Guns and roses

Art galleries have become the new arbiters not just of taste (whatever that implies) but of the human gaze, chiefly the female gaze, reflecting churns in society where the male is no longer at the feudalistic head of the food pyramid, not even notionally.

Usurped from his moorings, the male has toppled from his base, and nothing reflects this better than a great deal of the new art that's coming our way in the form of popular images. Whether in Mumbai or in Bangalore, shows have eradicated the male persona, objectified it and, to whatever extent, held it up as a reflection of his own complex vulnerabilities and follies.

While Subodh Gupta or Shibu Natesan or T V Santosh still attempt the profiling of violence, increasingly artists are hurtling towards an emasculated image where the male object becomes an iconic cult product, at the receiving end of a culture of consumption, the almost comic interface robbing him of the dignity with which he cloaked his survival as top dog for centuries.

Nothing is more indicative of this than London-based artist Alexis Kersey's more recent work. There is the (barely) male figure shorn off all hirsute pretensions save a Mohican-like tuft of hair on the scalp. The faux-feminine features are pierced, adorned and exaggerated to such an extent that the question of identity becomes critical to his body of art, currently showing in New Delhi.

In distant Mumbai, at the oddly-termed metrosexual festival, a slew of new age artists have socked out their versions of this creature, whatever (or whoever) it be. In dealing with the subject, the gaze is again on the effeminate persona. Shorn off his public face, as he gears for battle with deodorants and poetry, the artist, it seems, cannot resist delivering a metaphoric kick in the pants to both the image and the reality, no matter that both are a reflection of the other.

In a sense, art mirrors popular sensibility, where too the male image is now being commodified. The media is bombarded with images of actor Shah Rukh Khan in a bathtub advertising a brand of soap used primarily by women, or John Abraham disrobing for the benefit of the readers of a film magazine. As objects of adoration, their images multiply till there's little to distinguish the adored from those doing the adoration. This crossover has spilled over from hoardings and cinema to art and advertisements. And as the boundaries of different media become increasingly more porous, it's evident that just as the subject and the viewer are one and the same, so too a work of art is no longer sacrosanct and its place can as easily be occupied by works from other media.

This has led to an uncertain caricaturing of the subject. The reason could be by way of comic diversion or cruel posturing. Ultimately, neither matters for the truth is less than vainglorious. As his own subject, or object, the male is considerably weakened irrespective of the platform he occupies. Nothing could be more ironic than this lessening giving birth to high art.