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Fake Masculinities
Shakuntala Kulkarni in her recent show at Chemould Prescott, Mumbai explores anti-patriarchal resistive stance of contemporary women through visual interventions. Amrita Gupta Singh says Kulkarni’s iconic figuration of women resists stereotypes of femininity and transgresses gendered constructions of the female body, which is only a marketing strategy in capitalist structures.
“Masculinity is Fake” declares Slavoj Zizek this grandly in the film, A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, while another shot of him watering a garden of flowers (read vagina dentata), almost violently, only displays his revulsion (or fear?) to ‘flowers’. An indicative example of the crux of gender contestations and violence? If masculinity is fake, why do males go to great lengths to prove their masculinity? Is metro-sexuality (which is again very elite- class based) the counterpoint to the heroic macho male stereotype? Does the answer lie in the donning of pink flower shirts/red pants by males? With men not being the sole providers, the choice of non-marriage, rising ratio of divorces, the acceptance of single mothers, and the availability of Invitro-fertilisation (though its ethical contingents are much debated), the imposing and ostentatious narratives of masculinity are certainly in question.
A very urbane, educated, and financially independent female friend of mine, shared with me with immense pain and disillusionment: “Men are not worth any investment, I don’t want a band-aid treatment of my wounds, I want my wounds to heal naturally”- (this statement after ten years of abuse, all in the name of ‘protective silence’). Another educated woman had to undergo several abortions in order to produce a male heir for the family run business. A tag-line on a Gmail account reads: “Boys and their crooked spines”. From passionate narratives to the building up of defense mechanisms that characterizes the passage of relationships over time, the spillage of power games from the home to the street and across nations, violence seems to be the core of gender politics, and we seem to be cultivating the scabs over our wounds rapidly, almost like high-speed computer deletions, in the passive and un-questioning acceptance of the next wound to be inflicted upon our selves. A recent survey also states that over forty percent of urban women are aligned to various aspects of domestic violence, obsessively gratified in the grand Indian Matrimon-(ey). Though women are equally capable of dysfunctional behaviour, a case example being the mother-in-law syndrome, the woman as ‘victim’ is largely prevalent as I observe in my everyday encounters as the private spills into the public.
What is intriguing for me is how ‘protective silence’ and ‘forgetting’ in a woman is often construed as ‘being nice, good, adjusting and accommodative’. Forgetting is a psychological device that humans adopt to be able to move out of painful histories, it sometimes heals, while at other times, it allows us to be escapists. A strategy often used to assuage the male ego and patriarchal frameworks, what happens psychologically in this ‘silence’ and ‘forgetting’? With these observations in mind, I would like to explore the visual narratives of the Mumbai based artist, Shakuntala Kulkarni. Over the years, Shakuntala, in her paintings, installations, performances and video works has largely dealt with issues of body politics, the male gaze, objectification, ownership, restrictive spaces, claustrophobia and alienation, emerging from experiences and shared stories of the domestic sphere and the psychological dilemmas of the multiplicity of roles that a woman has to play in a capitalist society.
Using the metaphors of grills, walls, curtains, circles, frames and thresholds, Shakuntala raised various questions of confinement and the possibilities of empowerment, the right over one’s body and the choices that women could make to protect this right. One could see this in her iconic figuration of women, with bold dark outlines, where the erotic ambiguities of the ‘nude’ versus the ‘naked’, is coalesced, challenging the patriarchal ideal and commercial norms of feminine beauty, resisting stereotypes of femininity and transgressing gendered constructions of the female body, which is only a marketing strategy in capitalist structures. These earlier works, were positioned in the paradigms of the explosive yet silent feminine Self struggling against repressive structures and in her latest presentation, titled, “…And when she roared the universe quaked” there is a definitive shift where the female protagonist appears in multiple ways, as a victim, defiant warrior, saviour and messiah. While such a positioning would be from the privileged subjectivity of the artist, it nevertheless challenges modes of spectatorship and viewership codes, evoking feelings of discomfort for the viewer.
Consisting of video films and mixed media paintings on fabric and glass, the works map the aesthetics of the female experience and the circumstantial identity of the female body. Numerous small glass paintings are attached to the ceiling, where the viewer has to engage in the act of ‘looking up to’ rather than ‘looking at’ the numerous female figures. A mirror is also given to the viewer so one looks at the fragmented inverted images of these paintings, the women undergoing various forms of pain (abortion) or rebellious defiance (practicing forms of kicking). This piece is one of the most conceptually engaging exhibits, where Shakuntala offers games of viewing, challenging the gaze, as it were.
The other paintings are large scale, of female figures set against decorative patterned surfaces of flowers and foliage (symbols of fertility). These works also recall feminine occupations of stitching and everyday fabric in the validation 'non-high' art forms such as craft (as the artist engaged in an earlier collaborative work ‘Godhadis’, though the approach was different). The women here are engaged in various forms of archery, forms of martial art in the role of the woman as a warrior. Monumental images of defiant protagonists are juxtaposed with minute female forms that are passive recipients to forms of violence, the exultant and ominous played out simultaneously.
In the video installations, Shakuntala positions herself as the protagonist, engaging in childhood games in the set of four films ‘Is it just a game’? Here the artist, enacts, amidst a theatrical set-up, of dark backgrounds with focused light, sound and props, games such as Blind Man’s Bluff, Trust Game or Kabbadi where the woman is largely the victim, desperate to cross thresholds, while also bringing in larger concerns of displacement and ethnic disputes of our fractured times. Though being documentative, these films bring in the artist’s eclectic explorations of theatre and performance. ‘The Role I would love to play- Messiah’ shows the confident artist practicing Aikido and Kyodo karate blocks, where self defense is linked to dignity and self-esteem. Another installation shows a monumental Shakuntala shrouded in darkness tearing apart her breast apart, like the mythical character, Hanuman, to show a powerful self aiming a bow at the viewer, bathed in green light (the colour of life). She is at war, peeling out ‘scabs’, exposing ‘wounds’, both of the female self and the geo-body, probing at ‘protective silences’ and provoking patriarchies.
While there may be several debates raised of whether the woman has to be categorized within the roles that the artist presents to us or how much the personal becomes the political, the artist challenges notions of the assumed ‘naturalness’ of these roles in the public imagination, generating a vigorous feminist debate of patriarchal formations that dominate/violate our everyday lives. Both masculinity and femininity are complex cultural constructs and it is in this explosive domain of that the latest suite of paintings becomes operative.
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