Sinister White

“Milk and Skin” might sound rather cruel, but may be not when it comes clean, bloodless and odourless in the sanitized purity of fake fur and fleece, fake pearls and prosthetic silicone.

Though these ‘stand-ins’ might for a moment pass of as ‘real’, their usage here is for what they are, fakes. In fact ideas about vigour, youth, vitality and immortality all seem to be more enduring and everlasting in the fake.

The saddle has perched itself on the hollowed out, lifeless, weightless, almost floating female form. The genuineness of its skin (cow leather) could well be suspect, given its existence among the fakes, much like its own identity of supposed male virility, power, obsession and authority. The spuriousness of its existence revealed here, functions not only as a cultural construct, a fabrication, but also the site of outmoded though persistent cultural myths, misplaced romanticism, unquestioned traditions, false sentiments and nostalgia.

The emphasis on the colour white, with its cultural and religious associations of peace, non-violence, purity and spirituality, could stand here for quite its opposite: sanitation, hygiene, mute violence and savagery, desire, disease and the environment.

It is a delight to juxtapose, combine and fuse the precious with the banal, the rare with the abundant, the high with the low, the powerful against the voiceless, the political with the artistic, so as to evoke a set of concerns without specifying the connections.

The contemplation of culture and the contemplation of the body occur as parallels here, experiencing (in their own ways) birth, mutation, proliferation, degeneration and death. The body as a biological system, a literal system that exists with its own sets of logic and its own pressures and conflicts, as against culture with its metabolism and multivalence, engaging in a dialectic conveyed by reference and allusion, rather than explicit statement, transforming the form or image into a psychological image only to help reconnect with experience in newly suggestive ways.

Krishnaraj Chonat.