tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2437491327930436782023-06-20T06:53:44.144-07:00My Writing Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-48173985103161629052016-04-27T03:55:00.001-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.414-07:00TAKE - Critical Writing I Issue 18 I April 2016<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again!</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Cynical governments,
greedy corporates and paid mobs are invading intellectual and cultural spaces in
the country in a pincer move, squeezing out all independent thought and
creative action. Artists in Karnataka are fiercely opposing the state
government move to hand over the official state art gallery in Bangalore to a private
collector and art dealer, to rebuild and house his private collection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">A SWEETHEART DEAL AND THE CULTURAL COMMONS </span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">BATTLE FOR VENKATAPPA ART GALLERY</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Karnataka Government
in its wisdom signed a Memorandum of Understanding recently, practically giving
away the Venkatappa Art Gallery (VAG), the official state art gallery in
Bangalore in a private-public partnership to Tasveer Foundation, the family
trust of art dealer Abhishek Poddar. This is apparently part of a policy of the
Karnataka Tourism Vision Group formed by the government to give heritage sites
in adoption to boost tourism. Tasveer Foundation’s plan is to rebuild it as a
new Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) to house Poddar’s collection on the site.
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When a colleague alerted
us in February about it, there was an electric response. The artist community was
galvanized and gathered in large numbers for meetings and discussions. The
consensus was to reject the MOU and stop the take over of the state institution
by any private entity. We have formed the Venkatappa Art Gallery Forum or
VAGforum to oppose this move.<span style="color: #222222;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: black;">Tasveer
Foundation thought this would be a triumphal march and are taken aback at the fierce
opposition.</span><span style="color: #222222;"> MAP’s supporters
did not think that artists would do hard legal research into all the documents
and processes. Meanwhile, MAP’s public relations machinery is projecting the
new museum as god’s gift to the Bangalore public, and the protesting artists as
a bunch of provincial spoilsports. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Artists are not
against the Museum of Art and Photography coming up in Bangalore. We
welcome another museum in the city. But we want MAP to be housed on its own
land and not try to usurp the state gallery. We oppose <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">any</span> private body taking over the
cultural commons, and see no reason why Abhishek Poddar should want the
official state gallery to build MAP when he can rent or get any property or
heritage site to house his collection. And there is no precedent to this. The major
art collectors in India like Kiran Nadar of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art - KNMA,
Lekha and Anupam Poddar of Devi Art Foundation, Ebrahim Alkazi of the Alkazi
Foundation for the Arts, or Priti Paul of Apeejay Media Gallery,have set up
world class museums of their art collections on their own land. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">If one wants to see
an example of a benign private-public partnership (PPP) in India, the case of
the historic Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai is the first of its kind. The
Jamnalal Bajaj Trust is in a tripartite agreement with the Mumbai Municipality
and INTACH where the trust gives generous funds for conservation, maintenance
and running of the heritage museum. However, they will not occupy it, build a
new building on it, put in their own collections, or get co-branding with it,
as Tasveer Foundation plans to do with VAG. If Tasveer Foundation will fund VAG
for its maintenance, conservation and activities, we welcome it. Or rather, as our
former Culture Secretary Mr. Chiranjeev Singh points out, if this is true
philanthropy there are several neglected art centres in other towns in the
state like Hubli and Gadag, which could benefit through a benign adoption. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Venkatappa Art
Gallery is the official Karnataka State Art Gallery built on three acres of
prime land in the Museum Complex at Cubbon Park in the heart of the city. The
gallery itself was built to celebrate K. Venkatappa, the early twentieth
century Bengal School Karnataka artist, and in response to the protests of a
whole generation of artists who demanded a space to exhibit in the city. It is
a combination of a modern art museum as well as a contemporary art space for
rent, and houses the large historical collections of K. Venkatappa and K.K.
Hebbar donated by their families, and many other works by Karnataka artists
acquired by the government. There is an extra gallery space, an auditorium and
grounds with a charming moat, which artists of the state have constantly used since
it was built in the 1970s.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It is an inclusive
and democratic space, which can be hired cheaply by young artists and those
from other parts of the state, and excellent for non- commercial and
experimental art events. Most of us here, like myself, have had our first solo
shows in VAG. Through the years, there have been group shows, collective
projects, eight state Kala Melas, retrospective of RM Hadpad, The Khoj
International Artists Residency, The International Live Art Festival, Co-Lab
and Ananya Drishya artist talks, a major IFA Asian Museum Curators Conference, to
name a few activities- open and free to all to use. VAG has acted like an
incubator for art in Karnataka and is an archive of a century of its history. Will
MAP be able to do these things? Do we need an exclusive wine and cheese place
here? We usually do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kaphi</i> and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> vade</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">VAG is also a
strange case. For though it is an official state museum-gallery of modern and
contemporary art, it has never had an identity of its own and has always been a
subsidiary of the Government Archeology Museum next door, getting step-motherly
treatment. If you google VAG, the red building of the old museum comes up rather
than the modern building of VAG. This also means that it does not have its own specialist
Director, staff or budget. This has given rise to certain problems of lack of
programming, upkeep and lack of infrastructure. The archeologists in charge are
hardly interested in any vision for VAG. They use rooms in the Gallery as
offices and dump spare artefacts in the storage.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">These are problems that the government can solve easily with the advice
of the art community and certainly not an excuse to abandon the gallery. The
government should not shirk its responsibilities and should generously fund and
run the gallery. Private players can work in parallel with the government but
cannot replace the government. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">“At this point, globalization is
everywhere a capitalist project, developing simultaneously on the regional and
world scales. But this project is always expressed through local systems of
governance and culture - - Neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of
contemporary capitalism is preaching about free and unrestrained market,
privatization of public commons and limitation of the role of the state in
those processes.”</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">- </i><a href="http://future-nonstop.org/a/787c6b7cc33b9d82d0529321b6bea1ab"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zoran
Pantelić</i><span class="apple-converted-space"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;"> </span></i></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">|<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i><a href="http://future-nonstop.org/a/8d17f650855fa5c4f7ce352c77a02bc0"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Branka
Ćurčić</i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: #222222;">The Hon. Tourism
Minister called us for a meeting. His opening remarks were that they had a
Central Government directive that governments cannot manage “women’s safety”
and “clean toilets” and so heritage sites should be given for adoption to
private bodies. This is comical! It is a scandal that the state government,
which has the responsibility to run the entire state claims not to have the money
or expertise to run the state gallery. A fact finding report by Rashmi
Munikempanna and Sridhar Gowda</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> “</span><span style="color: #141823;">A Broke Government of
Karnataka And Other Myths: Has</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> </span><span style="color: #141823;">Funding
Always Been The Red Herring?” (www.vagforum.in), blows the lid off this claim,
proving from the annual reports of the Department of Museums and Archeology
that 21 crores from its budget was returned unspent by the Department at the
time of the signing of the MOU.</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> And Tasveer Foundation had
committed to raising only ten crores!. As far as expertise goes, </span><span style="color: #222222;">Karnataka has artists, art scholars
and curators of high repute and wide experience. This is a scam of the
first order. </span><span style="color: #141823;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">VAGforum has
studied this MOU thoroughly with legal experts. It is vague, flimsy and lacks
scrutiny. It is a sweetheart deal, which Tasveer Foundation has written in its
own favour and signed by the government officials without any safeguards. MAP
gets free rein to occupy and use the VAG space with no responsibilities. The
MOU was signed between the State Tourism and Archeology Departments and Tasveer
Foundation without consulting the art community, which is a sign of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">malafide</i> intent. A cultural institution
comes under Culture, and not Tourism, which is under the Industries Department.
The Tourism Department had no business to identify VAG as a tourist destination
and commodify it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: #222222;">There are many
areas of conflict of interest. Abhishek Poddar, as a primary member of the Karnataka
Tourism Vision Group, elected to adopt VAG for his trust, in a prime instance
of crony capitalism. For a scheme involving Corporate Social Responsibility
funds, as a trust Tasveer Foundation is not a corporation and so has no CSR money
to donate. He is the Director of the non-profit Tasveer Foundation which signed
the deal (strangely a shadow entity with no website), and its subsidiary MAP, (</span><b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="mso-field-code: " HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/map-india\.org\/\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022 ";"><u><span style="color: #1155cc;">http://map-india.org</span></u></span></span></b><span style="color: #222222;">), but also an art dealer, the owner
of a commercial photography gallery Tasveer Art Gallery (</span><b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="mso-field-code: " HYPERLINK \0022http\:\/\/www\.tasveerarts\.com\/\0022 \\t \0022_blank\0022 ";"><u><span style="color: #1155cc;">http://www.tasveerarts.com</span></u></span></span></b><span style="color: #222222;">), and the Cinnamon lifestyle
store. Poddar had also recently invested heavily in an online art auction
house, Fine Art Bourse that has now closed down.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: #222222;">We wonder where the
profit ends and the “non- profit” begins, and vice-versa? Everything is
strangely porous. We have seen photographs shown and sold in Tasveer and
Cinnamon. Photographers Raghu Rai and T.S. Satyan are two of 25 photographers
who Tasveer Gallery represents- their works are also in the MAP collection. The
same image by T.S. Satyan is shown in both websites. While the MOU mentions </span><span style="color: black;">the Louvre rather fancifully as a model</span><span style="color: black;">- in France, a state
department runs all the state museums. The strength of institutions like the
Louvre is their independence from commercial interests. </span><span style="color: #222222;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">MAP is being projected as an act
of philanthropy. Will the MAP building and the art collection be donated to the
state? The MOU does not say so. The MOU is for a minimum of 5+5 years. It will
take several years and several crores just to build the museum. Will they
vacate the building after ten years? Then where will the MAP collection go? Is
this a land grab in the guise of philanthropy? And what will happen to the historical
collections already existing in VAG during this building period? Will they be
moved to an art warehouse for storage? The donor families are worried. In the
MOU, MAP refuses to take responsibility for any damages, grievances of artists
and even the safety of visitors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: #222222;">If the state is endorsing a private collection by giving it the branding
of an official state museum, it should be obvious that the focus should be on
Karnataka art. If you look at the different sections of this eclectic
collection consisting of popular art, crafts, photography, contemporary art, folk
and tribal art, there is hardly any representation of art from Karnataka in any
section. What MAP will do is appropriate the existing heritage collections of
Karnataka artists in VAG by the co-branding of MAP-VAG, which will give the
rest of the collection the credibility and weight of an official state
collection.</span><span style="color: #222222;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Artists question
what Poddar has done for Karnataka, (besides providing explosives to its mining
barons) that he should be practically gifted the state gallery? His art philanthropy
until now has not been very noticeable. We have not seen him in any art event
in Bangalore in the last twenty years, which only shows his utter disdain. Tasveer
Art Gallery has not put together a comprehensive invitation list of artists and
art lovers in the ten years of its existence, preferring the corporate crowd. It
has barely encouraged upcoming or even well known photographers from the state.
Bangalore has a unique art scene run by artists, who have created (on shoe
string budgets) huge public art projects, run international art residencies and
festivals and collective art spaces. It is considered the <i>avant- garde</i> art
capital of India with artists experimenting in new materials and forms like
installation art, new media, conceptual photography and live performance
besides traditional forms like painting and sculpture. Karnataka has some of
the leading artists in India of international repute. Whether as connoisseur,
gallerist or collector, Poddar has shown supreme disinterest. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our protest about the
giving away of the Venkatappa Art Gallery should be seen against the backdrop
of a general philistinism sweeping the country where our finest cultural and
intellectual institutions are being invaded and neutralized. Many are of the
opinion that these raids are moves towards eventual privatization, along with a
plan for total control over free thought and right to dissent. VAG is part of our
cultural commons, and we want to retain it as an open and democratic space, accessible
to all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: #222222;">The very notion of
“tourism” taking over culture </span>shows
the deeply flawed notion that art and culture are only for entertainment and
profit - rather than something central to the life of a people, an expression
of human creativity and a philosophical exploration of the world. Arthur
Koestler in his seminal work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Act of</i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Creation</i> has argued how important
creativity is to the very act of survival and evolution of species. A society
with its creative community suppressed and denigrated is like a body without a
soul.<span style="color: #222222;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">VAGforum will not
give up until the government cancels this MOU. We are fighting against a
neo-liberal government and a powerful corporate world, both hand-in-glove. The government
and media want to project business leaders as the cultural and intellectual faces
of the state. But we also wonder how MAP will come up at Venkatappa Art Gallery
against the will and severe displeasure of the entire art community of
Karnataka.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bangalore, April 2016<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">www.vagforum.in<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">VAGforum Actions<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">March 6 - We@Venkatappa, # HugVenkatappa<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">More than 500 artists, art
scholars and art lovers occupied VAG on Sunday March 6<sup>th</sup> for
We@Venkatappa from 11am to 6 pm in a day of protest and creative actions, in a
wonderful show of solidarity. We made a human chain around VAG and later
discussed the whole issue of the MOU in a meeting. The mood was festive, with
people performing, drawing and singing in different parts of the building and
gardens. People took photographs of themselves hugging the building as an echo
of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chipko</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Appiko</i> movement, which were printed and put up in the gallery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">March 19- Wepaint @Venkatappa<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">A day of landscape
painting at VAG to remember K. Venkatappa <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">March 20- We@Town Hall<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">A spectacular public demo
at the Town Hall on 20<sup>th</sup> March with black umbrellas, whistles and
drums. Leading figures and groups from theatre, film and literature addressed
the gathering in support. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">March 27- MOU Read /Rejected/ Recycled<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Artists and children do
creative acts with copies of the MOU at VAG.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">April 10 – We@KWC<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We@KWC or the Karnataka
World Café, was organized at the Gallery as a first step to discuss a
democratic vision of VAG. Based on the internationally popular world café
model, a hundred invitees with experts from cultural administration,
architecture, theatre, literature, film, and public space activists
brainstormed ideas for the future of the Venkatappa Art Gallery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Public Protests by artists in towns all over the
state like Hassan, Gadag, Badami, Raichur, Shimoga, Bijapur, Tumkur.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-55700938909082176432016-04-25T01:48:00.002-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.419-07:00TAKE - Photography I Issue 17 I <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>The Phantom Lady Strikes
Again </b></span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-weight: normal;">I</span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-weight: normal;">found this old unpublished essay from 1998,
written after one of those hot discussions with friends, discussing many things
still of interest today. Here it is, warts and all-</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><b>REARGUARD</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My friend, artist Christoph Storz has been talking
frequently of questioning the artist’s position of being avant garde – as
someone leading society from the front into a vision of a Utopian future. He
says if imagining a technological future is one of the features of the avant
garde, perhaps that vision has been taken over by computer programmers and
people working in electronic media and communications – the artist maybe
somewhat questioning and apart from these leaps. Perhaps then he/she can be
called ‘rearguard’ or someone re-thinking, re-looking or re-assessing both the
past and the present and trying to imagine a future without the hype or the
clutter of tall technological claims.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I regard this rejection of the concept of the avant garde as
a reaction of someone living in the western context. In the Indian context,
where rights and futures are being severely contested, there is still a
progressive role for the artist to play. In fact the recent violent attempts by
the VHP to censor artists [Husain’s nude Saraswati, the recent nude Sita on
Hanuman, the vandalism of a Dutch artist’s work in the NGMA, Delhi] has brought
artists together to play an activist, progressive role in a situation of
danger. We may now question a jingoistsic nationalism but I believe that we do
still believe in playing a progressive nation building role, even we are
dismissed by a majority of our people as elite, irrelevant or ornamental.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The ‘rearguard’ concept can have another meaning in a
colonised country. We are condemned by the west to be rearguard – primitive,
pre-industrial, folkloric or under-developed. Everything we produce is seen as
either a poor imitation of the west, outdated, exotic or inscrutable. Funnily
enough, these attributes are completely internalised by our own public in our
own country: our own critics, art historians and audiences see our work in
these terms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Till the mid 1980s many of us believed in the indigenist
position. As a student in Baroda, I wanted to make work out of Indian materials
[terracotta] and look at folk, popular and classical Indian sculpture as
inspiration for my forms. Out of this would be fashioned a new modern art that
would be able to express a uniquely Indian reality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">These ideas came from Indology, this search for a uniquely
Indian identity is a need from the natonalist days when we as a colonised
people had to define and protect ourselves from the political and cultural
onslaughts from the colonial power. Myself and many others in india began
deeply questioning this position in the late 1980s which led to abandoning the
premises of our earlier work and in some sense starting afresh.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There are many reasons for this rejection. One of the events
that made me deeply question my romanticising the ‘folk’ was the projection of
bear dancers, folk artists and street performers in the festivals of India and
Apna Utsavs in the Rajiv Gandhi era, which while defining Indian culture as
‘folkloric’ exploited both artistically and materially the folk artists with
the folkloric- as-authentic polemic. The notion of ‘developing’ and
‘patronising’ folk art seen as an authentic but dying expression seemed to be a
middle class notion where a middle class urban educated person from a position
of power and knowledge and access to financial resources played a paternalistic
role to the traditional craftsman. These imperatives never seemed to come from
the folk artists themselves.. When I was recently in a panel of an art funding
agency many of the proposals of collaboration came from urban artists wanting
to work with folk artists in order to improve a ‘dying’ art form. There were
two problems in this. These folk/traditional artists of course had no way of
directly applying for these funds because of their illiteracy, their rural
background and their ignorance. But the middle class urban artists seemed to
admit to no problems in their own practice. They wanted to solve their own
crises in theatre, art etc by patronising the ‘folk’ and thereby gaining
authenticity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This had another twist recently when in an international conference
in Mysore, apparently the Modernist painter Jatin Das showed only works of
Indian tribal artists and proclaimed to the assembled international audience
that this was the genuinely Indian art. This kind of violently
self-flagellating, masochistic rejection of one’s own existence by a well known
modern artist is extremely disturbing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">While the folk can be described as pre-industrial collective
mass practice, there is also the problem of romanticising the popular – which
is a post-industrial urban ‘folk’ art. In a recent catalogue of the exhibition
of Satish Sharma’s collection of photographs from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>popular street studios from the streets and
fairgrounds of North Indian cities, he writes an extremely polemic introduction.
He claims that this popular photography is ‘truly Indian’ photography. Urban
middle-class photographers and artists who are trained in art schools based on
the western model have marginalised these people who are direct descendants of
the miniature painters. While it is important that he retrieves this material
and posits it against the glamourous photo-journalism of the India Today
variety [to which he himself belongs] and thereby broadens the impoverished
practice of contemporary Indian photography, there is a danger again of seeing
only popular art forms as expressions of ‘real’ or authentic’ experience of a
society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This position of course is a favourite International
position for looking at cultural production from non- western countries. Street
art, poster art, film hoardings, commercial films, calendars are the only forms
seen as authentic expression because of their mass production and distribution
and use. There are several dangers in this view. One that that much of the
material may neither be imaginative or interesting, or even unique, which is
the case with the Satish Sharma collection. The other danger is that much of
the material can be extremely politically conservative and express rather than
question the status quo – which is the reason for their wide popularity. So the
romantic notion that they are really are the expression of the common man, the
underdog of society, the poor; and so therefore progressive and democratic, is
questionable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Since the late 1980s, the Hindu Right wing in India seems to
have appropriated the Indological “Nationalist’ indigenist position which makes
it difficult for any progressive artist to uncritically accept certain old
notions of Indianness etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">What then do we do? If we reject this earlier notion of
Indianness are we unquestioning Internationalists? The fact is that
international audiences are opening up for Indian artists in various ways – so
these are very real problems that we face today. Internationalism or globalism
as it is now called, raises many problems. Economically we can see ourselves as
victims of concerted attacks by global economies competing to grab the market.
Culturally, because of this opening up, we have suddenly become objects of
great interest to Western countries who now suddenly recognise ‘modernity’,
‘contemporaneity’ and ‘urbanity’ in us. On the one hand, we may be tempted to
exoticise ourselves to project a unique identity in the international art
world, or accept a eurocentric, universalist, internationalist view.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However therre is a way of being specifically Indian artists
without accepting the earlier indigenist position and to be open to the outside
world without accepting western hegemony or definitions. Location need not be
defined culturally as based on ancient heritage or folk forms but in
recognising India as a political entity which is a kind of circuit that
generates its own knowledges, audiences and markets. While earlier, our only
way of connecting to different regions in the world was through the conduit of
Europe or America, we now have the opportunity to make direct contact with the
art of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We then begin to contextualise the art
produced – international is certainly not universal. Even within the west, New
York art is different from the art scene in the west coast, or that produced in
London, Berlin or Rome- there are many arts, each is culture and situation
specific.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our work then relates to our context – the needs, the
situations, the past histories and the conditions of producing art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As we come out of an indigenist past we also recognise the
need to recognise technology and new technologies and urban realities in a new
way. The nationalist idea that India is a land of villages [statistics show
that 40% of the population lives in cities] has turned art practitioners away
from seriously looking at technology either archaic or new.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bangalore,1998</span></i></div>
</div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-28547160268485407052016-04-25T01:46:00.002-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.405-07:00TAKE - Studio I Issue 16 I May 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady looks again
at Rodin’s <i>Gates of Hell</i> .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: courier new, courier, monospace;"><b>REVISITING</b></span><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> RODIN'S 'GATES OF HELL'<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Rodin’s <i>Gates of Hell</i> is one of those great
works of Western art that one studies in art school and soon relegates to some long
past art historical moment. Recently when I was stranded in the Rodin Sculpture
Garden in Stanford University waiting for a friend to pick me up, I spent a
long time in front of the <i>Gates</i>, leisurely
‘re-looking’ and thinking around it. Stanford University has the second largest
collection of Rodin’s works after Paris, spread over several floors of the
Canter Center Museum. The sculpture garden on the side houses his monumental
bronze doors depicting a scene from <i>The Inferno</i>,
the first section of Dante’s <i>Divine
Comedy, </i>which is<i> </i>popularly known
as the <i>Gates of Hell</i>. The Directorate
of Fine Arts in Paris which originally commissioned the sculpture in 1880 to be
an ‘inviting’ entrance to a Decorative
Arts Museum, apparently left the choice of the subject to Rodin. Whether the
subject of Hell was suitable for a Decorative Arts Museum or not, Rodin, who
was fascinated by Dante all his life, had begun making sketches of characters from
the<i> Inferno</i> even before he got the
commission and continued to work on it until his death in 1917. The Decorative
Arts Museum was never built.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This was the first time I
was seeing the <i>Gates</i> in the ‘flesh’
so to speak and I thought they were indeed extremely ‘fleshy’. Over a hundred
and eighty agitated figures pop out of the matrix of the relief from the twenty
foot high doors. The ground could be a
landscape with rocks or even the surface of skin with wounds and lacerations.
The work has an overall sense of great instability and movement with figures of
men and women tumbling upside down, falling, in a tangle of bodies. But there
are no traditional scenes of sinners being tortured here. Rodin has not used
any of the bestial imagery from Dante’s <i>Inferno</i>,
with its nine circles of hell and its fabulous beasts, its wasps and maggots,
or its swamps, blood and fire. Instead, one feels a sense of helplessness in
the bodies to resist the gravitational pull downwards, a lack of uprightness,
an inability to stand erect. He builds up a ‘feeling’ of horror without
horrific acts being narrated. Perhaps Rodin as the first great modern sculptor,
a child of the rational thought and scientific temper of the modern age, saw Hell
as the opposite of rational order, as absolute chaos. He places above the
scenes of swirling disorder the iconic sculpture of <i>The Thinker</i>, representing Rodin himself, looking down at the suffering
below him, deep in existential thought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My mind wanders off into
more art history, to the grand tradition of Christian painting and the fantastical
paintings of Heaven and Hell by Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel and the Northern
painters, Michelangelo’s <i>Last Judgement,</i>
and William Blake. Biblical themes have been central to Western art. I once
argued hotly with a European curator when she accused Indian artists of doing
religious themes, that our references to religion were not traditional or
devotional, but critical social comments responding to the political crisis in
the country. Many contemporary western artists like Damien Hirst used Biblical
themes in a direct way for instance (the fish imagery, the golden calf?) but
were not seen as religious artists. Hirst’s dead and rotting animals and armies
of flies were direct descendants of the kind of imagery used in traditional
European scenes of hell. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">One birthday historian Ramchandra
Guha gave me a book on Marguerite Milward, a British sculptor trained in Paris
under Antoine Bourdelle, who comes to India on a project to do anthropological
portraits (a kind of ‘peoples of India’ project) in the heyday of those
expeditions. In a fascinating story, Milward first comes to India in 1926 and
stays in Santiniketan as a guest of Rabindranath Tagore, who suggests that she
come back to teach the students sculpture. When she comes back on his
invitation in 1929, one of the students she teaches is Ramkinker Baij. Bourdelle,
the influential French sculptor and teacher had assisted Rodin for many years. Ramkinker
who is seen as India’s first modernist sculptor, adopts Rodin’s style of rough
impressionist modelling via Bourdelle and Milward which comes to be seen as a ‘virile’
modern style. So we have an interesting situation here where Marguerite Milward,
as a rare woman sculptor and teacher, introduces a ‘virile’ way of modelling sculpture
to the Indian art scene! (My Malayali leftist friends in art school in the ‘80s
taunted me for using rounded forms in my sculptures and called it ‘feudal’. The
ideal was K P Krishnakumar, who was strongly influenced by Ramkinker when in
Santiniketan and whose figures were heroic and angst-ridden, bent in tortured
poses, struggling against hellish forces. Krishnakumar and his friends later
formed the Indian Radical Sculptors and Painters Assocation, wanting to create again
the idea a modernist avant-garde.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Then as an artist I think
how complicated the casting must have been. The ambition of Rodin’s twenty foot
high <i>Gates </i>has no precedent though he
took inspiration from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s 15th century bronze <i>Gates of Paradise</i> at the Baptistry of
St. John in Florence. Rodin’s<i> Gates</i>
however is no harmonious classical piece. He entirely does away with the
Rennaissance perspectives and architectural details of Ghiberti’s <i>Gates, </i>or even of earlier illustrations
of the <i>Inferno</i>, instead placing his
figures in a kind of no man’s land, using the structure of the doors as an
armature. The figures and forms forcefully jump out of the ground in extreme
three-dimensionality, and several like the <i>Thinker</i>
must have been cast separately and then welded on. The technical virtuosity of <i>Gates</i> makes it a landmark. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Just as the vamp is always
more seductive than the heroine, artists love scenes of hell and turbulence. While
Heaven has to be orderly and harmonious, Hell could be interpreted in many interesting
ways. Hell provides more space for imagination and invention than goody goody
scenes. Indian contemporary popular charts of scenes of Hell influenced by medieval
Christian ideas and taking from the imagery of English popular prints, show sinners
being tortured by devils according to their sins: stealing, adultery, lying, murder,
the devils in the prints amazingly resembling those in Mughal painting, with a
further ancestry in Persian miniatures. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Once, when I was working
with the cinema hoarding painter Ealamalai in Bangalore, he told me he had
designed an ashram for a Hindu Swamiji on the outskirts of the city. He said that
to get to the swami in the ashram on top of the hill which was Heaven, you had
to climb past a series of caves built in cement, with painted sculptures depicting
graphic scenes of Hell where sinners are being punished cruelly for their
various misdeeds. The scenes were taken straight from popular charts, very
Christian in their ideas, but fully nativized in the popular Hindu imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>1 May 2015</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-4315149764779735182016-03-26T00:14:00.000-07:002016-05-04T00:15:10.012-07:00Citizen Matters I Venkatappa Art Gallery Controversy I 26 March 2016<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">WHY ARTISTS OPPOSE THE TAKE OVER OF VENKATAPPA ART GALLERY </span></b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">What are the concerns of the artists who are opposing the MoU between the government departments and Tasveer Foundation with regard to Venkatappa Art Gallery? An opinion from the artist fraternity. <br />
<br />
Read more at: <a href="http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/artists-protest-ppp-in-venkatappa-art-gallery-bangalore?utm_source=ref_article"><span class="s2">http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/artists-protest-ppp-in-venkatappa-art-gallery-bangalore?utm_source=copy</span></a></span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Some people are a little confused why Karnataka artists are against the adoption of the state Venkatappa Art Gallery (VAG) by Tasveer Foundation to build MAP - Museum of Art and Photography, to house Abhishek Poddar's art collection. Artists have formed Vagforum (Venkatappa Art Gallery Forum) to oppose this move. </span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">MAP in VAG is being projected as god's gift to the Bengaluru public. Let me explain our stand: </span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Artists are not against the Museum of Art and Photography or MAP coming up in the city. But it should be housed on its own land. We would welcome it. We are against it being built on the land of the Venkatappa Art Gallery. We oppose any corporate house taking over our cultural commons. Why should Abhishek Poddar want the official state gallery to build MAP when he can rent or get any property or heritage site to house his collection? We will go to see it, have a coffee and salute him. </span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">No precedent </span></b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">All major art collectors in India like Kiran Nadar of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Lekha and Anupam Poddar of Devi Art Foundation, Ebrahim Alkazi of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Priti Paul of Apeejay Media Gallery to name some, have set up world class museums of their art collections on their own land. Abhishek Poddar should follow their example. </span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Case of a Benign PPP </span></b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There is an example of a benign private-public partnership - PPP, in the case of the Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai, the first of its kind. The Jamnalal Bajaj Trust is in a tripartite agreement with the Mumbai Municipality and INTACH. The trust gives generous funds for conservation, maintenance and running of the heritage museum. However, they will not occupy it, build a new building on it, put in their own collections, or get co-branding with it, as Tasveer Foundation plans to do with VAG. If Tasveer Foundation can fund VAG for its maintenance, conservation and activities, we welcome it. It will be philanthropy. </span></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Why is Venkatappa Art Gallery important for artists? </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Venkatappa Art Gallery is the official Karnataka State Art Gallery. The building is on two acres of prime land in the Museum Complex at Cubbon Park in the centre of the city. It is not an empty shell. It houses the heritage collections of K Venkatappa, KK Hebbar and CP Rajaram donated by their families. There is an extra gallery space and auditorium and grounds which have been constantly used by the artists of the state since it was built in the 1970s. It is in good condition and needs some upkeep. It is an inclusive and democratic space which can be hired cheaply by young artists and those from the provinces, and also excellent for non-commercial and experimental art projects, festivals, workshops, seminars, talks and meetings. Most of us here, like myself, have had our first solo shows in VAG. Through the years, there have been group shows, collective projects, 8 state Kala Melas, retrospective of RM Hadpad, The Khoj International Artists Residency, The International Live Art Festival, Co-Lab and Ananya Drishya artist talks, recently the IFA Public Art presentation, to name a few activities - open and free to all. Will MAP be able to do these things? Do we need an exclusive wine and cheese place here? We usually do kaphi and vade. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We have read the MoU, it's not transparent </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The MOU has been studied thoroughly by Vagforum with legal experts. The MOU is vague, flimsy and lacks scrutiny. Tasveer Foundation has written this in their own favour which has been signed by the govt. officials without any safeguards. MAP gets free rein to occupy and use the VAG space with no responsibilities. The MOU was signed between the Tourism and Archeology Departments and Tasveer Foundation without consulting the art community. The secrecy is a sign of malafide intent. A cultural institution actually comes under Culture and not Tourism which is under the Industries Department — the Tourism Department had no business to sign the MOU. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Conflicts of interest </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Having studied the MoU, we find that there are many areas of conflict of interest. Abhishek Poddar, as a primary member of the Karnataka Tourism Vision Group which created this policy, identified VAG for adoption by himself. He is the Director of the non-profit Tasveer Foundation (strangely a shadow entity with no website or any info about trustees), and MAP (http://map-india.org), but also the owner of a commercial photography gallery Tasveer Art Gallery (http://www.tasveerarts.com), and the Cinnamon lifestyle store. We wonder where the profit ends and the non- profit begins, and vice-versa? We have seen photographs shown and sold in Tasveer and Cinnamon. Photographers Raghu Rai and TS Satyan are two of 25 photographers which Tasveer Gallery represents- their works are also in the MAP collection. The same image by TS Satyan is shown in both websites. Nathaniel Gaskell, associate director of MAP (non-profit) who is working on the plan of the Museum, is also the curator of Tasveer Art Gallery (profit). </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Lack of transparency and clarity </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Poddar is being projected as a philanthropist. Is he building and donating the building of MAP and its collection to the state? The MOU does not say so. The MOU is for 5+5 years. It will take several years and several crores just to build the museum. Will he vacate the building after 10 years? And then where will the collection go? Is this a land grab in the guise of philanthropy? And what will happen to the heritage collections already existing in VAG during this building period? Will they be moved away to his art warehouse? The families are worried. In the MOU he does not take any responsibility for damages. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">If the state is endorsing a private collection by giving it the branding of an official state museum, it should be obvious that the focus should be on Karnataka art. But if you look at the different sections of this eclectic MAP collection, there is hardly any representation of art from Karnataka. What MAP will do is appropriate the existing heritage collections in VAG by the co-branding of MAP-VAG, which will give the rest of the collection the credibility of an official state collection. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Where is Poddar's social responsibility, his giving back to society? We have not seen Poddar in any art event in Bengaluru in the last twenty years which only shows his utter disdain. The city has a unique art scene run by artists, who have created on shoe string budgets huge public art projects, run international art residencies and collective art spaces. It is considered the avant garde art capital of India with artists experimenting in new materials and forms like installation art, new media, conceptual photography and live performance besides traditional forms like painting ands sculpture. But he has hardly supported art activity here or anywhere in the state. We are not glamour-struck by references to the Tate Gallery or MOMA, as many artists from the state have been exhibiting in the major museums of the world for the past twenty years.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Rangashankara model is not comparable! </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This MAP project is erroneously being compared to the Rangashankara theatre. Rangashankara (www.rangashankara.org/) is not a PPP. Here, the Sanket Trust was set up by well-known practitioners, who got an empty plot of land from the government to build an auditorium, and raised funds for the purpose from the public and business houses. It is run on sponsorship. This was for the use and development of the theatre community, which is rented out cheaply to theatre groups with cheap ticketing for the public. But if the state had tried to give away Ravindra Kalakshetra, for example, to Sanket Trust to rebuild and occupy, the entire theatre world would have been up in arms. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The trustees of Rangashankara are Girish Karnad (playwright- Jnanpith award), Arundhati Nag, S. Surendranath, who are all experienced theatre practioners with S Parameshwarappa who is an administrator and theatre enthususiast. M S Sathyu (theatre director) is a consultant. There is a gravitas and a vision to this group. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>Business people, auctioneers, lobbyists on board of</b> <b>directors and trust</b> - <b>only one art expert</b> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>MAP -Museum of Art and Photography:</b> Director is Abhishek Poddar (business, collector), and Associate Director Nathaniel Gaskell (a young British curator). </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>The trustees of MAP are:</b> Arundhati Nag (theatre person) and Nirupama Rao (diplomat). It has an art consultant, Amanda Miller (expert in marketing Asian art who worked for Bonhams auction house). </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>The Board members of MAP are:</b> Kiran Majumdar Shaw (business, collector), Priya Paul (business, collector), Som Mittal (IT), Vivek Gupta (business, collector), Dilip Cherian (image consultant, political lobbyist). Why a political lobbyist? Not one of these people above is a practitioner of art or expert in the field. There seems to be a preponderance of business interests and usefulness for lobbying in all these names, rather than practical experience and expertise in the field. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>The</b> <b>Advisory panel of MAP consists of</b> Dr Jyotindra Jain, scholar and institution builder whose expertise is in tribal, folk and popular art. Arundhati Ghosh of India Foundation for the Arts is an arts administrator and not an expert on visual art. For a Museum of Art and Photography, there is no expert or practitioner in Photography, or in Modern and Contemporary Art, in the list of trustees, board or advisors. Dr. Jain is the only expert from visual art. How serious is this museum which wants the status of an official state collection? </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>Cancel the MoU on VAG</b> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Our protest against this MOU is against the backdrop of huge scams where government banks have given thousands of crores of bad loans to renegade business houses. Vijay Mallya, another Bangalore businessman (strangely not part of MAP) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of such government scams. This is how governments drain their money and have nothing left for culture, and have to sell our institutions to corporate houses. Would anyone tell me how much the private sector has contributed to the development of the city and how much it has taken from our town? </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There are efforts to divide and rule the artist community by pitting artist S G Vasudev against Vagforum. But S.G. Vasudev has clarified privately to us, and publicly in the press, that he is against the MOU and PPP with Tasveer Foundation. We are all united in opposing it. Vagforum will not give up till the MoU is cancelled. We are getting support from other cultural fraternities and from all over India as it is an issue that concerns the entire art world. We also wonder how MAP will come up at Venkatappa Art Gallery against the will and severe displeasure of the entire art community of Karnataka. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>State has to run the gallery</b> </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We are fighting for the cultural commons and our public space. This is a wrong precedent being set by the government - where a public cultural institution is being given away carte blanche to a corporate house to occupy and rebuild. This has never before happened in India and is against public interest. It is a scandal that the state government which has the responsibility to run the entire state, claims not to have the money or expertise to run a small gallery. It is ignorant to say the state lacks expertise. Karnataka has artists, art scholars and curators of high repute and vast experience. Theatre people here who have a strong lobby, had already got the government to build Kalamandira theatres in each district way back in the 1980s. We not only demand that the state invest and run this gallery in consultation with the art community, but also build a string of art galleries all over the state to develop the art scene.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Pushpamala N. </span></i></span></div>
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Read more at: <a href="http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/artists-protest-ppp-in-venkatappa-art-gallery-bangalore?utm_source=ref_article"><span class="s2">http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/artists-protest-ppp-in-venkatappa-art-gallery-bangalore?utm_source=copy</span></a></span></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-17950076493718880412015-10-01T22:16:00.000-07:002016-04-27T22:16:53.681-07:00Shifter I Dictionary of the Possible I Issue 22 I pub. New York I 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">MIMESIS </span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When I was young, I wanted to get into the skin of another person</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Into the mind of another person, so that I could experience the world differently</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We imitate to understand how something works</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We imitate to become something else</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Hrithik Roshan once said that if he gets the hairstyle right, he could get into the character of any role</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Is mimesis <i>maya</i> or illusion?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Renaissance painters wanted to create the illusion of reality with that most abstract of arts, geometry</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Art students traditionally copied old masters</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">You need to construct something to deconstruct it</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Walter Benjamin said that the best way to read, is to copy the whole book by hand</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And for learning by rote, we aesthetized knowledge with rhythm and rhyme and alliteration</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our ancient mathematics was written in verse</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When I went to Santiniketan once, I saw many K. G. Subramanyans</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The same kurta pajama with jhola and the same walk</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">They all wanted to become him</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">(Without the hard work)</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sometimes mimicking is a sympathetic act</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When the listener is mimicking every gesture of the speaker she is sympathetic to the speaker</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Kannada activist Vatal Nagaraj routinely leads protests in the same dress as the protestors</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In police uniform for a police protest, as a farmer for a farmers’ protest</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Once he was wrapped up completely in a thick blanket, the newspapers reported a mysterious bundle </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And people could neither identify him nor the protest</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our politicians like to go to far-flung disturbed areas</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And dance with the tribals</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">They want to say that they are with the people </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">But it’s a trick, and they look stupid</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Or wear the headgear of some ethnic groups</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Because they are sympathetic to them</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Or not, because they are not sympathetic</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">But the funniest joke </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Is the Independence Day parade when tribal groups are dressed up </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In standard “tribal” costumes designed by the Culture Department</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And when they go back to their areas after dancing much on floats</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This becomes their traditional tribal dress</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Pushpamala N, October 2015</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>For Dictionary of the Possible</i></span></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-44663771847339705802015-08-01T22:48:00.000-07:002016-04-27T22:48:55.713-07:00Catalogue Essay I Vinay Kumar I pub. Art Hauz Gallery Bangalore I August 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ON VINAY KUMAR’S “KNOWN TO UNKNOWN METAPHOR”</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As a trained printmaker, Vinay Kumar has an interest in tools and processes. This has continued over his earlier series of digital images of printing presses and printmaking studios he has worked in, into this recent body of work titled “Known to Unknown Metaphor” made during a stay in in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Here he takes the ready made copper <i>yantras</i> available in the market and made in the city and uses them as intaglio plates, rubbing ink on them and passing them through a printing press to make prints. The prints become inverted images of the original embossed images, like a mirror image: the original religious text unreadable or rather, difficult to read. The found images of a long tradition are in this way brought into his contemporary art practice, being both readable/ unreadable, religious/ aesthetic, artisanal as well as industrial.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In several of the prints, abstract etched forms reminiscent of the shapes of primitive tools and weapons, but also of <i>yonis</i> and <i>lingams</i>, are printed along with the inverted images of the <i>yantras</i>. During his stay in Bhopal, Vinay Kumar saw the fossils and tribal artefacts in the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum, the Birla Museum and the Museum of Natural History in Bhopal and also travelled to the nearby Bhimbetka cave shelters with paintings from the Paleolithic era, exhibiting the earliest signs of human habitation in India. Fascinated by the palimpsest of these layers of histories existing now in the same time and space, he attempts in these works to place together these two kinds of ancient traditions: the Tantric as well as the aboriginal, and to find a relationship between them. Finally, both the copper <i>yantras</i> as tools used for worship and the primitive tools used for hunting or agriculture, become his tools for making art.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>Pushpamala N</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>Bangalore, August 2015</i></span></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-35004240676970593042015-05-04T00:12:00.000-07:002016-05-04T01:05:56.283-07:00Cult of the Goddess seminar 2005 I National Museum Institute I DK Printworld New Delhi I ed. By Arputha Rani Sengupta I 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Mother India</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Images of Woman and Nation</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1">The idea of “Bharat Mata” is invented at the end of the 19</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> century, perhaps as a response to Britain’s “Britannia”. The image is really a hybrid figure, cobbled together from existing iconography and mythology by adding contemporary symbols, and tends to proliferate in many avatars according to changing political needs. In a country like India where the land has been considered holy since the earliest times, it was only in the late 19th century during the period of early nationalism and Hindu reformism that the new concept of the “nation” began to be personified into a divine being called “Bharat Mata” - or “Mother India”. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Mother India image, an entirely modern construct, gets its potency by inciting primeval and traditional emotions to arouse patriotic feeling, which disguise its recent origins and almost deny the sense of a modern nation. India is not the only country to have created a female personification. However, the way the figure has been deified into a goddess, her many colourful forms, her changing iconographies, and the practice of actually worshipping the figure, seems to be a uniquely Indian phenomenon, reflecting the obsessive feeling for the mother in Indian culture. A peculiarly male way of relating to the nation after the long trauma of colonial domination, the patriotic relationship is turned into an infantile one-to-one bond between mother and son, rather than creating the sense of a shared community.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">According to Christopher Pinney, the earliest Bharat Mata image is<i> Bharat Bhiksha</i>, (“India Begging” or the “Begging of India”), one of the first lithographs by the Calcutta Art Studio, printed around 1878-80. This seems to be a rare secular image, as India is invariably depicted as a Hindu goddess with a trishul and lion like Durga. Probably based on a Raphael etching, the print shows a young Indian child being held towards Britannia by Mother India, portrayed as an old crone. The allegorical meaning is not very clear- we cannot be sure whether the Romanized young India is being offered into the benign care of the British, or whether the old crone is displaying a new, reformed version of the country to the rulers for approval. The infantilization of the country however, was a common theme among western educated Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century who saw the land as being reborn after a long dark history of superstition and ignorance. (In fact Gandhi’s mouthpiece, much later, was called “Young India”.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1">While the trend among a section of the middle classes was to admire British culture and attempt to transform Hinduism into a monotheistic religion like Christianity, the counter movement that grew around the figure of Ramakrishna and Kali worship contemptuously attacked Anglicization, and believed in the potency of idol worship. Kali had been the chosen deity of the revolutionary brotherhoods that were active in Bengal at the beginning of the 19</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> century, and also specifically seen as the patron goddess of the present age, the Kaliyug. Ramakrishna believed that having pictures of gods was a mark of Hindu-ness, and that the images actively demand propitiation. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When the technology of printing oleographs came to India, they were immediately used as a medium of propaganda to spread nationalist ideals. Display pictures, advertisements and postcards carried hidden codes and messages in an era of strict British censorship. Mythological images like Kali dancing on the body of a white skinned Siva, or of Durga as Mahishasura Mardhini, were used as nationalist allegories and circulated widely. These pictures were framed and displayed in houses, and worshipped in the private home temples.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, in the course of time, when the image of a bloodthirsty folk goddess Kali dancing naked with a necklace of skulls symbolizing the country became somewhat of an embarrassment to the middle class intelligentsia, the more benign cow began to be used widely as an extremely potent sign, in what became a veritable war of images. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj established the <i>Gaurakshini Samaj</i> or Cow Protection Association. With the cow protection agitation in Punjab and Bihar in the 1890s, the cow, seen as the gentle, loving universal mother, became the sacred symbol of the endangered Hindu nation needing protection from the violent beef eating non-Hindus. It was also <i>kamadhenu</i> or the mythical wish-fulfilling cow. A popular Ravi Varma lithograph showing the cow as a proto–nation with its body imprinted with divine images and feeding all the communities, being attacked by a demon, was seen by the colonial government as anti-British and heavily censored. The divine mother cow soon got transformed into the image of Mother India.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Hindu revolutionaries like Aurobindo at the time were writing “Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is power, a godhead…” Vivekananda saw India as the Divine Mother, and the ideal woman as a chaste mother rearing patriotic sons. Mother India could be imagined as a militant, powerful goddess, or even as a virtuous and helpless woman enslaved by hostile powers. In Subramanya Bharati’s play <i>Panchali Shapatham</i>, Draupadi in the hands of the Kauravas is described as the enslaved Mother India. The disrobing of Draupadi was a very popular allegory for the shaming of the nation by the foreign conquerors, which was instantly understood by the public. A popular Ravi Varma nationalist print doing the rounds at the time was of Draupadi standing behind a curtain cowering from Kichaka’s advances.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">For the British rulers, India as the subject country was feminized - as a woman to be conquered and ruled, educated and reformed. The West was defined as active, masculine, practical, and the East as passive, feminine, spiritual. Many of the fiery issues of the time revolved around the rights and control of Indian women: like sati, child marriage, widow remarriage, or women’s education, prostitution and public morals. Historians like Partha Chatterjee have described how in late 19the century Bengal, life was seen as dichotomized into the public and private spheres. Public life, coming directly under the control of the foreign rulers, was a westernized world of rationality, science and technological progress, in which Indian men were forced to operate. Private life, the domain of women, home and family, was a protected area where “true” Indian spiritual values could be maintained. The woman was idealized as the carrier of ancient Indian culture and the bearer of the country’s shame and honour, whose purity had to be zealously guarded. Reformists, while seeking to create a “new Indian woman” were willing to allow her modern education and certain rights within the family, but her life was strictly circumscribed. The women who freely operated in the public sphere- the prostitutes, the actresses, the labourers and domestic workers, were seen as dangerous outcasts offering themselves up for sexual exploitation.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Dewan T. Madhava Rao advised Ravi Varma around this time to make popular prints of his mythological paintings as a service to the nation. It was an era when the ancient Sanskrit classics were fashionable amongst the intellectuals and literati of Europe influenced by the ideas of Max Mueller and Goethe, as part of the Romantic interest in exotic and Oriental subjects. Kalidasa’s <i>Shakuntala</i> was a great favourite amongst the translated Sanskrit texts. These were the most popular subjects in Indian literature, painting and theatre as well. Hindu nationalists had their own agenda in reviving interest in India’s golden past and invoking the idea of a grand civilization that existed before the foreign conquests. Leaders like Lokamanya Tilak believed that hero worship makes a nation great. It was thought that stories of great kings and ideal heroines would arouse a sense of Hindu identity and reinforce traditional society, which was being undermined by the new ideas from the West. The new print technologies were used extensively for this. Millions of copies of Ravi Varma’s mythological pictures were printed and circulated all over India after the establishment of his lithographic press in Bombay and then Malavli, replacing local gods with a pan-Indian iconography. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The beginnings of the popular national imagery of Mother India images can be traced to Ravi Varma’s 1898 oil painting of Bharat Mata as a beautiful young goddess dressed as a queen in a red sari, standing against a halo with two lions. In her four arms she holds the symbols of Durga and Britannia, the arrow and palm leaf, which are mascots of war and peace, and the goad and snare, mascots of state power. The lion, the symbol of imperial British power, is her vahana and in an ironic comment, lies subdued at her feet. The hybrid iconography, containing a mixture of Indian and European symbols, reflects an idea of self-rule at the time, which was in terms of sharing power rather than complete independence. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Abanindranath Tagore’s celebrated 1905 watercolour painting of Bharat Mata however, expresses another strand of nationalist thought, coming from the Orientalist ideals of spirituality and austerity. She is conceived as a married woman dressed as a vaishnava ascetic in saffron robes. In her four arms she holds the rudraksh mala, a sheaf of paddy, a white cloth and a palm leaf manuscript, representing the different sections of Indian society.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>This Hinduization of the national imagery was not popular with other groups, particularly the Muslims. Tilak’s introduction of the Ganesh festival as a nationalist rallying point had aroused resentment from its beginnings in 1893. It appears that Ravi Varma’s real service to the nation was to provide a “heroic past” to the Hindu ruling classes, to project their own interests in the anti-colonial movement.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>In a flood of calendar pictures that circulated all over the country during the days of the freedom struggle, Bharat Mata assumes different forms according to the political climate of the time. In 1920s and ‘30s posters, the map of India takes on an iconic value, with the figure of the goddess rising from it like a <i>swayambhu</i> or self-generative form. In many, the goddess is a divine queen who demands cruel sacrifices from her subjects. Freedom fighters pledge their lives to her by offering their severed and bleeding heads, like Bhagat Singh and other martyrs. She is seen offering a sword to Bhagat Singh or Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose just as the goddess Bhavani is said to have given the sword to Shivaji. In some, national figures like Gandhi, Netaji, or Bhagat Singh, tear open their chests to reveal her image inside. Mother India is shown with many arms, holding the symbols of the nationalist struggle along with her own weapons like the <i>trishul</i>. Later, at a time when Independence was being endlessly delayed, she is depicted as a maiden in chains.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, it is interesting to note that at the level of popular imagery, Gandhi’s use of the “passive feminine” and “spiritual” values as political tools of resistance, or the ascetic ideals of Abanindranath’s <i>Bharat Mata,</i> never took root. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In this profusion of tradition and Hindu religious sentiment enters the strange figure of Fearless Nadia, “queen of the stunts”, one of the biggest female stars of the 1930s and 1940s Hindi cinema. Rosie Thomas writes how this large, buxom, blonde and blue eyed, white- skinned former circus artist of Australian origin became the idol of the masses, playing an Indian avenging angel in a series of stunt films at the height of the nationalist movement. Her musclewoman persona is a counterweight to the other big star of the era, the delicate, aristocratic Brahmin beauty Devika Rani, trained in England in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and a grand niece of Rabindranath Tagore, who came to be considered a classic heroine. She traces Nadia’s success with the Indian masses to a long tradition of <i>virangana</i> or warrior women in Indian culture that was used in all the forms of popular entertainment during the freedom movement. The <i>virangana</i>, according to Hansen, is the good queen, whether fictional or real, who takes over the throne when the king dies, leads the people to battle dressed as a man, and dies defending her kingdom against invaders. The Rani of Jhansi is an important figure in this geneology. Fearless Nadia was a lively combination of the Hollywood stunt queen (Pearl White), the Indian <i>virangana, </i>and the cosmopolitan urban <i>Bambaiwali.</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The films of her producer JBH Wadia, first a staunch Congress supporter, then a follower of the Radical Marxist and Humanist MN Roy, were full of nationalist propaganda. The amazing thing is that Nadia was accepted in anti-British allegories though she was cheerfully breaking all Indian codes of dress and behaviour as a big white woman in skimpy dress thrashing Indian men, because she heroically took up the cause of nationalism and the rights of the oppressed, lower castes and women in all her films. She is portrayed as a <i>virangana</i> of the modern world, laughing at all obstacles. Her films are filled with images of modern technology, cars, planes and especially trains. Fearless Nadia is perfectly in control out of doors in the male world of technological progress- in fact, empowered by it.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Thomas sees Nadia and Devika Rani as alter egos, two opposed constructions of Indian femininity in the late colonial period. While Devika Rani embodies the tradition of passive suffering, chastity and fidelity, the ideals of <i>stridharma </i>or “woman’s duty”, Nadia takes on the <i>virangana </i>persona, which actively upholds the moral order, justice and truth, the domain of men. She is given a freedom denied to other women because she earns it with her own heroic deeds. The two visions, she says, express two different versions of the nation, two different relationships to modernity and the world. One is based on an essentialized Orientalized tradition, while the second “recognized the hybridity and fluidity within the porous borders of the modern India”. While the first used melodrama as a film form, the second used comedy, action and masquerade.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Prostitution became a major problem around the same time that the woman was seen as a <i>devi</i>, and the nation as Divine Mother. After the 1860s when Calcutta became the imperial centre, thousands of destitute women started pouring into the city. Many were Hindu widows or victims of Kulin polygamy (the custom where traveling Brahmins wed a series of women, who they sometimes never saw again) women turned destitute by the series of famines in the countryside, runaway or abandoned women. In earlier times, prostitutes, devadasis or courtesans had their place in traditional society, where their activities seen as sinful, but not illegal. During the colonial time, a strange situation developed when the authorities saw their existence as necessary to supply the sexual demands of the large numbers of British soldiers who were pouring into the country, but passed a series of stringent laws to control them due to the alarming rise of venereal disease in the British army. Cantonments had their own official brothels for the soldiers, where prostitutes were practically held captive and had to undergo regular medical checkups. Prostitutes in the city were also told to register themselves and were subject to severe harassment by the police. Any woman walking in certain areas could be picked up and questioned by the police. Finally women’s rights activists in England kicked up a furore over this, as also the Indian babus who found their own mistresses in the red light areas humiliated. The draconian laws, which punished only the prostitutes but not the men frequenting them, were then eased, or used in a surreptitious way.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The prostitute, the actress, the courtesan, the fallen woman, is also a traditional alter ego of the chaste woman - the <i>devi </i>or <i>Bharatiya Nari, </i>the “ideal Hindu woman”. She has been pictured in countless novels, plays, farces, poems, art works and films till the present day, as threatening traditional values by practicing the very opposite of <i>stridharma.</i> Kalighat paintings are obsessed with these images. The courtesan, the adulteress, even the modern educated woman are seen as threatening the very fabric of society, corrupting and castrating men and destabilizing social order. The vamp and <i>devi</i> are sometimes collapsed into the same character, as the heroine in Manoj Kumar’s early 1970s film <i>Purab aur Paschim</i> (“East and West”). She starts off in London wearing a blond wig and mini skirts, smoking and drinking, and ends up in an Indian village temple as a <i>Bharatiya Nari </i>singing a bhajan<i> </i>in a sari, won over by true Indian culture and the true Indian man! In the recent cult film <i>Dil Chahta Hai</i> - (made by a young, trendy director) - Dimple Kapadia is the alcoholic, divorced, older working woman, denied access to her own children, who finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver. Her character as an independent woman is pitiful, and set against the other two virginal young heroines, who look “modern” but operate only within the traditional limits of family approval.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Post Independence calendars show Bharat Mata throwing off her chains. She presides as Lakshmi over India’s development. In Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film <i>Mother India</i>, the peasant Nargis, abandoned by her husband, has to till the soil to feed her two small sons, threatened by misfortunes and lascivious men. She is a kind of rural <i>virangana </i>figure, who operates and succeeds in a man’s world, chaste and heroic even while she breaks the rules of <i>stridharma</i> by selling her <i>mangalsutra, </i>the marriage necklace,<i> </i>for survival, or shooting dead her deviant son. The socialist- realist film still of Nargis carrying the plough (only men traditionally use the plough) is a popular icon of modern India. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The idealistic belief in the new nation of the early years of Independence gives way to cynicism by the 1970s, which directly reflects the way women come to be depicted as symbols of nationhood. The village is seen as the essence of real Indian values, the city, a hellhole of corrupt materialism. In Raj Kapoor’s late film <i>Ram Teri Ganga Maili</i> (‘Ram, Your Ganga is Polluted’), a cynical allegory of lost national ideals, the river Ganga is personified as an innocent hill maiden who is seduced by a visiting city boy. She gives birth to a son and starts off with her child in search of her lost lover to the plains, tracing the course of the holy river. In a series of adventures, she is dirtied and sexually used all along the way, arousing lewd male attention even in the pure maternal act of breastfeeding. The sexy picture of the actress Mandakini in “wet drapery” exposing her breasts under a waterfall – which somehow got past the censors - was widely used for the posters and publicity of the film. The double take is interesting. The director uses a voluptuous starlet to play a pure village virgin, and exploits her in semi- nude scenes throughout the film to illustrate a moral tale of contemporary decadence!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The recent film “Mathrubhoomi” (“Motherland”) by Manish Jha is a dark fantasy set in a future India that is woman starved due to widespread female infanticide. The Mahabharata tale of Draupadi being married to five brothers is used again, not as a tale of empowerment, but as leading to even more unspeakable sexual and domestic abuse of women. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Many contemporary artists have used the archetypal Bharat Mata imagery in their work. Notorious among them is of course, MF Husain’s 1970s Emergency paintings of Indira Gandhi as Durga and Sita, also popular images in the calendar art of the time. Atal Behari Vajpayee had similarly eulogized Indira as Durga during the Bangladesh War. But later in the 1990s the Sangh Parivar organizations made violent attacks on Husain and his work for his depictions of Hindu female deities, warning him as a Muslim to keep off. [ As I write this, there is a new controversy over Husain’s nude Bharat Mata painting.] In Tyeb Mehta’s fragmented modernist images of Kaliyug – Kali and Mahishasura Mardhini counterposed with the figure of the falling man, the earlier heroic mode turns to critical analysis. Atul Dodiya’s series of watercolours of grotesque, emaciated hags, falling, crouching and teetering on a map of India, <i>Tearscape</i>, painted around the year 2000, are bitter expressions of loss and dispossession.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In this irrational regard for the nation as mother- goddess, where eulogistic images of mother’s milk, mother’s forgiveness, mother love, mother tongue, mother earth, reverberate as political slogans, in sentimental auto-rickshaw graffiti and in virulent regional and language identity agitations - the Indian man is forever infantilized. Problems are never faced, only maternal protection invoked. The relationship between the man and the nation becomes a duality, where the idea of community is circumvented into a one- to- one emotional relationship between the mother land and the child-citizen. The Indian woman is the adoring Yashoda captivated by the naughty pranks of the perpetual child Krishna. The Indian mother is worshipped, because she gives birth to men. In mother and child posters everywhere the mother fondles the male child: that is the greatest bond. Even the machismo of the “mard- na mard” politics around the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation created a helpless, sweet <i>Ram Lalla</i> figure to be babied by the whole country. The trauma of the colonial moment is never forgotten, the Indian male never grows up, and the Indian woman never breaks the maternal bond, never lets go. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pushpamala N</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bangalore 2006</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Thanks to M Madhava Prasad for his critical comments and suggestions.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bibliography</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Totem and Taboo</i>, Sigmund Freud, 1913 (Volume 3- Freud, The Origins of Religion, Penguin Books, 1985)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, </i>Partha Chatterjee,<i> </i>Princeton University Press, 1993</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts</i>, Rosie Thomas, from <i>Bollyworld- Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens</i>, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J Sinha, Sage Publications, 2005</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>A Popular Indian Art, Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India </i>– Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger – Oxford University Press, 2003</span></span></div>
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<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>A World without Women</i>, essay on Manish Jha’s film<i> Mathrubhoomi</i> ( 2003 ), Maithili Rao, Frontline, July 1, 2005</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Photos of the Gods – The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India</i>, Christopher Pinney, Oxford University Press, 2004</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Dangerous Outcast, The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal</i>, Sumanta Banerjee, Seagull Books, 1998</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema</i>, ed. by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>From Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art</i>, catalogue of show curated by Dr. Patricia Uberoi and Pooja Sood from Dr Patricia Uberoi’s collection</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Woman / Goddess,</i> ed. Gayatri Sinha, Multiple Action Research Group, New Delhi. 1999</span></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-57186490167994448752015-01-02T01:45:00.000-08:002016-04-28T00:29:49.424-07:00TAKE - Vadfest I Issue 15 I January 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Phantom Lady is appalled
that the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts is hosting the Gujarat government festival
VadFest.</span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">VADFEST, VIBRANT GUJARAT AND SHINING INDIA<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The studios at the Faculty of
Fine Arts, Baroda have apparently been closed to students for the past two
months to spruce up the buildings for VadFest 2015, a new arts festival started
in Baroda by the Government of Gujarat to celebrate Narendra Modi’s
constituency, running from 23 to 26 of January. In an unprecedented move, the
students have been asked to work at home while many of the teachers in the art
school are busy curating several major shows which will take place in the
faculty premises. Newly furbished classrooms and manicured lawns are said to be
giving the much beloved shabby old campus, once the intellectual centre of the
Indian art world, a corporate look.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The Fine Arts Faculty in the
MS University was set up in the 1950s as a liberal arts institute (as against
the polytechnic model which had prevailed till then), which emphasized
intellectual debate and studying art history as much as learning technical
skills. It has since been a model for all future art schools in the
country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seen as the leading art school
in India which has produced many important thinking artists and scholars, it has
had a distinguished reputation for supporting the autonomy of art and education
and progressive ideas in general. Constantly attacked over the years for the
progressive stands, called elite because it kept away from the fundamentalist
mobs, it seems to have lost its steam now. I am not sure whether this is
because of fear, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">coercion, opportunism or
actual support from within.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The participation of the art
school in this Gujarat BJP government flagship festival is shocking. My artist
friends, both curators and participants, seem to have forgotten the shameful
incident of the attack on Chandramohan in 2007 by the Sangh Parivar and its
continuous interference and policing of the art school ever since, or their own
protests against the Gujarat genocide of 2002. The 2007 incident ruined the art
history department which had grown into the liveliest course in the campus,
with the removal of Shivaji Panniker and some of the bright young temporary
staff, leaving a vacuum in the teaching yet to be filled. The school has been
growing more and more conservative over the years and riddled with internal
politicking, with a few teachers bravely struggling to keep the show going. Voluntary
internal censorship has already been in place for some time now with art works
not being shown to students because it might offend (“ we cannot show a video
with animal slaughter because it will offend Jain students”). It is ironical
that the same political dispensation which has been for years trying to destroy
the school, now wants to project it as an iconic institution and tourist
destination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The BJP and Sangh Parivar
wings through various tactics of interference, intimidation and control have
been targeting to take over and neutralize this premier institution for a long
time, knowing its influence and international reputation in the art world. While
the earlier strategy has been intimidation, the present strategy seems to be of
inducements, perhaps of bringing back the school and campus to the forefront of
attention. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">Though it appears that many Indian
artists seem to work ‘politically’ today addressing various issues like global
economics, communalism, farmers’ suicides, environment, water, feminism and
whatnot, when it actually comes to taking a political stand, their politics
becomes fuzzy and naïve. This came out into the open when we called for a
boycott against the Tel Aviv Museum’s India exhibition in 2011. One of the
arguments used then, and being used again by some of the artists, is that one
could participate in the show and critique it by making subversive work. I
don’t buy that, because there is always censorship in the choosing of the
artists and the art works. In 2011 a young artist who did not want to boycott
the Tel Aviv show, had sent a proposal to the Israeli curators that she would
make a work about the Palestine Wall, but it was rejected on the grounds that
the show was about ‘Deconstructing India’ and not about critiquing Israel! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The best way to subvert this
takeover of the cultural world is by refusing to be a part of it, which has
been done by some prominent artists. One understands that it is a delicate
situation for many in Baroda to protest against this government in the open,
but a quiet refusal is possible. If well known artists refuse to show, the
event will lack credibility; if they show, it will gain credibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">Yet, many senior and
prominent artists are showing in the exhibitions, thereby giving the event a weight
and legitimacy that it does not deserve. Like Amitabh Bachchan, I fear my
artist friends are going to play the role of brand ambassadors to give Narendra
Modi’s constituency a bright, liberal, expansive, trendy look at the time of the
international Vibrant Gujarat summit. But the reality is quite different:
Gujarat is a tightly controlled, fascist state, which brooks no dissent or
debate and has extinguished all opposition. I fear my friends are being
co-opted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">‘VadFest’ is nothing but ‘Vibrant
Gujarat’, a propaganda tool for the government. Some years ago, Johny M L was universally
criticized (and rightly so) for naming an exhibition of young artists he
curated in Baroda ‘Vibrant Gujarat’, as it was seen as endorsing Modi’s agenda.
But the mood seems to be softening today with the new acceptability of the
present dispensation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">Meanwhile, the forces of
Mordor are gathering. The success of VadFest will lead to future festivals on
an all India basis, Shining India. I hope the artist community will see through
these tactics and not become collaborators. You cannot be naïve in the dark
times. And you cannot be naïve again and again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>Pushpamala N<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>2 January 2015</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-34746574172189057912015-01-01T22:18:00.000-08:002016-05-04T01:07:23.411-07:00Cult of the Goddess seminar 2005 I pub. National Museum Institute Delhi I ed. By Arputha Rani Sengupta I 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Mother India</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Images of Woman and Nation</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1">The idea of “Bharat Mata” is invented at the end of the 19</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> century, perhaps as a response to Britain’s “Britannia”. The image is really a hybrid figure, cobbled together from existing iconography and mythology by adding contemporary symbols, and tends to proliferate in many avatars according to changing political needs. In a country like India where the land has been considered holy since the earliest times, it was only in the late 19th century during the period of early nationalism and Hindu reformism that the new concept of the “nation” began to be personified into a divine being called “Bharat Mata” - or “Mother India”. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Mother India image, an entirely modern construct, gets its potency by inciting primeval and traditional emotions to arouse patriotic feeling, which disguise its recent origins and almost deny the sense of a modern nation. India is not the only country to have created a female personification. However, the way the figure has been deified into a goddess, her many colourful forms, her changing iconographies, and the practice of actually worshipping the figure, seems to be a uniquely Indian phenomenon, reflecting the obsessive feeling for the mother in Indian culture. A peculiarly male way of relating to the nation after the long trauma of colonial domination, the patriotic relationship is turned into an infantile one-to-one bond between mother and son, rather than creating the sense of a shared community.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Early Nationalist period</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">According to Christopher Pinney, the earliest Bharat Mata image is<i> Bharat Bhiksha</i>, (“India Begging” or the “Begging of India”), one of the first lithographs by the Calcutta Art Studio, printed around 1878-80. This seems to be a rare secular image, as India is invariably depicted as a Hindu goddess with a trishul and lion like Durga. Probably based on a Raphael etching, the print shows a young Indian child being held towards Britannia by Mother India, portrayed as an old crone. The allegorical meaning is not very clear- we cannot be sure whether the Romanized young India is being offered into the benign care of the British, or whether the old crone is displaying a new, reformed version of the country to the rulers for approval. The infantilization of the country however, was a common theme among western educated Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century who saw the land as being reborn after a long dark history of superstition and ignorance. (In fact Gandhi’s mouthpiece, much later, was called “Young India”.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1">While the trend among a section of the middle classes was to admire British culture and attempt to transform Hinduism into a monotheistic religion like Christianity, the counter movement that grew around the figure of Ramakrishna and Kali worship contemptuously attacked Anglicization, and believed in the potency of idol worship. Kali had been the chosen deity of the revolutionary brotherhoods that were active in Bengal at the beginning of the 19</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> century, and also specifically seen as the patron goddess of the present age, the Kaliyug. Ramakrishna believed that having pictures of gods was a mark of Hindu-ness, and that the images actively demand propitiation. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When the technology of printing oleographs came to India, they were immediately used as a medium of propaganda to spread nationalist ideals. Display pictures, advertisements and postcards carried hidden codes and messages in an era of strict British censorship. Mythological images like Kali dancing on the body of a white skinned Siva, or of Durga as Mahishasura Mardhini, were used as nationalist allegories and circulated widely. These pictures were framed and displayed in houses, and worshipped in the private home temples.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, in the course of time, when the image of a bloodthirsty folk goddess Kali dancing naked with a necklace of skulls symbolizing the country became somewhat of an embarrassment to the middle class intelligentsia, the more benign cow began to be used widely as an extremely potent sign, in what became a veritable war of images. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj established the <i>Gaurakshini Samaj</i> or Cow Protection Association. With the cow protection agitation in Punjab and Bihar in the 1890s, the cow, seen as the gentle, loving universal mother, became the sacred symbol of the endangered Hindu nation needing protection from the violent beef eating non-Hindus. It was also <i>kamadhenu</i> or the mythical wish-fulfilling cow. A popular Ravi Varma lithograph showing the cow as a proto–nation with its body imprinted with divine images and feeding all the communities, being attacked by a demon, was seen by the colonial government as anti-British and heavily censored. The divine mother cow soon got transformed into the image of Mother India.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Hindu revolutionaries like Aurobindo at the time were writing “Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is power, a godhead…” Vivekananda saw India as the Divine Mother, and the ideal woman as a chaste mother rearing patriotic sons. Mother India could be imagined as a militant, powerful goddess, or even as a virtuous and helpless woman enslaved by hostile powers. In Subramanya Bharati’s play <i>Panchali Shapatham</i>, Draupadi in the hands of the Kauravas is described as the enslaved Mother India. The disrobing of Draupadi was a very popular allegory for the shaming of the nation by the foreign conquerors, which was instantly understood by the public. A popular Ravi Varma nationalist print doing the rounds at the time was of Draupadi standing behind a curtain cowering from Kichaka’s advances.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">For the British rulers, India as the subject country was feminized - as a woman to be conquered and ruled, educated and reformed. The West was defined as active, masculine, practical, and the East as passive, feminine, spiritual. Many of the fiery issues of the time revolved around the rights and control of Indian women: like sati, child marriage, widow remarriage, or women’s education, prostitution and public morals. Historians like Partha Chatterjee have described how in late 19the century Bengal, life was seen as dichotomized into the public and private spheres. Public life, coming directly under the control of the foreign rulers, was a westernized world of rationality, science and technological progress, in which Indian men were forced to operate. Private life, the domain of women, home and family, was a protected area where “true” Indian spiritual values could be maintained. The woman was idealized as the carrier of ancient Indian culture and the bearer of the country’s shame and honour, whose purity had to be zealously guarded. Reformists, while seeking to create a “new Indian woman” were willing to allow her modern education and certain rights within the family, but her life was strictly circumscribed. The women who freely operated in the public sphere- the prostitutes, the actresses, the labourers and domestic workers, were seen as dangerous outcasts offering themselves up for sexual exploitation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Dewan T. Madhava Rao advised Ravi Varma around this time to make popular prints of his mythological paintings as a service to the nation. It was an era when the ancient Sanskrit classics were fashionable amongst the intellectuals and literati of Europe influenced by the ideas of Max Mueller and Goethe, as part of the Romantic interest in exotic and Oriental subjects. Kalidasa’s <i>Shakuntala</i> was a great favourite amongst the translated Sanskrit texts. These were the most popular subjects in Indian literature, painting and theatre as well. Hindu nationalists had their own agenda in reviving interest in India’s golden past and invoking the idea of a grand civilization that existed before the foreign conquests. Leaders like Lokamanya Tilak believed that hero worship makes a nation great. It was thought that stories of great kings and ideal heroines would arouse a sense of Hindu identity and reinforce traditional society, which was being undermined by the new ideas from the West. The new print technologies were used extensively for this. Millions of copies of Ravi Varma’s mythological pictures were printed and circulated all over India after the establishment of his lithographic press in Bombay and then Malavli, replacing local gods with a pan-Indian iconography. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Devi</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The beginnings of the popular national imagery of Mother India images can be traced to Ravi Varma’s 1898 oil painting of Bharat Mata as a beautiful young goddess dressed as a queen in a red sari, standing against a halo with two lions. In her four arms she holds the symbols of Durga and Britannia, the arrow and palm leaf, which are mascots of war and peace, and the goad and snare, mascots of state power. The lion, the symbol of imperial British power, is her vahana and in an ironic comment, lies subdued at her feet. The hybrid iconography, containing a mixture of Indian and European symbols, reflects an idea of self-rule at the time, which was in terms of sharing power rather than complete independence. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Abanindranath Tagore’s celebrated 1905 watercolour painting of Bharat Mata however, expresses another strand of nationalist thought, coming from the Orientalist ideals of spirituality and austerity. She is conceived as a married woman dressed as a vaishnava ascetic in saffron robes. In her four arms she holds the rudraksh mala, a sheaf of paddy, a white cloth and a palm leaf manuscript, representing the different sections of Indian society.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>This Hinduization of the national imagery was not popular with other groups, particularly the Muslims. Tilak’s introduction of the Ganesh festival as a nationalist rallying point had aroused resentment from its beginnings in 1893. It appears that Ravi Varma’s real service to the nation was to provide a “heroic past” to the Hindu ruling classes, to project their own interests in the anti-colonial movement.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>In a flood of calendar pictures that circulated all over the country during the days of the freedom struggle, Bharat Mata assumes different forms according to the political climate of the time. In 1920s and ‘30s posters, the map of India takes on an iconic value, with the figure of the goddess rising from it like a <i>swayambhu</i> or self-generative form. In many, the goddess is a divine queen who demands cruel sacrifices from her subjects. Freedom fighters pledge their lives to her by offering their severed and bleeding heads, like Bhagat Singh and other martyrs. She is seen offering a sword to Bhagat Singh or Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose just as the goddess Bhavani is said to have given the sword to Shivaji. In some, national figures like Gandhi, Netaji, or Bhagat Singh, tear open their chests to reveal her image inside. Mother India is shown with many arms, holding the symbols of the nationalist struggle along with her own weapons like the <i>trishul</i>. Later, at a time when Independence was being endlessly delayed, she is depicted as a maiden in chains.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, it is interesting to note that at the level of popular imagery, Gandhi’s use of the “passive feminine” and “spiritual” values as political tools of resistance, or the ascetic ideals of Abanindranath’s <i>Bharat Mata,</i> never took root. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Virangana</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In this profusion of tradition and Hindu religious sentiment enters the strange figure of Fearless Nadia, “queen of the stunts”, one of the biggest female stars of the 1930s and 1940s Hindi cinema. Rosie Thomas writes how this large, buxom, blonde and blue eyed, white- skinned former circus artist of Australian origin became the idol of the masses, playing an Indian avenging angel in a series of stunt films at the height of the nationalist movement. Her musclewoman persona is a counterweight to the other big star of the era, the delicate, aristocratic Brahmin beauty Devika Rani, trained in England in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and a grand niece of Rabindranath Tagore, who came to be considered a classic heroine. She traces Nadia’s success with the Indian masses to a long tradition of <i>virangana</i> or warrior women in Indian culture that was used in all the forms of popular entertainment during the freedom movement. The <i>virangana</i>, according to Hansen, is the good queen, whether fictional or real, who takes over the throne when the king dies, leads the people to battle dressed as a man, and dies defending her kingdom against invaders. The Rani of Jhansi is an important figure in this geneology. Fearless Nadia was a lively combination of the Hollywood stunt queen (Pearl White), the Indian <i>virangana, </i>and the cosmopolitan urban <i>Bambaiwali.</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The films of her producer JBH Wadia, first a staunch Congress supporter, then a follower of the Radical Marxist and Humanist MN Roy, were full of nationalist propaganda. The amazing thing is that Nadia was accepted in anti-British allegories though she was cheerfully breaking all Indian codes of dress and behaviour as a big white woman in skimpy dress thrashing Indian men, because she heroically took up the cause of nationalism and the rights of the oppressed, lower castes and women in all her films. She is portrayed as a <i>virangana</i> of the modern world, laughing at all obstacles. Her films are filled with images of modern technology, cars, planes and especially trains. Fearless Nadia is perfectly in control out of doors in the male world of technological progress- in fact, empowered by it.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Thomas sees Nadia and Devika Rani as alter egos, two opposed constructions of Indian femininity in the late colonial period. While Devika Rani embodies the tradition of passive suffering, chastity and fidelity, the ideals of <i>stridharma </i>or “woman’s duty”, Nadia takes on the <i>virangana </i>persona, which actively upholds the moral order, justice and truth, the domain of men. She is given a freedom denied to other women because she earns it with her own heroic deeds. The two visions, she says, express two different versions of the nation, two different relationships to modernity and the world. One is based on an essentialized Orientalized tradition, while the second “recognized the hybridity and fluidity within the porous borders of the modern India”. While the first used melodrama as a film form, the second used comedy, action and masquerade.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Dasi</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Prostitution became a major problem around the same time that the woman was seen as a <i>devi</i>, and the nation as Divine Mother. After the 1860s when Calcutta became the imperial centre, thousands of destitute women started pouring into the city. Many were Hindu widows or victims of Kulin polygamy (the custom where traveling Brahmins wed a series of women, who they sometimes never saw again) women turned destitute by the series of famines in the countryside, runaway or abandoned women. In earlier times, prostitutes, devadasis or courtesans had their place in traditional society, where their activities seen as sinful, but not illegal. During the colonial time, a strange situation developed when the authorities saw their existence as necessary to supply the sexual demands of the large numbers of British soldiers who were pouring into the country, but passed a series of stringent laws to control them due to the alarming rise of venereal disease in the British army. Cantonments had their own official brothels for the soldiers, where prostitutes were practically held captive and had to undergo regular medical checkups. Prostitutes in the city were also told to register themselves and were subject to severe harassment by the police. Any woman walking in certain areas could be picked up and questioned by the police. Finally women’s rights activists in England kicked up a furore over this, as also the Indian babus who found their own mistresses in the red light areas humiliated. The draconian laws, which punished only the prostitutes but not the men frequenting them, were then eased, or used in a surreptitious way.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The prostitute, the actress, the courtesan, the fallen woman, is also a traditional alter ego of the chaste woman - the <i>devi </i>or <i>Bharatiya Nari, </i>the “ideal Hindu woman”. She has been pictured in countless novels, plays, farces, poems, art works and films till the present day, as threatening traditional values by practicing the very opposite of <i>stridharma.</i> Kalighat paintings are obsessed with these images. The courtesan, the adulteress, even the modern educated woman are seen as threatening the very fabric of society, corrupting and castrating men and destabilizing social order. The vamp and <i>devi</i> are sometimes collapsed into the same character, as the heroine in Manoj Kumar’s early 1970s film <i>Purab aur Paschim</i> (“East and West”). She starts off in London wearing a blond wig and mini skirts, smoking and drinking, and ends up in an Indian village temple as a <i>Bharatiya Nari </i>singing a bhajan<i> </i>in a sari, won over by true Indian culture and the true Indian man! In the recent cult film <i>Dil Chahta Hai</i> - (made by a young, trendy director) - Dimple Kapadia is the alcoholic, divorced, older working woman, denied access to her own children, who finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver. Her character as an independent woman is pitiful, and set against the other two virginal young heroines, who look “modern” but operate only within the traditional limits of family approval.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Post Independence</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Post Independence calendars show Bharat Mata throwing off her chains. She presides as Lakshmi over India’s development. In Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film <i>Mother India</i>, the peasant Nargis, abandoned by her husband, has to till the soil to feed her two small sons, threatened by misfortunes and lascivious men. She is a kind of rural <i>virangana </i>figure, who operates and succeeds in a man’s world, chaste and heroic even while she breaks the rules of <i>stridharma</i> by selling her <i>mangalsutra, </i>the marriage necklace,<i> </i>for survival, or shooting dead her deviant son. The socialist- realist film still of Nargis carrying the plough (only men traditionally use the plough) is a popular icon of modern India. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The idealistic belief in the new nation of the early years of Independence gives way to cynicism by the 1970s, which directly reflects the way women come to be depicted as symbols of nationhood. The village is seen as the essence of real Indian values, the city, a hellhole of corrupt materialism. In Raj Kapoor’s late film <i>Ram Teri Ganga Maili</i> (‘Ram, Your Ganga is Polluted’), a cynical allegory of lost national ideals, the river Ganga is personified as an innocent hill maiden who is seduced by a visiting city boy. She gives birth to a son and starts off with her child in search of her lost lover to the plains, tracing the course of the holy river. In a series of adventures, she is dirtied and sexually used all along the way, arousing lewd male attention even in the pure maternal act of breastfeeding. The sexy picture of the actress Mandakini in “wet drapery” exposing her breasts under a waterfall – which somehow got past the censors - was widely used for the posters and publicity of the film. The double take is interesting. The director uses a voluptuous starlet to play a pure village virgin, and exploits her in semi- nude scenes throughout the film to illustrate a moral tale of contemporary decadence!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The recent film “Mathrubhoomi” (“Motherland”) by Manish Jha is a dark fantasy set in a future India that is woman starved due to widespread female infanticide. The Mahabharata tale of Draupadi being married to five brothers is used again, not as a tale of empowerment, but as leading to even more unspeakable sexual and domestic abuse of women. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Many contemporary artists have used the archetypal Bharat Mata imagery in their work. Notorious among them is of course, MF Husain’s 1970s Emergency paintings of Indira Gandhi as Durga and Sita, also popular images in the calendar art of the time. Atal Behari Vajpayee had similarly eulogized Indira as Durga during the Bangladesh War. But later in the 1990s the Sangh Parivar organizations made violent attacks on Husain and his work for his depictions of Hindu female deities, warning him as a Muslim to keep off. [ As I write this, there is a new controversy over Husain’s nude Bharat Mata painting.] In Tyeb Mehta’s fragmented modernist images of Kaliyug – Kali and Mahishasura Mardhini counterposed with the figure of the falling man, the earlier heroic mode turns to critical analysis. Atul Dodiya’s series of watercolours of grotesque, emaciated hags, falling, crouching and teetering on a map of India, <i>Tearscape</i>, painted around the year 2000, are bitter expressions of loss and dispossession.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In this irrational regard for the nation as mother- goddess, where eulogistic images of mother’s milk, mother’s forgiveness, mother love, mother tongue, mother earth, reverberate as political slogans, in sentimental auto-rickshaw graffiti and in virulent regional and language identity agitations - the Indian man is forever infantilized. Problems are never faced, only maternal protection invoked. The relationship between the man and the nation becomes a duality, where the idea of community is circumvented into a one- to- one emotional relationship between the mother land and the child-citizen. The Indian woman is the adoring Yashoda captivated by the naughty pranks of the perpetual child Krishna. The Indian mother is worshipped, because she gives birth to men. In mother and child posters everywhere the mother fondles the male child: that is the greatest bond. Even the machismo of the “mard- na mard” politics around the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation created a helpless, sweet <i>Ram Lalla</i> figure to be babied by the whole country. The trauma of the colonial moment is never forgotten, the Indian male never grows up, and the Indian woman never breaks the maternal bond, never lets go. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pushpamala N</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bangalore 2006</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Thanks to M Madhava Prasad for his critical comments and suggestions.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bibliography</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Totem and Taboo</i>, Sigmund Freud, 1913 (Volume 3- Freud, The Origins of Religion, Penguin Books, 1985)</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, </i>Partha Chatterjee,<i> </i>Princeton University Press, 1993</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts</i>, Rosie Thomas, from <i>Bollyworld- Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens</i>, ed. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J Sinha, Sage Publications, 2005</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>A Popular Indian Art, Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India </i>– Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger – Oxford University Press, 2003</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>A World without Women</i>, essay on Manish Jha’s film<i> Mathrubhoomi</i> ( 2003 ), Maithili Rao, Frontline, July 1, 2005</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Photos of the Gods – The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India</i>, Christopher Pinney, Oxford University Press, 2004</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Dangerous Outcast, The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal</i>, Sumanta Banerjee, Seagull Books, 1998</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema</i>, ed. by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>From Goddess to Pin-Up: Icons of Femininity in Indian Calendar Art</i>, catalogue of show curated by Dr. Patricia Uberoi and Pooja Sood from Dr Patricia Uberoi’s collection</span></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>Woman / Goddess,</i> ed. Gayatri Sinha, Multiple Action Research Group, New Delhi. 1999</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-4322704455973751732014-08-01T01:44:00.000-07:002016-11-01T02:14:15.077-07:00TAKE - I Issue 14 I August 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">There were some people who were crucial cultural players who seem
have slipped out of the country’s cultural memory. The Phantom Lady rediscovers
the critic and connoisseur Govindraj Venkatachalam .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">'BEAUTY IS MY ADVENTURE'<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">ON THE LOST CRITIC G.VENKATACHALAM<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Ram Rahman, while on a conversation on dance in Facebook, urged me
to write a column on the important art critic Venkatachalam who it seems the
world has forgotten. (I had always been wary of Facebook, thinking of it as a
repository for dog, cat and baby lovers or for various kinds of self-
indulgence and self-promotion, but it seems that it can also urge you to
write.) G. Venkatachalam – “Venka” to many - was an important early critic,
connoisseur, nationalist and Theosophist from Bangalore who was a patron and
godfather to many artists. He is credited with discovering the genius of M.S.
Subbulakshmi, who he met when she came as a sixteen year old to record in a
studio in the city, and whom he immediately proclaimed as an immense talent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">There is an essay on him in a 1947 book Eminent Indians by the
Sinhalese political journalist D.B. Dhanapala, where he writes, “ He is of
great consequence for he belongs to a category of people who have made the
colourblind see: Ananda Coomaraswamy, E B Havell, James Cousins, O C Ganguly,
Percy Brown, NC Mehta, Stella Kramrisch. I am not quite clear where exactly in
this list Venkatachalam’s place is; but he has done as much as anyone of these
in making India art-conscious.” He talks about him as a great popularizer of
art, “ While we learned the finer points and the more intricate philosophy of
Indian art from men like Coomaraswamy and Havell we also learned to love Indian
art as something connected intimately with us from Venkatachalam. He gave us
the personal details of the artists, created them into human beings of flesh
and blood…he infused ease into aesthetics, personality into painters; and
friendliness into frescoes.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Venkatachalam belongs to a quaint world of cultural clubs, drawing
rooms and “At Homes”, where “Beauty” was sought and ideas like “soul”,
“essence” and “inspiration” were intensely discussed. He is one of the
cosmopolitan modernists of the pre-independence world, travelling all over
India to give talks with “lantern slides” and representing Indian culture
internationally. It is a bohemian, free wheeling world where nationalists and
people from the arts travelled widely and knew each other intimately. In fact,
Venkatachalam was so well known in Ceylon that Dhanapala makes a plea that he
should be appointed cultural ambassador in Colombo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">When I was a student in Bangalore in the 1970s Balan Nambiar once
took me to see a collection of Bengal School paintings housed in the
Theosophical Society building in Ulsoor. There were many paintings of important
artists hung in a large, gloomy hall, many of them damaged and ill kept. He
told me it was Venkatachalam’s collection and that most of them were gifts.
There seemed to be nobody in charge looking after them. The collection seems to
have disappeared since, and like “Venka”, is lost to the art world, unknown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">S.G. Vasudev who was a protégé of Venkatachalam, said he first met
him in 1959 when Venka saw his youthful paintings and urged him to join the
College of Arts in Madras, convincing Vasudev’s reluctant parents and
recommending him to the principal K.C.S. Paniker. He is not sure whether Venka
was a theosophist (he was close to Annie Besant, though in his book Fragrant
Memories he praises the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti), but said he used to
stay in the Theosophical Society whenever he came to Bangalore or Madras.
Perhaps with his peripatetic bachelor life, Venka had no fixed home.
Venkatachalam introduced Vasudev in the 1960s to painters like Husain and
Satish Gujral, when they were largely unknown in the South and said he was
collecting works to build up a permanent gallery of modern art named after Fred
Harvey to be housed in the Theosophical Society in Bangalore. He was also
collecting the works of KK Hebbar, Ara and KCS Paniker and of young artists
like Vasudev, Viswanadhan and Rani Nanjappa. Vasudev remembers seeing a
portrait bust of Venka done by Debiprasad Roychaudhury.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Venkatachalam is said to have had a genius for making friends. A
close friend was “Kidi” Seshappa who brought out a political magazine called
Kidi (“Spark” in Kannada) in the 1950s. Kidi Seshappa was exposed to art
through Venkatachalam who persuaded him to take an exhibition of Indian art to
Europe in the late ‘60s. Vasudev says that he was supposed to go along with the
exhibition and help set it up in various countries, but finally it was
Viswanadhan who went along with Seshappa and who historically remained behind
to make his career in Paris.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Out of sixteen books written by him, I have one in my collection
called Fragrant Memories published in 1941 by the Hosali Press in Bangalore and
described as a book on “Modern poets, Painters, Dancers and Musicians”. The
book is autobiographical and ranges from his meetings with Rabindranath Tagore
in Mysore and Santiniketan to encounters with painters like Abanindranath and
Gaganendranath, K Venkatappa , Sarada Ukil, Chughtai and George Keyt, musicians
like MS, dancers Balasaraswati, Rukmini Devi, Shanta Rao, Uday Shankar and
Ramgopal , critic Kanhaiyalal Vakil and Japanese writer Yone Noguchi ( father
of Isamu Noguchi), philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, politicians from Nehru to
Mirza Ismail; and in Shanghai, the Communist and Mao supporter Agnes Smedley.
Even the politicians he likes are aesthetes. Venka is a man of the Indian
Rennaissance, influenced by the ideas of Ananda Coomarswamy and Havell and a
strong supporter of the Bengal school of art. In an amusing chapter on meeting
Kanhaiyalal Vakil in Bombay, he describes the hot arguments they have on Bengal
versus Bombay art and finally concludes that both were in fact fighting for the
same cause.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Dhanapala writes about his art criticism as if he were a method
actor: “Venkatachalam has a mind that is so plastic that it can fit itself into
the crannies and crevices of other minds, making them his own. He is sensitive
to a high degree to the intentions of the artists… like a great actor living
the role he has to act, he gets under the skin of the artist… if he wishes to
draw our attention to the Persian glories of Chugtai’s work he travels all the
way to Lahore, has Mughulai dinners with him, sees him at work and play, before
he makes an estimate of his work ”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Venkatachalam describes himself as a dilettante and a born
vagabond, tramping the streets of various cities in India “ discussing men and
matters, art and artists”. For a dilettante, he is rather cultivated and
knowledgeable about the arts, quoting Roger Fry and Clive Campbell often. He is
impatient of traditional and conventional teaching and supports the freshness
of invention, admiring rebelliousness, stubbornness, modesty, and austerity in
his subjects. In his writing too he is suspicious of pedantry, “ Scholarship, I
have always held, is a positive hindrance to art appreciation. You soon get
lost in the archeology of it and the beauty, the simple direct beauty of a
thing escapes you…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Sukanya Rahman writes an amazing story about her grandmother
Ragini Devi in her book Dancing in the Family. An American who trained herself
to be an “Indian” dancer, Ragini falls in love with the poet Harindranath
Chattopadyay and pregnant, leaves her husband Ramlal Bajpai in New York to come
to India. Her daughter Indrani Rahman is born prematurely on the ship and she
is stranded penniless in Pondicherry, unable to enter British India as her
husband is a nationalist on the run from the police. On learning of her sorry
state, Venka comes to her rescue along with Harindranath’s wife Kamaladevi and
Annie Besant, looking after her and later taking her to meet Vallathol at the
Kerala Kalamandalam. That is how she becomes the first woman to be trained in
Kathakali and soon begins her travels with Gopinath popularizing the form
across India. He was also instrumental in shaping Indrani's career, starting
with her first performance at the Theosophical Society in Bangalore in 1949,
after her training with U.S. Krishna Rao.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">A bachelor himself, Venka is described as living an “enviable
roving, rolling, carefree, bachelor life with the whole of India as his horizon
… in Bombay for a month, in Calcutta for two, in Mysore for six and in Madras
for a week ”, travelling widely in “Japan, Java, China, Korea and Ceylon
carrying the gospel of Indian art”. The last time Sukanya Rahman met him, she
says, he had a pretty young lady draped on his arm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">It is the norm today to describe a certain kind of liberal, modern
milieu in India of the 1950s and ‘60s as Nehruvian; when in fact it was a
continuation of the exciting, open, intellectual world that existed before
independence. G. Venkatachalam’s writings open up a fascinating history of the
burgeoning cultural scene being fashioned at the time (though he was a player
post-independence too, being part of the Lalit Kala Akademi and cultural
bodies), and of the unconventional friendships and relationships which shaped
them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">I have always envied the film world its “film buffs”: those
tireless enthusiasts who so love films and filmmakers; and it seems that here
is a man who is the original Indian “art buff”- who takes such pleasure in art
and artists - that we so lack.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">Pushpamala N.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New';">August 2014<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-16792537276112349172013-12-01T01:42:00.000-08:002016-11-01T02:15:09.645-07:00TAKE – Sacred I Issue 13 I December 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The Phantom Lady Strikes
Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #1a181c; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The Phantom Lady writes about the work and dilemmas of her close
friend Rummana Husain (1952-1999) and the unusual show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Order to Join</i> at the Museum Abteiberg in Germany inspired by her
work, which brings together an array of international women artists born between
1947 and 1957<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– Helen Chadwick, Chohreh
Feyzdjou, Angela Grauerholz, Sheela Gowda, Jamelie Hassan, Mona Hatoum, Rummana
Hussain, Shelagh Keeley, Astrid Klein, Ana Mendieta, Pushpamala N., Adrian
Piper, Lala Rukh and Rosemarie Trockel –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">RUMMANA HUSAIN / THE POLITICAL IN THE HISTORICAL<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">In Order to Join</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political in a Historical Moment</i>, a major historical show of
international women artists of a generation who came to importance in the 1980s,
curated by Swapnaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz and now showing at the Museum
Abteiberg in Germany, is formed around the work of Rummana Husain, one of the
pioneers of conceptual art in India. Rummana, a close friend, was born in 1952
and died tragically of cancer at the age of 47 in 1999, when she had just begun
doing her most significant work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The
show came out of the persistent work done on Rummana by Canadian curator Swapnaa
Tamhane in curatorial collaboration with the Director of the Museum Abteiberg,
Susanne Titz. Swapnaa has a two year curatorial residency at the museum, which has
an important collection of contemporary art starting with the work of Joseph Beuys
who taught at the nearby art academy at Dusseldorf, where his legend is present
everywhere. (We had lunch at the Ohme Jupp, a restaurant in Dusseldorf which
Beuys famously patronized serving German homemade food). When I asked Swapnaa
on the reasons she decided to focus on Rummana’s work, she said she had started
researching on Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram and Rummana, but found Rummana
quite different and decided to work further on her. Possibly Rummana was the
first Indian artist to work with identity politics, which I found disturbing at
the time. I remember a sense of betrayal since I felt that we were both alike,
that we both belonged to a free- floating bohemian secular world, and that she
was somehow retreating from that position by foregrounding her identity as a
Muslim. (This was especially so as just before this, she had been intensely
against Muslim orthodoxy and had taken a strong position against the Indian
government ban on Salman Rushdie’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Satanic
Verses</i>). This conversation was soon after the post- Ayodhya Mumbai riots in
1993, when Rummana had felt threatened and besieged by the anti- Muslim
violence which shook Mumbai and changed its nature forever from the foremost cosmopolitan
city to one marked by narrow sectarian parochialism. She replied that since I
belonged to the majority Hindu community I didn’t know what it felt like, the
depth of her fear. I think it was also a shock that because of the recent
events she had been thrown out from a secure progressive centre to the nation’s
margins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">I
met Rummana in the mid –eighties in her earlier avatar as a painter when she
was working in the Garhi Studios in Delhi. She had studied design in England.
Coming back to India and marrying early, she had gone to live with her husband
in Kolkata where she began painting. When her husband, a high ranking corporate
manager was transferred to Jamshedpur, a small town in Bihar, she had refused
to move there as she would be in the position of a corporate wife isolated from
the art scene, and decided to work in Delhi. (Many of us from that generation
had long distance relationships from our partners!) Her move caused friction
with her family and particularly her daughter who was put in boarding school,
and it took many years for them to have a close bond. The family in general
treated her as an eccentric. In Garhi, she shared a studio with the sculptor
Mrinalini Mukherjee, and painters Manjit Bawa and Arpana Kaur. She was
influenced in her painting by Manjit Bawa and had a close friendship with
Mrinalini Mukherjee who scolded her like an elder sister about her bad painting
(yet she was a most sincere and hard working painter). I had recently got
married when we met, and my husband and I became close friends with her. She
could be a bit of a drama queen, high spirited and outrageous, and had a great
sense of humour.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">Rummana
came from a prominent and liberal Muslim family from Lucknow. Her father, a
general, was Chief of Army Staff of the Indian army at the time of Indian Independence
and a staunch nationalist. He had written a book about Independence in which he
had lambasted his relatives who decided to migrate to Pakistan as anti-national
and caused a furore in their circles. Her mother was active in politics and had
been a Congress party minister. Both came from a milieu of progressive left
thinking, being connected to cultural figures from the Progressive Cultural Movement
that formed the avant-garde in India between the 1930s and the 1960s. She
herself read widely and had a large circle of interesting and distinguished friends
who she did not talk much about, but I remember she introduced me to Minnette
De Silva, the internationally recognized Sri Lankan architect who is considered
the pioneer of the modern architectural style known as “Tropical Modernism”,
influencing figures like Geoffrey Bawa.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">When
she moved to Mumbai with her husband in the late 1980s she felt liberated from
the intensely gossipy and competitive art scene in Delhi. But Mumbai was also
lonely with no community studios or artist gatherings and one had a solitary
life as an artist. I was just moving out of Mumbai to Mysore to teach at the
time but we met often when I came back to visit. Mumbai was then the centre of
the art scene and art discourse and the Mohile Parikh Centre for Visual Art had
a series of important international seminars through the 1990s, discussing the
changes in the art scene – “painting vs. installation art”, “modern vs
post-modern art”, “national and global” “, “post-colonialism” etc. where major
figures were invited to speak. We were both active participants in the debates,
challenging the traditional status quo, and arguments could turn raucous and
aggressive. We met Adrian Piper there and Rummana, later had a correspondence
with her. The mid - 1980s in India was the beginnings of the ‘art market’ and a
time of increasing communal tensions with the rise of religious fundamentalism and
civil war situations in many states. Rajeev Gandhi as prime minister had
started the liberalization of the Indian economy to let in foreign companies and
it was a time of “India Festivals” internationally, which presented India
mainly as a folkloric country while simultaneously using the cultural festivals
to sign arms contracts with major powers. Some of us who were painters and
sculptors were rethinking our work. The old organic ways of working seemed
inappropriate to deal with increasing fractures in Indian society and we were
looking for new forms and materials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">A
crucial event, a trauma which changed everything was the destruction of the Babri
Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu fundamentalist forces. Some of my scholar
friends refute this and say that the 1947 Partition was equally traumatic, but
Indian art was more affected by what happened in Ayodhya, for whatever reasons.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid marked the sharp end of the idea of a
secular and socialist India and the rise of the right wing, leading to a
growing violence and anxiety in Indian society. Sahmat, or the Safdar Hashmi
Memorial Trust, created by artists and intellectuals in Delhi weeks after the
murder of the left theatre activist Safdar Hashmi in 1989, became an important
force and platform for secular people to congregate. We were both involved in
organizing their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artists Against
Communalism</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>festival in 1992 in
Bombay. Sahmat, which is a gathering of some of the most important cultural and
intellectual figures in India, became the progressive community that Rummana
was looking for. Involvement in Sahmat and some of their ideas influenced her
work profoundly and she started calling herself an ‘activist -artist’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Canadian artist Jamelieh Hassan was talking
about meeting Rummana for the first time in Mumbai, how she insisted that her
husband and she move from their hotel and stay with her as her guests, and their
intense time together watching films. Rummana, I think, had found in Jamelieh just
the role model she was looking for at the time: a feminist political artist-
activist from a Muslim background.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">One
of the utopian ideas held by many progressive intellectuals in India and
promoted by Sahmat is the idea of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“syncretism”,
or the invoking of a joint Hindu and Muslim cultural past, particularly
manifested in the teachings of the Sufi and Bhakti saints. There is also the
history of the “Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb” ( Ganga- Jamuna culture) propounded by
the Nawabs of Avadh which brought together the best of the Persian and Mughal
cultures and the Benarasi Hindu forms in music, dance and literature, whose
centre was in Lucknow and Faizabad-Ayodhya from where Rummana’s family came.
Going further back in history, one could invoke Mughal Emperor Akbar’s new
religion called Din e Ilahi ( Religion of God) created in 1458, intended to
merge the best elements of his empire to reconcile differences, primarily drawn
from Islamic and Hindu beliefs but also from Christianity, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.
These ideas of a Utopian past have offered Muslims in India a way to overcome
the bitterness and deep trauma of fundamentalist attacks, connect to a common
history of social harmony and justice and project a Utopian future. Taking from
these ideas of syncretism, feminist ideas of the “personal is political” and
images of common people’s labour and existence, Rummana created a language of
images and symbols to create installations, video and live performance. The
conceptual language she evolved was not minimalist but had a sensual
materiality which involved deconstructing many traditional Hindu and Muslim symbols,
with the women’s body (or her own body) as a container of this violence and
trauma, using the aesthetics of the ruin and fragment. Her exhibition <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Home / Nation</i> in the Chemould Gallery,
Mumbai in 1996 was a pivotal, path breaking show. To quote Ram Rahman:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">“Rummana
Hussain’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Home/Nation</i> evolved
directly from her Sahmat activism. Rummana and her family had to flee their
flat and remove their nameplate in an elite area of Mumbai during the riots
that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. A violent national
tragedy finding its way into her personal spacedeeply shocked the artist. The
communal riots in Mumbai suddenly thrust her “Muslimness” in her face in a way
she had never imagined. A short while earlier, the discovery that the sores in
her maid’s mouth were probably a manifestation of a thrush infection caused by
HIV, and that she had hidden it in desperation from her employer, also caused
great anguish for Rummana (the maid died soon after from<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">AIDS).
It was around the same time that Rummana was diagnosed with breast cancer, to
which she succumbed in 1999. This combination of events collapsed personal and
national conflicts into a searing struggle in her person, which led Rummana to
abandon her earlier expressionist figurative painting to search for other
formal means as an artistic language. Home/Nation with its photographs of women’s
open mouths, the maid rolling chapattis (Indian flatbread) in the kitchen, architectural
doorways and arches, objects in bottles defining a so-called Muslim cultural
identity from her roots in Lucknow, all defined the maturing language of assemblage
that transformed Rummana’s work. The architectural elements came directly from
her installation of Sahmat’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hum Sab
Ayodhya</i> in Mumbai and subsequent travel to Ayodhya for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Muktnaad</i>. This work exemplifies the complete transformation of an
art practice due to the events of that decade, something that occurred among
many artists in India at the time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">The
exhibition <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Order to Join </i>is titled
after Rummana’s work of the same name made during a residency at Art in General
gallery in New York in 1998. In the video, she walks from the skyscrapers of
Manhattan through the Queensboro Bridge to the crowded South Asian market at
Queens – ‘joining’ the West to the East, the centre to the margins. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The exhibition can be seen as a unique event where
several western art stars show in a context inspired by a less-known Indian
artist. As a historical show, there were works from the 1970s onward along with
contemporary works, many of them based on the notion of the archive, besides
being ‘from’ the archives. The sometimes bloody and visceral, sometimes funny,
cool, playful, confrontational or satirically biting dark works flowed through
the museum making unexpected connections between artists, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<span style="color: #1a181c;">to look at works
and practices that engage with a political framework …. while questioning their
own position within these structures”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">At
the opening of the exhibition, where Jamelie Hassan, Angela Brauwholz , Shelagh
Keeley, ( from Canada) Astrid Klein ( from Germany), Sheela Gowda and myself
were present, there were some interesting discussions around <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>being a woman artist. It appears Adrian Piper
has a policy of not being part of shows focusing on women, race or colour, but
the curators had managed to get photographs of her early performances. (As I
write, I see she has withdrawn her work from a ‘Black performance art’ show in
New York). Astrid Klein talked amusingly of her student days in Dusseldorf
where she found in the Academy an intensely sycophantic atmosphere dominated by
the persona of Joseph Beuys and said she made a conscious move to shift to
another school in Cologne. She said she would never call herself a woman artist
and this was the first time she was in a wholly woman artists show. This was
also the case for most of the Western artists, who never showed in a ‘woman’s’
show earlier. In an earlier generation in India, artists like Nasreen Mohammedi
had rejected the description, seeing it as an effort to stigmatize them. In
fact when Arpita Singh initiated the series of water colour shows with Nalini
Malani, Nilima Sheikh and Madhavi Parikh in the 1990s, critic Geeta Kapur had
refused to write the catalogue essay for the ‘all-woman’ shows. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">However
the western art scene (where art institutions have had a longer history and
stronger traditions than in India) has been more intensely patriarchal, more of
a white men’s club. In India, being an artist is in itself considered a rather
feminine activity. It is also true that in post-colonial countries women have
been active participants in politics and reform movements, helping to build the
nation, and there are powerful women leaders in many fields. The founder of
modern art in India is considered to be Amrita Sher-Gil for instance, who
practiced in the 1930s and has influenced a generation of male artists. It is
an interesting fact that while an icon of feminism like Simone de Beauvoir
could get the vote in France only as late as 1947, women in India got universal
franchise at the same time in 1950 with the new constitution. Post 1980s,
particularly, an array of consciously feminist and articulate women artists in
India made directly political work using new forms and new media and changed
the whole art scene in India. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;">Perhaps
we have to differentiate between a ‘woman artist’, which is a passive definition
of gender, from a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘feminist artist’
which is an active political position, not really defined by gender. By taking
the political position you connect to the various broader debates and history
of feminist thought, women’s movements and egalitarian ideas, which is a
progressive platform from which we can all ‘fly’ without fear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>The
Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>December
2013</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-41888291076189640742013-05-01T01:40:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.407-07:00TAKE - Residencies I Issue 11 I May 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The
Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">May 15<sup>th</sup> every year is
commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba Day, or the Day of the Catastrophe – the
displacement that followed the creation of Israel in 1948. Hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled, and hundreds of Palestinian
villages were destroyed. In continuing decades of injustices, blockades and
disempowerments, Palestine remains the last bastion of colonialism.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In a situation where the Indian government
is collaborating militarily and strategically with Israel, the Phantom Lady
looks at the response of the Indian art world to the Palestinian issue. She
believes this is a touchstone to our relationship to the much discussed
“global”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">ART AND POLITICS</span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Last year, at the seminar “ To Let the
World In” at Art Chennai, critic Ranjit Hoskote lamented that Indian artists
had not responded to the “Arab Spring” – the string of student and citizen
protests against their dictatorial regimes that recently extended across the
Arab world and to Europe and America. This was supposed to be a measure of our
international involvement, of letting the world “in”. I was just curious as to why
he had not responded in any way (either in support or disagreement) to the call
for boycotting the major Indian show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deconstructing
India</i> at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel some months before, which created a
flurry of debate and discussion in the Indian art world on email, facebook and
blogs, with prominent coverage in the newspapers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The debate was an important landmark, as
for the last many years the only discussion about Indian art in the public
domain has been about the art market, prices and auctions- and suddenly
everybody in the art world was talking about the Palestinian issue. In fact it
is a matter of pride that the much maligned art fraternity has been the only
one which has collectively engaged with the issue, in sharp contrast our
literary, music, film or dance practitioners.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">The International Call for Boycott<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Call for Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions (BDS) was issued on July 9, 2005, one year after the historic
Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, declared that Israel's
Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory was illegal. Palestinian groups
called upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience
all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment
initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa in the
apartheid era - until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian
people's inalienable right to self-determination, and complies with
international law. BDS has been endorsed by over 170 Palestinian parties,
organizations, trade unions and movements representing the Palestinian people
in the 1967 and 1948 territories and in the diaspora. On July 13, 2005 the UN
International Civil Society Conference adopted the Palestinian Call for BDS.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">Palestinian intellectuals and
artists have asked cultural figures internationally not to show or perform in
Israel, to delegitimize and isolate the government and to protest against the
building up of Brand Israel as a glamourous cultural destination. The boycott
is against complicit institutions and not against individuals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">The Boycott has gained momentum all over the world
after the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Peace Flotilla in 2010. Leading
figures like John Berger are active in the movement while well-known musicians,
artists and writers have refused to accept invitations to perform in Israel. A
hundred artists in Toronto and a hundred and fifty in Dublin have signed the
Boycott call, while Left and anti- Zionist Jewish groups internationally have
been vocally opposed to Zionist fundamentalism and have been working for a
peaceful solution to the Palestinian issue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">Boycotts
within Israel<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.5pt;">Within Israel as well, cultural figures revolted by
the rising fascism of the state to Palestinian rights are increasingly
protesting about performing or showing in occupied territories, braving a new
law that penalizes boycotts harshly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
example,</span><span lang="EN-GB"> more than fifty prominent Israeli actors,
directors and playwrights had issued a petition declaring their refusal to
perform in the state-financed theatres in Ariel deep within illegally occupied
territories in the West Bank because they say the settlement violates
international law and hinders the Israel-Palestine peace process. Some time
ago, The Hindu newspaper reported protests against the upgradation of a
University in Ariel where a hundred and forty five <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>academics announced a boycott of the
establishment saying that “Ariel is not part of the sovereign territory of
Israel”. Building institutions in occupied lands is a well- worn ploy by the
Israeli state to legitimize illegal possession of land.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Indian
Artists Boycott<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In 2011, when some of us invited artists
decided to publicly boycott the Indian show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deconstructing
India</i> planned for the new wing of the Tel Aviv Museum and gave a general
call for the other artists to join us, it resulted in a wide debate in the art
world and it would be interesting here to recapitulate some of the criticisms
and arguments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Arguments<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Some artists argued that we should keep
cultural spaces separate from politics. However, the curatorial note of
“Deconstructing Israel” was itself political. It spoke of colonization,
partition of India and creation of Israel which are all political events. The
artists were chosen by the curators because we “deconstruct stereotypes”. We
deconstruct stereotypes not for fun or interior decor, but to make a political,
institutional and social critique. Indian artists are making works on political
subjects like global and national economic exploitation, poverty, rights of
farmers and workers and minorities, religious intolerance, gender and
sexuality, and ecology, often using directly political material in their work.
Many of us have been involved in protests and agitations, write eloquently on
various public issues, and worked to support and build alternate spaces and
platforms outside formal institutions to express our voice. In fact, many
Indian artists are invited internationally to show in biennales and important
exhibitions precisely because they are making “political’ work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the Tel Aviv Museum itself was hardly a
neutral cultural space. It was in the Independence Hall in the museum in 1948
that David ben Gurian, the architect of Israel, formally proclaimed the State
of Israel in a ceremony, a parallel to Nehru’s speech at the Red Fort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is called part of the “central hub of
Hebrew culture” which by definition leaves out Palestinian culture!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Many artists felt that boycotts would
paralyse their practice and that all governments are repressive, so why only
target Israel? I believe this is a purist argument that cynically precludes all
action. In fact I have not heard of a boycott call against USA, China, Iran, or
other places mentioned by artists as repressive, by people repressed by them. This
includes Kashmir, where as far as I know, no local group has called for any
cultural boycott. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There are specific international petitions
like the protest against Ai Wei Wei’s arrest that many of us have signed, but
it is interesting to note that neither Ai Wei Wei who had earlier worked with
the Chinese government on the Beijing Olympics, nor other targeted Chinese artists
or academics, have actually called for a boycott of China or Chinese
institutions. They may not want, or need a boycott. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">An international boycott is a serious issue
and an extreme step to be used in a worst case scenario, a non-violent strategy
to bring about change. The Palestinian movement is inspired by the earlier
International boycott against Apartheid South Africa which finally led to
sanctions and brought about the dismantling of the apartheid system. The most
famous boycott however, was the Non-Co-operation Movement of M.K. Gandhi
against the British, which led to Indian Independence and has inspired all
other boycotts since! Nelson Mandela and the ANC adopted these methods for
South Africa and Martin Luther King for the Civil Rights movement in America.
However, no change is instant and needs to be built up over time. Each action
is like a building block.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Hindutva
and Zionism<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our Hindutva organizations deeply admire
the Zionist ideas of racial superiority and anti- Muslim views while identifying
themselves fully with the sense of victimhood. Ironically, they also admire
Hitler and his fascist policies of ethnic cleansing, forgetting that European
Jews were themselves victims of the Holocaust, which led to the formation of
Israel!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Starting with the NDA
Government, the earlier Indian policy of support to the Palestinian people
shifted to one of building a strategic tie-up with Israel, as India has been
moving rightwards and getting closer to America, the greatest supporter of
Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>India is importing billions of
worth of arms from Israel with its attendant arms deal scams, and tying up with
Mossad, its secret service, in “counter-terrorism” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or “security co-operation” which also operates
in sensitive spots like Kashmir. The collaborations extend to science,
agriculture and cultural exchange.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The Deconstructing
India show was going to inaugurate the new Amir wing designed by the American
architect Preston Scott Cohen, a show piece of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, heavily
funded and built in an effort to increase Israel’s prestige internationally as
a world cultural hub. The boycott of the show got a lot of media attention in
India and internationally, particularly in Israel and Palestine. When the
curators were asked by the Indian press about the boycott call they replied
that the show might not take place, not because of the controversy surrounding
it, but because of lack of funds. In fact, the show took place in a somewhat
low key way on the same dates, in May 2012. Most of the artists invited for the
show decided to participate except for three of us who boycotted it. It was
renamed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critical Mass</i>, in an amusing
sleight of hand. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">For those artists who feel that we have no
power to change anything, so what is the point of a Boycott, the answer is that
artists, intellectuals and sportspeople are seen as opinion makers, which is the
reason they are asked to take a stand on issues. In the earlier successful
Boycott of Apartheid South Africa, the strong stand taken by individuals and
small groups built into a large movement that pressurized world governments
into imposing sanctions, which finally led to the dismantling of Apartheid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>May 2013<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-42094376577843494802012-06-12T01:39:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.410-07:00TAKE - Biennale I Issue 8 I June 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom
Lady ruminates on the heritage of modernism in India after seeing a show of
Madan Mahatta’s architectural photographs curated by Ram Rahman in Delhi.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">INDIA MODERNA / DELHI MODERN</span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I just saw a
fabulous exhibition of Madan Mahatta’s architectural photographs from the 1950s
to the ‘80s curated by Ram Rahman at PhotoInk in Delhi. Ram has selected the
images from within his own constructivist aesthetic and Madan Mahatta’s
photography with its intense graphic quality and dark gritty textures is
visually stunning. Many of the small size photographs are actually portraits of
the architects in the domestic architecture of their own homes with furniture
designed by them. Nasreen Mohammedi would have been delighted to see these
images! Mahatta’s photographs cover the important period of Nehruvian high
modernism, a record of the creation of the new Delhi and the urban monuments of
the new nation, most of them commissioned by Nehru himself. Coming from a family
which owned the biggest and most reputed photo studios in North India, Mahatta
worked closely with two generations of India’s best known modern architects
including Charles Correa, Habib Rahman, Jasbir Sawhney, J.K. Chowdhury, Joseph
Allen Stein, Achyut Kanvinde, Ajoy Choudhury, Kuldip Singh, Raj Rewal, Ram
Sharma, Ranjit Sabhiki and designers Mini Boga and Riten Mozumdar. (In fact, I
had no idea that there was such a thing as modern Indian furniture design till
I heard about Mini Boga’s work, which unfortunately, is not known outside
Delhi).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As far as I
know, there has been no great International style architecture in the South,
(though Laurie Baker’s low cost architectural work can be considered modernist
in terms of his truth to materials and functionalism). However, a kind of
provincial modern architecture spread rapidly all over through government
buildings. Curt Gambit, an architect who has been researching on Bangalore,
thinks ideas of modern architecture spread through pictures in cement catalogues,
a new material just introduced in the period, from which Public Works
Department (PWD) engineers took inspiration. International style architecture
seems to have existed basically in Delhi, Chandigarh (commissioned by the
government) and in Ahmedabad, commissioned by industrial families such as the
Sarabhais. In fact, Gujarat was at the forefront of modernism in every way,
which ideal seems to have completely collapsed. Chandigarh itself, a new city
designed by Corbusier on the invitation of Nehru, has been criticised for its
mechanical inhumanity and lack of sensitivity to Indian ways of life, yet it is
an important part of our modern heritage. It appears that the Corbusier
buildings are in a sorry state, with the original furniture designed by him either
gone missing or vandalized. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Though there
has been a lot of interest in recovering the history of Indian photography for
some time, much of the research is on the pre-colonial era, written about by
scholars like Christopher Pinney, and in which Rahaab Allana of the Alkazi
Archive has been very active. But the history of post-independence photography,
which documents the building of the new nation and which defines our immediate
past within which we can contextualize ourselves, is less known. Ram, in fact,
has been lecturing widely on the history of contemporary Indian photography,
and has curated a retrospective show of the work of the Marxist photographer
Sunil Janah. Filmmaker/ scholar Sabeena Gadihoke has researched on women
photographers and her recent show of the life work of the first Indian woman
press photographer Homai Vyarawala has just travelled through the National
Galleries of Modern Art in India. Some years ago, Nafeesa Ali exhibited her
father Ahmed Ali’s photographs widely and Pablo Bartholomew has been printing
and exhibiting the photographs taken by his father, the late critic Richard
Bartholomew. While the photographers mentioned above mainly did press or
commercial photography, Richard Bartholomew’s images are more domestic and
personal, documenting family life and pictures of the studios of his artist
friends who belonged to the Delhi Shilpi Chakra or the Progressive Group. They
have an aesthetic of clean bare rooms with little furniture and informal
living, parents and children curled up napping on the ground in the heat. The
Modernist aesthetic for interiors in India seemed to have been a mixture of
Gandhian simplicity and austerity combined with Nehruvian socialism with bare
and unfussy spaces, handloom fabrics, natural weaves and vegetable prints.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The “modern” in
India is closely associated with the Left and perhaps this is why it is so
discredited today with the rise of right wing thinking. SAHMAT, the Safdar
Hashmi Memorial Trust, had a major conference on the Progressive movement in
Delhi some months ago covering theatre, literature, film and art. The
Progressives, a Marxist cultural movement, formed the avant-garde of modern
India over the1930s, 40s and 50s, and had a profound influence. Progressive
ideas again surfaced during the 1970s when there was a burst of creative
activity in all the arts and creative thinking. This was a highly influential
time politically and artistically which has not been studied enough.
Unfortunately a deep conservatism has set in with the Left which sees the
Progressive moment as belonging to a vanished era and a particular style, and
ignores the avant-garde critical work done today, (a critique made by Geeta
Kapur in the conference), which has only impoverished Left thinking. The
feminist, caste and gay critiques of a universal monolithic modernism are seen
as divisive and splintering. Rather than re-thinking and including these
critiques and discourses, there is a tendency to dismiss them. The fall of the
Soviet Union itself can be seen as the collapse of an extreme form of modernism
and universalism, which was insensitive to differences in pursuing a general
Utopian ideal. The closed thinking of the Progressives isolates them from us
and makes the movement seem distant. Left intellectuals now pride themselves on
their philistinism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Today, there is
a widespread notion that India has gone straight from the pre-modern to the
post- modern, and is in fact a kind of quintessentially post-modern country,
successful in “infotech” while seamlessly adhering to its “ancient”
traditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I end by quoting film
theorist M. Madhava Prasad who writes in his essay <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Last Remake of Indian Modernity</i>, that dominant Indian cultural
discourse has been about essential and unchanging identity that refuses to
accept the sharp break<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>from the
past, which defines the modern condition in which we live:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The discourse
of Indian culture is replete with the jargon of being and belonging, and
within it art is assigned an expressive function tied to this phantasmic
essence, figured as besieged by a modernity that threatens to banish it into
oblivion. In such a conception, time has only one axis of articulation: there
is a past rudely interrupted which awaits the restoration of its line of
continuity, and the present, which is an interregnum of alienation. In this
scenario, modernity has no temporal depth, no ruptures or transitions internal
to its time. It is posed as eternally in conflict with its other – tradition–
in a space bracketed out of time. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Such a stubborn
disavowal of the contemporary is of course easily explained by reference to the
difficult historic struggle for cultural survival after the devastating impact
of colonial rule. But today we can and must pose against this nationalist
imperative the necessity of not only coming to terms with, but also of
embracing without reserve, the actuality of loss, rupture, ungrounding. It is
only through such a gesture of recognizing that the only position of
enunciation available to us is located in the modern, that we can emerge from
the stalemate of the politics of being. The nationalist discourse has glossed
the freedom won by our ancestors as the freedom to go back to being what one
always was (itself a fantasy construction), thus inaugurating the politics of
being. If modernity continues to appear to us as an external imposition, it is
only because we have not rallied to its cause, letting it instead only befall us. Against this constricting
definition of freedom which imprisons us once again, we should strive to reopen
the closed pathways to alienation, to the freedom of becoming.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>The Phantom
Lady<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>May 2012<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-56178189147710748062012-02-29T01:36:00.000-08:002016-11-01T02:16:13.928-07:00TAKE - Design I Issue 6 I December 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">The Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier";">The Phantom
Lady interviews Smitha Cariappa about the very successful performance art
festival she organized with Bar1 at Bangalore recently: LIVE ART 2011.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PERFORMING BODIES / THINKING BODIES </span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PL Smitha, the LIVE ART 2011 Bangalore
International Performance Festival you organized recently for Bar1 was so
ambitious in scale and thoughtful in conception, I have never seen anything
like it. It was part public performances, part workshop and part seminar, with
experienced international artists, young artists and students. We spent two
weeks together and became a community. I found an unusual intimacy, openness,
experimentation and spontaneity with a lot of discussion and analysis. Can you
talk about how it came about? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Performance
is like dope, you get hooked on to it! It started with my being a part of BAR1,
the Bangalore Artist Residency 1. We decided to stop our residency programme in
November last year and work on projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have been thinking for a while that it was very important to document
and archive performance and to encourage students and performance art studies,
and the best way was to organize an international platform. You know that
Bangalore has also been a city where theatre and performing arts has had a long
history but the people here have not really understood performance art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">As an artist organizing the event, I wanted it to
be informal and intimate, and my target was the students and upcoming artists.
It had to make a change to the approach to performance art in the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I invited artists who had made a big
difference in their own cities, like Dorothea Rust who created the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dawn to Dusk</i> performance in Zurich and
Tamar Raban who is really responsible for the performance art scene in Israel
by creating the Performance Art Platform (PAP) in Tel Aviv. I had met Bandu
Manamperi and Janani Cooray at the Theertha Residency in Colombo. Janani who
works on critiquing the concept of “Beauty” was so constrained in Colombo, but
she was very relaxed and almost giggly here. I think it’s very male-dominated
in Colombo but she found so many women artists in LIVE ART. I wanted her to
meet Mangala because they are so similar in some ways, and finally they did a
performance together here. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">Dorothea Rust and Monica Klingler curated the Swiss
section and invited Markus Goessi and Susann Wintsch, curator and editor of the
DVD magazine on contemporary art called TREIBSAND. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">I found a book on Ratnabali Kant’s work in Suresh
Jayaram’s place (1Shanthiroad) and realized she was doing performance in the
mid 1980s and felt that her work had not been recognized, so I invited her for
the event. She had stopped doing performance in 2005.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PL<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I found so many elements of Ratnabali’s work
in young artists today- using installation and painting and sculpture in their
work, in the literariness and the direct feminist statement, and in using
traditional cultural material. One of the problems around her work was the lack
of context or discourse around it at the time, like the early videos of
Rameshwar Broota. They were like lone figures doing something before its time!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Usually
stars are invited for these events but I didn’t want to invite the regulars,
except Sushil Kumar (who tells me that he has been doing performance since the
1980s as well). I also wanted the invited participants to interact and stay for
all the fifteen days of the event to give back to the students and young
artists. This way the crowd doesn’t get dispersed after the performance and the
conversation keeps going. The invited artists can also get into the culture of
the place. In most international festivals the local artists just come for a
day and perform and don’t involve themselves in the whole festival. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PL<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I thought you had structured the event very well.
The first two days there were artist talks, the third day was the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dawn to Dusk</i> performances all over the
busy roads between the artist spaces Bar1, 1Shanthiroad and Jaaga, and some
inside them. You were dressed like a sergeant major in army fatigues with a
LIVE ART 2011 umbrella, leading the people to the various spots. And there were
actions taking place on the flyover, under the flyover and medians, walking
across the roads and pavements in the traffic. It was great fun. The art
student Deepak’s performance on the flyover while painted half black and half
white was really spectacular. And sometimes the street performers also joined
in. The police and the shopkeepers and the petrol bunk people were so intrigued
that no one objected to the confusion! And then there was the intensive two-day
workshop after that by Dorothea Rust and Monica Klingler, where each one’s work
was analysed and critiqued, followed by loosening up exercises. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
idea was to have the 15 November event first and then the workshop, because
seeing documentation is not experiential. The invited live art performances
were for five days after the workshop. Being an artist myself I wanted to give
everyone freedom to choose their time and space, so sometimes the schedule was
very loose!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">Basically I’m an introvert. I can’t be with people
all the time. At the same time the Festival was a free go. Especially, the 15
November <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dawn to Dusk</i> 7 am to 7pm
almost non-stop performances was very interesting. The whole day was in the
open, on the public roads in the centre of Bangalore. I felt very comfortable
leading people to the sites, with the public crowding around. Being an
introvert you are suppressing yourself, but when the event happens you break
away all those walls and you create a sacred or structured space, and another
persona comes out. Something you would like to develop over a period of time
re-surfaces. Being an artist and organizer is difficult because as an artist
you need a lot of freedom, a bare minimum of restrictions, while as an
organizer you need to be more structured. In this I was being more of an artist
yet giving it a definite structure, rehearsed in my mind as I would do for my
own performance. In many ways LIVE ART 2011 is my conceptualized durational
performance lasting for over nine months.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PM<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The next five days of invited performances in
the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and Venkatappa Art Gallery were
intense and also had their ups and downs. Artists chose their own sites and
times and worked with the elements on site - the favourite one in NGMA being
the pool! Or sometimes it was an indoor space like the white cube of the
Venkatappa Gallery. Vijay Shekhon and Manas Acharya actually worked with the
figure of K.Venkatappa and his collection there. Many artists improvised or did
several actions, doing collaborations towards the end with other artists or
students. The whole thing ended with two evenings of talks. And there were lots
of parties throughout!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
was almost so certain and predictable that most artists prefer to perform in
the evening as they would anticipate a large crowd. Venkatappa Gallery has a
raw quality in its landscape, the very opposite of NGMA, and to have a museum
crowd strolling in without knowing what they are to see is interesting for
performance art. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">At the NGMA, I was expecting more artists to
present their work. In fact when I introduced the space to them I took them
from the car park and backyard and much later approached the water body and
café space. Yet it fell into the more predictable site of NGMA near the water
body. I found Janani’s approach interesting as she laid out the braids she used
for her work on the café tables. I also liked the way Sahej Rahel used the all
round space of the NGMA venue, disappearing and re-appearing and working at the
favourite spot near the water body under the tree with charcoal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Monica’s idea of choosing the back yard of
Venkatappa Gallery, a rough space was so perfect in contrast to her
sophisticated flamingo-like movements. The confinement of the indoor space at
Venkatappa served well for video projections and vocal dialogues for the
performers. I had given artists complete freedom in their work. Tamar Raban’s
actions in the Archeological Museum courtyard matched very well with the pigeon
birdfeed and words spoken to melt/ drown in the traffic noise as she performed
with the “horn” in her pocket, followed by very subtle and almost hypnotic
gestures with the thread in her mouth and between her fingers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PM<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The prelude to LIVE ART 2011 was the workshop
you organized with Pascal Grau in 2009 in Bangalore with the Chitra Kala
Parishad students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
2007 on my Swiss residency I got to know Pascal Grau and I was part of her
video performance where I had to play my maternal and paternal grandmother’s
roles and only with gestures! I found that Pascal had been Marina Abramovic’s
student and also her assistant. There was this myth that had been created
around Marina. I was very impressed by Marina’s book on the student body, which
was about her workshops and exercises with students and that’s how this whole
discourse started. Pascal was interested in doing her tableau vivant project in
Bangalore, which she had done earlier in Bolivia and Myanmar. So she was here
at Bar1 for twenty days and created a work after an old Mysore painting, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girija Kalyana</i> with Chitra Kala Parishad
students. It was a sort of collaboration where I was the artistic director.
This was performed in the Government Arts and Science College library in
October 2009.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Since
I am untrained in Performance art myself, part of the idea of having the Live
Art Festival was to also have artists who have been academically trained in
Performance art exercises to conduct a workshop for students. Pascal’s approach
with the students was quite different from Dorothea and Monica’s approach,
because their background is from contemporary dance. In 2009 Pascal had worked
for five days with the students with Performance art exercises to tone and
prepare their bodies to maintain stillness for thirty minutes for her
production, which is easier for an individual but very demanding for a group!
The LIVE ART workshop was for two days, starting with an intense analysis of
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dawn to Dusk</i> performances of 15
November, and on the second day more about loosening up and letting go, very
playful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PM
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why is there such a surge of interest in
performance art in Asian countries?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Made
Surya was telling me that they have a group in Bali. Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy
says that he tells his students to do performance so that they don’t have to
depend on gallery shows and selling, and can keep on making art. He says he has
stopped doing sculpture because he doesn’t know what to do with his works, and
concentrates on performance. In contrast, according to Monica when she started in
the 1980s in Europe, performance was big and there were museum shows and
artists got paid well to perform. While now there is a lack of interest
institutionally and it’s basically small artist groups who meet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
are interesting things happening in Myanmar too where Moe Satt is the artistic
director of a group called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beyond
Pressure</i> in Yangon (Rangoon) and the two Myanmar artists who came, Aung
Myatt and Ma Ei are from there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">However, some statements made about getting into
performance art may sound too light, in most cases. It is necessary to
understand ‘body aesthetics’ and then the quality of material and expense
involved. It is a mistake to believe performance art does not have a market! In
Bangalore people started doing it as a public event. It was about creating the
observer and the observed. In the Bangalore Habba of 2003, a public city
festival, some of us did some performances. Though sometimes things are done
too casually here and I’m very doubtful about it. We got a chance to see some
work in the Mysore Khoj in 2002 where there was this performance artist Michael
Tuffery from New Zealand. And we have these alternate spaces like Bar1 or
1Shanthiroad which have young artists and students helping out by which they
meet artists and learn. These spaces become open classrooms, open to artists to
develop skills in art events and art administration in a practical way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PM<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The beginnings of performance art in America
was in the 1960s and ‘70s at the time of the Vietnam war protests, the civil
rights movement, the Women’s Movement and Flower Power. You can see the
politics deeply embedded in the Kashmiri artist Sushil Kumar’s work, which is
sharp and violent – as when he wore that old commode he found on his head and
walked around at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dawn to Dusk</i>, or
when he was dragged around naked in Venkatappa gallery. You invited artists
from Israel, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Performance art in Sri Lanka has come out
of the troubled situation there, Bandu’s act of breaking a thousand eggs with
his hands and then putting his head inside a sewer drain, was powerful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">Tamar Raban invited me to Israel for the ZAZ Festival in 2010 and I
did a performance called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Body Line</i>. I
lie at the entrance and exit of a busy bus station, so I’m obstructing the flow
of passers by at the evening peak hour. Those who are curious come and stand
around me. There are bags of flour near me and a sign saying in English and
Hebrew ‘Sieve the flour on the body’ so the flour is sieved over me. I lay for
one and a half hours in stillness. Soldiers were passing by and I could smell
their boots. The circle around me which was five feet away came closer and
closer. Some people were very gentle while one person threw a whole bag of
flour on me violently. An orthodox Jew who was standing nearby kept shouting
that I was Satan! My passiveness was very irritating to people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So sometimes passiveness can be very
aggressive!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just like silence can be
noise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">PM<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Well, Gandhi used passiveness as a political
tool very well!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had an interesting
discussion about Marina<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abramovic’s
retrospective at the MOMA New York. The Europeans made faces and said they were
no longer interested in her, and her performances now are not convincing. There
was this controversy about her students replaying her old performances in the
show, with plastic bones used instead of real ones. But I found the notion of a
‘retrospective’ of performances and of the copy and the bad copy interesting,
so did the Swiss curator Susann Wintsch. It’s like reproductions of paintings
circulating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">SC<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
feel a bit queasy in the stomach hearing about plastic bones!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">Performance is very spontaneous. There is no
rehearsal, though it may be done in the mind. Even if one uses video
projections, something is picked up and improvised. The performer has to be
sensitive to the vibes from the audience, at the same time you shouldn’t get
carried away and overdo things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">December 2011<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">LIVE ART 2011
Bangalore<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">November 11-25
2011<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">www.bar1.org<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier";">facebook: LIVE
ART 2011 Bangalore (updated)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-61200803538779109192011-08-06T00:24:00.000-07:002016-11-01T02:16:48.020-07:00Letter to Curators I On Boycott of Deconstructing India show in Tel Aviv Museum I August 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Letter to Curators / On Boycott of Deconstructing India show in Tel Aviv Museum / August 2011</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Dear Tami Katz-Freiman and Rotem Ruff,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I should have answered your joint reply to the Boycott call some time ago, but I have been unwell.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I understand your anxiety as you feel that you and Israel artists and people are being personally attacked. This is not a boycott of you. This is a misconception. Let me emphasize again that the call for Cultural boycott is only against mainstream institutions supporting state policy and not an all encompassing one. The International call for Cultural boycott is not forever, but will be called off when Israel complies with UN norms and recognises the rights of the Palestinian people. The onus is on Israel to change the system.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Several Israeli artists have been coming to India for workshops and residencies and we have all taken part with them, and welcome it. In fact in November this year there will be a major Performance art festival organized in Bangalore by artists here, where an Israeli performance artist will be coming. I am also one of the invitees.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It is true that dissident Israelis have been trying to work for a “change from within”, as you said. Photographer Ram Rahman sent me the attached news report from <i>Yale Daily News</i>, which writes of more than 50 prominent Israeli actors, directors and playwrights recently issuing a petition declaring their refusal to perform in the state-financed theatres in Ariel in Israel, because they say the settlement violates international law and hinders the Israel-Palestine peace process. (see attachment).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When Israeli officials condemn these protests, the argument they use is that “culture should be separated from politics”.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, the show <i>Deconstructing India</i> is not organized by artist groups or in dissident spaces. The curatorial note is written on the Tel Aviv Museum letterhead! What the Tel Aviv Museum says about itself on the website confirms that it is a central part of the art establishment in Israel. It is no dissident institution. While it may be a “centre for learning” it is also an important part of the political establishment.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Its history is interesting. Founded in 1932, the Tel Aviv Museum was chosen in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the architect of Israel and its first Prime minister, to formally proclaim the Establishment of the State of Israel in a ceremony in the “Independence Hall”. This is the famous Israeli Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">David Ben-Gurion declaring independence beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism in Tel Aviv Museum, 1948</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It is a major institution, which is on the tourist sites of the country, part of the “central hub of modern Hebrew culture” which by definition, leaves out Palestinian culture! In fact Palestinians will find it very difficult to see the Indian show because of the various blockades and security checks that they have to pass through: the show is not for them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Is Israel a democracy as described in the curatorial synopsis, or is it a military state practicing the system of discrimination, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing as it is variously called, that has compulsory two- year military service for all Israelis, the main purpose of which is to repress and control the Palestinians.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s2"><a href="http://www.americanfriendstelavivmuseum.org/">www.americanfriendstelavivmuseum.org</a></span><span class="s3"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>says:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Tens of thousands of soldiers visit the Tel Aviv Museum of Art each year. These young men and women give the most precious years of their lives in defense of the State of Israel. Entrance is free, the Museum’s way of thanking them for their service.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">- which means that a large part of the museum audience are soldiers, who will then go back to man the barricades and security checks!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Elaine W Ng, publisher of Art Asia Pacific magazine sent me this article by their editor at large HG Masters, about Palestinian artists:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s2"><a href="http://www.artasiapacific.com/magazine/74/nooccupationwithoutrepresentationartistsinpalestine"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">http://www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/74/NoOccupationWithoutRepresentationArtistsInPalestine</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Your letter says "this upcoming project at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art reflects a profound interest in the political and critical function of art across societies". While the curators' intentions may be good, it is difficult to believe that a change will come from within this extremely conservative institutional framework. I am not sure what sort of open and critical dialogue can take place in this context.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I think instead, that the show will be hijacked and our presence will be used to vindicate the state. 2012 is the Year of Art in Tel Aviv and also the opening of the New Museum Wing. It will be a highly publicised event. Recently after the condemned raids on Gaza and the attack on the peace activists on the Freedom Fleet, Israel has been busy creating <i>Brand Israel</i> to promote the country as happy and happening and uses cultural events and figures in its promotional material. Singers Paul McCartney and Madonna who performed there have been used in this way earlier.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Nalini Malani sent me this website:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s2"><a href="http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/2009/09/toronto-declaration-no-celebration-of.html"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/2009/09/toronto-declaration-no-celebration-of.html</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The question is whether <i>Deconstructing India</i> will deconstruct Israel? It will only remain a critique of India by Indian artists in Tel Aviv cheerfully seen by all. The show focuses on the problems of India rather than of Israel. If you say we are in similar post-colonial situations, I do not see the factor of a critique of Israel in this show. I think the whole purpose of this show is to gloss over Israel’s problems by pointing at India’s problems.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In fact the situation will be exactly the opposite of what you say. Instead of the Cultural Boycott playing into the hands of people who do not want critical voices, by participating in this show in the museum <i>our</i> critical voices will be completely lost and we will play into the hands of the establishment.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">While one of the arguments is that Indian artists can make a statement through their work instead of boycotting, I wonder how an artist can make a critique of the Israeli situation in a show addressing Indian problems? The entire media around this show will be about covering Indian problems!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I truly believe that by boycotting the show we are more likely to create change, rather than by participating.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Just as the art world and wider society is hotly discussing the issue here, maybe an Indian boycott will give Israelis more to reflect about than an Indian show! I think the debate going on here now, is in fact, to use your quote, "poignant, critical and irrepressible".</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pushpamala</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">6-8-2011</span></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-61030671941709452552011-08-05T01:32:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.426-07:00TAKE - Curate I Issue 5 I August 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The
Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">For
this issue, the Phantom Lady invites her friend, the cultural theorist-
curator-art critic N. Rajyalakshmi to interview Archana Hande about her
thrilling bicycling tour of Switzerland.</span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">LADY ON A BICYCLE</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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about your cycling project in Switzerland. Did you know that learning bicycling
was an important part of the women’s reform movement in India? It meant
modernity and freedom, and even now we can see that a woman on a vehicle is the
butt of jeers and jokes, if not outright attack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A friend was telling me that his grandmother
created a sensation in Pune as a young widow, learning bicycling from her
teenage son. And there is that hilarious scene in Arun Khopkar’s film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Katha Don Ganpatraonchi </i>about the two
feuding Ganpat Raos, when the mother arrives on a visit in her nine-yard sari,
cycling to military music and doing ferocious lathi exercises at every stop.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(Laughs)
In Switzerland I was a great curiosity and known as the “the Indian lady on a
bicycle”. The Swiss are used to seeing Indian tourists who love luxury and will
not walk a step. On top of Mount Titlies in Engelberg where a song was
picturized for the film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dilwale Dulhaniya
Le Jayenge</i>, there is a big cut out of Shah Rukh and Kajol as Raj and
Simran, which is a favourite place for Indians to take photographs. At the base
of the mountain you will find a desi hawker’s cart with vada pav, pav bhaji,
idli and chai where Indian tourists crowd to devour the food. While eating,
they make enquiries like, whether it will be cold and snowy up at 3,238 metres?
They are usually dressed in thin Tshirts or sarees and Hawaii chappals. By the
time they finish, the ticket counters are closed so they have to come back the
next morning!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(Laughs) What was your project about?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
applied for a residency to Pro- Helvetia and my proposal was that I wanted to
become a landscape painter. I was in art school in Santiniketan where we are
taught to be landscape painters – we used to cycle around the countryside with
our sketch books every afternoon and the seniors used to train us: senior boys
training junior girls. And it had to be in a particular style. So in
Switzerland I thought I’d cycle around being a landscape painter, or playing a
location hunter for Bollywood films. A cycle has more convenient access to
places: you can carry it, go along paths and stop anywhere you like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The idea was to bring back the Swiss
landscape to India. It’s like a migration of landscape: first, when the trouble
started in Kashmir, Switzerland became “Kashmir” in Bollywood films, later
Switzerland became “Switzerland”, and then Switzerland came to India. I’ve seen
painted Swiss landscape sets in the Ramoji Rao Studios in Hyderabad. At one
point the Himachal and Ladakh areas which had less conflict became
“Switzerland”. It was all about the exoticness of snow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I saw a Hindi film, I think it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hum</i>, in which the Ooty scenes were shot
in Mauritius. The scenery did not look like a hill station at all - it looked
tropical! <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Before
going there, I thought it would be very simple- I’d take a tent and a bike and
stop whenever I was tired- and I’d do watercolours whenever I felt like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Then I realized that you can’t do that
because there are a lot of restrictions on camping: you can’t really camp
anywhere, there are special camping areas, so you have to find places to stay.
I would have to carry food for the whole day. I was told that people in the
interiors may not speak English and that Switzerland was divided into cantons,
and that a lot of the cantons may have a problem with race, so they might not
be helpful at all. The Swiss people I was corresponding with thought that
Switzerland was not friendly- they were scared that if I was tired and knocked at
someone’s door to stay the night I may not be entertained, and they were
nervous that I was a woman and an Indian woman, and that I couldn’t afford to
stay in Bed and Breakfasts because it would have cost me a lot of money. They
completely ruled out my idea of spending the night in village homes, because
they said I could meet a psychopath, for instance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This sounds like a great adventure, and
you did it alone. It must have taken a lot of planning?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
took three months of planning - I bought an 18-gear bike in India and did some
trial runs in Bangalore and Mumbai, from Kandivli where I live in Mumbai, to
Alibaug which is 75 kms away and back, for example. I had to check the timing
and whether I could maintain the energy; on the second day the body gets tired,
and then you pick up the energy again. In Bangalore I would cycle from my
parents’ home to far off parts of the city every day so that my body was not so
unprepared.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How did you work it out? You had never
been to Switzerland before.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
met several people by chance, and through friends, who helped me. Surekha told
me about Lilian Hasler, a Swiss sculptor who lived in Pune. When I met her and
told her about my project, she laughed. She said an Indian doing anything
physical was the most hilarious thing! Then Lilian said she would help me and
took out a cycling map of Switzerland. She showed me all the low and high
areas, and advised me to try and follow the rivers and the lakes because if
there was a water body, it meant it was a low lying area. She asked me to
figure out the entire route and fix it before I left. She said don’t knock on
strange doors, but organize a set of friends from here. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy’s friend was a
sportsman called Balz Laimberger from Aarau. He’s a cyclist and a sailor. He
told me to come with a plan, he’s part of a cycling group and they have a
directory with the phone numbers and addresses of about five hundred people
from all over Switzerland who are cyclists. So a cyclist can call up a member
and ask to stay for one night- but you have to be a member. Since Balz was one,
he said that any time I got stuck in a place I could call him and fix up my
stay, but I could call only a day earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He helped me with the route suggesting short cuts, more scenic views and
mountains to avoid, fleshing out the map that Lilian and I had planned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bernard Imhasly, the Swiss brother-in-law
of my gallerist Shireen Gandhy and his daughter Anisha who lives in Bern,
helped out and later Pro-Helvetia gave me an assistant, Lena Eriksson who
started connecting with all these people. She made a list of what I would need
for the trip and warned me about sudden rains. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And what happened in Switzerland? Did
everything go according to plan?<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the first ten days I thought I would travel by train and get used to the
country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Art Basel was going on and I
met a lot of Indian artist friends there and spent time with them seeing all
the museums, but it was raining throughout! I fixed my trip to start on 20th
June but the rain wouldn’t stop. I was nervous because I wouldn’t be able to
cycle properly or do watercolours and I had to reach my host by 7pm. everyday. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In Basel, people told me about Jean-
Frederic Schnyder, a Swiss artist who’s a big star: he’s a landscape painter
who cycles and paints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has several
series of works- sometimes he only cycles up to highways and paints them,
sometimes it’s just mountains. He’s older now but he did this till his forties
and became famous for it. I was very excited about this but everyone told me
that it was very difficult to get in touch with him. He lives in Zug. I
realized I could go to his place on my bicycle tour, but that would come at the
end as it was near Zurich.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Luckily, the rain stopped on the first day
and it was sunny for the rest of my trip. I planned my journey anti- clockwise
from Zurich. I had wanted to do it clockwise like the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pradakshina</i>, but the route was very mountainous, so it was easier
to go anti-clockwise and do the plains first. Someone told me this had been
Napoleon’s route when he attacked Switzerland! I thought I could meet Jean-
Frederic in Zug at the end and show him all my watercolours. I would call my
trip “ Meeting Jean- Frederic Schnyder” and build up a story around it, about
being on my way to meet him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I googled Schnyder and an article says he
paints certain banal things over and over again, like series of train stations,
and called him an artist- archivist. That’s interesting because you work with
the idea of the archive yourself, and this is close to your project.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Everyone
told me that it was impossible to meet Jean-Frederic unless I went through his
gallery, that he rarely appears in public. He didn’t even have an email id or a
cell number, just a landline. Till the day I left Basel, I couldn’t get through
to him. So the plan to meet him in Zug was unpredictable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I stayed at Lilian’s flat in the first
month in Zurich. When I reached Zurich, Lilian arrived from Pune and she gave
me her 7- gear bicycle to use on my trip. Lilian was still doubtful about me.
On the first day she showed me around Zurich, and on the second day she gave me
the keys of her bike and the address of her studio and said she was having a
barbecue there and I should be there at 6 pm sharp. I googled and found a
detailed cycle map. I didn’t realize this was a test! The studio was in the
countryside 30 kms. away but I managed to cycle there on time. She was pleased
and gave me the green signal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Between Lena, Lilian and Balz, they gave me
everything I needed. I didn’t have to buy any equipment, except my clothes. At
my first stop in Aarau my host Balz and his friend Jürg Fritzsche laughed at me
when they saw my 7- gear bike and Jürg gave me his new 24- gear light mountain
bike to use. I was embarrassed because the bike was really expensive, but Balz
told me in an aside that Jürg was very rich and he could afford it! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I had to learn how to repair a puncture,
and in Switzerland, even parking a bike is a skill because you have to lift it
up high and hang it up by a hook on a pole in the parking areas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And what happened on the actual journey?<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Swiss
people exercise the whole day! They spend their lunch breaks having a quick
sandwich and jogging the rest of the time. In fact I hardly saw any place that
was lonely because there were people cycling or jogging in the deepest forests.
Sometimes I felt silly to be doing this project which was so normal for them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My experience was the opposite of what we
had imagined. In one of the most conservative cantons in Giswil (which I was
warned could be racist), where I had no host to stay with, the Hotel Krone gave
me a free room. The owner said an Indian woman cycling was a rare thing and
should be encouraged! Sometimes when I got lost and knocked at some door,
people would give me food and drink and cycle along with me till I found my
route. I experienced no racism, and because of other cyclists encouraging me on
the road, I finished my trip, otherwise I could have got tired and got on to a
train at any time, since I had a free train pass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The host in every town cooked a fantastic
dinner for me and showed me around the city. They would make breakfast for me
the next day and pack lunch for the journey. So I saw the events and museums
everywhere. One of the interesting things I saw was the Obwald music festival
held in the deep woods near Giswil. This happens once every year, when there is
yodelling through the night. Groups from different cantons perform different
types of yodelling. It was a full moon night and Bernard and Anisha had booked a
table there. A guest country is invited each year and it was Mali this time.
All night, there were group performances by Swiss yodellers, very formal,
alternating with wild Mali dancing, with Mali and Swiss food being served. It
was a fantastic experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When I reached Burgdorf I saw a huge poster
of Subodh Gupta’s show, and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">in Thun I ran into Bharti Kher’s show. The
museum people in Thun said I could park my bike with all my luggage right
inside the building at the reception- it was so funny, like taking Subodh’s
work to see Bharti’s show!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ms. Archana, all this is seems so
strenuous! Did you manage to do any watercolours at all?<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
water colour painting project was very difficult, because I hadn’t calculated
that I would need to calm down for some time after the cycling, or that
sometimes the landscape would not change for a long time. But I would blog
every evening. My bicycle tour is part of an ongoing work called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Archana Devi Travels</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sometimes I would end up taking the wrong
route. I once took the hiker’s route instead of the cycling path and I had to
carry my bike with the luggage up a steep path beside a waterfall, for two or
three hours. A car hit me once, and I had several falls, but nothing serious,
just got a few bruises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And did you meet Jean-Frederic Schnyder? <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">AH<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
night before I was leaving for Zug, when I still had no clue about how to
contact Jean- Frederic, my host, a curator who knew his gallerist, managed to
get his number. I called him and he was so welcoming, inviting me to come at
any time! When I reached there he spent four hours with me seeing my
watercolours and bringing out his old paintings, to compare our versions of the
same landscapes. He knows every mountain in Switzerland. When I asked him about
his reputation as a difficult recluse, he laughed and said that was only for
commercial people like curators and gallerists, for artists he was always
available. He insisted that I stay with them another day, but when I said I had
to leave for Zurich, he gave me all his catalogues and even packed my bike for
me expertly. So I did finally meet the mythical Jean-Frederic Schnyder!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Cycled
532 kms. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Starting
21 June to 1 July 2010<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Route:
Zurich – Aarau – Burgdorf – Bern – Thun – Bonigen, near Interlaken – Mariengen
– Giswil via Brünig Pass – Sarnen – Engelberg - Emmenbrucke - Zug - Zurich <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">http://archanadevitravels.blogspot.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">N.
Rajyalakshmi<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">( N.
Rajyalakshmi began her career as a journalist in the Ideal Times, Bangalore,
where she had a regular culture column. She is now widely respected
internationally as a leading intellectual in the cultural field, celebrated
particularly for her interviews with the artist Pushpamala N.)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pictures courtesy: Archana Hande <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>March 2011<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-81532190330585524022011-08-01T00:23:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:23:27.139-07:00Arguments for Boycott of Deconstructing India show in Tel Aviv Museum I Pushpamala N. I August 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ARGUMENTS FOR INDIAN ARTISTS BOYCOTT OF TEL AVIV MUSEUM SHOW</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Indian Artists Boycott of the <i>Deconstructing India</i> show to be held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in April 2012, is in solidarity with the International Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel called by Palestinian intellectuals, artists and citizen groups, and the India Campaign. The call for boycott, inspired by the earlier successful international boycott against Apartheid South Africa, is a non-violent Gandhian campaign to pressurize Israel to recognize the rights of the Palestine people directed at mainstream Israeli institutions, and not at individuals. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Once Israel follows UN norms and recognises the legitimate demands of the Palestinians, the Boycott will be called off, just as the boycott against Apartheid South Africa was called off when the apartheid system was dismantled.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The curatorial note is written on the Tel Aviv Museum letterhead. What the Tel Aviv Museum says about itself on the website confirms that it is a central part of the art establishment in Israel. It is no dissident institution. Founded in 1932, the Museum was chosen in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the architect of Israel and its first Prime minister, to formally proclaim the Establishment of the State of Israel in a ceremony. It is a major institution, which is on the tourist sites of the country, part of the “central hub of modern Hebrew culture” which by definition, leaves out Palestinian culture. In fact Palestinians will find it very difficult to see the Indian show because of the various blockades and security checks that they have to pass through: it is not for them. While the curator’s intentions may be good, it is difficult to believe that a change will come from within this institutional framework.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">While there are dissident artists and groups within Israel, who may be working in similar ways as us, this show is not hosted by them or in an alternative space. In fact, some of the progressive people in Israel also support the Boycott.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Israeli government is now building Brand Israel which uses cultural events and figures to promote Israel as an exciting, glamourous tourist destination, to whitewash the actual realities there. Singers Paul McCartney and Madonna who performed there were projected in this way. The Indian artists who will show in the highly publicised New Museum Wing will be used to vindicate and promote Brand Israel. I was not sure whether I was comfortable with that.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Some artists feel that we should keep cultural spaces separate from politics. However, the curatorial note of “Deconstructing Israel” is itself political. It speaks of colonization, partition of India and creation of Israel which are all political events. The artists have been chosen because they “deconstruct stereotypes”. We are not deconstructing stereotypes for fun or interior decor, but to make a political, institutional and social critique. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Indian artists are making works on political subjects like global and national economic exploitation, poverty, rights of farmers and workers and minorities, religious intolerance, gender and sexuality issues, ecology; and use directly political material and quotations in their work. Many of us have been directly involved in protests and agitations, write eloquently on various public issues, and worked to support and build alternate spaces and platforms outside formal institutions to express our voice.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In fact, many Indian artists are invited internationally to show in biennales and important exhibitions precisely because they are making “political’ work. We cannot suddenly turn around and say we are not political. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In the curatorial note, the curators compare the histories of the two nations as being victims of colonization, comparing the partition of India with the creation of Israel and the ensuing problems and animosities, which itself is problematic. I do not believe that the cases are similar. The Israeli State proclaims that it is built on desert land, an empty land which it civilized and made fertile. This thesis from the start negates the existence of the Palestinians for centuries on this land and dismisses their culture and civilization. It is not a democracy as described in the curatorial synopsis but a military state practising the system of apartheid, that has compulsory two- year military service for all its young people, the main purpose of which is to repress and control the Palestinians. The Tel Aviv Museum rewards free passes to Israeli soldiers for their recreation after their tiring duties, and they form an important part of the museum audience.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">To answer the argument that all governments are repressive and why only target Israel: I believe this is a purist argument that cynically precludes all action. In fact I have not heard of a boycott call against USA, China or other places mentioned by artists as repressive, from people repressed by them. There are specific international petitions like the recent protest against Ai Wei Wei’s arrest that many of us have signed, but it is interesting that neither Ai Wei Wei who worked on the Beijing Olympics, nor other targeted Chinese artists or academics, have actually called for a boycott of Chinese institutions. They may not want , or need a boycott.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There is a misconception that this is just a show of moral disapproval, something “holier than thou”. The Boycott is not about some “good people” punishing some “bad people” for their “bad deeds”. The Boycott is a tactic and a strategy for collective action, most famously adopted by Mahatma Gandhi for the Swadeshi movement, to put pressure on a worst- case situation to change it. As we know, we did get Independence by following these strategies, which have influenced the world. No change is instant and needs to build up over time. However each action is like a building block.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Some artist friends felt that as artists, we had no power to change anything, so what was the point in the Boycott? The answer is that artists, intellectuals and sportspeople are seen as opinion makers which is why they are asked to take a stand on issues. In the earlier successful Boycott of Apartheid South Africa, the strong stand taken by individuals and small groups built into a large movement that pressurized world governments into imposing sanctions, which finally led to the dismantling of Apartheid.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Though others like Nalini Malani had categorically decined to show in this exhibition sometime ago, this was not made public. I felt that the issue should go into the public sphere to provoke debate and bring awareness. To boycott or not to boycott is each artist’s decision, but it is interesting that everybody in the art world is now thinking about the matter, as well as the spontaneous letters that have come in solidarity.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Pushpamala</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Bangalore August 2011</span></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-52534514221711300992011-07-03T00:21:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:22:13.479-07:00Art Asia Pacific Magazine I Hemant Sareen I On the Boycott of the Tel Aviv Museum show on India I interview with Pushpamala N. I July 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ON THE CALL OF BOYCOTT OF THE DECONSTRUCTING INDIA SHOW AT TEL AVIV MUSEUM IN 2012</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Were you aware of your inclusion in the show before you received a formal invitation?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Curator Tami Freiman contacted my gallery, Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai about wanting some of my work for a show in Tel Aviv. Since I had not heard about the show, I wrote to her and asked her for a concept note and list of artists, as I think it is very important to know the context of an exhibition. In fact at that time I was interested in going to Israel if I got the opportunity to see for myself what the situation was. When I read the concept note I realized that it was an official state show in the Tel Aviv Museum and did not want to participate. I also have problems with the concept.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Did you have time to think about your decision? Did you consult other participating artists?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>It was my decision to decline the show and call the other artists to join me in a boycott. I thought about it and felt it was right. It’s also that I am in Bangalore now and most of the artists are in Delhi or Mumbai. The joke is that some of the artists I spoke to from the curator’s list were mystified as they didn’t even know about the show!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>How many have boycotted the show?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Artists Anita Dube, Amar Kanwar, and myself, from the present curators list, have declined to show. But some others like Nalini Malani refused much earlier without going public. Ashok Sukumaran wrote that he had been approached too. I decided to go public to put the issue in the public sphere. The curators have been approaching artists since several months it seems. Several people from the art world have written their support for us in a short time.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>You are boycotting the show in support of the Palestinian Civil Society Movement's BDS campaign. Is there any personal reason or is it a more impersonal and humanitarian motivation that made you boycott the show?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I hope you are not trying to trivialize the issue. There is no personal reason! </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I believe in the boycott as a non-violent strategy to bring about change. The Palestinian movement is inspired by the earlier International boycott against Apartheid South Africa which finally led to sanctions and brought about the dismantling of the apartheid system. The most famous boycott however, was the Non-Co-operation Movement of Mahatma Gandhi against the British, which led to Indian Independence and has inspired all other boycotts since! Nelson Mandela and the ANC adopted these methods for South Africa and Martin Luther King for the Civil Rights movement in America. But I am not naïve to think that anything is instant. Every action is a step or a building block.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I am one of the signatories of the India campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. To clarify some confusions about it, the Boycott is addressed at mainstream and state institutions complicit with state policy and not individuals. It exists so far as the Israeli state continues with its illegal apartheid policies and recognises the rights of the indigenous Palestinian people, it is not for all time, obviously. I would like to continue to have a long term relationship with the Palestinian groups and maybe work out some projects in the art world.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Critics of your boycott remind you of other countries and regimes with equally bad human rights records, China for instance, where Indian artists are regularly featured. How would you respond to that?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Critics of my boycott start with the US and Europe and then go on to China! People are mistaking this as taking a high moral ground and show of moral displeasure. The call for boycott, as I have mentioned is a collective strategy to bring about change in a worst case scenario, it is not about so called “good people” punishing some “bad people” for their “ bad deeds”. It is of course based on sympathy and support for the desperate and unchanging scene there. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Recently, there was an international petition protesting against the Chinese government’s arrest of Ai Wei Wei, which many of us signed. However, neither Ai Wei Wei nor any Chinese artists or groups, have sent an international Boycott call. In fact Ai Wei Wei had worked just before that for the Beijing Olympics. Artists have a complex relationship there with the government, are critical, but also probably disinclined towards outside interference, just as the Iranian people are wary, or we are. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In this case, I would have refused individually anyway, but I made a general call to the artists in response and in solidarity with an existing movement. I would be careful about playing God and asking for boycotts left and right, unless there was a credible movement. By the way, 100 artists from Canada and 150 from Ireland have signed the PACBI boycott call earlier, besides many popular musicians and groups worldwide cancelling concerts there.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Why is it that in the case of so called rogue countries boycotted by the west, the action is taken for granted, while Israel which is breaking all international laws has so much sympathy?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS: What would you say to those Indian artists still insisting on participating in the show?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I think it is each one’s individual choice. Everybody is thinking about it and each artist will have their own opinion. One thing is sure: there has been a lot of debate generated, and still going on. I get several letters everyday, each with different positions. I welcome argument; it galvanizes the art scene when it is in danger of becoming soporific. Didn’t Amartya Sen write a book called “The Argumentative Indian”?!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Earlier, the India campaign had asked writers and musicians to boycott their invitations, but there was no response. It is a measure of the liveliness of the Indian art scene and Indian artists sincerity that there is so much discussion going on. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">And have you noticed something? For the last decade the only public discussion about Indian art was art market, prices and auctions. Now suddenly everyone is talking about the Palestine issue! Isn’t that interesting? </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HS:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Has the Ministry of Culture been in touch with you on this issue?</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>No, why should they? Sounds Kafkaesque. It is my right to agree or refuse to participate in any event. And this is a funny question because part of the argument against cultural boycott is that the cultural is separate from the political!</span></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-54204682507894359942010-12-01T01:30:00.000-08:002016-04-28T00:29:49.417-07:00TAKE - Ouevre I Issue 4 I <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
Phantom Lady Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The
Phantom Lady takes off from Umesh Maddanahalli’s project with donkeys in
Mysore, and ruminates about donkeys in art …</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">DONKEY TALES</span><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The donkey is seen as a lowly animal, an
ass, a beast of burden. It is neither noble like the horse nor as endearing as
the dog. The donkey is actually the common man, the subaltern of the animal
world: sort of foolish and unattractive, obstinate by nature, and unwilling to
be cuddly and pet-like. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Umesh Maddanahalli’s recent student
workshop, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Name and Form</i> in CAVA,
(Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts) Mysore, looked at the donkey bench, a
commonly used object for artistic study and practice, as a starting point to
connect the study of art to the experience of ordinary life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “donkey” as we know is a bench with a
resting place for a board, used in the classroom for life study, drawing and
painting. It has a vaguely animal-like form with a neck and head and four legs.
Umesh plays with the meaning of the object by replacing the donkey bench with
real donkeys, to look again at art pedagogy and art history as it has come down
to us from the 19<sup>th</sup> century and think about the “journey of art”. He
questions whether it is at all important to study a chronological sequence of
events, and whether the examination of the art of the past means anything to us
today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Umesh hired a group of donkeys from a
village near Mysore and the project was that the students walk them back to
their “home” sixty five kilometres away to a place called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Santhe Saruguru,</i> also called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaththe
or “ Donkey”</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saruguru,</i> which is
well-known for breeding donkeys, which are used as pack animals and for manure,
or sometimes rented out for film shootings. The group would walk through the
day till sunset, stopping to cook and sleep in villages along the way, carrying
some provisions along with them, but borrowing pots and pans from the villagers
and cooking on rough stone and wood fire stoves made on the spot, spending
nights in the village schools. The students could document the project in any
medium they wanted and edit the material in any way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A keeper brought six of the animals to
CAVA, situated on the principal street of the city, Sayaji Rao Road, (named
after the Baroda Maharaja who was a close friend of the Mysore king) which is
the main route for the ceremonial Dasara procession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Umesh and the troupe of thirty students
started off in a straggly group with the donkeys the next morning, exciting
curious attention from the public, astonished people and vehicles stopping on
the crowded street and staring at them. The students were confused about what
to say to bystanders; rustic people laughed and told them the donkey was
Lakshmi and lucky for them. The students holding the donkeys being unused to
handling them could not control them, and either the donkeys would pull them in
different directions or stop mulishly, holding them all up. The journey took
three days with many adventures on the way, with some of the students dropping
out, but most staying till the end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On the first day one of the donkeys which
was loosely tied, escaped and vanished just outside Mysore while they were
having lunch. Frantic calls were made to friends to look for it. There was a
pall of gloom and though abandoning the donkey and walking on was discussed,
the students sat down by the side of the road and refused to move till the
animal was found. This aroused great interest on the highway and trucks and
cars stopped to find out if it was a strike or satyagraha. Finally someone
found it after several hours and brought it back in a tempo to great
jubilation, and the donkey which had been unnamed till then, was called Gopala.
It seemed that the beast, which by reports had always been a troublesome
animal, had by an act of rebellion become an individual. Just two or three
generations ago, the lower castes in India had no names of their own and were
either called by the day of the week on which they were born, or followed the
custom of naming all the children, male and female, in the family god’s name.
Even having an individual name is an elite thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Several people from Mysore visited the
group in the evenings. The CAVA Dean came with art history students, and Mysore
artists like N.S. Harsha and Dwarkanath, the theatre designer for the State
Repertory Rangayana, dropped in. Dwakanath’s take on the workshop was that the
donkeys were just an excuse and not central to the experience. What was
interesting for him was the way the students quickly divided themselves into
different groups: some handling the animals, some cooking, some washing up the
pots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But finally, everything revolved
around taking the donkeys back home. They got close to donkey behaviour living
with them, saw how they walked, grazed, shat, slept, and their stubborn
animal-ness. It was a “life study” of another kind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Au
hasard Balthazar</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> (By Chance, Balthazar) the classic
1966 film directed by Robert Bresson, one of the cult figures of the French New
Wave, revolves around a donkey. The film follows the lives of Marie, a shy farm
girl and her donkey Balthazar through a life of callous abuse and is described
as having “exquisite renderings of pain and abasement” and “compendiums of
cruelty”. While some critics have seen it as a religious allegory and a
spiritual tale of human suffering, others see it as an existential account of
life as it is, or as Jean-Luc Goddard described it, “really the world in an
hour and a half”. The donkey’s dumb pliant figure takes us through the
indifference, sadism, greed, exploitation, irresponsibility and criminality of
humankind, represented by the characters of the village who use it in various
ways, told in an unsentimental and minimalist aesthetic style.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-GB">The donkey was the pivotal character
in Kerala filmmaker John Abraham’s 1977 Tamil film</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">
Agraharathil Kazhuthai</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;"> ( Donkey in a Brahmin Village), a biting satire on
brahminical superstition and bigotry. The film which got the National Award,
was not allowed to be screened on Doordarshan by the furious Brahmin lobby, and
ignored by the press. Critiquing the caste system was an important part of the
Indian New Wave cinema of the ‘70s and the filmmaker uses the device of
inserting an ass into a place anxious about its ritual purity, with all its
black humour. A donkey which strays into a Brahmin village, is adopted by
Professor Narayan Swamy who appoints a mute girl to look after it, much to the
disapproval of the entire village. It is seen as an unclean animal which
pollutes the village, and when the girl’s still-born baby is found outside the
temple, the donkey is blamed for it and killed. Later a series of miracles
happen and the Brahmins believe that it is due to the donkey’s blessings. When
they dig out the skull of the donkey to give it a ritual funeral, the fire
symbolically spreads and engulfs the village in a huge conflagration,
destroying everything except the professor and the mute girl. It is the Day of
Judgement and only the innocents are saved.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">The director John Abraham, who is remembered more as a bohemian
anarchist, was a revolutionary who believed in the empowering and liberating
effect of cinema and tried to create a new kind of people’s film making. He
formed the Odessa Collective (named after the port in one of the most important
films of all time, Sergei Eisenstein’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Battleship
Potemkin,</i> about the great Russian naval mutiny of 1905 against the officers
of the Tsarist regime) which tried to change the history of film production and
distribution by going to the villages and directly raising money from the
people. His last film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amma Ariyan</i>
(Report to Mother), was funded by collecting one rupee each from the audience
from screening Chaplin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Kid</i> all
over Kerala. The film once made was also released non- commercially.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">Many of my Malayali artist friends like Madhusudanan used the image of
the donkey<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in their work in the 1980s as
a symbol of oppression, possibly coming from the Christian Left. The donkey,
being a creature of the desert lands, figures in many Biblical stories. In both
Jewish and Christian traditions, the Messiah is described as riding on a
donkey. It is a heavily loaded symbol, particularly in Christian legend, seen
as a metaphor for Christ’s meekness, humility and poverty, and stands for the
spiritual kingdom of god. </span><span lang="EN-GB">Jesus rode into Bethlehem on
a donkey as the Messiah on Palm Sunday.</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;"> It appears often in Western painting: in the
Flight into Egypt, as also in the manger scene at the birth of Christ when he
is recognized as the Saviour, and first worshipped by the lowly animals. In
earlier times it appears that riding a donkey indicated affluence as commoners
at the time went on foot. Later on when the nobility begin owning horses,
riding a donkey takes on the opposite meaning and becomes a sign of simplicity
and sobriety. </span><span lang="EN-GB">Christ pictured on a donkey came to
symbolize forgiveness and peace, whereas the image of Christ mounted on a horse
was seen as a sign of judgement and war.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">The donkey is also a jackass, standing for a dumb and unthinking
foolishness. Manjunath Kamath uses the image constantly in his work to
satirically comment on the antics of men. But most famously, Bhupen Khakhar has
used the Panchatantra story of the Father, the Son and the Donkey with a wicked
twist for his gay “coming out” painting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You
Can’t Please All </i>painted in 1982<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i>
A naked man stands on a balcony, looking down at the story unfolding below in
stages like an Indian miniature painting. A father and son set out on a journey
to the town to sell a donkey. On the way they meet some people who laugh at
them for walking while one could ride. So the boy sits on the donkey and they
go on. They meet an old man who criticizes the boy for having no respect for
his father, so the son gets down and the father rides on the donkey. Further on
they are mocked for the son walking when he could ride the donkey too. Finally,
when both are riding the donkey, they are abused for overloading the poor
animal. They then decide to tie the legs of the donkey to a pole and carry it
upside down on their shoulders. While crossing a bridge on the river, the
donkey struggles and falls into the water and drowns. At which, says Bhupen
Khakkar, the man watching from the balcony concludes, “You can’t please
everyone” and takes off his clothes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">Umesh’s workshop was a miniature form of his larger idea to travel
across various parts of India with a retinue of donkeys. He would welcome art
students and anyone else who wanted to walk the roads of India in the company
of donkeys, stopping to cook when hungry and resting when tired. “The herd of
donkeys and its human companions” would visit art schools on their “rambles”
and the journey would be recorded on camera. The project may not prove anything
or answer any questions, or really help to discover the nature of art history
or pedagogy. However, it would raise some questions. He says the premise of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Name and Form</i> lies in the last lines of
a poem by Gopal Honnalgere</span><span lang="EN-GB">:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">you<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">search<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">for
the donkey<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">you<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">ride<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">on<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">December 2010<o:p></o:p></span></i></span><br />
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-73118772715319351372010-10-01T22:13:00.000-07:002016-04-27T22:14:27.083-07:00Golden Dreams catalogue / pub. Gallery Chemould Mumbai / October 2001<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">10 QUESTIONS</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">N. Rajyalakshmi, Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, interviews the artist Pushpamala N.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Ms Pushpamala, for the last few years you have been getting photographs taken of yourself and exhibiting them. Are you a narcissist?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: No, I am a humourist! <i>[laughs] </i>. Bhupen Khakhar in an early 1972 catalogue had photographs of himself posing as James Bond, Mr. Universe, and a Man with a Headache- it was delightful! In fact it was turning artistic narcissism on its head! I always felt that it was a lost moment in Indian art because nobody really followed it up…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: But Madam, what is the purpose of this?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: The first work in which I performed, ‘Phantom Lady or Kismet’ was a photo-romance set in Bombay, about a masked adventurer and her search for her lost twin sister separated in childhood, who has now become a part of the underground mafia. It was shot like a thriller using real locations, with typical scenes and characters. Bombay has a place in the Indian imagination as the Great Modern Metropolis – a place of great opportunities and freedom but also of decadence and cruelty. It was a homage to the city as a centre of theatre and film, as the producer of modern fantasies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> When I become the protagonist, I put myself into various kinds of narratives; one of them is my own story…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: There are so many artists all over the world using masquerade. Isn’t it a cliché?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>But clichés interest me! I am using an existing form because I find it useful to work with.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> At this point of time, in my 40s, I find autobiography interesting, for instance. And there are so many eccentric aspects of modern culture around us which in fact use masquerade - like celebrations, political events, tableaus, studio photographs - that are crying out to be used as artistic raw material.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> But I find many artists in India today doing self- portraiture in different ways. Perhaps it’s something to do with the turbulent and changing times - a way of self-questioning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Ms Pushpamala, earlier you worked mainly with poor materials like terracotta, waste paper, etc. Why are you now working with an expensive medium like photography?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: Earlier, I believed that India was a poor rural country and so artists should use <i>poor</i> or humble materials to talk about our reality. But in fact here I am, a very metropolitan person who is a citizen of one of the highly industrialized countries in the world with a long history of modern technology. We are falling into an orientalist stereotype if we seek reality only in the pre-industrial, Ms Rajyalakshmi. The art critic Hans Mathews made an observation which I like - that because photography and film making entered India almost as soon as they were invented, they don’t carry an oppressive colonial burden for us. We have our own history of photographic image making, for instance - the early photographs painted like miniatures ignoring Western perspective, the <i>manorathas</i> or pilgrim souvenirs made in Nathdwara in Rajasthan using painting and collage. What interests me about the photograph is its documentary aspect - its <i>I</i> <i>was there</i> part, and the possibilities of overturning and questioning that factuality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Your work looks very jokey and flippant. What is the point? Is it art?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: Yes I like to use humour! I use it to seduce, to provoke… I like my art to work on different levels. The humour makes you relax, it’s an entry into the work. I also use references to the popular for the same reason. But this is only one aspect - my intentions are quite serious!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Madam, you are a trained and recognized sculptor. Why are you doing this kind of work?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1">PN: I like the lightness and mobility of working with forms like photography, Ms Rajyalakshmi. As a student in Baroda I was formed by the Narrative Movement in the 1980s. There was a lot of interest in 19</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> c. hybrid arts like Company painting and early photography. This was part of an interest in all indigenous developments in art. So there was a background to this. When I was finding it difficult to use narrative and the human figure in sculpture - perhaps because of its very concreteness and realness - I found that photography creates images which float on the surface of the paper: shimmering, other worldly. And I like working as an outsider, you can break all the rules!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But it’s quite different from making sculpture, where I physically made the work. Here, I am working more like an architect or a theatre or film director, the creativity is in conceiving and directing; it’s collaborative work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Besides all this, I’m just following my instinct as an artist! I think I’m on a hot trail!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Ms Pushpamala, you seem to be interested in the past, in old things. Why this nostalgia?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: No, Ms Rajyalakshmi, I’m too critical to be nostalgic or sentimental! I’m interested in history and memory. I sometimes use autobiography, nostalgia and melodrama as devices to evoke a whole range of associations, to connect in different ways to the experience of the audience. But the issues are very contemporary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Isn’t art universal? Feminist art is like a reservation category.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: Working consciously as a woman artist need not be a limitation! It can open up unexplored territories and subject matter, which can create powerful new ways of seeing and making.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A book like <i>Women Writing in India</i> [edited by Susie Tharu and K Lalitha] tries to create an alternate tradition to the mainstream literary tradition, which is enormously interesting. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Why are you borrowing images from films? Can’t you be original?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: But I <i>am</i> interested in stereotypes and archetypes, Ms Rajyalakshmi! And it is popular media that is creating these images. It’s not only film that interests me, but novels and songs and plays, and photography itself. These scenes and situations are like found objects - they are so recognizable and common. I like to mix up different genres and alter them, to interject my own point of view.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">NR: Will you say something about your recent work?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">PN: <i>Sunhere Sapne [Golden Dreams]</i> a photo-romance, is the fantasy of a middle class housewife dressed in a housecoat and her alter ego, a girl in a golden frock and a bouffant hairstyle. The work is enigmatic, there’s no real story; though each scene is evocative and together the pictures give rise to a certain feeling. I’ve used different kinds of references: the thriller, the fairy tale, the honeymoon snapshot…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I did the series in a small town near Delhi and commissioned a local studio man to hand paint the pictures. They have a sweet, old world, intimate look, though in fact the content is quite dark and the period contemporary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>Bombay Photo Studio</i> is a set of portraits taken at the studio of Mr JH Thakker, who used to be a still photographer for Hindi Films in the 1950s and 60s. He also took photographs of the stars in his studio, experimenting with expressionist Hollywood style lighting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There are a set of studio portraits – of a Muslim, a Hindu and a Christian woman, which are posed in the conventional way but where the subjects are veiled. With some other photographs, I’ve used images of <i>Nayikas</i> or heroine figures - the pining woman, the woman caught in a web of deceit. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As a sculptor, I am also interested in the material richness of the photograph itself – the large size sepia prints on fibre paper have an intense, visceral quality-</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Pushpamala N.</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Bangalore</i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-61700840259834387732010-09-23T01:29:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.429-07:00TAKE - The Moderns I Issue 3 I September 2010<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady
Strikes Again</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady looks
at the role of the artist today and sees her as a messy archivist; as a
detective looking for clues rather than a modernist hero… <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">THE ARTIST AND THE ARCHIEVE<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Artists are like scavengers who use various kinds of
references in their work, thereby creating their own archive out of disparate
materials. They may in fact revive dead technologies to infuse them with new
life, or experiment ferociously with the latest forms of media, or put together
ordinary found objects and transform their meaning. They may accept no
watertight boundaries between genres or disciplines. And the new archive finds
creative connections between categories seen as opposed, mixing up high and
low, central and marginal, insignificant and significant, questioning
established conventions, in search for a more profound insight into what shapes
our world today.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">History of the Museum
and the Archive<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">First, we have to see the public institutions of the archive
and the museum as 19<sup>th</sup> century European constructs, which were
created at the high point of colonialism, and closely connected to the
disciplines of archeology, anthropology and ethnography. The Great Exhibitions
that took place in London and Paris in the late 19th century were related
phenomena, which were showcases of technology and industry as well as of
colonial crafts. Native artisans were brought in from the colonial countries
like India, and made to work on site making their “authentic” crafts and
entertain the onlookers with exotic display.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(The real story was that paid agents got people from India who were not
necessarily trained in that particular craft and made them pose in native
gear.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Museums were seen as repositories of cultural memory, where
artifacts from past civilizations like the Elgin marbles, Egyptian antiquities,
Medieval illuminated manuscripts or Mughal miniatures were stored and displayed
recalling a sumptuous golden age, or ethnographic objects collected to reveal
the primitive stages of human civilizations. These were always great
inspirations to artists and poets besides scholars, and artists were allowed to
copy the works inside the museums. Copying from originals has always been a
traditional way of learning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Museums and archives are based on the nineteenth century
European mania for collecting, classifying, typing and listing, which was the
base of all knowledge systems of the time. The explosion of new knowledge with
the contact with new cultures with trade and colonization made it imperative to
sort out all the new information, and certainly the idea of hegemony was very
much a part of this. Many artists have critiqued the museum and its
classifications in their work, notably Fluxus artist Marcel Broodthaers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Historically, collections and collecting have always been
contentious and dynamic in meaning. There is constantly a war between the old
Western empires and the former colonies about the objects they have stolen for
their museums – over the Peacock Throne for instance. In India, when J.
Swaminathan, artist and Director of the Bharat Bhavan Cultural Centre in
Bhopal, capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh, which has a large tribal
population, created a contemporary art museum especially for tribal art and
commissioned tribals to make new work for it, it created a huge stir. The
tribal collection has a separate building right next to the contemporary art
collection, making a very obvious attempt to move tribal art out of its status
of timelessness and anthropology into the living present.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Museums and Archives
as Cultural Memory<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Talking about cultural memory, on the other hand, there is
the Curious Case of Ananda Coomaraswamy and his collection. At the time of
Independence, when the great anti-imperialist philosopher-art historian Coomaraswamy
wanted the new Indian government to fund a museum for his vast collection of
South Asian art in Varanasi, the government which had other priorities took no
interest, and miffed, he moved his whole collection to Boston, where it is now
housed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In recent times, we have the scandal of the sack of the
Baghdad Museum during the Iraq War, when the occupying US army allowed mobs to
loot priceless and irreplaceable objects. The irony is that the collection was
made by British and Western archeologists in colonial times, which then became
the official heritage of the Iraqi people – which was then looted again to
reach Western collectors no doubt! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Again, the notion of the archive as history, and as
collective cultural memory is both contentious and dynamic as in the 2004
scandal of the vandalization of the Bhandarkar Orientalist Research Institute
in Pune by a group calling itself the Sambhaji Brigade, offended by a biography
of Shivaji<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>by American academic James Laine
who had researched his book there ( <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shivaji:
Hindu King in Muslim India</i> ). Rare manuscripts and materials relating to
Maharashtra were burnt and destroyed in the process. Scholars have compared
this to the sack of Baghdad Museum or Sarajevo, or the destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddha – but perpetrated in this instance by misplaced nationalism. The
stand of the Institute, the custodian of history, was very interesting. It was
to call for a ban on the book, referring to Shivaji as a national “deity”, who
therefore could not be historicized.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This brings me to my own current work, where I am using
popular images of the young nationalist martyr Bhagat Singh. In calendar art,
Bhagat Singh is shown worshipping the figure of Mother India, often portrayed
like a sort of Hanuman, tearing open his chest to reveal Bharat Mata inside.
The fact is that Bhagat Singh was an atheist and a Communist, but this fact
will never be accepted in a “popular archive” of cultural memory. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Quotation<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Quoting and referencing past works is supposed to be a post-
modern phenomenon in art practice, but at every “original” and innovative
moment in art history, either the past or foreign images are used and recalled.
Self- conscious quotation it would seem comes after the emergence of art
history as a discipline and the establishment of museums, collections and
archives as institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Looking at Western high culture, we see that Renaissance
artists and architects in Italy actually strove to copy Greco- Roman works
which they saw as an ideal, while the practicalities and demands of the new age
with the inventions of new materials and technologies like oil painting,
perspective drawing and the optic lens transformed their work into an
expression of their age. In fact, outdated forms and technologies are
particularly rich mines for the artist’s imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">While discussing the idea of context transforming meaning,
it is interesting to look at Jorge Luis Borges’ short story <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote</i>.
Pierre Menard, a 20<sup>th</sup> century novelist writes a word to word replica
of the original 17th century Cervantes novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don Quixote</i>, which, according the narrator of the story, becomes
infinitely more sophisticated because it has to be read in the context of the
intellectual and scientific culture of the 20th century. To quote from the
story, the narrator says: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Cervantes’ text and
Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.
(More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Exactly the same words take on a different meaning when read
in a completely different context – in this case, time: reading a 17th century
work as a work by a 20th century author, makes the meaning far more complex and
subtle, according to Borges.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">When collectors and traders started getting African sacred
masks to France from colonies like Mali, they were a revelation to artists like
Picasso, who saw in them a very different approach to reality and the human
figure, than the conventions of Western realism. In the new context, the mask
took on formal qualities it was unaware of. (Ironically, while the cubist style
is seen as an “original” form, the African masks are doomed to ethnography, as
repetitive cultural products. Their “authenticity” however, a French collector
told me, depends upon their actually having been used in rituals. )<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Quotation as Cultural
memory / the Art work as Quotation<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Quotations are not a recent phenomenon- the traditional
concept of “copying” is in itself a form of quoting:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the new work is invariably different from the
original. Copying creates continuity or a genre, and at the same time
invariably breaks it, as in the very act of copying, changes become inevitable.
The 16th century Turkish miniature painters in Orhan Pamuk’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Name is Red</i> are confused by the
advent of Western realism. The Master Painter blinds himself with a thin
needle, so that he can “ see” better. But does this mean that he will go on
copying the old works perfectly with the most delicate inflections without
actually seeing them, or that he will inevitably create a new work taking from
the wells of his own experience?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Arcades Project</i>,
Walter Benjamin’s monumental work about late 19th century Paris, is entirely
composed of quotations. It is like a montage of views of the city, each view
hitting off against the others to create an original cultural landscape of
Paris, the leading European city. The book is a quest to define a civilization
by putting together all the relevant and striking things about it, as an
archive of found materials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Mimicry<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As post- colonials, we are constantly accused of “aping” and
“mimicking” Western culture, denied “originality” but expected to be
“authentic”. This denies us the right, as citizens of the world to make use of
knowledge systems available to us, which is freely given to a Western artist,
and puts us in the position of being “un-thinking”, “un- original” and
“in-authentic”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Interestingly now, with the coming of the world wide web,
the archive itself becomes ephemeral, with a free- for- all access to unending
images.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">………………………………………………………………………………………….<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Artist as Flaneur<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The artist is a
flaneur… who walks through the labyrinths of the city with the amused and
ironical detachment of the onlooker, yet with a strong empathy which goes to
the heart of the matter. Filled with understanding, playing both protagonist
and audience, the artist dreams, and becomes the characters in the play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The street as an archive, the archive as
performed, acted out… <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The artist plays the
detective probing the mysteries of contemporary life, scrutinizing the world
for clues, a narrator familiar with the secret language, the hieroglyphs of the
city. The artist is a carnivorous animal, imaginatively devouring life around,
both the banal and the profound; a cook, who creates a fabulous new dish from
the material she takes from the real world and her own inner life.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Artists are scavengers
who use varied kinds of references in their work, thereby creating their own
archives. If a traditional archive in society represents an accepted order and
historical value, the artist may take materials from genres that are not
recognized as of archival value, or invert accepted icons and redefine the
notion of a society’s dominant history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The new archive may find creative connections between <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">categories seen as
opposed: such as high and low, central and marginal, insignificant and
significant, in search for a more profound insight into what shapes our world. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The pseudo- archive is
an archive formed from the artist’s own imagination. The parade of daily experiences
large and insignificant all feed into the artist’s vision. From the combination
of past images and present and imagined ones, new connections and insights
emerge. The artists’ subjective experiences and her remembered past life and
emotions form an archive from which images are drawn. These subjective,
emotionally charged images melt into the larger cultural icons. Yet all the
time the artist is rooted in the present, the urge to dive into the past is to
find meaning in the present and to understand the future: in short, to search
for a larger civilizational meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Benjamin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arcades
Project</i> while being nothing but a collection of quotations about Paris is a
revolutionary new work. It is a new work because of the painstaking and
profound research that has gone into it, the texture and piquancy of the
quotations selected, in the study of the most banal of materials- shops,
streets, city plans, cheap entertainments- in order to discover a panoramic
understanding of a whole civilization and time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The artist as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">auteur</i>
uses subtle shades and complexities to problematize the present and the past.
Art historical or other cultural references from literature/ music/ cinema /
theatre become alive and throb in another context or location, when the present
and past are both charged with new meaning. While rejecting the modernist
notion of originality and formal purity as a primal quality, the artist frees
herself to be inventive, play with genres, fill her work with political and
social material, and address the contemporary directly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">September 2010<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-28144204865507769032010-06-01T01:26:00.000-07:002016-04-28T00:29:49.402-07:00TAKE - Gallery I Issue 2 I June 2010<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady
Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Bangalore is now seen
as the third major art centre in India along with New Delhi and Mumbai: a city
with scarcely an art market or long history of professional modern art practice
and few galleries. The Phantom Lady looks at the vibrant alternative art scene
in the city…</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">OTHER FACE, OTHER SPACES<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Today, Bengaluru has five active artist run spaces ; Bar 1-
Bengaluru Artists’ Residency 1 is the oldest, then there is 1 Shanthi Road and
BAC ( Bangalore Artists’ Centre) , with the latest entrants being Samuha (
Coming Together) , which is a one- year long artist collective, and its
offshoot Jaaga ( Space), which has been conceptualized as a ‘creative common
ground’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">When I was back in the city in the last few months, there
was an explosion of art, all happening in the artist run spaces in the city.
Surekha, Ayisha Abraham and Bharatesh Yadav had major solo shows at Samuha, a
project space initiated by Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy along with Archana Prasad
and Shiva Prasad. Several artists<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have
contributed two thousand rupees a month for a year, with which a space has been
hired above the ADA Theatre in the heart of the city, with S.G. Vasudev giving
surety. After a year, in August, the collective closes the space and the
technical paraphernalia will be given to Mysore artists who plan to set up
community studios. Each artist gets seventeen days in the year, which they can
use or give to others. Besides shows, there are performances, video workshops
and other projects, where young unknown artists get a platform along with
experienced artists. (Suresh Kumar usually dresses up as the Samuha<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Handyman’ in uniform and tool kit for the
openings…)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Samuha invaded the staid Government Arts and Science (GAS)
college in October 2009 with a month long workshop, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inter,</i> with thirty artists from Bangalore and Mysore creating
installations, performances, presentations and public interventions. During the
show, collaborating with Bar 1, there was a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tableau
vivant</i> in the college library by the artist Pascale Grau from Switzerland
in collaboration with Smitha Cariappa, recreating a scene from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Girija Kalyana</i>, the wedding of Shiva and
Parvati, from an old Mysore painting. Using painted backdrops and a cast from
Chitra Kala Parishad art school, the half- hour tableau slowly subverted the
original scene by introducing new elements like a figure with a computer and a
rag picker. While I missed these, I saw an amazing performance on stilts by the
Swiss company Trickster Teatro, organized by Bar1 first in the GAS College open
courtyard with oil lamps, and later again, with an effervescent busload of
artist friends going on a picnic to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adima</i>
at Antargange Hill near Kolar, a few hours from Bangalore. Started with a fund
collected by a group of people saving a rupee a day for years, Adima is a Dalit
Research Centre run by K. Ramiah situated on top of a hill above Kolar town,
where a theatre performance takes place every full moon day against a backdrop
of spectacular rocks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Archana Prasad who was looking to create an alternative
space, met American technologist Freeman Murray by chance who suggested that
they build a free-standing modular pallet rack construction with walls made of
recycled billboards, based on a model used earlier in America. Jaaga was built
in seven days by a group of eight people with some more volunteers. It stands
on an empty plot opposite the Hockey Stadium given by architect Naresh
Narasimhan, who by the way, has designed the National Gallery of Modern Art in
Bangalore. ( The NGMA itself came to Bangalore after more than twenty years of
lobbying by the artists here.) As a blogger writes “The exhilarating range of
activities at Jaaga map how much international public media and activism has
changed in the last five years: a Facebook developers group, a photo
exhibition, a brinjal (eggplant) four way cooking contest, an experimental film
festival, a dance event, an entertainment industry meet up, activist circle
sessions on Indian microfinance.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">What is interesting about the groups is that they work
together constantly, collaborating together, rather than being at war. Suresh
Jayaram built a space above his parents home in Shanthinagar in the centre of
the city while he was still teaching art history in Chitra Kala Parishad, with
a small space for himself to live and a gallery/studio space next door, divided
by open terraces, an award winning design by architect Meeta Jain. It is named
after its address, 1. Shanthi Road. Many artists have had preview or first ever
shows there and it is a hive of activity with continuous talks, residencies,
shows and performances besides being a general adda. Last time I walked in
after buying some props at the Sunday market, there was a ‘drawing marathon’ going
on. We have just started a monthly lecture series on art: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Re-Look</i>, which invites scholars doing the most exciting research in
the country. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Bar 1 in its earliest avatar began with the Bangalore based
Swiss artist Christoph Storz initiating six month residencies in 1997 for young
artists from Bangalore to the Guest Atelier Krone in Aarau, Switzerland, a
collective of which he was a part. K. Raghavendra Rao and Surekha who were the
early recipients started the Indo-Swiss residency in 2001 in a flat in the
Malleswaram area. Lately they became a registered trust with the support of
Pro-Helvetia by which time the artist volunteer base had expanded , including
Sureshkumar G., Smitha Cariappa and Prabhavati Meppayil. Bar1 has had the
earliest peer residencies in India. They told me that this year they had got
hundreds of applications for the Indian artist residency funded by India
Foundation for the Arts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Artists BJ Shamala and Nandesh Shanthi Prakash who had an
advertising company, started BAC some years ago in a furniture factory owned by
one of their clients outside Bangalore on the Hosur Road, and gave several
young artists residencies<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there. This
has now moved to their old studio in the city. Nandesh recently made a site-
specific work of a large butterfly out of discarded paper cups in the lobby of
the popular Forum Mall.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There is so much experimental, new media and performance
work that has been going on in Bangalore since the 1990s that the joke is that
the word “installation art’ ( and anything other than painting or sculpture is
called that!) has even entered the vocabulary of our visually illiterate
Kannada writers and intellectuals. I recently had a huge argument with theatre
director Prasanna who sarcastically asked me whether “you artists are still
doing this installation art” which is a bit like asking if poets are still
writing blank verse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact is that
artists are the most open, contemporary and lively creative practitioners in
Karnataka, while Kannada literature, film and theatre are in a sorry state,
having fallen into a mentality of frogs-in–the-well after the influential days
of the 1970s and ‘80s modernist and revolutionary literature, new theatre and
new wave cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The culture tends to be
predominantly literary and patriarchal, with the writers closely connected to
state politics and patronage ever since the days of the state formation
movement, when Kannada writers were crucial in putting together the Kannada
speaking areas which existed as fragments under different states.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">To go back and give a context for the art scene, Bangalore
was a small city with a provincial art scene, compared to the metros. ( In
fact, till the 1980s there were no full fledged art schools in the state.) It
has always been a defence centre, with public sector industries and science
institutions, and a population of salaried employees on the whole. There has
been no landed gentry, or private industry with a rich bourgouisie to collect
or patronize art, which holds till today, nor was it the capital of the Royal
state. The much talked about new IT crowd have no deep interest in art or
culture. Yet, Bangalore has always been a hub of intense avant- garde cultural
activity at different periods. Besides literature, film, street and proscenium
theatre, it was a major dance centre before Independence, with legendary
dancers like Ramgopal, Shanta Rao, U.S. Krishna Rao, Ragini Devi and the critic
G. Venkatachalam living there, and others like Mrinalini Sarabhai coming to
learn (where she incidentally met Vikram Sarabhai, at the Indian Institute of
Science!). Ayisha Abraham’s recent video installation <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Subterranea </i>uses found film footage on dancer Ramgopal. On the
other hand, the contemporary dancer Tripura Kashyap has closely collaborated
and performed in several art projects.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">An interesting focus in many artists’ work is a kind of
archiving of the city. Perhaps the city itself is sprawling, indefinite,
amorphous, yet a magnet for many things new. Sometimes it seems like a blank
canvas without the weight of a grand tradition or oppressive ancestors.
Surekha’s recent show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unclaimed</i> was
an extended video archive of marginal trades, and the new roads and landmarks
of the city looked at in terms of their changing connotations, economics and
politics. While Ayisha Abraham collects found footage of local home movies and
re-edits them, Abhishek Hazra has been working with<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>scientific concepts and histories for some time and Naveen Thomas
works with sound, satirizing the IT and call centre scene as a culture of
parroting. Or the Oarsed (Christoph Storz’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nom-de-plume</i>)
show at Samuha, which was a compilation of cheaply printed found film posters
interspersed with his own commissioned pictures of past Samuha shows. As I
write, an exhibition on the German horticulturist Krumbiegal, one of the chief
architects of the Lalbagh gardens in its present avatar, called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whatever He</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touched He Adorned</i> is going on in the Max Mueller Bhavan, curated
by Suresh Jayaram, who comes from the Thigala caste of market gardeners and has
been long interested in the horticultural history of Bangalore. He has also
initiated the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mapping Bangalore</i> art
project.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The public art show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sthala
Puranagalu</i> (Place Legends) that I curated in 1999 was an exploration of the
history of the city through three artists creating large site-specific
installations around three important sites, after half a year of research.
Ramesh Kalkur’s work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Royal</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Feast</i> was a large hoarding using images
of public statues around the Queen Victoria statue on Mahatma Gandhi Road,
while Shamala B J did a floating sculpture on the Ulsoor Lake, the oldest tank
in the City of Lakes, which you had to visit by boat. Srinivasa Prasad built a
structure of construction poles of several levels with live animals, music and
interactive happenings around Samudaya’s old office and rehearsal building,
recalling the history of the legendary left theatre group. The money was raised
for the show and catalogue by asking a range of artists, theatre people,
writers, architects and other friends to contribute five thousand rupees each.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Talking about the gallery scene in the city, I remember that
musician Konarak Reddy and theatre director David Horsborough had set up a
pavement gallery on a hoarding on Mahatma Gandhi Road for a few weeks in the
early 1970s when I was a university student, outside the Revel Tours office,
who had no doubt given them the space for free. There were no galleries at all
in Bangalore then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I had my first solo show in 1983 in Venkatappa Art gallery,
an adjunct of the Government Archeological museum which you could hire for 30
rupees a day. (The government built the gallery when artists protested
vociferously for one.) The funny thing was that the show just before mine was
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Self- Nude</i> painting exhibition of
the artist Savitri which had created a big furore, and people were pouring in
to see her work right into my show. Those were the halcyon days of open
thinking in India, when instead of violent censorship and court cases, there
were heated debates in the press about her work, which continued for weeks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Sara Abraham’s Kala Yatra was the first professional gallery
to open in the city bringing shows of established Indian artists from outside,
and later Sakshi Gallery. But the eccentric thing about these two galleries was
that they had no interest at all in showing Karnataka artists’ works, though
many of us were being courted by major galleries elsewhere, till Sakshi
Bangalore had a takeover by Sunitha Kumar Emmert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sunitha’s Gallery SKE and Premilla Baid’s
Gallery Sumukha are the two professional art galleries in the city. (There are
others which I would call ‘non-serious’). SKE has got a critical reputation in
a short period for showing conceptual work of mainly young artists and
functions like a western gallery, while Sumukha is a more open, eclectic space
where there are talks and workshops, and artists have done performances and
experimental works. Suman Gopinath and the architect Edgar De Mello have CoLab
which is now project based; their ongoing programme <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Re- Presenting Histories</i> curated with British curator Grant Watson,
has recently mounted major traveling exhibitions of K.P. Krishna Kumar and
Nasreen Mohammedi’s work in European museums. And there is art collector
Abhishek Poddar’s gallery, Tasveer, specializing in photography.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But many of the most interesting projects have been done by
artists on their own in unconventional places, putting in their own money or
raising small sums from a range of sources, from friends, government
departments and other organizations. John Devaraj did some public projects in
the 1980s as also CF John, whose initiative <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Silence
of Furies and Sorrows- Pages of a Burning City</i> was a response to the anti-
Muslim riots of 1995, with Raghavendra Rao, Shanthamani, Rameshchandra,
Ambarish, Nandkishore, Ravishankar Rao and dancer Tripura Kashyap. The show of
mixed media installations , held in the Venkatappa Art Gallery,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was based on a month’s research by the
artists visiting riot hit areas and interviewing people, and finally creating
the works in Sheela Gowda’s newly built studio. Sheela Gowda has long been a
mentor figure to younger artists, while many have been strongly influenced by
Vivan Sundaram’s early political mixed media installations. Umesh Maddanahalli
has remained consistently out of the gallery scene. NS Harsha says he is like
those itinerant Chinese artists, disappearing every now and then to Europe to
work on projects, playing roles in Kannada films and serials when he is here. His
one-and-a-half<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>acre land sculpture <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Earthwork</i> of 1995, one of the most
ambitious individual art projects done in India, has exerted a great influence
on younger artists in Bangalore. It was a series of large black craters
excavated in the ground, with live tethered cows, dramatically lit, as if meteors
had landed on the earth. He also ran an art space, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shankara</i>, in a factory shed given by the Hegde industrial family
where they had workshops and public art projects like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We- As In India</i>, an Austrian- Indian art project there funded by
himself and the artists, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Territories,</i>
a site-specific art show curated by C F John. Ayisha Abraham’s show<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Ends and Beginnings</i>, commemorating her
grandmother’s old house which was soon to be pulled down, ran for a month in
1999 with installations, events and works in progress. Two Khoj international
workshops were organized in Mysore and Bangalore in 2002 and 2003, which was a
Herculean task in a context where there is barely any patronage for
contemporary art. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Many of us have exhibited in our own studios, an outstanding
work being Srinivasa Prasad’s monumental project <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Known to Unknown</i> in which he laboriously covered the entire walls
of his studio with dot drawings made of human ash from unclaimed bodies that he
collected from the crematorium, pressing each ash-dot with his finger. The
audience entered with flaming torches to view the darkened space enveloped with
soft map-like forms reminiscent of aboriginal Dreamtime cave paintings. It was
a magical experience which I would rate as one of the finest shows I have seen in
the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There is a tendency for art writers and curators to assume
that the Indian art scene is a shadow of the system in the west. I believe
there is no ‘gallery system’ here for one thing: there are galleries, but no
general system in the contractual sense as in the west. Indian artists happily
move between gallery and alternate spaces or exhibit in all galleries in those
wonderful events called ‘group shows’ (which is a way of getting access to
artists normally represented by other galleries!). This is to our advantage
because we have more freedom and a wider audience. In fact there is no defined
mainstream as versus alternate art practice really, one finds the most
successful artists also involved in artist spaces, doing experimental and
collaborative work, initiating new media or new forms, and older artists
sponsoring and helping out, while it is not difficult for new artists to
exhibit or be written about. And of course, Indian artists are great
organizers. Perhaps the notion of a professional gallery has never set in
firmly, and many active artists do not have a representing gallery, preferring
to show in rented public spaces, consulates or mainly in group shows. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At the same time, there is a need for good art schools,
museums and professional galleries, biennales and art fairs to anchor the art
scene in a way, draw large audiences, and to historicize art as well as make it
commercially viable. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Indian art scene
is that artists here have an audience, patronage, a history of critical and art
historical writing, and a gallery scene within our own country, which does not
exist in most post-colonial countries. When we showed in the first Johannesburg
Biennale in 1995 for instance, India was one of the few countries in which both
the curator (Geeta Kapur) and all the artists actually lived and worked here,
while in the case of most African, South American and Asian countries, both
artists and curators lived in western countries. This grounding I believe is
crucial to the problem of address – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">who</i>
do we address, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from where</i> do we
address them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">May 2010<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></i></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">(Postscript: Kannada
poet Mamta Sagar and I are now preparing for a collaborative performance for my
upcoming slot in Samuha…)<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Websites:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">www.1shanthiroad.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">www.bar1.org<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">bangaloreartistscentre@gmail.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">samuha.wikidot.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">jaaga.wikidot.com<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">www. blanknoise.org<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">World-Information
City Exhibition, Bangalore<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Photographs
courtesy artist spaces and artists<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-79931642922867633122010-03-01T00:55:00.000-08:002016-04-28T00:29:49.432-07:00TAKE 1 - Black I Issue 1 I March 2010<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady
Strikes Again<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The air is thick with
identity controversies which seem to manifest themselves over statues and
monuments. The Phantom Lady ponders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HEROES<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">If you wander about the city of Bangalore, you will be
surprised to find many of its public statues wrapped with cloth as if a local
Christo had been hard at work. One of these was the statue of the Tamil saint
poet Thiruvalluvar near the Ulsoor Lake erected by the Tamil Sangham<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> Ulsoor is a Tamil area, and hostilities
have existed ever since the British, after the defeat of Tipu, created the
largest cantonment in India in Bangalore and populated it with Tamils to
counter the Kannada speaking City area under the Maharaja of Mysore. These
hostilities have worsened lately with Kaveri water disputes. Kannada
nationalists would not allow the statue to be unveiled, and Thiruvalluvar has
remained a ‘conceptual’ work for eighteen years till a statue of the Kannada
saint poet Sarvagna<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>was put up in
Chennai. Both were inaugurated in close sequence recently in a great
demonstration of what was called ‘statue diplomacy’, and considered a momentous
step in the strained inter- state politics by all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Tamils are great forerunners in many matters cultural,
and the Dravidian and pure Tamil movements created a strong self-identity.
Chennai itself is a city mapped by its statues of Tamil heroes. They say if you
asked someone for directions there he would say - go past the Anna statue and
turn left at the Kamaraj<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Statue - and
so on. The Marina beach has large memorials on its sands dedicated to
Annadurai, MGR etc. (On the pavement of the beach is also one of the most
famous works of modern art in the city, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury’s bronze
sculpture, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Triumph of Labour</i>). NTR as
chief minister of Andhra installed a row of bronze statues of Telugu heroes on
the Tank Bund Road in Hyderabad, and the joke goes that they all look like him
in various roles as a film actor, including the woman poet. The twenty- two
metre great granite Buddha which sank once, but has been safely installed now
in the centre of the Husain Sagar Lake, is also said to bear a close
resemblance to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Mumbai, being larger and richer than any of these cities,
has planned to build a 350 crore Shivaji monument outdoing the Statue of
Liberty, standing on its own island in the sea. The irony, as Girish Shahane
writes, is that while Liberty is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy,
Shivaji has been co-opted as a mascot for Hindu/ Marathi identity politics and
has become a symbol of divisiveness. Mayavati’s agenda is more ambitious: she
is erecting statues of herself and Dalit icons on twenty four memorial sites in
the state of Uttar Pradesh. A front-page case has been going on in the Supreme
Court to stop the construction work on public money. So what is the real
opposition to Mayavati’s memorial building – its lavish use of government
money, that she is a ‘heroine’ and not a ‘hero’, its Vanitas ; or the fact that
it is going to be a place of Dalit identity, where there is none other? Or are these
purposes so inextricably mixed like good and evil in our complicated times,
that we cannot separate them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After the first heady idealistic days of early independence,
making political statues has become embarrassing for contemporary artists. The
language of contemporary art is anti-establishment, while the public demand is
for idealized neo-classical representations. Then who makes these statues? The
good sculptors are usually trained in the big art schools and specialize in making
political portraits, or are from traditional families of sculptors. Some time
ago I visited a factory near Gwalior which takes orders to make political
statues from most of North India. As a busload of us approached, we saw acres
and acres of spectacular rolling hillocks, set with dramatic groups of figures
of political leaders all gesturing into the air in their characteristic poses: Netaji
Bose, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira, Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh, Jhansi ki Rani,
Mahatma Gandhi. It was an amazing sight: the heroes, the vast sky, the bare
landscape, and the larger than life tableaux in various perspectives in the clear
light of the panoramic view. The factory makes fibre-glass casts first from the
clay models, then takes moulds from them and casts them in bronze. The waste
fibre-glass models are then placed on the site, making a kind of unmeant
installation of dark post-modernist satire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Who then can be the heroes of our times, and how can we
celebrate their lives? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I recently saw <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Advocate</i>, a film made by Deepa Dhanraj on the Hyderabad lawyer KG
Kannabiran, one of the founders of the human rights and civil liberties
movements in India, a man who has spent a lifetime challenging the Indian State
to uphold justice. While the first part of the film is a biography and history
dominated by his charismatic presence, the second half, with interviews with
his wife and colleagues, contains a critique. He is never shown larger than
life, but as passionate, hardworking, brilliantly analytical, firm in his
beliefs and relentlessly persistent. His wife, prominent in the women’s
movement herself, critiques him for his lack of interest in women’s issues as
being central to human rights; his colleagues, for other weaknesses in his
thinking and practice. But finally, the film in both its parts makes a
monumental plea for a way of life that is serious minded and committed to
social justice, lit up with an intense life-energy. At a time of extreme
hysteria over icons and symbols, the biography shows that a reasoned analysis
and historical sense need not belittle, nor aggrandize, an exemplary life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Phantom Lady<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">1 March 2010</span><o:p></o:p></i><br />
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-47712091496533425832009-11-01T22:26:00.000-08:002016-11-01T02:19:33.007-07:00India Today I Issue on Beauty I 2009<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Beauties and beasts</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Published In India Today issue On ‘Beauty’, 2009</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The cultural theorist N. Rajyalakshmi interviews the artist Pushpamala N. on the quest for eternal youth, beauty and fitness, and the culture of consumption.</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Ms Pushpamala, what do you think about the recent craze for plastic surgery in India?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>You know I’m really shocked at how powerful the plastic surgery lobby seems to be. Some years ago, Agony Aunts in magazines advised people with acne, big noses, skinny, fat, etc. to use grandma remedies, exercise, or just change their hairstyles or clothes to hide the feature. It’s straight away nose jobs and tummy tucks and botox injections now. And I’m sorry to say that our plastic surgeons being no artists, make all the noses the same, a Caucasian upturned Barbie doll nose, which you can see from Shilpa Shetty downward. I think a standard how-to manual comes along with the nose job kit, which the surgeons follow faithfully! </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>And the nose is one of the most individualized features!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Someone told me that the shape of the nose and the shape of the chin are related, so if you change one, you have to change the other. I think this was Michael Jackson’s downfall – as he kept changing his nose, he had to keep changing his chin.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Which reminds me, fairness creams being big business here, all the ‘phoren’ cosmetic companies are in the race for the huge market. East meets West, tradition meets modernity etc. Shah Rukh Khan who started off being brown skinned is fair and lovely now, no doubt from using the men’s fairness cream that he endorses.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>But I see more people walking now in the cities, it’s quite the fashionable thing to exercise!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Oh yes, the ideal of urban Indians in the past was the survival of the fattest - to let go as soon as you have your first child, let it all hang out from between your too-short blouse and the too-low sari waist - or have it all pop out extravagantly between the buttons of the too-tight safari shirt. It was a sign of prosperity and contentment. Men and women nowadays are buying sports shoes and going for brisk walks round and round the walking paths that have been created in all the former playgrounds of our cities. They are usually of Japanese- type design, and have artificial rocks created from gravel and Fevicol between picturesquely low rolling mounds of Chinese grass.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I saw a very funny Kannada TV talk show where the ‘thin’ male anchor is telling the fat ladies that if they don’t lose weight their men will fly away- and then there’s a sort of montage of large women jogging and puffing juxtaposed with rows of beauty contestants walking the ramp. Talk about sexism!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>And what do you think about beauty contests?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Years ago, when ABCL was hosting the first Miss World contest in India in Bangalore, a motley crowd of protestors landed up from all over India, extreme right rubbing shoulders with the leftwing, feminists with religious bigots etc. saying it was against our culture, sexist and morally corrupting. But in fact, it’s amusing to see that all these so-called decadent Western phenomena match quite effortlessly with our good old feudal values like the arranged marriage market and buttress them. If the ideal of an international class is the minimal lean mean Kareena Kapoor in designer clothes, the desis love the heavily ornamented bahus of the K serials. I’m amazed at the number of jewellery shops – is there a recession? In fact, much of the consumerism here revolves around marriage and dowry.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>And fashion shows seem to have caught the Indian imagination…</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Ms. Rajyalakshmi, walking the ramp is a rage everywhere and is an integral part of Indian culture now! All annual college functions have fashion shows. It fits in seamlessly with our yearning for past glories and our anxieties about caste and religion. Our fashion designers survive on their Punjabi wedding outfits. One of our fashion gurus who was incarcerated in a Dubai jail some years ago passed the time by training his fellow jail inmates how to walk the ramp, which apparently had a spiritual effect. Walking the ramp seems to satisfy some deep atavistic need in us, perhaps it goes back to our ancient custom of the <i>swayamvar</i>, or even the traditional marriage selection interview, where the girl was asked questions, told to thread a needle, and to walk up and down to check whether all her faculties and limbs were in working order.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR: <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>(laughs) Do you think we are obsessed by beauty?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Well, recession or not, one business which is thriving and expanding in India is the beauty parlour. You find beauty parlours in the poorest slums and farthest boondocks. This is in a country, mind you, where most people lack piped water or sanitary systems, leave alone literacy or public health care. And these beauty parlours, amusingly, have blonde blue-eyed models advertised on their signboards. Colonialism is like a mind parasite! And while there is this whole cornucopia of cosmetics and toiletries to beautify us, our towns and countryside are being uglified relentlessly, from factories dumping toxic waste, filth and garbage, to mindless unplanned demolitions and building. So while the European cities we so admire remain beautiful museum pieces, we make our habitats unliveably ugly and unhealthy. The worst epidemics of cholera, hepatitis and plague start in our richest cities. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Gyms are flourishing too, sometimes three or four on a street…</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>As in everything else, our film stars set the trend. It takes so much energy to make the pelvic thrusts and bosom shudders in filmy dances that they’ve taken to weight lifting, building six packs and power yoga, inspiring the nation. But somehow yoga has not really caught on in a big way with Indians, perhaps because it is actually traditional and has no exotic appeal besides being usually taught by conservative old fogies. I must admit I’ve started going to the gym myself lately to keep fit, in a gentle geriatric way. But the biggest racket now is the Ayurvedic massage spa, which is spreading out from Kerala with an unstoppable centrifugal force and is our latest gift to the world.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>How do you think globalization and liberalization of the economy have affected our self-image?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>It has created a culture of the surface, from economic and political policies to a general obsession with trivialities, or in trivializing everything. There’s a strange idea that multiplying luxury goods will benefit the poor. It’s like the icing on a mud cake, and the icing has only shown up the ugly poverty in the country, the kind of poverty that is not found anywhere else in the world except in sub-Saharan Africa. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The media is the worst manifestation of this. A leading paper had horrific pictures of the Gujarat riots next to photographs of the latest modeling contest on the front page. All images become equal and saleable, pain and suffering become products. This is really evident in the Page 3 – ization of culture. A society’s art forms provide a mirror, a critique and a means to introspect. A serious discourse on art, literature, theatre, cinema and music is a serious introspection about our times and ourselves. I think there’s been a dumbing down of society lately that’s to be regretted. We’ve become beastly, though that’s an insult to animals!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NR:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>What effect do you think the collapse of the global economy will have on this euphoria of consumption, or this ‘beastly beauty’?</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Well, we’re considered economically booming so all the ‘phoren’ brands are wooing us with goods that they can’t sell otherwise. A friend remarked that just as ten years ago when Indians started winning international beauty competitions, cosmetic companies and designer labels flooded India, <i>Slumdog Millionaire’s</i> success would open the door for an influx of western film companies. I heard from film friends in Mumbai that there are scores of western film units coming there after <i>Slumdog</i> to film Dharavi, rag pickers, the Deonar Municipal Dump, etc. The funniest story was about the municipality hearing about a particular shoot and sending imported garbage trucks with mechanical road washers and garbage men dressed in spotless overalls and gloves to the spot to impress the units. Perhaps the government should stop ‘beautifying’ our cities by clearing slums, we can make more money out of slum tourism!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The last ten or fifteen years have been extremely contradictory times, with a kind of opening up, as well as a kind of looking backwards to some imagined golden past in order to preserve grand old hierarchies and exploitative systems. There’s been a lot of violence, a beastliness and brutality between different sections of society, struggling both to open up, and to close out. There have been so many tensions and aspirations released by a certain notion of progress which did not consider and still refuses to consider the ground realities. Why are we so seduced by the image of Singapore, a small trader island the size of Bangalore under a notorious dictatorship, which in no way relates to the needs of the vast and diverse sub-continent that is India? Surely we need to think beyond surface glitter. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pushpamala N.</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Bangalore November 2009</span></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-243749132793043678.post-39896751159394629792008-11-27T22:44:00.000-08:002016-11-01T02:20:32.884-07:00Reframe DVD I pub. Lowave Paris I 27 November 2008 <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">NATIONAL PUDDING AND INDIGENOUS SALAD</span></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">N. Rajyalakshmi, Chief Reporter of Ideal Times, Bangalore, interviews the director Pushpamala N.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Ms. Pushpamala, the title of your film </span><i style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">National Pudding and</i><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><i style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Indigenous Salad</i><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> is rather unusual. What does it mean?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>(laughs) The film is based on family cookbooks dating from the 1950s and ‘60’s, the period soon after Indian Independence. <i>Rashtriy Kheer</i> (<i>National Pudding</i>) and <i>Desiy Kheer</i> (<i>Indigenous</i> <i>Salad</i>) are two Independence Day recipes using the colours of the Indian flag, which my mother had cut out from a magazine. I found them very amusing as a title for the film, which is about the modern Indian family as ideal citizens. And India, with its various communities and ethnic groups could be both described as a “pudding” or as a “salad” – melting into one dish, or coming together as separate ingredients!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR: </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Madam, why recipe books? </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I’ve been interested in using women’s material and women’s narratives. I happened to find these old and tattered cookbooks of my mother and mother-in-law, both of whom died more than two decades ago. It was very moving to read through them, they were like a diary, a document of their lives. I wanted to use this very personal material to say something larger about the period, and about the new nation. <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR: </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">But the characters in the film write on a </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">blackboard, not in </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">notebooks…</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>The blackboard is a pedagogical device. I use bits of the original text in the film, but if I had made the characters write in notebooks, it would be too literal and illustrative. The blackboard becomes emblematic, and the space becomes a classroom, the classroom of the nation! In fact the father and son’s notes are literally class notes, while all three use lists, constantly ordering their worlds.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">And why is it a silent film? </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I love early silent film! It’s a kind of “primitive” form and I wanted to see the 1950’s as a “primitive” period in modern Indian history, in the sense of a beginning - with a kind of freshness and naivety. I wanted the look of an old technical training film, somewhat distressed. And of course, the text could then come in as inter-titles.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">How did you put together a script from these </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">cookbooks?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>There were several books from my mother-in-law, which had started off as the Colonel father’s used military notebooks, in which the entire family started writing things. She is at first pregnant with the son, who then grows up and also starts writing in the books! It was the history of a military family over ten years. Each character came across as a type, but the same time, there is a certain tenderness and pathos. The mother uses the notebook as a diary when she is pregnant, addressed to her army husband who is posted far away. I read the books closely and picked out the most interesting bits from the huge amount of material, which was in several languages, and put the text, image and music together as a montage. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Is the film supposed to be funny?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>It’s both funny and serious, Ms. Rajyalakshmi! The film has a lot of text, and nothing much happens, so the cartoon form makes things entertaining. Each character is sharply defined by a distinct walk, costume and music score. I tried to make a complex work formally from what was really very simple material with the pace, the editing and the unexpected juxtapositions. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Tell me about your role as the mother?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>For the first time, I played a real character from <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>my own family, my mother-in-law, who I had never <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>met! Then I was trying to get the walk of a heavily <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>pregnant woman, and the funny thing is, wherever I <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>went, I always saw a pregnant woman. I would stop at <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>once and observe her walk. I tried to borrow a <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>readymade “stomach” from a costume company, which <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>was hilarious - it was a sack filled with sawdust, <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>and completely shapeless. Finally I used a pillow, <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>which my friend who played the Colonel confirmed <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>looked very realistic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Madam, this is your first video. Why did you start </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">making films?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I’ve been writing down video ideas for years; sounds on the left page and images on the right. When the time was right, it all came together. It’s a continuation of my interest in narrative: starting with sculpture, going on to performance photography, and now also to video films!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">How did you go about the shoot?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>The Colonel is an old friend from an army family who is a management Professor and had shifted to Singapore. I had to wait till Christmas till he came back for a holiday. I had organized the costumes, blackboard and props, but the most difficult was finding a ten year- old boy to play the son, and when I tracked one down, I couldn’t get through to his father, till two days before the shoot. We had a late night meeting to explain the whole thing to the boy; they went off the next day and bought the school uniform and shoes. A filmmaker friend organized the cinematographer free for a day, after he finished her shoot – it was my first film and I decided to have a static camera, and create a tableau. I was up till 2 o’clock the night before cooking for the unit and making the notebooks. The shoot was very simple: the film was really shaped on the editing table.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">NR:</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">Congratulations, Ms. Pushpamala. What next?</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">PN:<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>There’s some fantastic material in those cookbooks, which belongs to me, which I don’t want to waste! So I am looking at making another recipe film, but it’s so complicated that it will take time to get things together…</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Pushpamala N</span></i></span></div>
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Pushpamala Nhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02892709205283493150noreply@blogger.com0