namrata arjun
anatomy of a phantom dick
98 x 36 inches
Oil on canvas
In Autistic Spatiality and the Limits of Care, Patrick Jaojoco writes, “Centering autistic experience, then, confronts the peripheries of communicable subjectivity in the context of modern society as such. Autistic modes of being are so internal to the self’s relationship to the body that nothing short of total freedom—bodily, psychological, and social—is required for a full autistic liberation. The very conditions of living are of immediate concern to autistic folks, whose currents of thought run along a number of different pathways and are fundamentally resistant to generalization and typologization. The trajectory of autistic spatiality in an increasingly urbanized, territorialized Europe throughout the twentieth century has had fundamental implications for how liberatory autistic spaces might be reconceived as communities that exist at—and, therefore, challenge—the societal limits of care.”. Using a personal convention of positioning my my own nude (normatively read as “female”) body in the first person perspective as a frame, I’m interrupting the idea of a universal (neurotypical/cis-gendered/heteronormative/white/middle class/upper caste/male) subjectivity, by producing a queer autistic visuality and spatiality – one that upends the horizon, the frontally of the “straight” gaze, and creates an ambiguous space in which the painted surface both enacts the ground as well as seems upright, while being marked by the body in intentionally complicated ways – whether it is standing/lying, swallowed up, angled or set against it in fuzzy or delineated ways, with little regard for the overdetermined structure of perspectival space, opening up multiple spaces within the picture plane. The ground, reconfigured into a perpetually shifting negative or in-between space, is (dis)oriented by multiple perspectives, while the figure conflates the categories of subject and object, centre and margin/periphery, while alternating between dysphoria and joy. Invoking the Lovecraftian “Cthulhu”, both through the queer space produced in the painting, and the iconography – the work insists on, makes visible, normalises, depathologizes, and cultivates queer autistic joy and expression. It is also an act of unmasking in paint. The relationship of the presented body, the photographic image held in the hand and the mirror echoes Bayo Akomolafe’s ideas in A Hundred Other Names for Autism “But my favourite of the lot was the silence that came afterwards, waiting at the end of the feverish proceedings of names. This wasn't an empty silence: it was a silence that gently applauded these names but also reminded me that none of them quite worked. Every name is a risk, you see, an image that cuts something out. I remain vulnerably convinced that something else is happening "here", and that this Unknown God we immortalize with the name "autism" marks a dense, undulating spot in the city...a thin place where the exquisite presses on the membrane that divides it from the familiar. I think there is a politics here, a pedagogy here, a praxis here, that doesn't want to be thought out in terms of rehabilitation, pathology, and baseline realities.”
