The foreword to the catalogue of my recently concluded solo exhibition of photo prints was written by the eminent artist and academician Sri. Narendra Raghunath . It was a matter of regret for me that he was however unable to attend the inaugural function in which the catalogue was released as he was recuperating from a surgery.
Thank you dear friend for writing a wonderful foreword for my catalogue.
"Gaze!
View!
Expression!
and
Experience!
In history, a lot has already been said about the art of viewing.
Often I get up in the morning wondering what could one talk about art that differs in its perspective and is still relevant.
Strangely, day after day, I end up reading a new piece of appreciation, critique or reflection on art that enlightens me about another way of looking at the world around me. Perhaps in our chaotic urban living, art is the only humane perspective that can simultaneously be disturbing and yet fulfilling.
When Hariharan requested me to write a foreword, my immediate response was to pen an academic critique. I ended up with one more critical academic piece that gave a wider historical and theoretical perspective on the body and photography. As is the predicament with academic writing, the piece I wrote was an attempt to place Hariharan's artworks amidst historical precedence, comparison and theoretical contextualisation.
There was no art related quest in it.
I deleted every word I had written and went back to view his work.
There was a body in it.
Nude
Naked
and
At times conjoined. A female body in black and white.
In his photography, the amorphous boundary often failed (or succeeded) in differentiating sensuality from sexuality and the body in his work did not have identities derived from the performance of facial expressions. He denies his flesh the possibility of performance through facial expressions. He systematically erases the face and lets the body speak the narrative of the flesh.
In his work,
the curves
the contours
and
the folds of the female body invite us to a plane of discomfort and too often, it leaves us with a sense of loss and agony, and we are left wondering about the nature of our gaze or view!
Predator?
Voyeur?
Dreamer?
Or perhaps, more rightly, a consumer of the female body!
Even as his black and white images, with the play of flesh accomplished through technical interjections have tried to contest the paradigm shift between sensuality and sexuality, fortunately, the sublime moorings of his aesthetic considerations have succeeded in containing the profanity of flesh to erotic expressions.
In his 1961 novel, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata narrates a beautiful yet disturbing story of the sleeping girls, retold from a quaint Japanese tradition. In it, lonely old men pay the titular house keepers to sleep with young naked girls. The girls are drugged and the old men also have to take sleeping pills before they share the bed with these young girls. During the entirety of the night, the men are not allowed to touch the sleeping girls.
The novel narrates a lonely old man's journey within this tradition, where he is made to sleep with different girls every night. The house of the beauties does not give him the liberty to select his bedmates. Even as he starts to weave his fantasies of lying next to the sleeping beauties in his attempt to escape his loneliness, he would have fallen asleep under the influence of the pills. In the morning, when he wakes up, the girls would have vanished. In essence, it is the story of two "drugged and unconscious naked bodies" lying next to each other the entire night, without ever knowing each other.
It tells us the story of the human mind's tragic attempt to cover up loneliness with the desire for the body as company and its nakedness as belonging. There is no assertion of masculinity in this story. Yet, it does not try to cover up the power play of masculine desire, as the girls in the story are all drugged before the men arrive. Also, they are removed from their bed before they wake up, leaving a question mark on the idea of feminine beauty, as suggested in the book title.
Before parting ways with painting as an art form, Marcel Duchamp asked this question about the aesthetic constructs around the female body in one of his works. In this work, a headless female nude is shown lying among the rubbles of a foregone past and holding a lantern in her hand, as if to question the aesthetic formations of the modern world.
Duchamp raised pertinent questions about female nakedness in art. Who authors the celebration of female nakedness as an aesthetic construct? Who defines it - the artist or the viewer?
Yoko Ono's stage performance asking viewers to strip her and Marina Abrahmovic's naked performance asking viewers to handle her body as they chose are a few continued aesthetic enquiries in that direction. Both were successful in their engagement with Duchamp's question in their provocative performances. They were able to expose the hidden tenacities of the masculine world and its fantasies with their shocking acts. The Iranian performance artist Shirin Neshat continued that enquiry with her famous series where, in one of her works, she holds a gun against her face tattooed with writings from the scriptures.
As I was going through Hariharan's works, I posed this question repeatedly to myself. Where does Hariharan place himself in this questioning game of aesthetics, aiming his camera on female nudity? Is it alongside the masculine gaze of desire or with the female expose of the male gaze and its duplicity?
His technical interjection for conjoined forms of flesh without a head defined the answer for me. To me, his large-scale prints stand next to Yoko Ono's in-your-face work of the vagina.
His erotica doesn't entice..
It provokes you..
It challenges you..
and
With a firm female gaze, it strips your masculine body to its nudity and then to nakedness. Like in the story of Yasunari Kawabata, your naked body will lie unconscious next to his artworks of female nudity."
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