encounter three cabinets with palette-shaped
perforations. Dodiya has often used the cabinet of curiosities, a
Wunderkammer reloaded for contemporary times, to perform an annotative
function, writing footnotes as it were to the unfolding narrative. These
particular cabinets shift focus from their shuttered black-and-white palette-
windows, which act as a poetic caesura to a lively bric-a-brac of art history
and popular culture. Here figurines and curios found in the flea market rub
noses with museum magnets bearing the seriousness of high art. This may
look like a pleasing disorder of things, but what we have before us is a
carefully arranged score of harmonies and discordances.
A strange metal boar wrapped in epoxy putty adhesive reminds us of the
dynamic Varaha avatar – the mythic boar who miraculously lifted up, on its
tusk, Bhudevi, the earth, from her misery. Paired here with a photograph of a
fingerprint from ‘Blackmail’, it testifies to an uncanny forensics of the male
artist’s mind: the tussle between the rescuer and the aggressor/violator. In the
windows below, an image from one of Picasso’s preparatory drawings for
‘Guernica’ (1937) – the head of an anguished woman looking skyward – is
neighbour to a weird curio, a set of vases fused together. Picasso saw women
as ‘suffering machines’.[12] Notoriously, hereduced his muse and partner
Dora Maar – a strong woman and a gifted photographer – to a tortured being.
His representation of Maar as a ‘Weeping Woman’ reveals the artist’s
oscillation between his sadistic desire to eviscerate the female form and his

veneration of the Catholic archetype of the mourning Madonna. The adjacent
milk-white vases could allude to upturned udders sucked dry.
If Picasso regarded women as ‘suffering machines’ and represented their
bodies through violent distortion, Degas, as we have seen, liked to depict
women – who he described as his “little monkey girls” – in the act of “cracking
their joints” while rehearsing for the ballet. In a previous generation, Ingres
had been more gallant – he had distorted the reclining bodies of his women
sitters more gently and elegantly. Ingres’ ‘Odalisque in Grisaille’ (1824-1834)
had been criticized, when exhibited, as a bizarre work: its protagonist, already
drawn from the exotic realm of the Ottoman andarunor seraglio, had one
vertebra too many, a twisted pelvis, and an enormously long arm. In one of
the cabinets in this exhibition, Dodiya places a reproduction of Ingres’ much-
maligned painting, which, in fact, is a magnificent symphony of grey tonalities.
This choice, I think, is not accidental. This Oriental fantasy – which fractures
the ideal protocols of a neo-classical, proportionate beauty by literally
stretching them to an extreme – bears an intense affinity with Dodiya’s own
love for the extreme, for the bizarre detail, for figures whose spines have been
drawn out, loaded and placed under torsion. Also, Ingres’ magnificent play of
grey tonalities offers a counterpoint to Hitchcock’s noirish aesthetic, each
artist putting monochrome and penumbra to very different use.