Hair & Nails, Talk & Touch: 4 Encounters with Women Artists in Mumbai
Over the past few weeks, Jennifer Doyle has been reporting from her travels in India. Following is her final dispatch. — Ed.
Masooma Syed makes small things, sometimes from materials gathered off the bodies of her friends, her family — a crown from her mother’s hair, tiny chandeliers from her friends’ fingernail clippings. An astonishing amount of care, attention, and labor is implicit in each of these works. The delicate materials are carefully washed and cleaned; the structures made from fingernail clippings sometimes require that tiny holes be drilled into them (without destroying them); each strand of hair is stiffened, shaped, and placed.
Masooma Syed, "Crown," human hair twined, twisted, and knotted, 9"x8"x variable, 2005
The works require an unusual degree of care and attention from the viewer, who is asked to pay attention to that which we hardly notice. Salima Hashmi places these works within the practice of “contemporary miniature” (Contrary Signs: A New Generation of Artists from Pakistan, Flash Art 265 March-April 09). Partly because I’d been looking at his work recently, as I am talking with Syed about her work, I think of William Pope.L — his work with hair and nails is deliberately dirty, trashy (while also visually engaging, even sort of floral). Tim Hawkinson made a two-inch bird skeleton and spiderweb from fingernails and hair. But that work is made from stuff from his own body (as is the also case with William Pope.L). There’s a narcissism in play in their works: William Pope.L’s is abject; Hawkinson’s is boyish. I would not say this is the case for Syed, quite the opposite. These works are made from the traces of other bodies, as sentimental and spooky keepsakes.
Masooma Syed, "No Man's Land," human fingernails glued together, 2002.
The smallness of Syed’s work seems appropriate to an artist who moves between Lahore and New Delhi. As she does so, she crosses one of the world’s most vexed borders. These works materially respond to structurally unstable situations, in which the storage and transport of works can be an artist’s most pressing material problems. Work made from the bodies of those around you makes sense, as both a sustainable and loving practice.
Political Football
Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the third in a series of dispatches from the road. — Ed.
Riyas Komu, "Stadium I," oil on canvas, 2007
Iraq’s victory over Saudi Arabia in the 2007 Asia Cup final is likely to hold up as one the decade’s most significant wins. The team’s victory represented a complex distillation of resistance and anger. The torture and murder of Iraqi athletes is frequently cited in the litany of horrors suffered by the Iraqi people at the hands of Saddam Hussein (see this 2003 Sports Illustrated story). Responding to allegations of torture in the country’s soccer program, in 1997, FIFA investigated the architect of Iraq’s athletics program, Uday Hussein, but spoke only with his people and wrote a report exonerating the sadist. Interest in the plight of the country’s people has long been guided by questions of political expediency. These athletes know intimately what it is to have one’s body enlisted in the service of the state, and are wary at best about having their experiences drafted into discourse defending the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. On winning the cup, while a frantic official stood next to him shouting, “No Politics! No Politics,” captain Younis Mahmoud said, simply: “I want America out of Iraq now!”
Riyas Komu, "A portrait of Younis Mahmoud" from "Occupation Stories I-IV" 2007
Drawn to the team by the Asia Cup victory and the captain’s powerful statement, in 2007, Indian artist Riyas Komu went to watch one of Iraq’s World Cup qualifying matches. At the time, these matches were played in Dubai; this was the period during which the team had been forced into exile (they’ve only recently returned to play in Iraq, with an inaugural match played against another dislocated team, Palestine). Inspired by this experience, Komu made a series of works that elliptically but powerfully tap into the contradictions that swirl around the team, and around the body as an instrument of nationalism more broadly.
Players Painting: Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier
Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Chilavert - The Chiller Thriller," acrylic on canvas, 2002
Chilavert is sitting on my hotel bed. The 6′4″ Paraguyan keeper cuts an imposing figure, even on canvas: his magnificent shaved head, thick neck and muscular shoulders rest on the crisp white linen of the Godwin Hotel in Colaba, Mumbai. He is looking at me as I write this. I can’t read his expression; he’s got a poker face and steely eyes. I’ve had to turn my chair away from him, which is OK because the view from my window is fine (treetops, birds, balcony gardens, and the beautiful decay of Colaba’s mansions). He came to Mumbai with me – I met him in Goa, where he was hanging out in a back hallway in Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier’s gallery. I couldn’t resist taking him home. The man is a goalkeeping legend; he is so identified with the position that his name is commonly used as a nickname for a good keeper. [By "taking him home" I mean Sousa Hammermeier's painting of him - not the man himself. My choice of words here was deliberately confusing.]
Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Umit Davala," acrylic on canvas, 2002
Goan artist Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier practices a very specific form of sport painting. She produces work in direct response to football matches, starting a painting at kickoff, and finishing it at the final whistle. Each painting is a form of match commentary. This is an impressive feat, because football demands a very particular kind of sustained attention. The game is absorbing – Juergen Teller made a work about this, filming himself watching a World Cup match. (The artist confessed that he is repulsed by his anxious contortions and whelps.)
Sousa Kammermeier watches the game differently. Her paintings have a playfulness to them. The painter is, as it happens, a former football player, and a signficant athlete in Indian sports history. Goa, a former Portugese colony, is football-mad. AC Milan and Argentina jerseys are on the backs of half the boys you see driving their scooters around the cows, goats, and pigs who seem to own the roads. The time difference between Goa and the EU means that you can watch Premiership matches from the disco floor, and people do. (I watched Manchester City defeat Chelsea last week, while dancing to Beyoncé with India’s no. 1 goalkeeper and player of the year, Subashish Roy Chowdhary.) Villages all have pitches, and those pitches are in constant use (rested only in the full heat of the day). The region hosts the country’s best club at the moment (Churchill brothers, based in Margao) and India’s national soccer teams (men and women) hold their training camps in the region. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goa hosted a thriving women’s football scene. Sousa Kammermeier was a star in that world, celebrated for what seems to have been a natural inclination to score hat tricks (three goals in a single match). At her heydey, she was heralded in the press as the “Madonna of Goan Football.” That’s no small title to hold in the intensely Catholic region.
Athletes & Artists: Riyas Komu’s “Mark Him”
Riyas Komu, "Syed Nabi" from the "Mark Him" series, 2007. Courtesy Komu Studio.
Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the first in a series of dispatches from Doyle on the road. — Ed.
Since he produced Mark Him (2007), a series of portraits of Indian National Team soccer players, Riyas Komu has been haunted by the sport.
“Mark him” is something one shouts to a defender: it means to track your opponent’s movements, to limit them. To mark is to anticipate where your player wants to go and contain him. An expert defender will study his opponent as he advances and deduce if he wants to take the ball down the outside, or if he dares to cut through the center. He’ll know his opponent’s preferences (which foot is stronger or more accurate) and if his ego can be engaged (if challenged, will he give the ball to a teammate, or will engage the defender directly). Marking yields a kind of intimacy. It can be surprising, too – a smart attacker knows well what you are doing, and can seduce you right our of your boots — taking you on a trip whose itinerary is of his design, not yours.
I came here to India on the force of this imperative: Mark Him. Somehow my interest in Komu’s work demanded not simply that I get to know the artist, but that I get to know the player who haunts him.
We look at the men in Komu’s portraits from the distinct perspective of heroic propaganda. We look up at them; their eyes are directed forward. We are lifted with their gaze according to a monumental logic. Mark Him is reparative, offering a visual attention to a class of athletes who are largely invisible to the cricket-mad Indian mass media. The team is currently ranked 135th by FIFA, and enjoys little glory even as it represents this large and diverse country (players hail from all over India, speak four different languages, and come from distinctly different cultures). Soccer here is a minor sport, edged out of the newspapers by the glitz and glam of cricket and by the television spectacle of England’s top league (the “Premiership”). To even India’s fans, the sport as played here seems slow and boring. The level is just not what it should be.
Difficulty, Part 2: Bad Feelings
Chris Ofili, Holy Virgin Mary (1996)
I started thinking about the word “difficulty” in relation to controversial art because the things in art which grab me, even shock me, rarely line up with the scandal that art produces. The first time I saw Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, I was shocked by its color-saturated beauty and then totally freaked out by the beaver shot-butterflies, which I only understood as porn clippings when I was within a couple feet of the canvas. It’s a chilling and eloquent visual comment on colonial desire—on the art world’s hope of “discovering some new form of Hottentot” (in the words of Rebecca Harding Davis).
Controversial art often challenges the production and regulation of pleasure in museums and galleries. We are taught to expect very specific forms of pleasure from visual art. And the range of feeling allowed the spectator in the museum seems much narrower than that which we enjoy in other spaces. Artworks can be difficult in their affective intensity—in other words, when they describe and provoke “bad feelings” like sadness, anger, or anxiety.
Why are we prepared to accept the value of “feeling bad” when we read a novel, but not when we go to our museums? Why is it “easier” for us to watch an upsetting movie than it is to keep company with contemporary art that makes similar emotional demands on us? Continue reading »
Difficulty, Part 1: Deceptive Forms of Simplicity
What if, instead of talking about what makes an artwork controversial, we focused on what makes an artwork difficult?
Difficulty has long functioned as a keyword in poetics and music criticism. Generally, when a literary critic identifies a poem as “difficult” she makes no value judgment; the word is used to describe the poem’s accessibility (not only in terms of comprehension, but in terms of pleasure as well). A poem can be hard to read—actively so—and still be very good, and very moving. A poem can also be “easy,” accessible, and also be formally elegant and deeply compelling. “Easy” poems are sometimes difficult, though, in that they can be so simple that they challenges our sense of what a poem is (William Carlos Williams wrote poems like this). Similarly, music can be difficult to play, and difficult to listen to—difficulty is part of music’s vocabulary. And, like poems, music can be incredibly simple in its structure and yet be very challenging for the audience (think: John Cage’s 4′33″).
What if, instead of focusing on what makes something controversial, we focused instead on this line between the simple and the difficult? What if we start a conversation about Tony Smith’s Die (1962), for example, with “What makes this hard to talk about?” and “What information do you need in order to ‘get’ this work?” Questions like these help us to understand what lies behind the controversy that certain works leave in their wake.
Tracey Emin, My Bed (1998) and Tony Smith, Die (1962)
For instance: like Smith’s Die, Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) is controversial because it looks so simple—Emin’s viewers tend to ask “couldn’t I just exhibit my bed?” and wonder why it “counts” as “Art.” It can be grasped at a glance, but like Die, it also tells stories that can only be accessed via familiarity with its art historical context. Emin’s installation comments on how work by women artists will always be read as personal no matter what they do, so one might as well just exhibit one’s bed. It also, to a certain extent, cites Die. Smith’s six-foot sculpture deliberately recalls the dimensions of a coffin, and, like a coffin—or a bed—it seems to be waiting for a body (this made it famously challenging for Michael Fried, who found it more “theatrical” than “sculptural” and, for this reason, controversial). You can’t “get” that side of art like this without doing a little work yourself. Even the simplest works, in other words, often contain within them their own forms of difficulty.
Andy Warhol, Torso (Double) c. 1982
Andy Warhol loved controversy and made work that was labeled “obscene.” His Torso series openly flirts with pornographic convention. It isn’t formally difficult. It’s easy to figure out what’s going on, and it doesn’t demand that much from us—except in the way that it positions the viewer in a homoerotic relation to the image, which is a challenging experience for some. In that sense, its difficulty, and its controversial dimension, is specific to how the viewer feels about looking at the image.
We arrive at the following question: is simplicity itself what makes some work controversial?
Blood Work & ‘Art Criminals’
I am not sure I would call artists like Jeff Koons, Vanessa Beecroft, Santiago Sierra, or even Kara Walker all that “controversial.” These artists are actually quite popular with curators. How controversial could a work of art be, really, when reproductions of it grace the covers of art magazines and when it is embraced by museums?
If that work marks the outer limits of our conversation about challenging art, then what do we do with work that is so controversial that it receives little or no institutional support—work that in most contexts is stubbornly unfundable, uncollectable, and invisible? With artists totally indifferent to galleries and their cultures, and to mainstream taste and values?
These questions are on my mind because I am programming a series of events centered on a performance by the artist Ron Athey. His work can provoke intense anxiety in people who have heard about it and, sadly, a lot of what people have heard is based in rumor, if not outright lies. In 1994, he was the subject of one of the biggest controversies in contemporary art. Kateri Butler describes the whole event economically in her LA Times profile of the artist:
A poster boy for bullshit. That’s how Ron describes his part in the aftermath of a 1994 performance of Four Scenes In a Harsh Life at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Catapulted into the heart of the culture wars. Denounced from the floor of the U.S. Senate. Blacklisted by the art world. All over the Human Printing Press scene–in which Ron cut the back of Darryl Carlton (a.k.a. Divinity Fudge) and made impressions of the wound on paper towels, which were then sent by a clothesline pulley out over the audience. It was erroneously reported, by a writer who had not attended the performance, that the audience had been exposed to HIV-positive blood (Ron has lived with HIV for the past 20 years; Carlton is not positive). And with that, the religious right was off and fulminating, and the media dutifully fanning the flames. Because $150 from the National Endowment for the Arts had been used in support of the performance via the Walker Art Center, Ron found himself defending a concept–public funding–that he didn’t really even understand, never having then or to this day applied for a public grant in the United States.
(The Catherine Opie photograph of this scene from Four Scenes from a Harsh Life, pictured here, now hangs in the Guggenheim Museum.)
Catherine Opie, Ron Cutting Divinity (2000)
Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid), 110 x 41 inches
People are very nervous about performances involving blood. Anytime someone bleeds in the presence of others, there are of course protocols one must take to minimize risk of exposure to blood-born agents. These protocols are in fact a part of his performances. Athey is HIV-positive, and developed his “signature” work in the midst of the AIDS crisis. So the fact that his work confronts us with our limits regarding things like blood and fear of contamination is not incidental to either its poetics or its meaning.
There are other contexts in which people risk contact with each other’s blood within the context of public performance: in sports, for example. Athletes will tell you that when they are cut in a game, they have to step out and be bandaged up before they can take the field again – and that the risk of injury is a part of the game. If fear of injury or contact with blood were the main issue in the institutional anxiety about performance art, lacrosse teams would play in full body armor. Blood is the subject of the controversy around Athey’s work, but it is not really the issue. People are anxious about what is going to “happen” at an Athey performance – not to him, but to them.
I don’t mean to suggest that watching someone bleed isn’t hard for a lot of people, including me. But the demands that are actually made on us by Athey’s work, the challenges posed to programmers and to the audience members are not as extreme or as unusual as we tend to think.
I suspect the enduring difficulty of Athey’s work is tied to the way that it mixes pleasure and pain—and does so in complex spectacles that speak to larger social experiences of belonging and alienation, care and abandonment, hope and despair. In Resonate/Obliterate, the piece we are staging in February, we see Athey resting naked, on all fours on a metal table. There are large sheets of glass standing vertically at either end, forming a kind of box around him. He wears a long blond wig which he brushes, and brushes. The intensity of the action increases until he is furiously pulling on the hair with his brush. (This aspect of the performance cites Abramovic’s 1975 performance video Art Must Be Beautiful.) He then sits up and leans back on his heels, and pulls out the pins holding the wig to his head. Only then do we realize that the wig has been pinned into his skin. It’s a frightful realization. The performance doesn’t stop here. He pulls the glass sheets over himself, and slides them across his body over and over again. By the end of the performance, there is blood all over the glass and his body. Recently, he has performed this work as a duet with dancer/choreographer Julie Tolentino who mirrors the exact sequence of action.
The two artists, one male, one female, stage a conversation about being ill-at-ease in your own skin, about being a beautiful monster. It speaks to the desire to make your body, your self, into something else; to the links between desire and pain, in which one seems to bring the other. It is moving like a punk rock anthem is moving; it is an act of defiance, and it’s hard. But beautiful, too. It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea…but then neither is minimalist sculpture.
You won’t be hurt at one of these performances. But you might feel upset, sad, disturbed, or agitated. You are more likely to feel like a witness than a spectator. This is no small thing.
In his essay, “In Defense of Performance Artists,” Guillermo Gómez-Peña quite rightly calls the people who make this kind of difficult work “art criminals.” Their work is, at the very least, extremely inconvenient. It produces no objects with value on which galleries and museums can trade. It often involves actions that make people uncomfortable. It makes a mess. It often has a visibly political edge and/or is produced by people who work from “borders and social margins.” It is often about painful subjects.
Art criminals include people like Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Coco Fusco, Valie Export, William Pope L, Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Franko B, Vaginal Davis, or Carolee Schneemann. The work of these artists has not been nurtured by art world institutions, but by gay, feminist, and punk underground environments. Their work was never about making a career, but rather about how one can use art to make life possible, to expand our notions of the self, and make the unbearable bearable. Their work is challenging or difficult in the ways that life is challenging and difficult. But their work is also playful, joy-filled, and ecstatic. It’s the kind of work that can change your life.
Interestingly, the art criminals I mention here are far, far less cynical in their work than the controversial artists that circulate within the art world’s inner chambers. Their work is made not in an attempt to mirror our worst impulses (as is the case with Sierra’s exploitation of day laborers in his installations, for example), but with a belief that art can change your life and, indeed, the world. Amazing that such an idea would be so controversial.
Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota, 2006), and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is currently finishing Critical Limits, a book about difficulty and emotion in contemporary art. She blogs about the cultural politics of soccer at From A Left Wing.
