Curator's Note

The Art of Thisath Thoradeniya

by Anoli Perera

Tisath Thoradeniya’s most recent thematic engagement in sculpture shows the intense allure of the technological and electronic products found in everyday environments of the globalized contemporary world.  Thoradeniya, in a series of sculptures titled ‘Me and You’ explores the thematic of ‘gendered notions of everyday objects’ where he highlights the categorization of certain objects in society as feminine/female and some as masculine/male.  The initial attempt of this series was seen in his work titled ‘+ and –‘ which depicts a larger than life-size plug base and plug top. Thoradeniya’s recent work illustrates his obvious attraction to common technological items such as computers, electrical wires and switches etc. In today’s context, saturated with electrical and electronic gadgetry, these items have become everyday and common place objects that are perceived merely as functional. They are easily accessible and easily replaceable, an attribute that makes them mundane, taken for granted and as a result their presence remains visually unnoticed.  Thoradeniya’s work draws us to this aspect of these electrical and electronic apparatuses and asks us the question, “are they only functional in terms of making our lives’ chores efficient?” 

In his series of work titled ‘Me and You’, he consciously engages in two activities. One is to take the most mundane and ‘taken for granted’ objects from the arena of common electronic apparatuses and transform them into large scale versions. Through this transformation, he presents these objects to us as ‘unique’ objects. The other is, through this very process of enlarging, he subtlety allows these objects to obtrude a sense of masculinized and feminized erotic sensations.

Both these actions probe us to think beyond the mere mechanical functionalities of these objects and go into the mechanics of their particular design and forms. Advertising industry, the nature of consumerism, economies that operate to sustain consumer markets, new inventions and new tastes inform us that the objects we consume come through a highly manipulated process in terms of their design, form and concept in order to meet the need they are going to satisfy in society. Therefore, design and form of an object is never innocent.  Creating desirer becomes an essential component of the market strategies. Any product, whether it’s a mechanical device, cosmetics product or a food container has this sense of desire built into it. This is a key aspect that is constantly manipulated and stimulated to attract consumers, redefine their tastes and to habitualize their desire for products.  Therefore, imbuing a sense of sensuality and sexuality into designs of products is not an accident or a coincidence.   Thoradeniya’s  art that blows up into larger scale the most mundane and common-place electrical items such as a toggle switch with its phallic shaft and  an enlarged computer mouse making bare a topography of a vagina hints at the eroticization inherent in these unassuming objects. It is as if he places these objects on a lab table under a microscope that would enlarge them for us for closer scrutiny.

With the eroticization of objects/products, another aspect of their design comes to surface. This has to do with their genderization. The terminology used in electronics and electric discourses as well as the physical sciences in general such as ‘female socket’, ‘male jack’, ‘plus and minus terminals’ implicitly draw attention to female and male biological references. Despite the pretenses of clinical and mundane usage of these terms, they are not without affirmations of ideological and hierarchical bases that construct masculinity and femininity in the larger society.   While the female socket or minus terminal denotes a hole, a depression and a lack in a Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical sense, the male jack or plus terminal refers to a protruding phallic object, an emphasis of a non-lack.  This dichotomy of lack/non- lack assigned to refer to senses of male and female in the jargons of physical sciences resonate the ideas of the Freudian ‘lack’ (meaning female child biologically does not have a phallus and therefore its a lack in her) that initiates ‘penis envy’ in the female child which impacts the formation of her personality and grasp of her sexuality.  At the same time, notions of feminine and masculine in this ‘apparently’ technical discourse are situated in a hierarchy.  One could see that such psychoanalytic ideas, now highly contested within the feminist discourse, however manifest and re-emphasize in language.  Although seemingly clinical and aloof from socio-cultural implications, the terminology used in physical sciences too reflects these gender hierarchies. They lead to masculinization and feminization of objects and  their form/design are further manipulated to emphasize these gender hierarchies.  Thoradeniya, in the process of naming his work  such as ‘+ and –‘  bares us the ‘non-innocence’ of this somewhat clinical references and terminology of electrical/electronic apparatuses. Here, in the hands of the artist, somewhat banal, clinical and functional objects such as electrical switches, plug points and the computer mouse undergo a loss of its presumed innocence.  He also turns them into a spectacle by enlarging and then repetitively using them almost as a motif in some instances where the viewer barred from looking away without engagement. His attempts probe me to quote from R. L Rutsky:

“High tech also involves (…) a noninstrumental or ‘nontechnological’ aspect. This ‘nontechnological’ aspect is linked to a realm that has generally been cast as the polar opposite of modern technology: that of art and aesthetics (…) High tech can no longer be defined solely in terms of its instrumentality or function (…) technology becomes much more a matter of representation, of aesthetics, of style.”¹ 

Is the artist reminding us that essence of technology is not technological but cultural?

Thoradeniya’s present work has clear linkages to his early works that used cutouts of eroticized imagery from glossy magazines which he used with the traditional medium of painting such as oil on canvas.  On the one hand, these early works referred to highly eroticized female imagery used in tabloids for men, and on the other it highlighted the repetitive absorption that each historical era and cultural context has on the ‘female nude’.  In his recent series of sculptures this theme of female nude is evolved into exploring female and male sexual symbolism in shapes and motifs found in the everyday environment.

Notes:

1.Rutsky, R. L, 1999. High Teche: Art and Aesthetics from Machine Age to the Posthuman, P. 3-4.  Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

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