(Untitled painting by Sriya KR)
Among the hundred odd works displayed at the Durbar Hall, Kochi as a part of the 49th Kerala State Exhibition 2019-20 one work caught my attention. A moderately sized painting and a bit clumsily done this work of art suddenly rushed long title of an article that had raised a pivotal question regarding the place of the women artists in art history’s hall of fame. Linda Nochlin, in her seminal essay, ‘Why Have There been No Great Women Artists’ written in 1971, had delineated the reasons how institutional obstacles prevent women from becoming great artists. It is not just because of the historiography is majorly patriarchal but often women are forced to confine within the family, playing out multiple roles as home maker, care giver and so on, eschewing their right and ambition to become individuals with creative agencies.
The painting that I have seen in the exhibition does not go
with a title. It has one of the most convenient titles; Untitled. When an
artist finds it too difficult to name a work of art or even he/she himself does
not know what has been the outcome of the creative efforts, or rather when the
ideas are too many and a singular title couldn’t do any justice to the work,
they prefer to go by the Untitled; some artists even think that Untitled is a
title in itself. In Malayalam there are couple of words; sambhavam (event) and
sadhanam (a thing). These words could be used for explaining the inexplicable.
If someone says that a work of art is a ‘sambhavam’, then it could contain the
arguments from Plato to Derrida, from Kant to Agamben, Mathew Collings to
Jonathan Jones. Untitled has become something like a ‘sambhavam.’
Sriya K.R, a Thrissur based young artist is the ‘author’ of
the work. The work somehow encompasses all what has been said by Linda Nochlin.
In his articulations about the ideological state apparatuses, Louise Althusser
talks about family as one such institution that controls the growth and outlook
of a human being. A home is not a home and a family is not a meeting point of
parents and children. It is a microcosm of an ideologically manipulated nation
state. Family becomes one of the institutions that brings order to a chaotic
human society. Kitchen, when it comes to the life of a female individual,
especially in the patriarchal societies like India, turns out to be a shackle
and a punitive dungeon where a woman is confined. She is straight-jacketed
using idealistic and ideologically endearing terms like mother, caregiver and
the ultimate embodiment of human virtues and so on.
In Sriya’s work one could see a surrogate presence of the
artist herself (I assume for the sake of the deliberations) looking up to the
sky which is surrealistically visible through the ceiling of the kitchen, which
has all the qualities of a pit with its curvaceous walls. To suggest the
familial duties of a woman, there is something being cooked in a pot on the
stove. The modern modular kitchen seems to give all comforts to the woman but
instead of a ladle she has a paint brush in her right hand. Her aspiration to
move out of the dungeon of familial responsibilities attributed to her is
visible in the ladder that is made available to her. She could climb up and
escape to the vast sky and space, and make a room for herself out there even if
it costs a lot on her behalf. But a closer look reveals that the wall that
grows up is made up of granite blocks suggesting the strength of the invincible
walls that engulf her. So is the ladder as its steps are replaced by sharp
edged knives. She could climb up to escape only by putting her life under risk.
This possibility of an escape and the circumstances that
make it impossible capture the woman in the limbo of existence. She has only one
way to survive; that is putting down the brush and taking up the ladle to stir
the soup of her life and drown into the eternal disappointment and domestic
discontent. We are confronting this work in a time when people are dealing with
the ideology of kitchens in books (Kitchens in Malayalam Films by
A.Chandrashekhar) and in movies (the Great Indian Kitchen). It is pertinent to
see that an intelligent section of the society is thinking in terms of
problematizing the kitchen in the cultural discourse. Sriya does the same thing
in her work. But the kitchen is a conundrum from which her flight seems to be
impossible unless she takes a bold step of climbing out staking her life
itself.
The frozen look of the protagonist in the painting consists
of the aborted histories that helped women to come out of the kitchen and take
up positions in the public and professional lives. Kerala’s history of
renaissance that brought many a woman out of the kitchens still has not borne
fruits especially in the case of the women artists in Kerala (an in India too),
a majority of them are sucked into the familial engine and spitted out as
abandoned beings in search of expression and agency only to be discarded or
abused at the hands of the powerful male folks. The proliferation of two
wheelers among women and also the coming up of nearly 75000 small scale
eateries all over Kerala has not only increased women’s mobility in the society
therefore their enhanced visibility but also has freed quite a lot of them from
the tedium of the kitchens. Sriya’s work is a subconscious response to the
women’s (artists’) aspiration to move out of the kitchen, scaling the
formidable walls and life threatening ladders. Could the ladder be the male
patronage itself? We are not sure but this simple but thought provoking work (I
would emphasize that it could have been painted better) is capable of bringing
forth a strong discourse on women and kitchen in the contemporary social
scenario.
-JohnyML
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