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An institutionally devised anachronism
Kavitha Balakrishnan, artist and art critic based in Kerala, in this exquisite piece of critique dismantles the curatorial myths built around the topic of ‘Women Artists in Kerala’
‘Life’ that has not yet inhabited the records of authorizing knowledge, creates difficulties at least for ‘the historians of lives’, though not necessarily for the lives of the undocumented. In spite of so many decades and waves of feminisms across the lives of women apparently around the globe, the recently felt need for declaring the presence of certain women painters as those not yet recorded in to cultural discourses of Kerala seems anachronistic while even the possibilities for ‘a discourse of localized art practices in the age of international professional validations’ remains a yet to be worked out area.
In an exhibition held at Contemporary Art Gallery, Durbar Hall, Kochi from 8th to 15th of March 2007, Kerala Lalith Kala Academy presented eighteen women as ‘painters in Kerala’. On a basic level, this is an important exhibition that attempted for the first time to screen women painters of Kerala.
Catalogue locates an unreal (matrilineal) history:
There accompanied a catalogue designed and written by Ajayakumar, the curator of the show. In an apparent attempt to create a historical lineage of women painters in Kerala, this region is put forward in this catalogue as an ‘exception’ to many other Indian cultural regions where ‘the art of painting and related practices are a part of the day-to-day life of women’. It is dubious how far women who do the art of painting for art gallery practices make it as a ‘day-to-day event’ in India at any region at any point of time. Art galleries in India could contain only a handful of women all through out 20th century and the feminist practices in India in 1970s and 1980s had to witness very individually formulated interventions by Nalini Malani, Navjoth Althaf, Arpitha Singh, Arpana Kaur, Gogi Saroj Pal, Rekha Rodwittiya and some such ‘others’ who always tried to penetrate into male-dominated gallery habits with immense amount of reservations and challenges posited within the very paradigms of their practice. It is different from any ‘day-to-day event’. They are doubly patch-worked and often very strongly alienated efforts as compared to their male colleagues. It is also an altogether different context from hobby painting or traditional floral painting or any such domestically bound inherited practices where women are obviously creating ‘their own spaces’ with less friction. But when women geared towards art gallery practices they always had to situate themselves vis-a-vis outsider standards rather than within any comfortable space of essential femininity or locality.
Tracing a locally bound historical continuity in a matrilineal manner through Mangalabai Thampuratty (beloved sister of Raja Ravi Varma) and T.K. Padmini as done in this catalogue, would do no help to understand the complexity of problems in working as an artist in Kerala with gender identity of a female. Padmini should be seen more in relation with KCS Panikkar than in any lineage with Mangalabai just in the fact that both are located at desperate contexts of art history where one’s being woman had nothing to determine. Mangalabai shared the issues of artistic acts in the context of her brother’s successful circumscribing of the dominant European idioms. T.K. Padmini had to deal more with discursive issues of ‘modernism’ as was getting constructed by many male gurus including her other teachers and fellow male students at that particular time. There is no historical continuity felt in life here or anywhere in India for that matter, for a woman to feel an allegiance particularly with a mother-figure when it comes to the case of art gallery practices. It is because all these isolated examples in history, had to inter-twine the fact of being a woman through many father-figures and discursive patterns one had to face at each contemporaneity. The very man’s world remains the operational premise of women when she enters an art gallery practice. And today only those women are creating so called ‘space of their own’ who can strategically act upon this hilarious man’s world. Sometimes it appears as a no-man’s world too, making the situation far more complex and ‘contemporary’ and somehow less alienated for a woman if she is still from some privileged conditions in life!
An ambiguous disparity: not just women painter’s problem
There is an increasing fragmentation in the lives and experiences of women across the world. Many sensitive women have to strategically overlook the simplistic gendered paradigms in both art and life. One's own political focus on gendered marginality has started getting more politically out of the way!
Even many of the women exhibited here do not share any coherent experience of history or artistic discourse at all, that can hope to provide them a community feeling or recognizable action plans. Gender identities are simply inadequate today for anyone who is conscious of painting as a dynamic socio-political activity. Women in metropolitan histories of art have already created somewhat graspable genealogy of their own efficient forging of dominant identities to the cause of one’s individual functionalities in life, though not simplistically as one of gendered enlisting of lineage.
So participating in a women’s exhibition does no big job in presenting such complex struggles for these women, especially when it appears as a letter from an institutional authority inviting works for a screening. If it were an evolved concern from the part of these women on the basis of their struggles to achieve a common platform, it would have been a different case altogether.
The first question that came to my mind both as a participant in this show and as somebody teaching art history in a fine arts college in Kerala is why such a task at this moment and what provoked or inspired a cultural institution to do this particular kind of showcasing task. The first answer that came to my mind is that this is part of a common ideological aim of a left front government supported executive council. That is fine. This spirited housing of women into the cultural discourses of this region is pretty appreciable. But it is important at this point to look into the basis on which this curated exhibition and a one-day seminar conducted on the International women’s day acknowledged some women as ‘working like artist colleagues’ and ‘as dignified as men’ here.
Different kinds of women with varied trainings and consistencies are assembled on the basis of an institutional ideology of bringing women artists together on a common platform of ‘participation’. On the basic level, this is a proof that the artistic world of at least eighteen women with roots mostly in Kerala is so desperately scattered. It is a fact that women passing out every year from the fine arts colleges of Kerala shall be just counted easily on fingers even today. And even among them the sustained professional dedication towards an art gallery practice is still less in number. Eighteen is not a small or unreal number though one can add some more women who equally could have passed this ‘screening’ if their works were collected.
But much more importantly, men trained in art (counting to a bigger number of course) and confined to this locale and who generally have not proven with considerable ‘professional success' yet, also work in such desperately incoherent levels of awareness regarding discursively (and often mistaken fully as commercially) viable international languages, attitudes and functioning today.
An ambiguous disparity itself is the lowest and only possible common denominator of anybody working in ‘non-metro’ and ‘quasi-metro’ cultures whether it is man or woman. So obliquely, this show states that this is not just woman painter's issue alone. Layers of locality on these women are to be identified within the methods of functioning rather than finding mother-figures.
There is an apparent difficulty one faces at the moment one starts to compare and contrast these artists on show who belong to various schoolings, backgrounds and possessing different levels of proven accomplishments. On one hand, this might be helpful to project this show as an open ended and seemingly inclusive effort. But then, this very fact destabilizes any simplistic political claim that can be derived from this show as an identity politics with a feminist perspective.
The degree of political efficacy of each artist participating in this show varies and remains desperate too. While presenting individual struggles to grasp and express one’s situations into a visual language of articulated discourses, many participants of this show cling on to patterns of time-worn modernist discourses or academic classroom exercises. In some works, rather than any discursive compatibility with the practices of contemporary art, some symbolic romances of personalized rhetoric are needed to make them valid. Dr. Razia Tony in her paper presentation in the seminar pointed out the need to recognize some women artists in south India right from 1960s in the modernist semi-abstract grooming for their consistent professional outputs. It was a valid point. But one wonders why she as an artist remains with seemingly un-enlivening quasi-abstract moorings. It can be part of a conscious choice also to re-affirm one’s long marginalized language in the new contexts. But some others present much more articulated standpoints. Kabita Mukerji injects her expressions with stark allusions and Rathi Devi works with an uninhibited mockery. Sreekumari makes an interesting painterly maneuvering on insect life. Sreeja P also posits from an articulated position.
Issue of women as professionals and individuals: yet to be addressed
How much ever well-intentioned the effort is, any curatorial attempt to simply consolidate women as in any manner an identical group based on their participation, is doomed to fail today unless and until it is grounded sensitively in their very dialogic and historically specific contextualization with regard to the dominant forms. It is simply because such an effort will not contain the professional issues of women as individuals. The curatorial remarks in catalogue did not research on each individual woman’s efforts through out life till now in professionally dealing with the discourse of art. Why they are not consistent or if otherwise, in what way each of them encounter with their professional anxieties are completely ignored. Instead, it briefed some formal observations of some of the sent works or some stray comments from some of the participants.
Finally this irresponsible consolidation neatly and dominantly ends up as admitting some women ‘as working like artist colleagues’ and ‘as dignified as men’ here and nothing more.
Of course, the paintings in the gallery showed and spoke their share by themselves. That is the way we women expressed our multiple layers.
Hence as a woman's show at the age of post-feminist critiques, this curation lacks rigor since it does not place these women in the larger frameworks and histories of modern art gallery practices. Instead, it localizes them much more, without raising real problems in assuming ‘professional identities’ in the world of booming art markets and some savvy tastes. So this virtually defeats these women’s own professional struggles of this day.
But if this provokes some of these women, to find a way to overcome such possible pitfalls in any institutional consolidation of identities, that will lead to put an extra effort to locate selves in much better ways in future.
An evolving political space of ‘non-metro cultures’ ?
At the same time, there are appreciable efforts on the part of Kerala Lalith Kala Academy to evolve a different political space for artists to operate, (though not necessarily to accommodate all individual variances even there) and it is reflected in another exhibition of artists from Kerala ‘South by South West’ (14 March to 20th March) at Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi following this show.
Such efforts may gear up discourses of locally developing discursive awareness and mutations of disparate aesthetic ‘status quo’s in the works of many artists in the age of globalization. There is an immanent need also for new paradigms of curation and connoisseurship to understand a huge world of non-metro cultures and artists properly.
It is important to see that many of the proven women of the art gallery system today have consciously located in ‘metropolitan’ or ‘thoroughly urbanized’ cultures. So marginalisation of localized women’s orientation needs to be addressed as a larger issue, not simply through a confounding lineage history.
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