writing on Surekha, Art concerns.com,april1 2007

Communing with Urban Heroines

Rollie Mukherjee and V. Divakar, Bangalore based art critic duo looks at the latest video works of Surekha and articulates the concerns of artist while testifying them with their critical knowledge. These videos were recently shows at Goethe Institute Max Muller Bhavan, Bangalore.

The ever changing metropolis constantly demands the inhabitants to cope up with its amalgam of contesting definitions. Each individual in turn tries to negotiate with these urban phenomena through the frames and structures they see and inhabit. The recent show “communing with the urban heroines: a culture specific visual project” by Surekha can been seen as an attempt to negotiate with the identity of the upwardly mobile middle class women.

The exhibition touches upon the manifold demands of urbanity, its effects and also her varied concerns as a ‘female’- a volatile highly reflexive signifier. This comes through her representations of stereotype, alienation, escape and the socially negotiated identity of the female subject. She also intertwines personal with social/political by bringing the autobiographical. Thus tends to universalize the specific (class). Her use of metaphors flexibly shifts from one theme to another. The natural elements like fire, water and earth are the key tropes. She contextualizes myth/folklore in a urban (middle class) space where her body becomes a important signifier.

Janaki – Between fire and sky (diptych), 1.28 mins

This work though doesn’t bring in the sinister image of death in a loud voice rather pinches at the sensory level about the crudity of our existence. It evokes both psychic distress and serenity inducing a sense of burden and relief simultaneously.

Aestheticization veils the physical signs of morality/ decay. It interplays the familiar with that of fabulous. The metaphor of infinity is erected vertically against death and endlessness reduplication it invokes silence by measureless-ness of death. Thus her notion of death is based on the culturally constructed notion of mortality and resurrection. She uses the aesthetic of subtlety.

Again and again defying time and gravity

The 2 minutes long video brings a two way narrative of the textual/verbal and the visual. This makes the work intriguing because the textual message is more referential i.e. it has to rely on memory images which are indirect medium of the mind. The viewer is allowed to create the narrative in between the visual and the verbal references. This enables her to connect the most concrete with the abstract without abandoning the concrete presence. The narrative is how there is always the defying and the accepting traditions within the feminine and which is free and which is imitative of the structure and is passive.

Three fragmented actions of silence

The first video shows a woman creating a rose flower out of the petals stored in her mouth. This is cobbled with a negative image doing the reversal. It is followed by the video titled ‘red river/ blue river’. The lines on the palms are rendered in blue and red layers. Slowly the palm throbs and creates forms which look sometime familiar and at times abstract. The third video uses her own image which is superimposed by frequently popping images from popular culture which enhances the tension between signifier and the signified. These works operate in-between the biological and social realms and overlaps one realm over the other. This reminds one of Julia Kristeva’s “new melodies of the soul” which describes the drive as “a pivot between soma and psyche, between biology and representation”. By juxtaposing shots contradictory to each other she evokes emotional and distracting ambience of modern metropolis. Her aesthetic is one of subtlety.

The boiling concept/ burning concept

Both these videos are placed face to face one showing a superwoman in a domestic space making tea and the other show her burning out on a treadmill/gym. What should one take these images as? Are they mockery or are they the documents of the urban heroine’s routine to become a super woman? The middle class women dilemma of assuming the identity which is the admixture of patriarchal definitions of tradition and also modern women is overtly visible. The question passes through without taking a position which is at a dialectical relationship with the masculine definitions of tradition and modernity.

Bhagiyarathi bringing water

Bhagirathi a folk character derived from Kannada folk story "Kerege Harra" offering to the lake in which a woman is sacrificed.
Here she re-contextualizes the folklore with the contemporary social context of murder and suicide. Death is here aestheticized. The sub-text of pain/decay is shrouded by fascinating visual. The same strategy operates in the flower for the kitchen where the flowers are kept neglected at the corners of the kitchens. There is something strange and familiar at same time. The fairy tale's usual ending "happily ever after" is problematised. In 'Bhagirathi….' there is a disjuncture between the visual language/ performance and the audio description of the folklore.

Janaki.. / A strange moment of stillness/ Making home

In this neither the overwhelming might of the nature nor its sublimity that is invoked. As we know sublimity upsets the balance of nature and art to make nature preeminent. Here she brings the vulnerability and fragility and nature as all embracing and identifies it with the feminine. As the environmental experience is not exclusively visual it also invokes sensory modalities. Environment is thus not interpreted as a material surrounding but a socio- physical context in which we participate.

Her performance videos shows her own body as raw material emphasizing the author as both subject/ object of pronouncement and incorporating personal experience for public dialogue.

There is a preference for a confessional instructive didactic realism, but this shows how language becomes a tool to talk about political and problematize the larger dominant orders but at the same time it can be slippery, ending up privileging one over the other,. We know feminism supposes that art doesn’t speak for everyone and that it privileges some kind of speaker over the other. But as we also know that there can be no single feminist aesthetic because women belong to different socially stratified structures and different aesthetic preferences and vocabulary of interpretation, neither there can be a universal definition of urban heroines and their experiences cannot be the same.

What one can attempt is to undo the fixed binaries that define feminine. Practically one need to relocate oneself and interrogate the complex systematic diversified terrain of caste/class/gender thereby using medium culturally as a instrument to define social practices.

writings for Artflute.com,2008

A Brief History of Modern Indian Art

Discourses in post colonialism were an important breakthrough which assisted scholars in positioning 3^rd world art and aesthetic at par with the European and western art. It brought forth myriad issues and politics which throughout governed art history. It in fact brought a parallel historiography and an alternative voice which blatantly questioned euro-centrisism and ethnographical framework. Throughout the history if one goes through the scores of writings from late 19^th century till present time on Indian art one can sense a bias reading of our culture. There has been some worth mentioning shows in west curated by Asian art historians Rasheed Araneen, Geeta Kapoor, Partha Mitter, Tapati Guha Takurda who have attempted to bring before western audience a definition of art which has its own trajectory. In brief we can say one can’t get a similarity and the same model of western art historiography while we attempt to write on our art and its growth, since it had pursued different routes in different historical juncture.

Our modernity’s story starts from colonialism. Often westernization was seen as synonymous with modernization. The realization that our artist acquired was not natural but one that was acquired language. The aesthetic sensibilities and norms of making in traditional India was very different. It was more conceptual, metaphorical and analogical rather than straight emphasis on naturalism or imitation of nature.

With the establishment of British rule all local patronages collapsed and our artist had no other way to escape the British hegemony. So the language they acquired made these artist distanced from their own reality and changed the way they perceived or visualized the world before the advent of the British. It was so well hammered in not only the artist mind but also gradually it changed our viewer’s choice. Ironically the common middle class loves realism which was based on the renaissance model and later the photographic. Thus when we talk about Indian modernity we need to talk about colonialism, its authority, subjugation and growing demand of certain kinds of works which the dominant colonizer and the local elite catered to. So its not just we get reflection of imperialism in political and social history but also in the changes that happened gradually in art and culture. Also it created a viewership and desire for this kind of art and language. If we talk about art and aesthetic before colonialism we find a very interesting variety. We see in lot of regional centers a different play of perspective, coloration and poetic interpretation. So we see that there is no parallel between west and Indian art. In the west one “ism” or movement emerged in conflict with the previous “ism”.

India was for the British an exotic land and the Indians were for the British an inscrutable “other”. This finds its reflection in series of company school paintings which shows Indians as barbaric wild and uncivilized and European as civilized and cultured. These paintings were ordered by the westerners to Indian artist, which acted as memories or tourist pictures. It existed until the advent of photography in India in1840 which made it easier for the westerners to click images which help them to essentialise India. So, Indian modernism can be seen not as pure cultural exchange, but as an imposition by colonizers on the colonized.

Revivalism was the 1^st movement which resisted the westernization and emphasized on a conscious art thinking. It considered the colonial rule as destroying our identity and criticized colonial standards of judging Indian art. They emphasized that Indian art should be judged on the basis of its own standards within Indian tradition. They questioned western writers who considered Indian art to be monstrous and to be in a primitive stage and lacking scientificity, by emphasizing the spiritual, conceptual aspect of Indian art. Shantiniketan was formed during colonial time rejecting modern western education because it alienates man from nature. Important artist of this schooling were Abaniranath tagore, Benode behari mukherjee, Nandalal bose, Gaganeranath tagore, Ramkinker baij. Since they wanted to revive Indian art style they were termed as revivalist. So, to appropriate tradition became the criterion for aesthetic practice for the revivalists. It was a kind of nostalgia or longing for the past. Thus a new non western language or style was emphasized which helped the Indian artist to break free from the colonial pedagogy. This affected a lot of places all over the country but it doesn’t mean it was the only medium which was seen. Simultaneously one can see existence of academic realism, the hybrid style i.e. indo European style which was preferred mode in lot of other institutes established by British and also there was greater popularity of Ravi Varma realism in Bombay.

The 40’s and 50’s generation celebrated the independence and modernity. They gave importance to themes like uncontaminated rural life in joyous manner. One can find a parallel between Nehruvian ideas of progress and modernity, industrial revolution and these artistic practices. These artists were called the progressives. They were influenced by Parisian modernism i.e. impressionism, expressionism etc. All these artists were affected by international trends but they abandoned the academic realism. In 1942/47/48 all over India these artists called themselves progressives. These artists opted for an art which is universal and so they rejected revivalism which relied heavily on tradition. The famous artists were M.F. Hussain/ Souza/ Raza/ Ara/ Bendre/ Paritosh sen/Gopal Ghose/ Ratin Maytra/ Santaraj/ Munnuswamy / Anthony das/ Srinivas/ B.C. Sanyal/ Dinakar kaushik/ Dhanraj Bagat.

But the 60’s generation rejected westernization and again raised the question of national identity or Indianity. The significant artists are J.swaminathan, kcs paniker K.G Subramanyam. They were more concerned with the past and living tradition (i.e. folk and tribal art). It was during this time that Geetha kapoor publishes her essay in a magazine called Virschik edited by Bupen and Gulam Mohamed sheikh and used the term indegenisim for the 1^st time in the content of postcolonial India. In 1963 group 1960 was formed under the stewardship of J.Swaminathan who considered art has nothing to do with social suffering. He upheld the idea of art for art sake and asserted that Indian art is spiritual and western art is materialistic and rational.

But K.G.Subramanyam, an eminent artist, historian, ideologue and a theorist brought a critique on this essentialist definition of Indian art as spiritual and brought a heterogeneous character of it in his work Even he celebrated the eroticism and also in his 70’s work, particularly the murals he emphasized the connectivity of art with society by criticizing the violence on women and children in Bangladesh. He also gave importance to traditional art and craft. It was he who started an art fair in Baroda like the Nandan mela of shantiniketan, so as to develop an interaction with the society. In the 60’s we also see abstraction as a dominant trend but we don’t find any pure kind of abstraction. But they are basically metascapes i.e. landscapes based on abstraction, transformation of nature. This we find in works of Krishna reddy/ Akbar padmesse/ Jeram patel/ Nasreen Mohammedi.

70’s generation particularly when we talk about works of Gulam Mohamed sheik, Bupen kakhar, Arpita singh are more multi layered and complex. There is an emphasis on a new kind of realism which brought in local environment with more preference to pluralism and eclecticism. Like in works of gulam sheikh we see influence of mughal paintings. They openly borrow from varied sources. The exhibition “place for people” held in new Delhi in 1950 included artists like bupen khakar, gulamsheikh, sudhir patwardhan, …. The predilection was destined from the pre-independent struggles. They found a language beyond indegenism. During the same time Bupen and feminist artists built on an iconography that privileged the margins. Bupen questioned the elitism of modern Indian art and the majority morality by using low art or kitsch. He is considered as the father figure of pop art in India. For many artists of this period works became confessional and autobiographic.

Mid 80’s felt the impact of a group which named themselves radical painters and sculptors association. This lasted only from 1985-89. Krishna kumar, Alex Mathew, Puskin, Madhu sudan, Prabhakaran, Jyothi Basu, Regunandan, Anita Dube were all part of the collective. They used a language highly ironic and metaphoric and used unconventional materials like velvet and coloured enamel over sculptures.

90’s was an important breakthrough in Indian art with lot of artists directly talking about art and activism. With the demolition of Babari masjid, a 16^th century mosque in Ayodhya on dec 6^th 92 there was a fractured secularism. There was an emphasis on existing in fragmented world. In varied modes artist found this expression –performance/ installation/ video. There were more metaphors of wound/ violence like that of Rumana hussain’s performances and installations, vivan’s installation memorial 1993 are worth mentioning . Sibu natesan futulity of devices, Surendaran nairs mestopese02 represents the age of false hood by use of highly complex allegories which talks about violence secrecy/ deviousness etc.

One can sense from the mid 80’s the move away from idealistic attitude towards society to a very dystopian vision of the world of unpredictability. This can be seen in all aspects of dealing whether talking about violence or globalization or global warming. Some artists take a very humorous mode, while other a very pessimistic, even some adopted the aestheticised idiom which celebrate bizarre and pain at the same time. So at one level we see there is a preference for an idiom which is ambiguous and open-ended with multiple meaning generations and on the other there is humorous directness in some artist work. Thus we get a mixed picture on one hand some artist focus on local problem and don’t attempt to universalize it; on the other hand they talk about a specific problem and then universalize it.

The recent art scene is varied and there are no well defined ideological categories these artists fall into. There are some artists who deliberately want to maintain an indigenize style but with a difference from the 60’s generation by bringing in more of local issues to discussed. One cant just fix them in limited binaries of east and west or tradition and modern of earlier generation. One can sense more of cultural nomadism as artists are not at all bounded by single style or tradition, genre of particular country or to only high art. Also there is a growing preference of new media like viedeos, digital art, installation, site specific art, performances etc. Thus there is interdisciplinary approach towards art.

The sources are varied ranging from internet, bill boards, comic strip, and animation. Artistic act today traverses both within the peripheries of the fixed notion of commodity productions and also sometimes outside it. The ambivalence of our globalised world is that of the commodity enterprise which has overpowered every attempts to resist it. Whether one constantly stay in guilt and celebrate it or reject consciously its modalities one is cornered at certain instant to fall within its ambit of commodification.

Rollie Mukherjee

Artist& Critic,

Bangalore.

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