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Six Drops By Sudarshan Shetty Six Drops is deceptive. A spectral image haunts the show. It is a show about showing, what happens in a showing. The minimalist, white backdrop suggests modern art's locus classicus - the white cube. The artistic self is an extension of this institution. The turbine hall of the Tate Modern. Itself a haunted space, its past extinguished by the march of history, it now receives the artist's blood and creates canonical history in its own right. How then was this space made? Six Drops is a fable about its making, a fable that mobilizes mythology. Blood and semen, life and manhood, are haunted by a demand for sublimation. As they are shed, so is the self sublimated, released from the prisonhouse of destiny. For each drop shed signifies the release from an emotion that binds, one that attaches the self to the world. Captive of six internal enemies, the self is ironically released in the letting go of its vital fluids, its body and its vitality through which these mythic enemies circulate. The self is crafted in this process of letting go, of shedding vitality, in an orgy of expenditure without return. The self is a work of art. The mythic ego lets go, releases an artistic self, already sublimated. But this sublime process of letting go, this act of self-realization only results in a transference. In this monumental space, the artist apparently gives into a demand for an authentic experience, a self properly crafted. A defeat appears immanent, meaning becomes metaphoric once again, captured by an institutional process, located in mundane acts of power. The ego’s freedom from destiny is necessary. Yet, ironically, that freedom is made captive once again, contributing to the extension of an institution. The exhibit comes to life in the throes of a death. Flowing bodily essences drain the ego of its enemies and also craft the artistic self. The institution is an extension of that self, purified but also rendered virtual, beyond reach. Everything is artifice in the realm of art but here is a virtual act, an artifice that mocks-up the making and showing of the artificial. In this show about showing, the virtual is what ensures vitality. What permits its expressive power is the artist’s gesture of putting the pain and ecstasy that should accompany the loss of the body out of reach. This artifice steers the viewer away from reality, from the body and from pain as surely as it steers one toward the artist’s supposed aspiration. In this play between aspiration and artifice, desire becomes elusive. The image punches a hole into the wall of the real. Virtual shedding of blood and semen renders the artifice of the artistic act and the reflections of the artist’s ambition into self-reflexive critique. If the exhibition requires artifice then Six Drops is exhibition as artifice, playing on the notion of setting something up. As a foray, the show raises suspicion and skepticism about the virtual. Six Drops is deceptive. Yet it is clear. Vyjanthi Rao Vyjanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at The New School, New York. She works on cities after globalisation and her specific interest lies in the intersections of urban planning, design, art, memory and speculation in the articulation of the contemporary global city. |
