Holy Positions
Vidya Kamath’s latest series of works titled ‘Holy Positions’ will be presented in a solo show at the Guild Galley, New York in March. Johny ML looks at the works of Vidya Kamath and observes that the artist’s explorations in the sacred realms of Gods could ruffle many feathers.
Icons are the symbolic repositories of cultural memories and aspirations of a society. Cultural memories and aspirations, when articulated with reverence, turn into mythologies. Within a particular cultural context, oral mythologies demand visual representations and these representations in turn result into a scheme of iconography. In this osmotic process, iconographic representations gain up symbolism by adding and subtracting cultural values and get attached to the politico-religious discourse of the particular society that gives birth to it. The demarcating line between these loaded icons and their interpretations for pragmatic purposes, is so thin that most often its blurring facilitates politico-religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. Perhaps, we in India live on this blurred edge and become sentimental about our own icons (whether it is religious or political) despite the logical secularist claims that we uphold.
Vidya Kamath, a scholar in Indian mythologies and a visual artist, would like to call this thin line of demarcation as ‘Holy Position.’ Holy position is as terrifying as a minefield, especially when such a position is approached, analyzed and negotiated from a gendered and gendering point of view. Vidya Kamath’s latest exhibition project titled ‘Holy Positions’, slated to take place at the Guild Gallery, New York, deals with the popular representations of gods, goddesses, holy men and women. She articulates her ideological positioning within this discourse of ‘holy-ness’ by superimposing her own portraits with the popular holy representations, using digital manipulations.
Bringing an analogy between the representations of holy positions and minefield is pertinent as both these categories function surreptitiously in a land of cultural discourse and abandoned war zones. They are mute and innocent until an external pressure is applied on them. Landmines explode when people stray on them and the explosions leave them killed or handicapped for life. Similarly, holy representations remain mute and innocent until vested interests stray into their fields. For detecting the minefields, special devices are used and once detected they are defused in sanitized conditions. Meanwhile, the holy positions are detected and debated using theoretical devices (unlike the sentimental tools meant for emotional inflammation) and are ‘de-fused’ and ‘re-articulated’ in logically ‘sane’ conditions.
Hence, one should acknowledge the fact that Vidya Kamath’s re-presentations or re-articulations of the popular representations of holy positions is an extremely sensitive one and it could explode into unforeseeable dimensions, if not understood within the theoretical framework she sets for it. Re-articulation or re-presentation (to use a more precise art historical term, interpolation) of holy positions could amount to vandalism and desecration, considering the counter positioning adopted by the religious fundamentalists on the aesthetical issues in our recent art historical past. In India, secular images are permitted to be interpolated. If the image of Gandhi or Nehru is digitally manipulated in order to make an aesthetic statement, none cares. Looking at the many representations of Indira Gandhi during the emergency and post-emergency period, those of Sonia Gandhi during the recent past, we are assured of our secularist claims. Even some scandalous video films made on Mahatma Gandhi recently went into oblivion without ruffling many feathers.
In all these cases, the interpolations and manipulations are done by males. However, when M.F.Husain, who belongs to a minority community in India, did an imaginative portrait of the holy woman, Sita, being rescued by a holy ‘man’, Hanuman, it became scandalous. Husain’s position as an interpreter is weakened by his non-belonging-ness to the majority community. Viday’s self positioning as a mediator of holy positions in her works could render her handicapped for her non-belonging-ness to ‘male artist’ category.
II
Vidya’s latest series comes as a part of her ongoing engagement with popular mythologies and their role in the mundane lives of the ordinary people. As an informed scholar and an ardent researcher on these issues, she looks at them from a feminist point of view. However, it should be made clear that Vidya’s feminist positioning within the generic cultural discourse of the country is not a militant one. Her engagement with feminism and the feminine is rather a critical category than an ideological one. Placing her own image as an emblematic of a particular representational category, she critiques the social imposition of values on such representations.
In her first solo Vidya dealt with the Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS), which in medical parlance is considered to be a treatable disease. Taking the texts written by feminist sociologists such as Arundhati Subramanian and Gita Chadha as a point of departure, Vidya superimposed these texts on her digitally manipulated portraits. These texts repudiated the medico-legal notions of PMS as a treatable disease and made counter arguments saying that the PMS was one of the most creative periods in a woman’s life where she could express her completely without confining herself into the social codings. These digitally manipulated images strangely resembled the portraits of Saskia done by Rembrandt.
When Vidya comes to her next project titled `Re-Write’ in 2005, she moves away from the predominant textual renditions and concentrates more on the visual contexts. The issues related to PMS come back to this series in a more refined way. Hailing from a Goan Gauda Saraswat Brahmin family, Vidya tries to locate her childhood memories, where she used to be treated as a virgin goddess during the pre-puberty days. She looks at how the attribution of godhead is nullified once the biological clock starts ticking in the body of a young girl. Vidya, as a grown up woman articulates herself as a ‘kumari’ (virgin) by superimposing her self portrait in the paraphernalia of the ritual.
In another work from the same project, titled ‘Making of Krishna’ Vidya uses a traditional studio photograph and digitally manipulates with the popular image of Lord Krishna. Interestingly, she shares the pregnant body of her sister and this composite image brings in three different notions of body into one, thereby displacing the final truth value of constituent bodies. She does not indulge in feminist sermonizing here. Instead, the artist enjoys the playfulness of digital montaging and its unexpected meanings.
III
Holy Positions, unlike her early works deviate from the autobiographical path traverse into the realm of public. This is a residual region where the mundane is transformed (transcended?) into the mythical. The ordinary people in this country are always looking out of holy men and women in order to find ventilation for their suppressed and repressed desires for the sublime. Attaining the sublime is considered to be the most difficult thing as he has to go through the rituals of daily life. Then the holy mediations become handy and it takes him into a quasi transcendental realm where could see godly icons shedding tears or drinking milk. He can even drink the filthiest of water from sea only because it tastes sweet thanks to some god-alone-knows chemical reaction. He can turn anything into a myth by believing the illogical and find logic for believing in it.
The artist, with her advantageous position as a scholar could dissociate from this realm of myth making. However, dealing with such holy positions is dangerous. Vidya’s articulations could be viewed with suspicion because she still has the social handicap of being a woman. When she superimposes her own image, clothed in a track suit, complete with a pair of jogging shoes and T-Shirt, with that of the Sheshashayin Vishnu (Lord Vishnu in his reclining posture on the snake) it becomes scandalous. She incorporates the holy representations of Durga, Vishnu, Saraswati and Krishna into the scheme of re-presentations.
Vidya sports a happy smile, as adopted from the blissful smile of the popular icons signifying harmony and purity of self. This smile is the critical tool that she employs to debate the ‘sacredness’ of the popular icons and the sacred ‘freedom’ of the individual artist. Vidya does not question the godliness of the respective images that she has used. Nor does she desecrate them with scandalous interpolations. She, like an ordinary person, who would like to have his photograph clicked along with the cut out of Aishwarya Rai or Abhishek Bacchan, places her self within the image of the godheads. She converts the aspiration of the ordinary man in the photo fair into a conscious deliberation with the images that she selects. Vidya’s dissociation with the myth and its image happens through a strange association with the very same myth and image.
To put in Vidya’s own words, “Holy Positions is an attempt to understand personal/political/social iconographies articulated through popular/religious posters of gods, goddesses and political personalities. Term ‘Holy’ holds a place of great fascination in our collective imagination. It signifies the longing for a time or state that transcends the conflicting nature of everyday reality existing only in tales handed down from generation to generation as a collective memory. The Indian public imagination keeps reclaiming this state through constantly inventing holy men and women who operate as beacons that once again herald such transcended states. In my work I have used the visual props gathered from popular poster art that are usually employed to suggest holiness and then superimposed them on self portraits.”
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