EXHIBITION ESSAY
Desire Lines: A solo exhibition by Dipali Gupta
8—30 October 2022
Playing Dirty
by Ellen Lee
Desire Lines is the debut solo exhibition of Dipali Gupta, an artist born in Mumbai, India, educated in Singapore, and currently residing with her family in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The works are explorations into the changing nature of female pleasure in the age of rapid technological advance and post-feminist attitudes towards female sexuality.
Upon entrance, the leftmost wall of the gallery shows a salon-style display of selected works from Dipali’s Pages from the Book of Spring series, in which the artist recreates Japanese shunga ukiyo-e prints from the Edo and Meiji period as paintings, with vibrator-drawn lines in place of faces. On the opposite wall are neon lightbox studies of her vibrator paintings. And on the right side of the gallery is a quasi-domestic setting with a television and lounge chairs for viewers to watch a loop of Dipali’s still life videos, which pay homage to the vanitas tradition of still life paintings but with sex toys thrown in the mix.
The Pages from the Book of Spring series appropriates classic works of Japanese shunga or “spring images”, the era’s euphemism for pornographic images. In Dipali’s version, she “paints” the men and women of these images with a vibrator dipped in ink and left to run free on the surface; once it’s finished to her satisfaction, she fills in the additional details of the scene, the rumpled clothes, the silent ornamental plants. In her 2018 graduate thesis, titled Her Pleasure, she chillingly and accurately describes these motions as “alien marks”: black marks that look like the scrabbling of a trapped cat or like a butcher’s floor. But within the demonic dance of the indifferent machine, there are also fluid, playful strokes reminiscent of the elegance of Chinese calligraphy. These “alien marks” reduce pleasure and sex into the basest expression of violent action, creating an image of freedom from society’s limitations that is not as liberating as you’d expect such an image to look. There are no facial expressions from which the viewer can read consent, let alone pleasure.
The exploration of erotic tension is continued in the moving image videos, made in 2018 while a student at the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Inspired by Duchamp’s sound-producing assemblage, With Hidden Noise (1916), the videos present scenes of bourgeois domestic bliss—marble kitchen countertop, heavy bedding—in which the presence of discreetly arranged vibrators generate low hums of disturbance. These hidden devices are household staples within any long-lasting bourgeois marriage but they are treated more like an open secret, like masturbation, or like sex itself. The moving image videos make a statement of the significance of sex in a woman’s domestic life, as basically indispensable to her as her best knife or her family’s china. They also suggest that the proliferation of sex toys signals a burgeoning crisis beneath the surface of modern-day sexual relations between men and women.
In the works, sex toys are presented as tools towards both sexual and artistic fulfilment. Men are unwitting oppressors, their patriarchal traditions perceived as gags on the independence of women, and sex toys offer a more direct route in the search for pleasure. With more women in higher education and all levels of the workforce, it is unlikely that we will soon be turning back the clock on the inclusion (even domination) of women in spheres of life beyond the domestic; the sex toys symbolise a rejection of the male-oriented view of sex in which the man’s satisfaction is prioritised, and perhaps even a doing away entirely of the role of men in the sexual act. Like any good commodity, sex toys offer a quick fix solution, a route to gratification without the emotional labour. In such an economy, the question of the role of men in the modern woman’s life is up in the air.
And yet, Dipali’s practice remains indebted to the contributions of male figures in the history of art and thought, whether directly influenced by them (as with Duchamp, Foucault, and Deleuze & Guattari) or borrowing their canonical valour in order to subvert it (as with the shunga artists or Jackson Pollock’s style of abstract expressionism). The changing status of women in our current world has created an interesting tension between the two sexes, a tension that both have to learn new ways of navigating or reconciling themselves to.
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This show is not a manifesto for women’s sexual liberation. It does not prescribe an answer to any of the questions it raises. Beyond the allure of the erotic and the sexy, the show is also about the latent tensions, contradictions, and doubt that are inseparable from the sexual act. About how pleasure is not without its consequences. The hidden vibrators in the videos continue tirelessly, without a resolution, while the inky marks on the paintings are acts of subversion but not necessarily liberation. They look creepy. All lines of inquiry within Dipali’s work only open up other questions and uncertainties.
Accentuating this ambiguity is the curious absence of the artist within her own work. This distance is felt on two levels: firstly through the use of a mechanical object (vibrators) as the primary mark-making tool in her paintings and, secondly, through her technique of sampling.
The use of vibrators in Pages from the Book of Spring feels like an act of subterfuge, of making her intentions as an artist illegible, a challenge to modern art’s mythologies of the artist as a tortured genius, especially the idea at the core of Abstract Expressionism that each stroke is an expression of the artist's inner soul. For her recent shunga paintings, made in 2022, Dipali attempted to make her vibrator lines look more “leaky” by using wet paper and less precise lines, and the word “leak” (used in her notes for the show) is also interesting for its connotations of something involuntary, and perhaps even embarrassing. The artist is further concealed and the works made more ambiguous through the method of appropriation and sampling which are recurrent features in Dipali’s practice. And yet there is still none of that challenging insolence that one feels in other artworks that utilise the method of appropriation—instead, Dipali’s works sit unsettlingly somewhere between parody, homage, and guerrilla warfare. The absence of the artist—an absence that finds its counterpart in her shunga paintings with the removal of facial features, and in her video works with the absence of people—suggests themes of diminishment, anxiety, and the struggle between anonymity and identity alongside the primary themes of erotics and pleasure.
Selecting and sampling, Dipali’s art foregoes definitive mark-making in favour of a more diffuse assembly method. To understand her art is to orient ourselves away from the didactic, declarative types of statement-making art that is such a common feature of the local art landscape, and to learn to appreciate the art of picking up on things without them being explicitly said, the art of leaks and cracks, glitches and ghosts. Thus is the title of the exhibition, Desire Lines, taken from the architectural term for paths in a landscape paved by walkers off the demarcated route, traces of inhabitants’ intuition and familiarity that shapes a landscape better than any design imposed from above. Dipali’s art trudges the paths laid before her by previous artists and thinkers, but spirals off into a journey that is uniquely her own.
There is no answer to the debate on whether men are obsolete in the modern woman’s life, because its answer will be entirely subjective to each individual and their situation. Setting it aside, what the use of the vibrator as a tool for both pleasure and artistic production in Dipali’s practice ultimately reveals is the significance of pleasure in a woman’s inner life. Throughout all of history since the dawn of consciousness, woman’s search for pleasure has been one that entails not just sexual satisfaction but also the pleasure of self-realisation through the creative act. Women, like men, are agents for creativity beyond biological reproduction, capable of leaps and bounds of the imagination in both work and play.
— ELLEN LEE, October 2022