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We live in an age of rapid transitions- when variously coded worlds surface simultaneously to demand attention from us- or at a time when time itself seems emptied out of content, for it is only then that it can, perhaps, be filled up. The time described is governed by the logic of capital.
This perception is always already precipital. The condition of perception exists as an aftermath of many similar occurrences, as it exists, often without a tremendous dependence on its own historicity, for to live within it and to construe a position of a critique from without is what many of us try and imagine; yet we continue to get caught up in the magnitudes of its aura. Its antennae, its sensors, its watchful eyes continuously inform and intersperse our fields of vision, infinitely implicating us.
Experiencing the life-world via mass media, as a transmitted image of terror, tragedies and confident exhortations about the future, produces a hyperreal world- a world that is only understood as a spectacle, and then vanishes with promises of a spectacle. But, often the ontic implication of being amid the spectacle, or even the hyperreal, is a difficult predicament; this produces sheer experiential confusion, especially when the facts and experiences are being overshadowed by codes with multiple entries. The act of experience is not the same as its representation. Since, as the situation suggests, one has to invent layers and riders to go with the representations, so as to create communicative function for the units of experience. For, at a secondary level, when the media forms the source of one’s imaginary, the language game is not a straight act, more so when, retrieving certain residual and depth-related questions is part of one’s agenda.
In the process of translating the second-order reality, there are bound to be deferrals, indefinite postponements of those primary and experiential moments- moments of revelation, moments of depth, for everything seems to cohabit the surfaces- past perfect and present imaginaries, with equal intensity and clamour for attention.
Murali Cheeroth seems to be playing the role of a rescuer in attempting to retrieve depth from this proliferating surface tension, in the metropolitan imaginaries that he calls Mise-en-scène- the theatre of the hyper real and the absurd.
Its not for no reason that Murali Cheeroth marks these surfaces, and marks the act of surfing by the theatrical/ cinematic term mise-en-scène - for anyone looking for the depth that this term implies, depth that would seem to be indefinitely lost- knows that it cannot be retrieved in its past heroic gesture; any attempt at such retrieval would be affected by its current status of indefiniteness, expose its fragilities, and hence would render the enterprise absurd. Thus his Mise-en-scènes- ‘whatever is there in the scene’- render their framing superficial and arbitrary. They proffer, suggest depths and defer them at the same time while attending to the halation produced by tiny movements.
The absurd does not reside in the contradiction of any suggested real, but in the possible passivity of the viewing subject, a subject who doesn’t know the entry or exit point of a scene, much like in absurd theatre. Wherein as a viewer, you won’t know when a scene began or ended. Much like Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s plays in general or, even much like the surrealists who would take upon themselves the task of de-familiarizing familiar scenarios. We are clearly faced with dilemmas here, clear dilemmas, as to the status of the images that Murali Cheeroth’s proferred mise-en-scènes produce, and the indefinite deferrals to which we as viewers are subjected. Thus, the viewing is not so much passive in its process as in its depth offerings.
To throw up a depthless meaning in a mise-en-scène, Murali Cheeroth has the task of introducing his field and its objects, which then are amenable to descriptive scrutinies.
In his painting Mise-en-scène 2, better described as a field or a screen, to the right, a laboring figure balances itself on a disjointed piece of steel that waits to be connected with other disjoined units- a bridge yet to reach completition. The other side also eagerly awaits this union, and much as the descriptive baroque salvo would await concrete referents, below is a figure of Hector, Achilles or Apollo, with his sword rested on the putties, looking up- as if for some instruction or revelation before taking up arms. Eyelines do not meet in baroque, they criss-cross; they are tempestuously upward looking- all the figures look up while the skin that retains them is made of infinite criss-crossings of flickers- pixilated features that call for special attention only when one withdraws from the scene.
I won’t measure the predicament of Murali Cheeroth, the maker / author of these images, but as we will see in a while, he addresses that himself.
In the scenography of his paintings, he creates a world of which he cannot be a part, for the reason that is obvious. For, a habitable scene has to have the basic criterion of a unity, a depth principle- which is quite denied in his mise-en-scène, hence he does not covet a habitable space- for there is no space – it is a surface, and a simulacrum. Yet, there are certain representational protocols in introducing a subject- he chooses the baroque drama of an indefinite center, but with a definite assumption of power- that is above. The lone figure on one side of the disjointed bridge, by its gait, look, produces expectations that are seemingly from the liturgical, as how the depraved would feature in both religious and secular scenes of redemption. Or, if we look down ward – wherein this upward look is replicated in the statue- there is an epic mythic and liturgical current in the predicament of these figures
A figure of a swimmer, in another painting, may have come as a necessary corollary, as if swimming in this shallow light would retrieve the baroque depth and redemptive illusion. The human form caught in its predicament- undecidedly tragic, indeterminately absurd, finds its pair always in those tinier signals. They swim in the infinitesimal, abysmal gesture of brushstrokes, pixels and repetition- as if a spaceship has just passed, leaving its residual signature on the retinal surface.
If Murali Cheeroth has, so far, been avoiding depth, his own proclivity to self examine would bring him to figuring himself in, in a roundabout manner, via the performative. What would be a performative for an assumed persona–governed self image or a being-governed self, in addressing depth after deferring it for so long? Is it a solace/ is it a scenography of the absurd, a pretext to introject himself in the motley ongoings of the depthless universe? Is it another strategy of deferral, whose protocols, he could not avoid? In other words, this attempt at positing oneself in the midst of a simulacra project can be, in a way, an attempt at completing the cycle by offering a possible corporeality to the immeasurable.
In fact his videos seem to serve the double purpose of disturbing the accepted surface simulations of the world. On the one hand they are a guarantee of an authentic presence, on the other, they are a pretext for asking the moot questions, which, by the medium’s own protocol of repetition and looping, we can hope, will create a secondary simulation in a documentary mode.
The Lure: Bare Singularity
His videos stand at the limits of these questions, in fact, for a favorable reading the two worlds-of paintings and videos would better produce splits, but that possibly is my own auto suggestion directing me to sum up via Murali Cheeroth’s project/ his projected universe, his uninhabitable universals.
One of his videos titled Tran-ver-sal, if played mute, produces an amazing result, throws open very many smaller gestures; it is an encounter between two personages- whose definitions are brief for mimetic precision. These personages get into an imaginary conversation. They face us informally, much like the protagonists in a Samuel Beckett play- quite barren- slightly differentiated clones of a single persona- the author of the video. The entire exercise describes a vain attempt at convincing the other self that one has a very pressing, very urgent question at hand. The response/ reply comes in the form of a skeptical smile or even dismissive laughter.
The videos are thus skeletal, minimal. They are, somewhat, testimonies to the bare life to which Murali Cheeroth possibly wants to give some witness value. They are also bearers of excess. The excess that holds a subject together with the context of his living, with the dialogue he can have, however rudimentary, however unformed.
His other videos, many of which are about otherness, defamiliarizes the subject: streams of water dribble down the face of the subject author, which in close up- as any familiar part-body does in close up- appears to be inflections in a landscape. These appear to be some kind of a residual of a secret ritual that binds a subject, escape from which being an absurd Sisyphian act. Quite suggestively then, he has titled them Re-visions.
In face of this one might wonder about the strategic emptiness of gestures, which would bring one back to the titles; one of the videos, which has a question for a title- Where were you when the war was on? renders this via an emptied out expression of blankness. The figure in it faces us, without an answer, without anything, with a blank expression, blinking his eyes sparingly, 180 times between twenty four frames, against a backdrop bathed in the red of a possible ritual horror, that can render a subject mute.
It acts within the parameter of asking questions, the bare fact that one has some questions, of the fact of baring questions, leading often to a sensuous- communicative impasse.
These videos are thus pre linguistic apparatuses, quite common in the gesture driven world of the closed societies, quite common in the language of the surreal.
These videos renders the paintings- his first attempt at suggesting simulacra, somewhat unstable , somewhat split, somewhat schizoid and show a passage via which to part negotiate, negotiate and withdraw, talk and withdraw, from/ with situations.
Anshuman Dasgupta
December, 2007
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