cross-posted from Browntown: Chitra Ganesh

hello readers and happy new decade to you from me... as some of you may have noticed my once feverish pace has slowed to a glacial crawl, what i like to think of as a majestic, solemn and stately schedule but that others may regard as a sign of laziness. no matter. solo-blogging--especially when you start a blog like jugaad which is full of really really long and time-consuming essays--can be tedious and off-putting, so in the spirit of the new decade's incipient geist of comradery and sociability i am doing some group-blogging at the great browntown, otherwise known as mansi shah's blog. this one is cross-posted from there, a quickie i wrote about a chitra ganesh piece that was hanging up at thomas erben in new york last month, waiting to be taken down...

Chitra Ganesh's Lady Mollusk (2009) sits stonily, with the aura of a prophetess demonstrating an old and meaningful wound that is unlikely to cicatrice itself closed any time soon. To the contrary, it looks cosmically alight, spilling ectoplasmic fairy-dust like a mystical inkjet womb. Bubblegum shoelaces stream from her eyes sideways at a distant, dispersed set of heavens, and although this is one war that never seems won, what's under attack here are clearly the poofy-sleeved perspectivalisms and vanishing points of the Western hegemon's scopic regimes: instead of concentrating our gaze on the lady herself, these florescent laser beams shoot off at invisible horizons, pulling us wonderfully toward inscrutable objects that float, weightless, beyond the edges of the image. Newton be damned: chrome plastic bubbles form and dissolve in the air around her according to some hidden and unfamiliar physics, blinded and dully reflective. If I look closely I can see myself standing there tiny, entrapped and multiplied by fourteen, with no head, upside down.

There is a deep mock-Orientalist archival riff at work behind this piece, a bass note sample one hears looping away a lot in "Indian" (post-Saatchi, I can only use that in quotes because I don't know what it means) art these days... often overplayed frankly. Here, happily, it actually advances the cause, giving its otherwise pixellated, digitally flattened, deliberately low-fi painted lady a set of ghostly black shadows, tiny points of unknowable nullity impervious to any kind of analog light. For more empirical thrills, we have to reckon with the coarse, black, sloppy, tangled braids turned loose from beneath her shawl--refugee tresses quickly tied and spilling forth onto the floor, coming at the viewer with an uncertain, possibly dangerous set of motives.

She's obviously some kind of shamaness, a sorceress busy at a spell. The monstrous, many-eyed, tongue-pink nudibranch that she cradles like a Spanish guitar, backlit with a chemical phosphorescence and draped gently over her shoulder like a friend pulled from a house fire? That must be her familiar.

many thanks to Nitin Mukul for the photo! do not try to: