LOVE's objects are everywhere and nowhere in particular. Crushed under the weight of references, love is extinguished as its own referent. What sense does it make to speak of love anymore? Love demands to be treated as a singular experience and yet slips out of grasp each time on each attempt to do so. A set is formed from the experiences demanding recognition as love. But its provenance is so wide-ranging that it collapses under the weight of its own variations. Love's contemplation leaves despair in its wake, the opposite of love. Madness is the condition of love and uncertainty its fuel. For love is not only all pervading but also all consuming, leaving a void in the subject's place and creating an overflow of meanings. The work of love demands the annihilation of the subject, the seat of meaning, yet cannot be grasped without that subject. Works of love step into that void, a void circumscribed by everyday memories of what love is, what it should be and what it can be-a void more terrible, harsher than it appears to be. But what fills that void has no natural pre-existence, neither in the realm of human nature nor in the logic of passion. And so to seek the subject of love is neither conceit nor self-indulgence, it is a necessary condition, a surrogate for the condition of art, anchored in the womb of the world.

Distraction For the subject in the process of annihilation, feeling love takes place through distraction. A form, a memory, an image is activated to take the place of the falling self. So serious is the intrusion required for the subject to regain consciousness. Memory is the counterpoint to madness. What is love, after all? A noun, a verb, an emotion, a condition, a feeling, an experience-corporeal; interior. It is also a dialogue between equals and opposites, each one attempting to conquer the other. But transcendence, proposed by all monist philosophies, is not an available option. Love is two-ness, a philosophy, an affect, an inner feeling concealed in the tussle between opposites. When the process of falling activates this two-ness, this insurmountable duality, the pain and the pleasure provoked by that state of being creates a void. The subject recognizes an emptiness at the core of duality.

A memory-at-large, coming from an indeterminate outside, with its images and acts, provocative of love, steps into that void. Like the giant toys making love on the gallery floor or the gently gushing fountains of "milk" and "blood," all images lead to distraction. All actions lead the self away from the consciousness of its loss. The impossibility of love without the distraction of images gives rise to all manner of deliberative acts of making love. And from there also arise the comedies, the threats and the tragedies of the 'love story'. If love's grandeur lies in its extinguishing of the self, works of Love must constantly cast that subject about, giving rise to doubt and uncertainty while also playing with the possibilities of comedy, darkness and wonder on the gallery floor. For love is blind but completely visible, the lover loses his mind but must keep his memory intact in order to lose his mind. Love is a condition of paradoxes.

Extension The enigmatic objects and works of Love provoke calmness and order only to extend this madness of love. The motion of Love's works, like the giant, oscillating brass penis, counterweighted with a brass heart, produce a lull in consciousness, a quelling of passion through incongruous projections of the self in acts of unlikely coupling. The complicity required to accept the principle of orgasmic pleasure extends the belief and faith in the real. But doubt about authenticity, the necessary aspect of falsehood raised in the moment of connection between the gaze of viewer and object of viewing always intrudes into the sphere of viewing as an enigmatic flag in the sea of love. The prosthetic extension of vision, the supplement of automatic writing, the three-faced, morphing valentine heart or the extended skeletal beasts enhance this feeling of doubt while providing an anchor in recollected images.

The impossibility of the supplement, seeking to overcome a condition of lack without succeeding at concealing it, is thrown up constantly as an answer, as if belief and faith in the real can be absolute while blinding oneself to obvious shortcomings. The possibility of such absolution-the pedagogy of the real extended by these substitutions for acts of love - in fact sums up that condition of doubt in which the subject is always maintained, held in thrall by the possibility of love. If one seeks illustration or interpretation in the acts and works of Love, one only returns disappointed. The perverse pedagogy-in its literal aspect of turning or twisting away from an apparent source, embedded in these creations-circulations without bodies, sounds from unlikely sources, acts without meaning and purpose or transformations without apparent source-seems calculated to pull the rug of complacency from under one's feet, to create and simultaneously destroy the illusion of comfort that these extensions and props might possibly provide.

Absence Seized by a burst of fire, the subject of love enters into a composition with the Other. But absence is both the catalyst and the remainder of the process through which the self displaces itself from its position as a "multiple singularity recognizable among others" (Badiou). To be mindful of this absence implies being alert and apart from one's own self. But this mindfulness also takes place in a state of distraction and cannot be directly engaged by the subject who is thus seized by love. Moving beyond one's self in the act of love, the subject struggles to remain intact in the process of exceeding. Enigmatically, the self in love must also engage in a process of self-love, to cultivate assiduously a space of absence already known to itself in the process of its daily existence. Like a petrified and fossilized form of life in metallic armour, the self protects itself from the passions of love.

These passions require inversions of the self, they turn it upside down and inside out. The body exceeds itself by becoming two, by creating a 'canny double' that sometimes appears to be a shadow of itself and sometimes much more. The emptiness and negative space, created by this dis-jointed doubling is filled with the absence of being. For the void seeks to constantly reiterate through this empty space, to recapture its proper location at the heart of being. Like a mirror image without the solidity or flatness of a mirror image, the doubled self risks exposure of its empty core. This risk is ever present for the self in love and yet, it is a risk that produces blindness as its hedge. As manifestation of absence, blindness covers over, it blankets the hollowness created by absence. It creates a formal presence of darkness, provides solidity, flatness and form upon which the empty core of the self might rest.

Morphology Blindness calls forth a paradox - how does one distinguish between the internal and the external in the solid darkness of blindness? Tactile language, a supplement like all language and symbolic form, is a powerful substitute. Through mechanical extensions of the body or poetical extension of machines, a grammar of love is reiterated in signs, symbols and icons. But the elusive nature of love, premised upon the destruction of the difference between an internal and an external field, places a new spin upon the tricks of language. Conceits of language are rendered meaningless through endless repetition of the formulae of love, at the edges of the boundary between the internal and the external, always brushing up against that boundary. As for signs of love, the irony of the heart as the universal symbol for love is hardly matched by the attempts of language to navigate the boundary between inside and outside, between internal and external.

The heart, ripped out of its innermost existence inside the body, inside a casing of blood and tissue morphs into a form bearing the slightest iconic resemblance to its natural referent. The condition of possibility of a morphological understanding of love lies in the ability of that understanding to actually extinguish both form and structure - a morphology that rests on the destruction of distinctions between internal and external. But that destruction always ends up producing a dreamlike state, another morphology of love, one that foregrounds the transitions from inner to outer and back again. Love emerges as a feeling that must be produced through struggle, through battle with the self in a field of mechanical reminders, a play that must overcome and overwhelm that field. And so, the invisible typist's fingers produce over and over a word that goes with the cliche of love's blindness to reality, of being seized over and over by the moment of the declaration of love.

Circulation The sport of love results in the circulation of essence, of rasa as sentiment and embodiment of aestheticized pleasure. The evident strain of sporting, as understood in the classical descriptions of leela, always yields a closed system of consanguinity, placing desire dangerously close to taboo, to that which destroys the social. The circulations of vital fluids as the extension of an exposed mechanism reverse the normal conventions of taboo, the concealed, the protected and the secret by appearing upfront to assert a negation of sameness in the figural conditions of consanguineous and erotic relations. The dualism inherent in these relations is concealed through acts of duplicity and acts that produce distraction and distance from the erotic in the sports of love, which embrace and submerge the entire, contradictory field of the social.

The absent body, present only through the continuation of its vital function of circulation, recalls the vulnerability of the subject whose place can always be usurped by the artful dissemination of its vitality. This field of subjective danger is characterized by the subject's attempts to synchronize his movements with those of the Other, even as the Other keeps shifting her place from one social role to another. Asynchronous acts are inevitable but taboo, allowing inextinguishable desire to arise by setting up the outside as an invisible foil to processes internal to the subject's social constitution.

Extinction The annihilation of the boundary between inside and outside is the condition of possibility for love. But expressed in the world, this annihilation also takes the form of things, objects made, creatively deformed. The giant toys disporting themselves on the gallery floor, the black rubber roses and the valentine pink images of a morphing heart all put into circulation an expression of destruction and retrieval. They engage the logics of perversion and fetishism in the realm of desire, passion and memory in bringing to the fore the modality in which the distinction between inside and the outside is transcended. The strange and hilarious coupling of two giant toys evokes the marriage of desire to a system of fetishism - of obsession with things as substitutes for a system of affects connected to love, to childhood games and adult assessments of value. With objects 'surinvested' with desire, the spectator's laughter over this couple recognizes a familiar struggle between desire and its extinction, in the comedy of complicity that unites the viewer with these fetish objects.

Mimicking the circulation of things in the world, aesthetic appropriation - as gigantic or miniature objects, as souvenir - like multiple editions - seeks constantly to transcend and annihilate the boundary between inside and outside, to substitute icon and thing for organic connection, to put it in the place of inner experience, affect, sentiment and feeling. Within the visual, aesthetic system, these images, icons and things function as hinges between the natural and the non-natural, the animate and the differently animate and the natural and the commercial. These dualities are themselves artefacts of the continuous articulation of the body, technology and subjectivity in the encounter between subjects and objects in the world at large. Love's objects are activations of duality, reminders of the fundamental two-ness of the world, a two-ness that must be transcended in order to reclaim the unity and integrity of the subject.

Street Theatre As activations of duality, works of Love erect a theatre of memory within the space of the gallery. The transformations of the street into amusement park are evoked in the transformation of the gallery into a site of bemusement and captivation. Works of Love are found in this space of captivation, reminiscent of the sites of mass entertainment of early industrial societies like the amusement park, the circus and later, the gaming arcade. Subjects of mass society and mass culture - trapped in cycles of leisure and boredom - between the production and consumption of commodities - were drawn to these sites of mass entertainment and spectacle that created 'embodied crowds' from the gatherings of souls scattered and alienated by the circulation of commodities. Signs on the street and in the world become seductions of a different order, attracting the self to enter into the fundamental dualities that exist in relations between subjects, between spectator and object of art, between artist and his works.

The active object, usurping and making absent the viewer, only heightens the subject's experience of being split apart from within, refracting, at multiple sites, the dualisms that drive the very possibility of ethical relations, of relations to truths, subjective or social. The complex use of love as cliche through familiar and mundane aesthetic and symbolic forms invokes a void in which an ethical, subjective relation can be articulated to a truth anchored firmly in the memory of the everyday world and in the encounter with objects of that world. But Love's works also articulate this ethical relation on the plane of the equally powerful current of excess in which the notion of love is submerged in everyday life, taken over by the logic of mechanically produced and reproduced desires. To work against this current, Love uses the very same weapons - the mechanical and the cliched - in completely unexpected ways, as an invitation to form an ethical relation to one's inner life in the world. Love, in this manner, is the shorthand for an all-consuming idea, a subject induced by fidelity to an encounter between self and other.

Vyjayanthi Rao
Mumbai and New York
October, 2006

This essay draws on Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2001) and Marquard Smith's essay, "The Vulnerable Articulate" in his edited volume, The Prosthetic Impulse (MIT Press, 2006). All quotes are from Badiou's essay. Smith's essay showed me a way to develop the concept of perversity in its etymological (non-sexual) sense of 'turning' or 'twisting away'. This was a term I used in my first attempt at writing about Sudarshan's work (catalogue for Statics, Gallery Chemould, 2004). I was also privileged to have extensive conversations with the artist, especially during his visit to The New School, New York as artist in residence (March-April 2006). As an anthropologist, my reading is necessarily conditioned by a disciplinary training that allows me to read the works and their context as cultural texts. My particular manner of reading proceeds by uncovering the genealogies of these texts in everyday processes and in the philosophical anchoring of these processes. This method meets Sudarshan's artistic practice somewhere along the way, especially in his desire that his works should activate the spectator's "memory at large," as he puts it, and, by doing so, to step beyond the gallery and into a being in the world as thing, not merely as a comment upon the world.

Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at The New School, New York. She works on cities after globalization and her specific interest lies in the intersections of urban planning, design, art, memory and speculation in the articulation of the contemporary global city.