Art and Gender – a Pedagogical Conversation(!?)

Natesh Muthuswamy with Madhushree

An email-conversation between Natesh and myself about gender, art and abstraction. Not sure how many of the questions are actually answered or whether, in the first place, the questions make sense or if there are anything such as discrete questions in this context or all of it is just another fuzzy interval in a continuous process of thinking and/or learning. If nothing else it certainly adds to the existing stream of doubts and dilemmas so that the brain feels muddled and happy. It’s a pity that WordPress humanifies all emoticons so that the multi-colour-of-consciousness-ed smileys that Natesh distributes all over the email space turn into dumb faces here!   – Madhushree

Natesh (August 4, evening) : Objectivity is total rubbish. The whole thing is subjective and `gendered’. Totally bored of everything I wanted to close down totally. I saw a movie and then another movie. This woman comes on screen and life changes. Though I am not a killer, I used to make bows and arrows as a child. It struck me like an arrow. Pierced. The perfect line. The active line. Though portraits are a big no, no, it is the female face that has the line. When gender never happened, it was lions, horses and then Ganeshas. But nothing is as compelling as the female countenance with its expressive detail. And then the abstract line if she looks at you. All life connect with the line. Even a crow looks at your eyes. All of them look at you in the eye. And if she looks at you in the eye, the abstract line gets registered. I am wired again, the line is back like an addiction. And I know that it is the female line. Male gaze? Me is not interested in making; making dissolves the line. The line is instinct. The line is life. Line is life? Good title for a show….. for once I found the missing link. In the total abstraction of the line. If you can save the link between the two of you with the line, you live with him/her forever. A link that can link you with the universe. Death becomes a good friend.

Painting by Francesco Clemente

Madhushree: Whole thing is subjective – one can possibly agree to some extent, but `gendered’? Isn’t that something all of you were against at one point?

N: Actually it is a politically correct lie. If you really look at it, we try so hard to befriend intellectual idiocy…. so wasteful since they are not organic enough; hence their unfriendly, necrophiliac evaluation…. an area which is inherently contradictory since at the moment of hardness, they are very subjective with their dried-up juices…

Gender not as a negative connotation but as an inherent fact….

Please correct me…

M: Oh personally speaking I don’t really care if a work of art is `gender-biased’ or not as long as there’s some thought and work behind it. This may not be the correct attitude – I don’t know. But then what’s the correct attitude!

B21 Improvisation – A Review

Madhushree

“Preethi pulled Chandana into her circle of obsession and in turn acquired Chandanas’s stable serenity. She countered Chandana’s proposition of an abstract definiteness with a frenzied narrative of familiar gestures”… it was when I wrote this line I simultaneously realized that I was increasingly sounding like a football commentator gone slightly askew in her mind, and that it was really three whole hours that had passed since I came in. It was not an extremely intense technique-based three hours. Rather cornily, it felt like a fun time that allowed both a bit of work and a bit of gobbledygook, and finally seemed to get over before one would like it to. The genre of fun might have had a shade of the obscure, or more appropriately a hint of uncertainty. But that might have been the whole point of the session –one that probably made each participant think, search and improvise beyond the grids of the auditorium of the Alliance Francaise of Madras.