ANALYSIS: Redirecting the Looked, ‘around’ Its Own Self

 

 (article published in the latest Art and Deal magazine for visual arts, ed: Siddharth Tagore, published by Art Konsult gallery, New Delhi, 2008. The article analyses one work by artist Ravinder Reddy called “Krishnaveni”)

  

         “Krishnaveni” is a sculpture-woman who looks at you as if she is looking beyond you. It is as if the viewer has reserved the right to look at this sculpture/woman/Krishnaveni, always in the future. It is so because ‘memory’ plays a major role while looking at her that hinders the viewer’s gaze meant to contemplate upon what is ‘seen’. It is so because there are too many Indian-culturally-familiar-references that cross across one’s mind while looking at her. One cannot be sure about whether his/her mind rests upon what is being seen or lingers upon the ‘cultural referents’ of  what is seen–evokes. A recall of someone/something ‘like’ her (i.e., both in the tradition (i) of Asian sculptures and (ii) in real life) and the ‘act of looking’ at her are analogous. Hence, not too many of Reddy’s works are essentially distinguishable, from each other, despite the fact that each of them have remarkably variable physical visibility.

 

The unassumingly large scale of the sculpture—not its ‘actual’ one, but the feel-of-its scale, is what brings about this ‘split-gaze’ between ‘memory’ and ‘watching’: she is looking as if she is seeing you, but is actually seeing-beyond-you. Let me explain what I mean by the politics of this ambiguous scaling. Before that, it is to be remembered that the act of permanently seeing-beyond you seem to have been patented by the meta-physical sculptures in the Indian context, which would consider the audience more mundane than themselves.*1*

 

“Krishnaveni”, executed in 2004 by Ravinder Reddy, is a portrait of a woman who can be categorized into prototypes of being Dravidian, rural, ethnic and the like. The golden painted and gilded surface of the face/sculpture retains its luminosity and ambiguous brittle quality to such an extent that it seems to contest the actual human-identity that is being there. For instance, while she can be ‘identified’ as a female face, the surface of her face cannot be identified with that of a skin. If there is a reference to reality within her, it is being smeared with gold–not as a beautifying layer but–as that which ‘camouflages’ her physical self. In a way, one can feel the organs and limbs of an animal (or its sturdiness, so to say) on her cheek alone, if they so wish, due to its feel  rather than its apperance. Feel and appearance contest against each other in a race to the gaze’s appeal. She is a collage of various realities of (that too) various organs of animalistic nature. Hence, every time she is being watched, our sense of a singular reality, a whole, is redefined as an ‘amalgamation of various self complete (or otherwise) entities’, thus throwing new light upon what we have been seeing as a singular-sculpture of singular phenomena, from ages.

 

Thus the three scales—(a) her actual scale, (b) the scale of memory that we mentally draw while watching her; and (c) the range of various religious and power-references that makes her, makes our gaze go ‘around’ Krishnaveni, rather than get involved on to her, unlike a bee might sit upon the flower to draw its essence, physically.*2*

 

  What is (a) seen and (b) hinted by, are necessarily dis-connected upon Krishnaveni. Hence she becomes a premise, a field, to contain experiences ‘upon’ her, and in the due course, what she herself projects as an art(work) experience is that of a catalyst. Every gaze focused upon her, is tangentially negotiated. Instead she metamorphoses the sight of the viewer into a ring and wears it around herself, wherein the ring-of-looks lingers around. The word ‘around’ in the previous sentence refers more to the telugu cultural context from wherein she hails as a motif, as a style, as a fetish and as a favoured imagery of mainly the male artists, from past four decades. The sights, gaze and looks are deviated away from her self and as well as from the surface, for, she refuses to equate her worth with her actual scale! Generally the physical identity and scale are mutually connected in artworks. When “Krishnaveni” problematises her own scale due to the way she has been formed, she is putting her own physical identity itself to stake*3*.  

 

Between being a lipstick clad contemporaneous South Indian woman and a tribal woman, the comic, she is unavailable for a singular definition of any known kind of gaze and definition. However she carries a semi-divine and semi-humorous appearance about herself as a trophy. It is a trophy whose scale and size is constantly ambiguous.

 

*

 

The overall reading about her non-entity can be thus categorized:

(1) She is looking at us, but contemplating beyond us—at the same. (2) Also she who looks is not in totality contained within (only) her presence (ex: cheek as elephant limb). (3) She has a specific identity but is also a remainder of a general whole. Thus three important characters of high modernity, the gaze, the presence and the individuality, all the three are engaged in a dualistic role that initially was all around her, before her arrival, in the magic of Indian Pop(ular) culture, a la films.

 

 

 FOOT NOTES:

 

*1* India and Indians, to which Ravinder Reddy belongs to, is yet to get accustomed to the custom of  surveillance cameras, even in the techno-suave metropolis cities. Earlier, it was sculptures-like Krishnaveni (in material and essence) who were lesser Gods/Goddess, whose gaze that one would be alert about, as they would be with a traffic camera. D.D.Kosambi refers to such images as lesser Gods, hailing from the forest and being subservient to the urban God. The equestrian public sculptures in India of the past two centuries, by and large, constantly faced the problem of this gaze. Either they were looked at, or were threatening due to their looks! The eyes were carved, often clad with marbles, and this made the specifically referred person(ality) to shed off himself and become the icon that he was, for which he was being sculpted at the first place. The sculpted cultural personalities happened the way the ruling power structure wanted them to be historically looked at rather than the way they were! Krishnaveni jeopardizes the way one should be looked at, forever. Her gender factor makes this issue much more denser.

 

*2* Ref: Gregory Ulmer’s essay “Object of Post Criticism” in the book ‘Anti-Aesthetic essays in Postmodern Culture’, Ed: Hal Foster. The idea I am drawing from the essay, to view Krishnaveni, lies in the design of this work in the repulsive gaze of her, wherein the overall self of the sculpture deflects our gaze, only to circle around the sculpture, both physically and metaphysically. Perhaps the equal spatial prominence given to her plaits finds justification in this repulsion.

 

*3* The issue of ‘woman’, beyond the discourse of feminism by women artists in the current times, has been variedly addressed by the artists whose identity with Andhra Pradesh is strong. Reddy is one of them. T.Vaikuntam, Laxma Goud and the like have treated woman through images that synchronize her dress as a part of her skin, and vice versa. In the due course, the sensuality of the skin is spilled beyond the dress, on to the surface to meet the viewer’s gaze. Reddy, on the other hand, ‘indicates’ woman as set within a site wherein gaze, scale and gender are reallocated with positions within what Norman Bryson uses base-superstructure of a society uses to deal with the position of art and artworks.//