Reading Buddhika through Jagath – Brief Remarks
If you may allow me to be bold, the only bone of contention I have with this reading is that, I felt, it does not play sufficient attention to the role – perhaps I should add that by using the word ‘role’, I have already fallen prey to the critical operations designated by Buddhika’s field of inquiry – of plants in this work. This is not to say that you are unaware of this concern – of course not. But, it seems to me, that they merely a play a subsidiary role in your reading, by giving a certain structure to Buddhika’s play with the undergarments. It is certainly true that the plants – or, to be more precise, the imprints of these crushed plants – give an identifiable form to the otherwise formless shapes of the undergarments. That also means, however, that they should also occupy, at the very least, an equally important position in all attempts for an interpretative intervention. Thus, the question for me or at least one of the possible questions we can raise: how do we think these two aspects – undergarments as well as the plants – together, as a unified but, perhaps, necessarily incomplete totality?
One of the first things I remembered after viewing these images that Buddhika had created, was a remark by Hegel according to which, a plant is an animal with its intestines outside its body, like an animal in inverted form, turned inside out. I thought the fact that the undergarments – that can be taken to symbolize, at least from a certain Freudian perspective, the clothing that hides our innermost secretive core – are here superimposed with the plants, allows us to see this strange inversion. It is as if Buddhika was trying to show his – and, of course, our – intestines by turning ourselves inside out, like a Hegelian plant-animal.
One of the advantageous of this point of entry is that it also allows us to link this interpretation with the idea of imprints, as a form of representation within a certain Cartesian paradigm of mind-body duality. Plants are one of the predominant symbols of a Nature that lies outside of, separated from, the solipsistic level of subjectivity. All we ever have access to, are the representations of this outside world, or the psychological impressions we have of this outside. The ‘oddity’ of Buddhika’s impressions – as you have also analyzed – is that these impressions of the pure Outside is intermingled together with – or always-already contaminated by – the idea of a pure interiority. This is further highlighted, I thought, by Buddhika’s use of scientific names of these plants, suggesting a certain idea of ‘Objectivity’ along with the colloquially named undergarments – ‘Jolly fit’ – that has strong affinities to subjective partiality.
The Idea of Nature is also, as we know, one of the common symbols of ‘purity’ and, by contrast, undergarments are symbols of ‘dirtiness’, not to be touched by anyone else other than their users. Unless, of course, within the impossible point of a ‘fetishist’ sexual act where the undergarments can potentially be invested with the limits of symbolic representation. As the Lacanians often like to remind us, the fetish object follows a logic of disavowal: ‘I know very well that this is merely a dirty underwear, but nevertheless I pretend that it has the key to my sexual fulfilment’.
I was also reminded of the famous Saussurian definition of the signifier as the psychological impression – or imprint – of a physiological act of sensory of perception. And the famous ‘linguistic turn’ of our elders, when everything became discourse and how we were eternally doomed to move from one signifier to another without ever finding a stopping point in any Real.
Ultimately, I thought, all this boiled down to a forceful critique or a disclosing of the logic representation that still dominates the artistic as well as the philosophical discourse in Sri Lanka. Just as the idea of a Real nature that is objectively present, radically outside our mind, should be questioned, equally, the idea of a Mind, a radical interiority, uncontaminated by any contradictory idea of an externality, should be questioned. What is clear from Buddhika’s work is that there is a clear interconnection between the outside and the inside, questioning the very distinction between them.
Vangeesa Sumanasekera
Buddhika Nakandala 