NOTHING is lost if every-thing simply changes shape. In May 1968, the hegemony of Euclidean geometry collapsed. A war against totality, against the Panlogician’s Absolutism was declared. Being and Consciousness was pluralized by expanding the latter to encompass every aspect of man’s psychological and social life without privileging the economic.
The global reconstruction of space questioned the individual’s emancipation as well as rational human progress. The period of ‘bricolage’ began taking multiple quotations of elements from within and beyond the human habitation. Politics and culture, social and the symbolic, was once again integrated without attacking any substantive adjectives.
Rejecting the Kantian sublime (not governed by a consensus taste), ‘the stable and secure law-governed existents’ (a natural order of things), the Post-Modern ventured into ‘presenting the unrepresentable’, without adhering to any pre-established norms representation. The Post-Modern artistic modes, the style, space and presentation of the works, defy rules as if to ‘formulate the rules of what will have been done’ (a Lyotardian phrase) undertaking a series of major modifications from the inherited modernist space.
The modernist value-split culture marginalised the dreary presence of everyday life, stripping art of its social functions and, freed from its utility purpose, it acquired an utopian character and this utopian space of potential human freedom become the axial principle of modernism.
What looks like a simple succession in line becomes a Miltonian Argument in history (of Cezanne challenging the Impressionists’ Space, Braque and Picasso Cezanne’s Duchamp of the Cubists’ and so on). But all these happened without a qualitative social change and hence, was easily co-opted by capitalist ideology making the modernist critique only partially effective. It was not just the loss for Man, but Man was lost with history, so it is claimed by the cultural theorists. But what was gained was the image of a more plural and fluid world.
Barthes, for instance, described his ‘sexual/textual/social- political ideal’ as a ‘happy Babel’ and in his happy Babel, there are ‘as many languages as there are desires’. But whether this plurality, heterogeneity and difference, or the cohabitation of languages of will produce a happy Babel here in India or elsewhere, will have to be seen as a variety of deconstructive art practices which are slowly emerging, moving away from the logo centric model.
One such attempt, where the Post-Modern sensibility/concerns are expressed, is in Rummana Hussain’s installations and works on paper in Fragments/Multiples, an exhibition currently on at Delhi’s LTG Art Gallery till September 14.
Rummana has emphatically discarded the conventional modes of expression(oil painting in particular) in preference to a space or site stand – a stance, gestalt, a framework, a schema -which can also fall decline or can ultimately dismantled. The purpose here is to produce new givens by rejecting the dominating givens and as she engages herself in the activity of installing, the focus shifts from the producer to the product; work to text, from the signifier to the signified and moves back again to history, society, ideas, autobiography. The text Rummana produces wanders, doubles and redoubles, enhancing meaning of critical Post-Modernism sometimes in fluid dualism, sometimes in an unhappy conflict. It remains finally an unstable text as opposed to the sealed text.
What kind of a text Rummana is trying to build up, or to put it from another perspective, is her approach to the objects/themes/issues a new one so that we can call it a new text? The language she creates through half conventional-/half non-conventional materials, say, for instance, terracotta pot, burnt wood and bricks (unearthed), sliced terracotta pot, acrylic sheet and red earth pigment (Conflux), Indio pigment and robin blue on paper (Indigo), Xerox and tracing paper (Behind a thin film), do not entirely move away from the meta-language. They move through the intertextual redistribution of materials in and around the objects she takes the plunge into a crisis, a crisis of the producer first and then produced-splintering the consciousness from the autobiographical (tunnel echoes and androgynous) to the socio historical and the political.
Rummanaas the ‘speaking subject’ draws on chance/accidents/casualness (her choice of everyday objects like her daughter’s cycle, robin blue, mud etc.,) as against the advanced systems of patriarchal linguistics. Like consciousness being, the Self, the body more specifically the female body is split and becomes the other. The docile body which was hitherto bound to foundational history culture and language, is released and deconstructed from its substance (the vagina being externalised from the private sphere to the public sphere in Tunnel Echoes to emphasize the changing models of the subject or the order of the same).
Rummana repeatedly uses the vagina image through various materials – like the zinc plate, printing’ ink on paper, etching, pencil drawing, gypsum board to speak both languages. But what are both languages that Rummana wants to speak and is there a visible difference between the one and the other or is she caught in the double-speak?
I have already stated that Rummana invokes the double-ness (the self-same and the other) of the subject, for instance in Androgynous (Frida Kahlo, Orlando and Shen Teh); but it is not produced by double-speak, the truth or the secret neither oscillates nor is it mimed. Frida Kahlo, Orlando and Shen Teh do not simply carry a singular sign, but it is like the double-ententes or double-bind, a curious doubleness in the male-female argument is not set in heterogeneity/opposition but it is to be seen as one and the other, with two signs, two meanings and to her credit, Rummana comes out successfully from the paralytic double-bind of either/or to establish a ‘wholly other logic’, a logic capable of saying both/and.
The logic both/and rests on the experience that the world actually lives encompassing all opposites and not on one side of any binary opposition leaning back on the archetypal feminine. Rummana refuses to fall in line with the phallocentric polarisation of the good mother and the bad mother; in Unearthed she splits the womb of the Great Mother, it seems she prefers to split instead of locking herself into a choice of opposites or choosing anyone of the extremes. But she must realise that the splitting device falls short of any reconstruction approach.
The womb which takes first (and never takes back) and gives, where ‘things happen’, where man comes from the outside ‘but can never occupy each other’s place’ (each body remains as separate entities), where life is born never to return again, where both/and are common existents in the complexities of life, why should it be split without suggesting the dialectical third of the double-bind? Perhaps, here she is trapped in ‘deconstruction’s fable of the feminine’?
It is immaterial whether one works with a predetermined set of rules or not, but it is important that we construct the structure with deconstruction as a strategy of provided by the possible worlds through contextual demystification of exaggerated symbols. Symbols are otherwise ordered linear, grammatical, linguistic system based entirely upon one fundamental signifier: the phallus.
I would like to argue that simply rejecting everything, finite, structured, loaded with meaning in the existing state of society will place women on the side of the explosion of social codes. Authentic disruption with feminine imaginary will not be enough; the feminine (especially the artist) imagination must build a new reality and transform the givens into a new world.
Here, I would like to refer to three works Crushed Blue Piece, Strung and Bodyscape which are uniquely locked in perpetual conflict between the pour-soi and en-soi (for-itself and in-itself) or, say, between Being and Nothingness. The use of the crushed paper as symbol of the female body is creative, capable of transcending, of forming projects, but the possibility of an authentic construction ends in the two dimensionality of the works even though textural depth is created by the natural folds/cleaves and adding earth pigment as the substantive adjective.
Similar problems occur when Rummana uses the acrylic sheet or glasses as gender glass, the reflection of the self becomes a fixed identity ending in the ‘unity of being’ which is false consciousness. Transforming the givens must undertake remaking the home and the world, the self and other.
Rummana Hussain’s Fragments/Multiples is a naked text with deconstruction as a strategy of critical analysis. The intention is to return to the interpreting viewer, who may in his humbleness mistrust the surface of language, who may grope to interpret only the partial as a result from the disillusionment of the totality or the absoluteness of the text.
Concerning the nature of the language and the character of the critical analysis, I would respectfully suggest that the naive viewer may kindly avoid locating the centre because ‘the 24 works which she has put up is characterised by free play diversifying all signs which makes absolute reading an impossibility.
By dislodging the univocal ideal of language from the logo centric Indian metaphysics, Rummana guides us to the ‘Aladdin’s cave of language’, the critical super-realism which she had formulated, I am sure, can be defined as the definitive Post-Modern tendency. However, it will be interesting to watch whether the critical-aspect in her work finally can remain outside the legitimising discourse of art by tagging the conventional virtues so familiar in the modernist paradigm.
Installation : image ,1,2,and 3
Title:Sequence & change
