Gender Mobility
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This text is an unedited draft on the basis of which the speaker delivered a seminar, talk or lecture at the venue(s) and event(s) cited below. The title and content of each presentation varied in response to the context. There is a slide-show below that accompanies this document. If the text has been worked upon and published in the form of an essay, details about the version(s) and publication(s) are included in the section pertaining to Geeta Kapur’s published texts. Venues • Lecture: ‘Gender Mobility: through the lens of five women artists’, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U., Baroda, 5th December 2006 • Lecture: ‘Play of Self and Gender’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, July 2007 (without Tejal Shah) • Lecture: ‘Through the Lens: gender in performance’, School of Arts and Aesthetics, J.N.U., New Delhi, March 2008 • Lecture: ‘Through the Lens: gender in performance’, India Moderna exhibition talk, IVAM (Institut Valencia d’Art Moderna), Valencia, February 2009 Gender Mobility: Through the Lens of Five Women Artists in India Feminist practice is, in its radical definition, provocative; in its more reflexive aspect it complicates the otherness of gendered sexuality, taking it beyond the narrow historicity of sexual antinomies—and toward a calibrated and critical account of “difference.” Female artists have devised means to materially transfigure sanctioned notions of identity, to push corporeality into interpretative possibilities at once nurturing and uncanny, to test the paradox of “mimesis and alterity”1 by a theatrical rendering of gender. Often compelled by the lure (and revulsion) of beauty, these artists play on the polyvalence of masquerade—from a wounding narcissism to fetishist forms of cross-gender sexuality, to a performativity that mocks the politics of representation. If we understand that art and culture in the cosmopolitan contemporary are driven by forms of representation that are as often simulacral as they are authentic, then feminists are often the ones to read either aspect of representation against the grain. Working against or beyond the universality presumed by phallocentric authority, they bring to the condition of oppression something more than ideological identification based on binary categories. The battle against 1 binaries is above all against the primal binary of male and female (man and woman), the premise of which must be questioned in order to demolish the metaphysics that surmounts it and dominates all existential questions. Feminist consciousness reduplicates the experience of loss in order to gain a contrary mandate: for a promise of survival incarnating, in the form of a witness, the pain and desire, the abjection and refusal, of otherness. Feminism is a discourse against power; feminist artists, refusing to accept the formal closure of (late) modernist art, translate feminism’s deconstructive “genius” along an itinerary of subversions; along such reconstitutive hypotheses that address the issue of power conceptually, retroactively. The questions investigated by the vast body of feminist literature rotate around representation as a psychosocial act. However, it is by complicating these into semiotic conundrums that meaning is elicited. Rosalind Krauss’s warning, not to take the signified as a given, not to lunge for it in an interpretative overkill,2 is crucial in understanding the strategy and ethics of representation. It is not enough to work a critique of “woman as image”; we should have to chase after the signifiers and arrive at indirect (allegorical?) reconfigurations that lead beyond the image to the limit of formlessness. Further, the very category of woman and, therefore, of sex and gender, suggests a juridical redefinition such as Judith Butler offers and contests. Asking for a deconstruction of the very terms of discourse on which gendered existence is premised, Butler promotes the ironies at play in the performance of gender.3 With the sign—visual, performative, discursive4—under scrutiny, the questions relevant to aesthetics come to the fore: fetishism5 in the exchange-driven economies of commodity and spectacle; contrariwise, the restorative possibilities of beauty and also those of mourning.6 Some of these modalities within feminism are direct provocations for the practice of art. In the present essay, I take the example of five women artists working in India with lens-based images (Nalini Malani, Pushpamala N., Dayanita Singh, Sonia Khurana, Tejal Shah), seeing how each of them addresses core questions about gender and representation, and how they open up detours specific to the Indian context. For this purpose, the framework implies cultural configurations that articulate gender according to certain customs and protocols. But the detours also crisscross into more individual versions where artists with distinct sexual attitudes can inscribe their practice, tendentiously, within the ongoing movement of global feminisms. Remythologizing How shall we conduct a transaction between the victim and the witness, between these two key signs, where the one verges on mortality and the other serves for a living testimony, and both together establish a large part of the iconography of twentieth-century art? The two designations 2 have been especially important within feminist and postcolonial discourses and, in both cases, the stereotype has been activated to conduct that transaction. There is the stereotype imposed in the act of othering; there is also the stereotype construed like an artifice by the subject herself, garnering attributes, mimicking the iconic—and averting the temptation to cast these ironies into instrumentalized iconographies. This opens up a debate on what an ethics of self-representation might be; specifically, on how the female “self,” identified in all its contestations, might be figured within the extended discourse of representational politics.7 Both Nalini Malani and Pushpamala, borrowing stereotypes of Indian women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and bringing them up-to-date, prod the questions posed above. Believing themselves to inhabit what is now called a postnational society, they address the national nevertheless. On site in the painting or photograph or video are female preceptors who act out meek or divine stereotypes, or stereotypes of the female grotesque; but who can, on reflection, be recast as the (dissembling) interlocutors of those more grand identities that characterize the national. Malani’s video-narratives are frequently based on well-known plays, stories, and social critiques.8 She chooses texts that embody dispossession, that allegorize the nation’s betrayal of its citizenry, that index the level of loss entailed by the populace in relation to the state. In inverse proportion to the developmental ambitions of the nation-state, Malani tries to materialize through image what Veena Das calls social suffering,9 and her choice of mode for this purpose is almost always tragic. In the single-channel video installation titled Unity in Diversity (4 images), Nalini Malani animates a nineteenth-century oil painting (Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians, c. 188910) in which a tiered group-portrait of Indian women, holding musical instruments and costumed according to ethnic type and region, serves as a tableau allegorizing the diverse and unified nation, the civilizational slogan Indians repeat in the hope of sustaining a secular, multireligious, multiethnic, and democratically structured polity. Malani’s galaxy mutates through a painterly rendering of video animation: a flesh-and-blood actor underwrites the images of her painted sisters, and the surface shudders with the uncanny overlapping of dead and alive women. The screen replicates an “Old Master” painting encased in a frame, and the pleasure of its pictorial imagery—blooming, twitching, dissolving—is shot through with omens. A gunshot causes us to regain consciousness in an India rent by religious violence.11 The screen breaks into palpitating viscera—an intrusion, a probing that might, in a Surrealist take on body metaphors, stand for rape. The short narrative closes with insurgent women wearing head scarves and carrying guns; a 3 voiceover sees the transfiguration support the right of representation—urging us to name by whom, and how, this right may be elaborated. Malani has always worked through certain psychoanalytic tropes: with neurosis that virtually forms the iconography of “woman”; and with the wounded female body—a personification of “lack,” fetishized through the masculinist gaze. Staking her artist’s chance on finding a way out of a corrupted condition, Malani messes with the glutinous accretions that adhere to the “real,” and melds into this matter her painter’s voracity for blood and gore from the victim’s body. In the very process, her female figures, mutilated by war and violation and other, more invisible metonymies of patriarchal violence, take repossession of themselves and, grabbing what is not-yet-language, work with gestures that are at once raw and reparative, and always also cathartic, in the expressionist sense of that word.12 Her multiscreen video installations are directly political and even topical, elaborately narrativizing war, bombings, ethnic cleansing, civil conflict, public murder;13 her “shadow-plays” are, on the other hand, sublimated into room-size chimeras echoing with cosmic demonology, human desire.14 Hosts of “figures” (shot, scribbled, animated) pass through the world as through scrims (screens, Mylar, walls) and crowd the threshold in surreal mutations. With these veiled icons, reality cedes to a charade of representation. Shadows and echoes, a chorus of lament rewinds itself again and again as in her early rendition of the Medea myth.15 Meanings chase themselves into an abyss, and Malani plucks out female stereotypes, shattered and bereft, pleading the need for a definitive dis-closure. In continuing to offer tales of terror and pity, her work becomes complicit with fate: are her maneuvers already, as it were, cursed, and therefore swept into hermeneutic closure? Malani belongs to a generation, and a tradition, that does not shy from producing replete imagery that still seeks to enrich secular culture with an image-code.