This article appeared in Searching Lines magazine, Department of Art History, Kala Bhavan, 2009
'A Bedouin Arab' by John Singer Sargent
The artist lives and expresses himself within a world of words and images. It has been proposed that in a postmodern world, words and images, as signifiers, express the reality of a subject. This postmodern view of the world has implications for the artist’s understanding of the self and of others. He looks out for the communicative signs that link identities with the rest of the world. The artist often places himself as the conscience of society, and fishes out identities from the subaltern, to remind us of their right to exist.
“People are what they look like and what they say; they are the text of their own lives.”1
The theologian Don Cupitt quoted the above as a clue to the understanding of the ‘self.’ As an extension, it can also be applied to an understanding of identities of others. Can there be any view of a person’s identity other than what he actually reveals? The artist technician sources out signifiers associated with identities, which he then uses in the process of image making.
Indian contemporary modern is a hotbed of activity inclined to dissolve the polarities set in place by political communities. Also, increasingly, artists are reacting to a new kind of ‘social class system’ brought in by globalization. With the concept of race being declared obsolete after post-Darwinian population genetics, the basis for social classes now is capitalism.
Riyas Komu questions this new ‘caste system’ by bringing the marginalized labor class to the forefront through his series called ‘Unconditional’ (2002), for which he sourced portraits of anonymous cast outs from the mass media; so to say the small fry or the underdogs. These images contribute significantly to what the cultural theorist Nancy Adajania has called “the new mediatic realism.” “Grass” (2005) and “Systematic Citizen” (2006) carried portraits of his assistants, thus recognizing their role in the larger scheme of things, and giving them visibility.
Riyas Komu; Systematic Citizen (2006)
From where does Komu source out this empathy for the marginalized? From his past experiences with scuffling identities. In his growing years, Komu had pictured Bombay as a multi-ethnic dwelling where there would not be the threat of being fenced in local identities. Instead, during the riots of December 1992-February 1993, these imaginings crumbled to the ground.
The question of conflicting identities is thrown up once again in the current scenario with the U.S, its allies and surrogates hegemonizing populations conceived as potential threats to their interests. The strategy is to manufacture consent for elimination of these peoples by using the mass media as a propaganda system. The machinery effectively demonizes these people and the basis for discrimination invariably is race. As Herman and Chomsky point out:
“A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.”2
We are now looking at the embattled world through the lens, and while cosmetic changes to documentary visuals may tweak the reality in favor of the propagandist, different identities are looking at the same visuals in different ways. A discourse on opposed ways of looking at such visuals is provoked by T. V. Santhosh’s work ‘Your Terrorist, Our Freedom Fighter,’ (2004). In this diptych, we come across a masked protagonist, his hands raised to make the victory sign. The two panels are composed in color negative and positive; a technique he employs to depict a protagonist whose identity can be read in two different ways. Depending on the viewer’s ideology, the terrorist may be perceived as a freedom fighter, or the freedom fighter as a terrorist.
T. V. Santhosh; Your Terrorist, Our Freedom Fighter (2004)
We live in times where widespread surveillance in the public as well as private sphere has been legitimized post 9/11. Demonizing a population conveniently makes it rightful to infringe on their privacy. Personal identities lived in private spheres are being flung into the public domain. Some of Santhosh’s mediatic images seize his subjects during their very private act of praying, suggesting that all of their actions are under constant surveillance. The tradition of popular suspicion of Muslims across the non-Muslim regions of the world has led to much violation of their right to privacy.
T V Santhosh; Elusive Solutions Need Sharp Scriptures (2004)
In T. V. Santhosh’s positive-negative images, identities occupy an ambiguous position in the viewer’s mind: it is difficult to judge their politics, and even more difficult not to give them a benefit of doubt.
Although now the propaganda system used to demonize identities is more sophisticated and even subtle, it was more brazen earlier. In the 1920s came up the now widely discredited idea of physiognomic ‘character-reading.’ It proposed stereotypes of human nature and character based on physical appearance and physiognomy. One such ethnic stereotype that helped demonize a race was the Bedouin Arab’s. In 2002, painter and sculptor Jehangir Jani made some head casts of himself as a study. Looking at these head-casts can you prove that he is a Muslim person of alternative sexuality? The head-casts speak for a universal human identity. And yet, like Changez Khan, the protagonist of the Booker Prize winning novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” he is a marked man. Every Muslim face is now scanned as a potential threat to world peace.
How does Jani react to this ‘boxing in’ of his identity? He takes an unexpected and mature turn by questioning the beliefs and devices of his own community. In his seminal installation titled ‘Feast of the Lambs”, the feast shared by Bohra males on festivals, is offered to four sheep, the very animals that would give their flesh for the making of the feast. Are the sheep being honoured by this feast or are merely being fed before the slaughter? Through this work, Jani questions the acquiescent followers of his faith pertinent questions about their identity, their destiny, and about their role in helping shape the image the non-Muslim world has constructed of their community.
Jehangir Jani; Feast of the Lambs (2007)
As an individual belonging to sexual and communitarian minorities, Jani has spent his life in both institutional and non-institutional structures. This informs his discourses on identity. His works make claims for equality and dignity for all.
Jani brings up the question of sexual identity through his installation ‘Pink Sun’ (2002), which was put up at the NGMA Mumbai. In a culture traditionally used to seeing the female nude, Jani proposes the possibility of the male nude. The effeminate male protagonist in this work questions the conventional norms of beauty endorsed by the male gaze. More importantly, the figure’s presence curiously unsettles macho and patriarchal expectations; a transgression that conventionally would be expected only of a feminist woman artist.
Where sexual identities are concerned, feminism itself has been relegated to stereotypes through sloppy discourses in the past, and there have been attempts to confine the feminist identity into slots. Of course feminism has come a long way, and has more possibilities now.
One of the guiding lights for feminist thought, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir offered a decisive feminist critique of sexuality in her 1949 book ‘The Second Sex:’
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
This brief and influential sentence raises a question as simple and complex as ‘What is a woman?’
It is with well informed considerations, often amusingly centered on the sexual act, that the artist Mithu Sen constructs an account of female sexuality, examining biological, psychological, historical and cultural constructs. Interestingly, in a country where female feticide is still rampant, her take-off point for feminism lies way ahead of the demands for civil rights and educational opportunities.
In her watercolor series titled “Drawing Room” (2006), Mithu Sen is seen to disregard protocols expected of “the fair sex”; of passive complicity in the politics of sexual identities played within patriarchal domesticity. By representing the female sexuality with images contrary to the ones expected, Sen tackles the clichés by which women are popularly represented. Through this suite of paintings, she speaks of the pain and embarrassment that are intimately related to female sexuality. The ithyphallus recurs as an ominous symbol of male domination in these works. But, to Sen’s credit, she avoids grounding her critique of female sexual exploitation by incriminating male sexuality alone. Her passion-laden red whorls of flowers and representations of the vagina dentate articulate female sexual pleasure with parody and humour. The vagina dentate is a suitable retort to the reckless violence unleashed by the dominion of the phallus.
Mithu Sen; Untitled
Sen’s protagonists do not suffer from a lack of the female self, thus quashing one of the proposals of Freud’s theory of sexuality. Also, they appear as complex, autonomous individuals rather than as the metaphorical virgins or whores.
With the world shrinking as an outcome of technology and globalization, identities have become more amorphous, and are informed by numerous cross-cultural influences. It is more a world of individualities than one of stereotypical identities now. So we see that patriarchal constructs are being questioned by female as well as male artists. And artists are questioning not only the hegemony of totalitarian regimes, but are also putting their own communities to the liability test. We find that identities are numerous and fluid. As many persons, so many identities. The basic need is sensitivity and empathy towards shifting identities, and equal human rights for all.
References:
1. Don Cupitt. ‘The Time Being.’ 1992, p.35
2. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Vintage Books, London; 1994, p. 37
Bibliography:
1. Ranjit Hoskote. In a Penumbra of Aftermaths: A Meditation on Riyas Komu’s ‘Faith Accompli’. Exhibition Catalogue, Sakshi Gallery Mumbai; April 2006
2. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Vintage Books, London; 1994, p. 37
3. Nancy Adajania. No Alibis for the Image. Unresolved Stories. T. V. Santhosh. The Guild; 2006.
4. Ratnottama Sengupta (Ed). Alternate Lyricism. Jehangir Jani. Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd; 2006
5. Great Expectations. Jehangir Jani. Museum Gallery, Mumbai. Exhibition catalogue; 2007
6. Nancy Adajania. Mithu Sen. “Drawing Room.” Exhibition catalogue; 2006
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