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Review
Porous Walls: Still Life of Death and Decay
Mumbai based young artist Prajakta Potnis recently presented her solo show ‘Porous Walls’ at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai. JohnyML reviews the show saying that the whole installation could be seen as a still life that exemplifies the flimsiness of life, death and decay.
Just outside the entrance of the Guild Gallery, Mumbai, at the reception area, a small plastic bucket with a lid is kept. Those smokers who are there to attend the opening of Prajakta Potnis’ solo exhibition titled ‘Porous Walls’, while looking for a place to throw ash find this bucket, and a moment before they spill it, they realize that it is not a dust bin. A closer look reveals that it is a work of art, a bucket with mustard seeds in a fungus like formation, slightly displacing the lid from the top. The object evokes a certain amount of curiosity and abjectness. However, this abjection has a controlling power on the senses of the onlooker. Witnessing abjection not only repulses but also it organizes, controls and helps to emote. In short, abjectness is beauty seen in reverse. Prajakta Potnis’ works are all about quotidian beauty seen in reverse.
For the artist, ‘Porous Walls’ is a moment in an aesthetic continuity in which she has been partaking for the last few years. For Potnis, ‘wall’ is a metaphor that represents the middle class life in Mumbai. The walls give a backdrop, provide shelter, add security and beauty and above all remain mute witnesses to all what is going on around. Walls like human beings have an inside and outside, and in this sense they are like human skin creating a sensory zone between the external and internal world. This zone is porous, like skin, and is vulnerable to decay and death. Potnis looks at these walls as human skin, simulating the ideological interventions taking place on human skin, exposing its scars and at times covering it up with artificial beautifications. Her paintings speak of these acts of ideology on skin, the politics of beauty and embedded racial discrimination practiced within an otherwise egalitarian society.
However, ‘Porous Walls’ is not about walls alone. It is about death and decay happening within the walls, a kind of degeneration taking place within the human beings even while going through the enriched times of material opulence and ideological coolness. I would say, the whole show is a three dimensional still life, which at times spills over to the exteriors of the gallery walls. As a genre in artistic practice, still lifes are meant to show the beauty of life, its order and sense of philosophical organization. With certain given interpolations, still life can act as a memento mori, a reminder of death and decay. What is seen fresh and beautiful today could succumb to the vandalism of time and become dead objects. Hence, the beautiful still life could also show the inverse abjection embedded in it. Still life is beautiful in its allurement and at the same time, a philosophical perspective gives it the quality of a reversed (or reversal of) beauty.
Potnis plays up (on) the ambiguity of the genre of still life by converting the whole gallery space into a dark zone, a kind of brooding setting for arranging the objects of contemplation. The dark ambience of the gallery subtly alludes to the interior of an excavated tomb, where artifacts and utensils are kept for the buried person’s comforts in the life after death. These objects laid out to the viewer as if they were in an operation table are all from our contemporary life. They are the familiar utensils and objects made curious by the artificial growth of fungus like forms using fake pearls and mustard seeds. Right from the water tap to the tooth brush, from comb to electric bulbs and bulb holders, anything and everything has a quotidian presence in our life, are transformed in the pure revelry of decomposition.
I would say this decomposition is stilled and stranded in the middle way. They have become static objects with some kind of museum quality. They are there to be looked at, contemplated and concluded. The moments which should have been pulsating with the bizarre activities of the fungi, somehow become arrested in Potnis’ works. As they are laid bare before us for scrutiny, perhaps this is an artistic deliberation to arrest the moment of articulation as a moment of finality. Had these decaying effects been moving out of their fixed surfaces and clinical display, it would have been a bit more interesting. Also, I feel these objects could have been spread out in the gallery in a more random fashion than what we see now. The paintings could have been avoided at least for this show. This has become a trend these days, the artists need to show all their skills at one go. Restrain, that is what I want to say for in this show, the paintings do not make much sense despite Nancy Adajania’s efforts to connect Potnis’ previous works to the recent ones.
Though Prajakta Potnis falls prey to the compulsion of commerce, she has tried her best to create a counter point of these decaying museum objects by positing them in their actual location in the quotidian life in a photographic installation which looks more like an organized Tony Crag’s work. But this comparison is not for disparaging Potnis’ photographic installation. Comparison could be for validation and conjoining the new work of art in a historical lineage.
