What to Call a Woman Artist?

There was a time in Indian art, especially between 2005 and 2013, when group exhibitions were cited as “ten Malayalis and two artists’ exhibition.” The participation of a minimum of ten contemporaries of Kerala origin was a must, and anything above that could be artists from other parts of India. Nobody took offense. It was a norm.

People used to tell me, “Hey, you promote only Malayali artists.” They were right because the galleries that assigned me to curate shows wanted this particular line-up. So I used to respond with a smile, “Why me alone? Look at all my contemporary curators. They too go by the same list. Only the locations change.”

Trans-artists were coming up then. It was much before Queer and LGBTQ were mainstreamed, and Maina Mukherjee took the lead in curating them in Delhi. We did not know how to address these artists. They were as touchy as the feminist artists. Some blanketed enemies, and some others were selective in choosing their “ideal” enemies. I do not discount the fact that Ram Rahman and Sunil Gupta were here much before. But they moved easily amongst the dicked ones.

Then came the question: how to qualify an artist who belonged to the female gender? Call her “a woman artist” or “artist”—both offended them because they hated being identified as women with feminine qualities. Look at the catalogue essays of feminist artists; it would be difficult to find words like femininity or feminine. It should have been feminist/ic.

Parallelly, actresses became actors. No problem. Personally speaking, I do not have any issues in talking about women artists as “artists” only. But then comes our training in post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and all the other -isms that preceded and followed. You look at a work of art and you see a lot of “gender” things present there. So, to talk about them, you have to say that the artist is a “female” artist! To apply any theory, you have to look at the gender.

You look at the abstraction of Raza and that of any other female artist. You could see the “feminine” thing in their works. How do you overlook that? If nothing is there to take you to the gender qualifications, then the medium, material, and technique scream from the rooftop that they are the handiwork of a woman artist. Look at the works of Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher. Look at Surendran Nair and Rekha Rodwittiya. Look at Atul Dodiya and Anju Dodiya. How do you talk about them without qualifying the latter group as women artists, not because they are “women” in the biological sense but are “females” in the ideological sense?

But look at the works of the dicked ones. Cool. You don’t know whether they are done by a male or a female. Women critics, at some point, used to go to that extent where anything vertical in a work of art was dubbed as “phallic.” So I prefer to call the male artists “dicked ones.” Bad taste, I know. But what to do? I am a human being with normal follies. I prefer to see people as humans before I see them as gendered beings. But then they are different from me, a dicked one. I understand that.

What to do? When a woman artist insists that she is to be called an “artist,” I do not think that any level-headed human being, with or without a dick, would challenge it. Yes, a woman artist is an ARTIST. No doubt. She should be called an “ARTIST.” But when we talk about the content, medium, material, technique, and intended meaning, how shall we shun the word female?

Brother, I am in a dilemma. I read a lot of literature of my liking, as there is no universal liking for any literature, just as it is with art. I can discern a woman writer’s writing from a dicked one’s writing. Everything about her writing is different. Okay. Now she is not called a “woman writer” but a “writer.” However, both in journalistic and academic parlance, she would eventually be qualified as a “woman writer,” not to underline that she has a vagina but by virtue of having one, she is different from the dicked ones’ output, perhaps much better.

Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are artists. But they really do male and female art that comes under the general category of art. Critics pick up the pros and cons of both parties and, perhaps due to a lack of jargon, they are qualified as artist and female artist—not always, but whenever such distinctions are demanded. There is no other way. But ah, there is a way: passing a bill in Parliament that bans any mention of gender while writing art criticism.

JohnyML

 

When an Exhibition Designer Turns a Vandal

 Prima Kurien, that is not a good designer act...

On Saturday, I went to Bikaner House and from there to Travancore House, where Bhuwal Prasad’s solo exhibition, 'Perpetual Drift', was inaugurated. My connection with the show is through the catalogue essay I wrote.

At the gallery, I noticed that the entire text had been reproduced on the wall outside the hall—something that, I felt, was unlikely to be read by anyone. Generally, a wall text is a blurb or a condensed version of the catalogue essay, running to no more than three or four short paragraphs.

What made me curious was the defacement of the text with some scribbles. I had already been handsomely paid, so I thought, “To hell with it. Who cares?” But curiosity got the better of my restraint. I asked the artist why there was graffiti on the text. He told me that the exhibition designer, Prima Kurien, had asked him to do it.

Well, Prima Kurien—or anybody, for that matter—does not have the right to do that. As an exhibition designer, she might have thought that only graffiti could draw some attention to a text that is so long and has been printed in its entirety in a vertical format, touching the ceiling. But that thought itself is pedestrian. She could have asked the printer to cut the text into different sections and placed them in each hall beside the works.

Now I have doubts about Prima Kurien’s design sense. Or was she trying to settle a score with me because of my earlier criticism of one of her shows?

Either it is overthinking on her part or outright cheapness.

JohnyML

Making of New Delhi- A Swapna Liddle History

From now onwards, I will not be able to see ‘Pandara Road’ or ‘Pandara Park’ as they are. Historian Swapna Liddle, with her book Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi, has changed a few of my perceptions regarding the city of New Delhi, which has been my home for the last three decades.

I am an ardent metro rider. Khan Market is my favourite station, as it can take me to various art centres such as Bikaner House, IIC, IIC Annex, India Habitat Centre and so on. I often come out of the metro at the Pandara Road opening. And now Swapna Liddle says that it was a clerical error. It was supposed to be ‘Pandava’, and while writing it down in the file, someone wrote ‘Pandara’, turning the ‘v’ into an ‘r’, with nobody then or later bothering to correct this clerical error.

In 1911, during the Delhi Durbar held by King George V and Queen Victoria of England on the shores of the Yamuna, he also laid the foundation stone for ‘New Delhi’, a new city that was to become the new seat of imperial power in East India. Old Delhi had too much history to handle and was beyond conversion. So they thought of acquiring land outside the city limits, starting from Malcha and ending with Purana Qila. In between were the Raisina Hills. The original idea was to align Malcha with Jama Masjid in Old Delhi and Purana Qila, along with all those monuments that lay in between.

The Raisina Hills stood in between, and it was difficult to cut through them, so the Malcha idea was abandoned and the project was pushed towards the hills. Today, we see the erstwhile Government House, Viceregal House and today’s Rashtrapati Bhavan standing tall on the hills. Four main architects were involved in the making of New Delhi and other landmark buildings around it: Herbert Baker, Edwin Lutyens, Swinton Jacob and Robert Russel.

Swapna Liddle brings out the story and history behind each building and how they came to be called what they are. The garden city idea of the early twentieth century in Britain was effectively employed in Delhi; therefore, we have a good green cover today. Thanks to over-familiarity, we see most of these buildings and places as mundane, except on ceremonial days. But beneath them are old villages, different lifestyles, occupations and establishments.

New Delhi was an administrative city meant for the British and their native staff. The founders of the city did not know that World War II was going to change the complexion of the world, including that of New Delhi. People started migrating to the new city. As the population grew exponentially, they had to be accommodated. Then New Delhi started expanding, and, as we say today, ‘New’ Delhi is NCR, which includes parts of both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

A city with its sanitation plants in Defence Colony and Lajpat Nagar has today grown to a different dimension, with these places becoming upmarket real estate, pushing the new migrants further to the outskirts, which, in fact, are in other states. Delhi Dur Ast — Delhi is still afar — is true even now, but in a different sense. People in the NCR have started saying that they are ‘going to Delhi’ rather than going to the city because New Delhi has grown beyond its capacity.

In Swapna Liddle’s book, history enthusiasts can read and see how this city came into existence, through stories and anecdotes. I am sure that once you read this book, New Delhi is not going to be the same again in your eyes.

JohnyML

 

I am Warli by Sanjay Parhad

 

When Zahir Khan of Bikaner House Galleries sent me an invitation to attend the opening of Mein Warli Hun — “I am Warli” — by Sanjay Parhad, I did not know that it was an invitation to a wonderful world. I could not attend the opening of the show. Somehow, I felt that I needed to reach out to Zahir and tell him that I would definitely make it before it was over. Yesterday, the 28th of September, was the last day of the show, and I rushed to Bikaner House. I realised how poor I would have remained had I missed it.

Presented by Jas Karan Gupta of Indian Arts Corner and curated by Chaavi Jain, Sanjay Parhad’s exhibition was a great experience. Parhad’s works are made along the traditions and canons (if any) of Warli painting. Hailing from Palghar in Maharashtra, Parhad is an environmental and Adivasi rights activist and a farmer who works in the field every day. He learnt Warli painting from his grandmother. In these works, he portrays the world of the Warli philosophical system as well as the folk mythologies in which Mahadev and Gauri play a great role. Bagh Dev, the tiger god, also appears in many paintings, protecting the daily life of his people in the village.

Warli paintings move between a set grammar and a loose structure. The grammar comes out of mindless repetition, as Warli painters (and, in that case, all folk painters) are not trained “formally”. They learn through observation and repetitive practice from their elders. As they do not have a model of perfection (as in the case of the Greco-Roman models in the academies), they improvise without straying far from their internal ritualistic and normative practices. This gives Warli art a sort of grammar, but the loose structure is an outcome of the artistic imagination of those who are much more daring and have developed a personal approach to their cultural expressions and existence.

Parhad is an innovator without straying away from Warli traditions. But his fine imagination and polished craft make the general Warli style into something extremely sophisticated. While the stick figures with inverted triangles as their bodies and the employment of multiple perspectives are intact in Parhad’s paintings, he converts folk stories that he listened to in his childhood into complex visual narratives, with the same figure appearing several times in different spaces within the painting. It is like the hunting scenes in a Mughal miniature painting, where a tiger appears a few times as it is pursued and hunted down.

For instance, the curator of the exhibition, Chaavi Jain, explained the story of a smart rat whose tail was accidentally cut by a barber while removing a thorn stuck to it. This smart rat takes a pair of scissors as compensation from the barber and exchanges them with a basket weaver for a bamboo basket. Through a series of exchanges, this rat even gets a bride, then a drum, and finally meets his accidental death in a freakish fall from a tree. Hilarious — but what a wonderful way Parhad has painted it.

In one of the paintings, Parhad depicts Delhi, the city. We recognise the painting instantly because of the unmistakable presence of the monuments. The curator tells me that the artist paints people in pairs when he paints a city, but when he paints the stories of his village, he paints people in groups or in chains, symbolic of their mutual dependence or connected lives. So is the case with the flora and fauna in the villages. They also do not have a separate existence. There is a painting of a set of migratory birds coming in concentric circles and making the painting vibrate with the flapping of their wings.

Parhad, in his imagination and rendering, goes back and forth between the past, the present and the future. He paints the future of humans, where one can see the word “Danger” written large in a few places. Parhad prepares his pictorial surface using a rough cotton cloth smeared with cow-dung paste mixed with fine mitti, or soil. Rice flour is used for creating the white figures, and some areas are fine-tuned with acrylic paint, charcoal, lal mitti and ash. He uses a bamboo stylus and commercially available brushes to make his paintings.

A wonderful show. What I liked was the pleasant approach of the curator and the gallerist, who enthusiastically walked me through the show even after I told them that I could handle the works myself. But the curatorial explanations made all the difference. Great, and thank you.

JohnyML