Shocking! But that's the idea Mondy Thapar IT'S A tricky thing, this business of shocking people and being shocked. It becomes ten times trickier when you bring in the business of art into the matter. When the two artists, Sanjeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar, were told by the police to shut their exhi­bition down at the Je-hangir Art Gallery be­cause their art had of­fended Tardeo resident Pushpa Vijula ("Vulgar!" she had screamed, not leaving the matter there), I rolled my eyes and told myself, "Oh well, here we go again!" Ms Vijula must have pulled up her petti­coat and huffed the mo­ment she saw that the ex­hibition was titled 'Tits, Clits 'n' Elephant Dick'. Nothing new in that. But what struck me was the way many of the lib­eral lot reacted. Alyque Padamsee, not known to be particularly squeam­ish about matters pachy-dermal or otherwise, correctly interpreted the exhibition as something whose "intent is to shock". Pravina Mecklai from the Jamaat Art Gallery found the title of the show "unnecessarily provocative" - as if she knew exactly the titles that fall under the 'neces­sarily provocative' cate­gory. To find 'shocking art' shocking is like finding ice-cream to be ice-cold. The very purpose of schlock art - a trashy, kitschy form of art that can be obscene if its cre­ators choose it to be - is to shock. It definitely doesn't have the charm­ing subtleties that one as­sociates with, say, a Raza abstract or the wonderful hypocrisies of a Ravi Var-ma or the delightful de­pictions of amourous love in old Hindi movies (two flowers touching, two swans necking). If a schlock artist wants to ar­tistically depict some­thing, he or she cuts through the chase and gets straight to the point. Thus, Damien Hirst's car­casses of cow and calf in formaldehyde, Marcel Duchamp's toilet seat, Robert Crumb's anatomy-defying cartoons. "Arre bhai," Pushpa-ji must be saying, "All that is in Western societies where everyone plays strip poker and loves to lose. True, but then while the arty-farties in New York and London find Hirsts and other shock­ers boring these days, they get completely aghast to find old Enid Blyton books showing Noddy with an irate Gol­liwog, or a video instal­lation showing the Is­raeli Prime Minister and Adolf Hitler side by side (as they did in a news programme on the Labenase al-Mara chan­nel), or the photograph of an old man with a 10-year-old girl on his lap. So societies decide what they are going to be shocked by. Nineteenth century Parisians were shocked by Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur I'herbe (Lunch on the Grass) depicting a naked woman sitting blissfully among two men in an overtly contemporary scene. Manet wanted to shock and got it. (Al­though his painting had other virtues that made it not just schlock art.) If the arty, liberal set don't understand that there's nothing inherent­ly wrong in shocking peo­ple when the idea is to shock them, what chance has Pushpa-ji have to simply see 'Tits, Clits 'n' Elephant Dick' for what they are - 'breasts, cli­torises and the penis of elephant' helping some artists to get their spot under the spotlights. Hindustan Times, August 8th 2006