lacan, the failure of the sexual relationship is a necessary corollary of the drama of subjectivation that is elaborated in his account of the mirror-stage. At a certain age the infant begins to recognize him/herself in a mirror (or a figure that stands in for it), trapped by the lure of an image that holds out the promise of future wholeness and mastery, in contrast to its present lack of coordination in a body felt to be an assemblage of heterogeneous parts. One's subjectivity is therefore split at origin, constructed as it upon an identification with an image outside itself, a proximity but also a distance with oneself that Lacan called a relationship of 'extimacy'. The ego is thus external to subjectivity, and our sense of the self a fictitious illusion. It is in essence an alter- ego, and our recognizing of our selves is in fact a mis-recognition since for Lacan our self-hoods are always already constituted in the asymmetrical fields of desire - between what we believe ourselves to be, what we believe others to be, and what we think others want us to be. Thus we never simply desire; our desires are always already fashioned by the impenetrable desires of (social and sexual) others, and it is this impossible demand that makes it or any other relationship impossible.
According to Lacan it is Love that comes to fill in the absence of the sexual relationship; in love, as he says, one tries to approach “the being of the other”. Philosophers like Alain Badiou, following Lacan, posit the event of love as a moment that shatters the familiar coordinates of our everyday lives, and thus see it as an opening onto the Truth. Love is the name of an experience of alterity without any guarantees; it is an aleatory encounter filled with risk, an openness to difference in the radical otherness of another human being that will undermine every stable sense of identity. In the other, as in a mirror we see a distorted projection of our own desires. But the truth of love consists in achieving a fragile adjustment between two incommensurable worlds, where we transcend the finitude of our own monadic selves – where we experience the world from the perspective of Two instead of One. As Badiou says, “In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself through the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. “[1]
In his sculptures and photographs, DeepjyotiKalita stages a number of tableaux where the relationship between man and woman (unselfconsciously depicted in his work as the sexual norm) has become thoroughly instrumentalized, based as they are on sexual gratification and the ultimately limited and meaningless pursuit of self-interest - a reflection of the prevailing socio- economic order's regime of narcissistic hedonism and instant satisfaction. In an age where the incentive is to maximize ever-greater and more intense kinds of pleasure and where even the most transgressive forms of desire have been channeled into the economy of consumption, the amorous encounter becomes a field where the means-end rationality of contemporary capitalism is most perfectly expressed; relationships between individuals embody the values of the exchange society of which they are a part. For Kalita, this reification of even the most intimate dimensions of human experience seems to be the prevailing modality of Being in our time.
'Lachrymoscope' is a work that indirectly encompasses a number of these considerations. It can also be seen as a sly rejoinder to the valorization of cyborg and mutant subjectivities in some versions of contemporary post-humanist thought. It is a prosthesis – a technological extension of human capabilities - but unlike the techno - utopianism that one associates with particular strains of (Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, pg 19) the post-human, he grounds this work in a perceived lack of affective capacity in the contemporary world. The machine is essentially a psychoanalytic object that performs the work of the analyst; it draws attention to a situation where even this human contact, which as Lacan insisted was at the most fundamental level a commercial transaction between doctor and patient, has been fragmented. It is designed to provide a temporary solution to ones psychic blockages - of which the inability to cry is the symptom- and thus permits one to keep up social appearances, allows one to continue playing the game, or perhaps even provides a semblance of what it is to be human.
Like many art forms that come out of an aesthetic engagement with the trope of reification, a number of these works start off from a narrative of the fall - in this case, of an irrevocable estrangement from the originary, Edenic wholeness of the moment of Love. They are essentially depictions of melancholia, and are therefore subject to the debilitating self-doubt and creative and sexual paralysis that it engenders in their fixation on a lost object that they cannot let go of. Many of them display an almost lacerating honesty that verges on self-mockery in their evocation of the (fear of the) failure of masculinity and male sexual potency; in short they perform their own lack. 'often I miss you' is a dreamlike masturbatory fantasy which points to solitary sexual pleasure, but also functions as its object-cause in its evocation of the fragile, evanescent moment of the imagined or recalled sexual encounter itself and the material or psychic residue or trace that it leaves behind. In these and many other works in the show, the deadlock of the sexual relationship and the impasses of the subject under capitalism are often staged as an aesthetic deadlock.
In a kind of inverted echo of Lacan's thesis that sexual desire fastens onto part-objects, there are a series of partial - in the sense of being incomplete – and fragmentary forms and structures here (for instance, in 'Beneath his room there lies a cell') that evoke the hollowed out presence of a recently departed lover. Part fetish and part traumatic object, they figure the impossibility of completion (or consummation) as well as the violence of the sexual relationship and the subjective destitution that it can leave behind - they are the torn halves of an integral whole to which however they do not add up. An installation that is not part of the current show, titled 'Triangle', acts out the moment when love turns to repulsion; it displays articles of private fetishistic significance in sealed plastic bags - a museumizing (or mummification) of objects that metonymically stand in for the loved one. The work simultaneously enacts the ritualistic and systematic entombment of desire as well as its memorialization, and in its participatory mode - inviting viewers to take part through their own contributions of such painful tokens of love - initiates the cathartic purging of repressed memory that is often seen as one of the ends of art. A set of photographic works (collectively titled aphasia) takes this a little further and exhibits a number of formal and conceptual similarities to these fetishistic part-objects and their broken narratives.
The photographic trace is often seen as mortifying; it is a congealed slice of time – in the sense in which it is seen as the material imprint of a now absent Real - that will never recur again, “wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is the weightless transparent envelope”, as Barthes remarks in Camera Lucida. It is thus again a traumatic object, entirely impervious to its reduction in language, always in excess of the sum total of its own significations, the reservoir of an unbearable affective surplus. Deepjyoti Kalita's photographic objects exist in the non-place between this traumatic dimension of the photograph and a wish-fulfillment fantasy of its obliteration under the weight of time; they exist in the space of a contradiction, between the desire to bury memory (perhaps of a lost beloved) itself, but which instead encounters the recalcitrance of its material inscription that preserves it in its entirety like a fossil preserved in amber. Thus they also stage the conflict between the singularity of the event and the paradoxical iterability of its medial trace, between the moment of love and its afterlife, and the continual work of the elaboration of its truth even after its end which stubbornly persists as its corporeal rem(a)inder, which like the drive continues to insist, in its unassailable repetition and compulsion.
Taking a cue from Gilles Deleuze and his suggestion that it is not merely enough to understand what art objects mean, but rather to attend to what they accomplish, it might be pertinent to look at the ways in which these works imagine future possibilities rather than the tragedies of the past. Scattered throughout Kalita's oeuvre there are hints and intimations where the art object transcends the local circumstances of their making – their conditions of production as it were - and their melancholic fixation on the lost object of Love. The end of psychoanalysis is seen as the moment when the patient comes face to face with the socio-sexual impasses that paralyze them, when the true nature of their socially transgressive desire is revealed to them in all its monstrous, terrifying intensity. The works that comprise this show can in that sense be seen as an acting out, or better still as an exorcism; rather than a resolution which is impossible in any case, these sculptures and photographic objects perhaps look forward to a moment when the broken fragments that constitute them can be made whole again, but as an assemblage of heterogeneous parts that are melded together at their frayed seams in the imperfectness of their union. This dialectical relationship that is worked through in most of the works - between the fragment and the lost or promised totality that it gestures towards - can perhaps be posited as the implicit logic that governs the show as such. The video titled 'I never promised you a rose garden' exemplifies this in a fashion by running the actual sequence of events in a loop, where the object is continually haunted and undermined by the very real threat of its immanent dissolution, but where the promise of wholeness still holds, as a distant possibility that is also its impossible horizon.
In a number of recent works, one can see an attempt on Kalita's part to move away from the somewhat limited projection of personal traumas and anxieties within the public space of the gallery towards a more expansive engagement with its social and political significance. For example, a video like 'Arbitrary' can be seen in the context of his increasing involvement in social, corporeal and sexual marginality and the specific forms of desire that they engender - in short in the politics of abjection - which is to be welcomed as a conscious departure from the normative heterosexual frame of reference visible in most of the objects of this show towards the elemental structures of social and sexual difference itself. This intimation of future directions appears promising insofar as it builds upon personal reversals in order to place them in a more social register proper. For only then will the works live up to their own declared promise - of presuming to performatively negate the strictly utilitarian rationality of the contemporary world rather than simply reflecting it - since what really matters today is to maintain a thought of rupture that wills the extraction of the real from the reality that obscures it, which if not immune to the powers of recuperation that our present conjunction represents, then at least tries to reflexively engage with its inevitability in the form of a vigilant and guarded practice.
Sathyanand Mohan
July 2014
[1] Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, pg 19