Excrescence

Ex·cres·cence
[ik-skres-uh

ns]
–noun

an abnormal outgrowth; abnormal growth or increase;
a normal outgrowth, as hair or horns; any disfiguring addition.

The rhetoric of our times is permeated by "hand-of-God" metaphors, such as “the invisible hand of the “market,” or the idea that seemingly autonomous processes "go viral,” morphing and spreading beyond our control—metaphors that frame our understandings of our changing world. Such notions have proliferated in the popular consciousness and vocabularies, informed by images of viral growth and infectious transmission, genetic mutation, and cancerous metastasis, as well as inexorable degeneration and decay.

Featuring a multidisciplinary array of works by artists from India and China—Ashutosh Bhardwaj (painting), Sheba Chhachhi (interactive video), HAN Bing (photography), Tushar Joag (drawing, and installation), Prajakta Potnis (photography and site-specific intervention) and WU Gaozhong (photography), Excrescence explores this constellation of powerful metaphors that pervade the imaginaries of contemporary discourse.

The power of metaphor has been richly explored across the human sciences. A glance across the breadth of this discourse will help contextualize the visual and conceptual explorations in the artworks shown in Excrescence. In his seminal work Mythologies (1972),[1] structuralist semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes examined the semiological functioning of myth and metaphor (and often myth as metaphor), through which we make sense of cultural and social phenomenon ranging from historical events to national flags; from sports like wrestling to the way we conceive of love. As a mode of signification, metaphor functions on the basis of imputed or (often unconsciously) assumed relations of resemblance, often via metonymy, wherein a part is treated as a representation of the whole, or the workings of a part are thought to be homologous with larger dynamics that govern the workings of the whole (such as in the notion of a microcosm). Myth as metaphor, he argues, can perform an insidiously "de-politicizing" function. By this, Barthes means that through myth historical contingencies can be made to look inevitable and "natural" in the very process of endowing them with meaning, and “what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality." In this way, myth falsifies nature, not by the denial of historical events, "on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation, but of a statement of fact." [2] But of course this “factity” is as political as it is fallacious.

Metaphors We Live By (1980),[3] a path-breaking study by cognitive scientists and linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, demonstrated that our thinking is unconsciously structured by metaphor. Against the grain of conventional thinking, which treated metaphor as a voluntary creative communicative strategy adopted when literal meanings are exhausted, they showed how metaphor permeates our most basic modes of linguistic expression. Metaphors encode implicit sets of values and are so common and widely shared (such as metaphors of direction, e.g. “up is good, down is bad,” “forward is good, backward is bad,” in English) that their workings often become invisible to us, and we speciously see them as descriptors of an objective empirical reality thought to exist outside of language, both external and impervious to the constitutive functioning of the metaphor. Like all language, however, far from being neutral, metaphor shapes our thinking, assumptions, concepts, and communication in ways that are built into the linguistic forms themselves, and as such, it shapes not only our perceptions of the realities so signified, but also plays a role in constituting those realities themselves.

A striking example of this can be found in social critic Susan Sontag’s illuminating discussion of the ways in which two “modern” ailments, cancer and tuberculosis functioned as dominant social metaphors for the disorder and decay of our times in her landmark work, Illness as Metaphor,[4] shaping our conceptions and treatment of people suffering from illness, but also shaping the way in which we process and respond to the social realities that are signified by such metaphors. In 1989, she expanded this analysis with meditations on “AIDS and its metaphors,” again demonstrating how our metaphorical discourses surrounding various illnesses serve as optics through which we make sense of larger social, political and economic processes we perceive as afflicting our contemporary world with far-reaching ramifications.

One such profound and disturbing ramification is the way in which such metaphors of excrescence perform a conceptual sleight of hand that explains, amplifies, and augments the widespread feeling of being without agency. Philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that this debilitating sense of alienation from our own agency comes, in part, from thinking of the world as if it were governed by an irresistible internal logic that seems to sweep away our ability to exert control over our world, our lives, and at times, even our minds. She refers to this conceptual trap as "autonomy of the process," and rightly identifies it as a fiction. It is a powerful fiction, however. Woven into the dominant narratives of contemporary political, economic, cultural, and social life of our times, is the idea that there are "forces out there" that push and pull us this way and that, and are essentially are beyond the scope of human action.

In Excrescence, the works shown come at this set of issues from a variety of angles, either meditating on, or reflecting, instantiating, or performatively embodying; either critiquing or deconstructing some of the metaphorical leitmotifs of this mode of thinking and the coded cultural memes and signifiers of these kinds of anxieties: viral spread, cancerous metastasis, uncontrollable (unpredictable) mutation, invasive toxicity, entropic degeneration and decay (a sort of excrescent anti-growth, if you will), and so forth, asking us to consider the way these metaphors shape our own gazes and transform the ways we see ourselves and the workings of a world we have come to think of us outside of us, but which we actually participate in making through our speech, actions and practices of everyday life. Unlike the conventional circulation of such metaphors in the mass media and our popular culture, however, their invocation in these works of art prods us to examine the underlying anxieties and processes—from which we often feel alienated or by which we may feel acted upon—from a critical distance offered in the space of the artworks themselves. And in this space of critical distance, perhaps, by deconstructing the workings of these metaphors, we may reconnect with our own agency and see these processes not in terms of overwhelming “hand of God” variables, but as products of the arrangements we humanly create, perpetuate and reproduce through our speech and action, practices and institutions.

The space in which this stealthy drama takes place is the interior of a typical household refrigerator. It is a controlled environment that suggests a larger matrix of human pretentions and fears. Almost the inverse of an incubator, which is rigged to maintain heat and promote growth, the fridge is instead designed to inhibit growth. It is a paradoxical kind of space as well, for while is serves as a showcase for its contents when it is open, it becomes a dark space of mystery when closed. For the artist, the space also resonates with attempts to create the kind of hyper-sterile, managed environments to which spaces like shopping malls and airports aspire. Yet the impulse to create such controlled spaces reveals an underlying, corresponding sense of hidden fear, and a terror of things getting out of control. Thus the refrigerator functions as a symbolic setting where the global reach of public policies and corporate machinations are grounded in the everyday—manifested not only in the private, intimate space of one’s own fridge, but by implication, invisibly too, perhaps, in our own corporeal beings, should these genetic interventions prompt our own cells to proliferate and mutate secretly in our bodies.

The move that makes such an ordinary space appear unfamiliar is achieved through the artist’s minute visual interventions. Likewise, the specter of genetically modified foods offers insights into the prevailing double standard at the node of intersection between public interest (food safety and health guarantees) and private (corporate) gain; conversely and yet simultaneously it also ties in with public interest and private loss in a different way—in the promise (false or not) of bountiful, healthy crops to feed multitudes and the death of the small-scale, local farmer at the hands of multinational mega-corporations, respectively. Here the consumer and producer’s fates and intertwined like a möbius strip.

Still Life adds photography to Potnis’ earlier body of work, which consists of painting and subtle site-specific architectural and spatial interventions performed on objects from our daily lives and the places that house them and us. Potnis investigates along multiple visual and conceptual axes that are tied to a clear, coherent set of preoccupations. Boundaries between the inside and outside, the organic and inorganic, the cellular and bodily are grafted onto the built and manufactured, and the relationships between discrete objects and their environments, too, are blurred and confounded, evoking visions of cyborgs and futuristic dystopian outcomes.

Potnis contributed two site-specific interventions for the exhibition, Porous Walls (2011), and Water Mark (2011). [12]In the first one, holes of an electrical outlet seem to have proliferated and taken on a life of their own, as they spill from the outlet and sprawl down the wall. In the second work, the excrescence featured is so subtle one almost requires a “double take” to notice it.

Working from an accumulation of rain damage on the walls surrounding a window frame in the gallery, Potnis riffs on the markings left by the water. Delicate bubbles of discoloration explode across the wall, like cancerous cells mutating out of control; a faint visual echo of the metastasizing genetically modified cauliflower as well. Like her other works, these too are rife with imagery that hints at infection, transmission and uncontainable contagion, interpenetration, permeability, and the porosity of the interface between our spaces, objects and life itself. These can be read as meditations on both social and scientific anxieties and the related causal trajectories of our times that permeate both public and private, as well as eat away at the boundary between.

Spectators become participants as they are integrated into the video, making the piece powerfully evocative. Their figures emerge in a lush yellow field of floating mustard flowers, only to be subsequently filled with bubbling, golden oil, surrounded by a rain of mustard oil bottles. As the bottles disappear, outlines of the viewer’s bodies are crowded by grains of rice, which then give way to a snapping sea of red mouths and hungry teeth. The chomping mouths fill the screen, momentarily obscuring the shape of the viewer’s bodies, before the bodies of the viewers metastasize into a gross, pulsating mass of tomatoes, and then eggplants—all genetically modified and mutating—that resemble cancerous cells proliferating and taking over the body.

What follows is a meditation on the relationship between the homogenization of our food and consumption patterns, and the homogenization and standardization of our own lives and selves. Images of genetically modified tomatoes and eggplants, grown square to fit more efficiently in boxes are substituted with human ID photographs and a barcode. This progression culminates in a creepy display of decapitated dolly heads, echoing social anxieties about the relationship between genetically modified food, and potential consequences of its consumption.

As the biotech industry attempts to gain a foothold in the Indian agriculture industry, a whole host of issues are raised in the process—as much as the agricultural intersect with the gastronomic here, the political, too, intersects with the economic. The work raises questions about our consumption patterns and their larger consequences in the minds of the viewers, offering a metaphorical embodiment of our anxieties about genetically modified crops.

The questions raised by the work are big macro-level questions that are entailed within the installation and linked to ordinary viewers through the micro-level questions that those viewers will have about their own health, eating habits, choices and rights. Beyond the discrete individual experience of buying and eating foods that have been modified and are dangerous on multiple levels, are larger questions that concern us as a collectivity. These are questions about consumer rights and government regulation; homogenization of products, and the destruction of regional and local diversity via mono-crop farming; questions about the health and safety of genetically modified foods, both to the individual and the environment; questions about massive multinationals (such as Monsanto) and their relations with politicians, the media, and local farmers; about power asymmetry between big corporations and little farming communities; about the impact of the aggressive introduction of genetically modified, or “BT” seeds into the Indian agricultural industry, as well as the larger ecosystems in which farming is embedded.

Excresence takes a different valence in the photographic works of Wu Gazohong. Part of his larger preoccupation with excrescent growth that has taken the form of everyday objects (rendered in carved pear wood) sprouting hair, this series of photography works adapts the same visual metaphor by rendering organic compounds "furry" with moldy growth.

In 2000, he began experimenting with a variety of organic compounds placed in bottles, allowing them to rot, molder, and be transformed by the strange new life forms proliferating there. In this body of work, he created and then photographed a series of moldy landscapes and traditional Chinese architecture, with pagodas, temples, memorial archways, and the like, transformed into eerie ethereal dystopian scenes by the strange, decadent beauty of rot and decay.

Does Wu Gaozhong's Eden make reference to a putative prelapsarian "paradise" before the "fall," existing in a space of imagination at a remove from the consequences of human destruction? Or is it perhaps a space of "pure" primordial nature in the ecological sense, in which perhaps fatally flawed human beings—who have set in motion so many processes that violate and degrade the natural enviornment—have no rightful place? Wu Gaozhong's moldy landscapes have an otherworldy aura or arresting beauty, but their dreamlike quality contains the spores of a nightmarish landscape of toxic decay.

While the works discussed above all directly or indirectly touch on things we consume, Han Bing’s work focuses on the toxic byproducts of our consumption. Metaphors of excrescence as an out-of-control, degenerative process, wrought by the excesses of our way of life, are present in his Urban Amber single-exposure photography works. Exploring dystopian implications of the internal contradictions of "development," urbanized notions of modernity, and the degradation of our planet that accompanies so-called “progress,” this series of works performs the difficult feat that China scholar Shannon May has characterized as "capturing the detritus and the dream in a single image."

Urban Amber captures a readymade metonym of this duality—the detritus and the dream—in a single frame by shooting ordinary scenes and architectural structures from everyday life along the banks of urban China's reeking "stinky rivers"— pollution-glutted, garbage-infested canals full of industrial waste, human and animal feces, white non-biodegradable trash, plastic bags, syringes, drink bottles, and more. [15]These inverted reflections capture the panorama of urbanized China with visuals of startling beauty, ironically achieved through icons of the ugliest parts of urban modernity. In Tower (2007) and Rose River (2011), we see the gleaming, glass and steel high-rises for the propertied nouveau riche that signify the rise of material excess as the dominant value standard in the New China, reflected in toxic, filthy water. In Liangma River (2005), the ramshackle shanties of the urban poor and rural migrants, are distorted by the pollution and waste in the dark water. In Chenge Village (2009), the last arboreal vestiges of the old village—now undergoing urbanization as well—shimmer through clots of trash bobbing and twisting in these polluted "skies" make up a stark yet complex portrait of the scenery of our times.

Like these dystopian dreamscapes captured in the canals excrescent with the toxic waste products of urban modernity, the basic elements that make up the world in traditional Chinese cosmology are inverted in these images as well. Water becomes a metaphor for air, toxic chemicals and factory waste—a metaphor for fire; plastic and non-biodegradable trash become a metaphor for wood, and the built environment a metaphor for our earth—transformed by unmeasured human greed, unrestrained desire, and our collective unwillingness to consider the larger consequences of our pursuit of a particular way of life.

Here we see at once the dreams of becoming a "modernized," "urbanized," "industrialized," "globalized," "propertied" new nation—dreams that have provided a major motor of China's transformation, and that of much of the developing word. At the same time, we see the enormous costs and consequences of these dreams that seem to float ethereally in the "skies" of these scenes, producing images that seem enticing until we realize they are the made of the toxic refuse of our own lives. Like amber's capacity to hold fast the sediment of the times, Urban Amber series captures the dark side of the fantasy of urbanized, environmentally unsustainable modernization and frenzy of consumptive excess that has wrought and fraught our world.

If art has the power to visually excavate the unexamined assumptions and interrogate the larger consequences of the new system of values that rationalizes and drives the expansion of a fundamentally unsustainable way of life and the poisoning of our home, the earth, then the metaphorical vocabulary of Han Bing's Urban Amber gives us a visual language with which to deconstruct the glossy, gimcrack lies of this brave new world being brought into existence.

Ashutosh Bhardwaj’s latest painting, Spoon-Fed Wonderland (2011) tackles a number of intersecting issues related to the metaphor of excrescence. The meticulously crafted conceptual painting represents and takes apart our contemporary obsession with “genetic engineering” of the body and the self, and by extension our society, revealing the distorted, mutant quality of this imaginary and the grotesqueness of dominant notions of masculinity.

Using visual and iterative hyperbole as rhetorical devices, Bhardwaj examines the effects of a different sort of consumption, and in doing so, achieves a spectacle of excrescent overgrowth. At the same time, he shows it to be a fantasy constructed through the mass media and popular culture and reproduced ad nauseam through commonplace performances of dominant notions of male gender. Each element in the painting plays a role is both representing and calling into question these notions, and together they form a visual and conceptual matrix of excess. Investigating and problematizing the socio-political “game” through which these ideas of masculinity defined by physical prowess are naturalized, the DNA helix is replicated in the background, while the squares of a chess board form the “playing field.” At the fore are two “castle” chess pieces, adorned with bulbous biceps flexed to show rippling muscle like so many pieces of meat hanging in a butcher’s shop display. In the background, a metallic, phallic weapon rears its “head” like an overly virile erection, behind the silhouette of a temple in which the outline of Bhardwaj’s signature “sleepwalker” figure can be made out.

Bhardwaj’s “sleepwalker” is an intertextually iterative figure that he cites and re-cites in many of his works. [16]Represented by the shadow of a boy standing slumped in the act of masturbation, the “sleepwalker” is a recurrent icon in his larger corpus of work. This icon asks us if we are really conscious of what we are doing, and evokes a complex of intersecting issues—the intimate act of male self-pleasure taken out of the private context and jarringly placed in a tableau of public imagery and socially-shared notions of manhood; traditional social stigmas and guilt associated with the act; its potentially transgressive nature—but perhaps here, most of all, this image can be read as a metaphor of the self-indulgent nature of our consumption of such hyperbolic representations and attempts to achieve a fantasy embodiment of masculinity that is distorted to the point of caricature. The little boy at the center of the work, who is peering down inside his shorts to see what lurks inside reveals anxieties associated with, even produced by, this exaggerated image of manliness and our attempts as a society and as individuals to somehow achieve this. The title suggests that our mass media and nation-making games inculcate populations with hegemonic metaphors that “spoon-feed”—or perhaps force-feed—an ideology of masculinity gone wild, producing fears of our own inadequacies and possibly even inducing further emasculation.

Tushar Joag’s work ties theme of mutation and transmission to social engineering, consumption, and urbanized modernity, in a different way. While the dominant valence of most of the works in the show focuses our attention on the negative aspects of out-of-control growth and processes of change, Joag shifts conceptual gears and offers a view of mutation as a conscious product of human agency aimed at the widening of our scope of control over our everyday lives.

While Bhardwaj’s bodies are mutating into super(manly)men, the superhero in Tushar Joag’s work is a character he calls Unicellman. The body of work involving Unicellman is diverse, ranging from interventionist “projects,” to “products,” to works on paper. One of the projects is a body of work related to what he humorously and ingeniously terms “Street Vendor’s Mimetic Scheme.” This project conceptualizes and creates “products” to help the plight of the ordinary street hawkers and small-time vendors who are subject to the predations of the police as part of the municipal authorities’ gentrification program. Like Han Bing’s Urban Amber, which reflects on the byproducts of urbanization, here too, we see the vicissitudes of these attempts on the part of governing bodies to deal with what is perhaps seen as the excrescent proliferation of populations of urban poor, who are often dehumanized with language structured by metaphors that render them akin to cancerous growths on the corpus of the body politic, or teeming viruses that must be quarantined so as not to contaminate “respectable society.”

Joag notes that Mumbai has at least 300,000 street vendors, but the municipal authorities have restricted their sphere of sanctioned commerce so that fewer than 10 percent can legally operate in the city proper. Raids by inspectors and police are commonplace, and these merchants must often pack up their wares and run for safety on extremely short notice, or risk having their goods confiscated. Unicellman offers special “mutant” products as practical tools of everyday resistance.

The letterbox, Mumbai to Shanghai Postbox (version 2) (2007), is a brilliant mutation of the typical mailboxes seen on the streets across the city. Their place in the city is accepted as legitimate, hence they offer sites of concealment for the street vendors’ wares. In the second letterbox work, the foldout interior of the box conceals earthmoving heavy machinery and scenes of urbanization/gentrification mutating into monstrosities. In the first version of this work, sunglasses were the iconic ware displayed inside a mutant letterbox that could open to act as a display case and close, morphing into a seemingly innocent object on the street, thus allowing the vendor to continue their covert small business operations, once the inspectors have left the scene. Likewise, Joag’s Shanghai Couch (2008) functions as a fruit stand that can be mutated back to its innocuous form in minutes to perform the same function as a micro-site of resistance. [17]

These works also raise the question of who can become a contemporary urban superhero of the periphery like Unicellman, and suggests that perhaps individuals reclaiming their agency and fighting back against predations of the dominant order embody the ethos of a superhero—a quotidian superhero fighting on the frontlines of everyday battles for subsistence and survival.

The works of Wu Gaozhong show us the alluring surface appearance of processes that are potentially toxic and degenerative, while Han Bing, Sheba Chhachhi, Prajakta Potnis, caution us to think about the larger dynamics of the world we are bringing into being, suggesting implicitly the power of self-reflection and more self-conscious, conscientious consumption. Bhardwaj offers an ambivalent view that highlights the quandary in which we find ourselves as we consume ideas of hyper-masculinity try to engineer selves based on unreal notions of idealized modes of being. Finally, Joag’s work offers a glimpse at these seemingly out-of-control processes and reminds us that we can reclaim our agency through micro-interventions in everyday life.

Each in their own way, these artists meditate on the excrescences of our contemporary way of life, their potential consequences, and the ways that we often feel overwhelmed, out of our depth and stripped of our powers. The works in this show all instantiate and simultaneously challenge the pervasive metaphors of our times—which I have described under the umbrella concept of “excrescence”—that can make us believe we have lost our agency because it seems that the scope of the humanly actionable has shrunk to disastrous proportions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein trenchantly expressed the predicament embodied in this way of thinking when he wrote: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."[5]

While these excrescent metaphors in the mass media and our popular culture sometimes seem to hold our thinking captive, their evocation in these artworks prods us to reflect upon the processes that make us feel alienated from our own powers. And by deconstructing the workings of such metaphors within the critical distance offered through the artworks themselves, perhaps we may reconnect with our own agency and re-envision these seemingly autonomous processes, not as overwhelming “hand of God” forces, but as creatures of our own making and within the scope of human action after all.

[1] Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Tr. Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 142-143.

[3] Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

[4] Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus.

[5] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2001. Philosophical Investigations, par. 115, p. 48e.


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