When you first start drawing—and this never fully goes away—each line provokes an experience of groundless terror and freefall, because delimitation has always been a twofold act of accounting and threatening, marking “you owe me,” which confirms “or else,” in sand, clay, or skin. The mark-er and the mark- ee both panic: “what do I do with these marks I have and I have made?” Drawing and life are both experiences of answering that question, again and anew, for all the time you’ve got left.
Drawing is the best medium through which to uncover forces; however, video is by default the more forceful medium. Every now and then, drawing pulls a jiu-jitsu move, turns its comparative weakness into advantage, and grafts itself onto the cognitive architecture of the viewer—the artist is also a viewer and a substrate for epigraphic erasure; she is patient zero for the obliterative effects of her art. Winning is ascending in status to a hieroglyph, integrating into, and jamming up, language; the goal is to contaminate all good books into rebuses.
Artists spend the most time with their own work and maintain relationships of alterity with it: “I made you, but I do not fully understand how or why. I could recount the steps, but art is not, and has no, steps.” Some feel their estrangement to be a burden, if they mistakenly believe “alienation” exists, not realizing it is a manifestation of our bias against surfaces, which we assume to be trivial, and aspire to peel back: then we will see face-to-face, blood-to-blood. In prioritizing depth, comprehension of the ways that surfaces matter remains incomplete. Two imperatives: artists should seek to understand the surface and the stranger, who enters, unannounced, miraculous, inscrutable, apertured exteriority: “you found me hiding in plain sight.”
Art is not the pattern, but it is found in the search for a pattern, exactly analogous to how advances in medicine are stumbled upon, and continuous with, the arms race, which art, as our highest technology, is also involved in. Art is what the sorting of the world by color and geometry excludes, exudes, and pulverizes. It is the pudding—the mixture—wherein we find the proof; what art is proof of is presently unknowable—it could be proof of “humanity,” but whether the human animal is much different than ants or ferrets remains to be seen. Art may have been an anthill pumped full of molten lead. Against the grain of the world and the better judgment I constitutively lack, I act like it’s much more than that: I was logging After Effects hours within hours of landing back in the hospital. Ordeal is my whole deal.
Artworks are not alibis, nor are they documents of innocence or utopia. They are all-terrain vehicles to take you deep into the desert. If they register anything, it is prairie madness. One cannot determine progress with the wind erasing your tracks. Only orientation is possible.
Text by Vijay Masharani
Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, Bay Area, US) is an artist and writer based in the Belmont, US. His practice comprises videos and drawings on an ongoing basis, in a manner resembling life writing. In his critical writing, he comments on art, politics, illness, literature, and race. Masharani received his MA in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies from University College London in 2022 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023.
Masharani has previously exhibited works at MoMA PS1, New York, UK; Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich, CH; Veronica, Seattle, US; Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, IT; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, US; Crisis, Lima, PE; Cherry Hill, Cologne, DE; hatred 2, New York, US; JUF Project, Madrid, ES; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, US; Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, US; Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles, US; Helena Anrather Gallery, New York, US; Interstate Projects, New York, US; Museum Gallery, New York, US; High-Tide, Philadelphia, US; Drawer NYC, New York, US and Clima, Milan, IT among others.