History in Print
Transgression in Print is a detailed documented text on Anupam Sud’s last four decades of artistic career in print making. Along with the development of Anupam Sud as a Printmaking artist this book also provides an interesting overview of the development of printmaking as a modern art language in Indian art. This book explains how a foreign medium/language and technique is adopted and made local by the artists like Somnath Hore, Jagmohan Chopra and Anupam Sud. They visited abroad and studied each aspect of printmaking and tried to find out the Indian alternatives for that.
In this context the chronological structure of the book delineates the development of Anupam Sud’s art in two essays by Gayatri sinha and Roobina Karode. Gayatri Sinha elaborates the development of Anupam sud’s ‘neo-classical’ images from the earlier embryonic images and their relation with the framed composition. Sinha deals with the works from the period from 1960’s to 80’s whereas Roobina Karode has written about the works from 1990’s till now. In second phase of her works Roobina elaborates the development of narration in Sud’s work in relation with technique and the realm of touch and sight.
In conversation with Anupam Sud her students Shukla Sawant and Subba Ghosh are able to bring out various personal aspects of the artist in relation with her art language but the interviewers’ own ideological stance comes out so strongly that some of the times Anupam Sud moves away from the intentions of the questions raised. Most of the questions are bigger than the answers that may be because of mixing up two people are involved in asking questions. But this mixing up creates a confusion regarding the intentions of the questions leaving several points unanswered.
In these essays the class assignment kind of approach towards Anupam Sud’s works and psychoanalytical feminist approach restrict and fix her images in a very outdated mode. In fact Anupam Sud works from a feminine space present in Indian traditional family structure and she deals with a woman's gaze on a woman’s body. These are put in a critical perspective. A gaze directed more by the socio-cultural perspective then a sexual one. That reminds me the solid presence of women protagonists in Krishna Sobti’s novels; their silences and their body languages, which are very similar to the Anupam Sud’s women images.
In connection with this reading and too much stress given on the technical expertise of Anpam Sud in Etching somewhere make a reductive art historical positioning of Anupam Sud’s works. Anupam Sud being a woman and having expertise in the technique of etching become so important that her criticality is sidelined. While the authors generally avoid dealing with the sexuality of the artist, they seem to have given more importance to the overt sexual narratives of other male printmakers like Laxma Gowd at the expense of his technical expertise. The complete silence on the other women artists working in print making at that time in India (specifically New Delhi) like Zarina Hashmi also adds to the reductive art historical reading. |
