Masculinities in the space of art

Masculinity cannot enter discourse on art, if art is understood as apolitical. The art institutional space is highly constructed and masculine in nature, determined by nationalist and modernist forces. Traditional art history as a discipline centres on men, whether as artists or patrons. In locating art history, curatorial practices and institutions as masculine, would one view art-practice itself as masculine? With this we arrive at the area to be explored in this project. It revolves around the overlapping of art-practices with masculinities.

‘Masculinity’ is a gender practice through which we ‘experience and perform our lives and bodies’. Its socio-cultural and political importance cannot be overstated. This exhibition begins with the need to explore its significance within art practice. Photography in India began as a colonial tool of domination, to serve classificatory, categorising functions, as in anthropology and ethnography. The anxiety to record, capture and possess can be located in its origins in coloniality. Photography, in its earliest avatar, was a masculine agent. Not only was the photographer male, but very often, the space to be photographed was also masculine. It functioned to serve the interests of masculine institutions and disciplines. Photography exists along the binaries constructed by traditional art history, between the social and the aesthetic, high and popular. It is only recently that both Art History and the ‘art market’ have awakened to the possibilities of the photograph. For long, art history has evinced little interest in the journey of photography from
the colonial and elite to being fetishised and ritualised within the popular. However, even when photography was no longer an event, the ordinary was still transformed into the extraordinary by the process of being captured and preserved. Art practice takes off from precisely this potential to explore the versatility of the photographic medium and its subversive possibilities.

Between image making and taking, photography has overlapped into and asserted its presence within painting and sculpture, the more traditional media of Indian art. There has been a parallel intrusion of painterly techniques within photography, while video has emerged as a new medium of art practice, not merely as an extension of the photographic space. Despite photography staking a claim to being an independent medium in the context of art practice, the boundaries between the mediums appear increasingly blurred.

All the artists exhibiting their photographic work in this exhibition identify themselves as art practitioners. As a curatorial exercise, we find that some of these artists have had a long term engagement with certain aspects of masculinity. However, we include also artists in whose work masculinity is a subtext. Despite differing approaches, they all somehow reflect the pernicious influence of masculinities as a lived and impinging reality.

Our intention in bringing them together in a common place is to compile a visual text that highlights the visible/invisible presence of masculinity. Masculinity is confined within socially constructed signs of gender. Signs of masculinity operate within popular modes of practice. One could define the space of art too as a site for the potential contestation of masculinities. We refer to the site of art not in its clichéd position of ‘high’ versus ‘low’, but as a space containing within it transgressive, transformative possibilities. Within popular masculinity, patterns of representation emerge around stereotypes, often restricted to hegemonic forms of masculinity. ‘Desired’ masculinity as constituted by mainstream cinema posters, advertising, popular photography, comic strips, and popular fiction among others, represents a perpetuation of these accepted notions of a dominant ideology.

The photographs and video work that form this exhibition locate themselves in spaces between, beyond and outside of stereotypes. They render suspect all established ideas of masculinity, finding it to be always in a state of transformation. These images mark a shift in locating masculinity outside of a hegemonic assertion, in terms of gaze, sexuality or the representation of the male body itself. Most of the participating artists, whether consciously or involuntarily, have been probing and questioning the structures informed by this ideology, traversing the space between the desired and the unrepresented. However, there is an intervention of the popular within the space of art, as in the juxtapositions constructed by Sunil Gupta, of the self and the popular, or the Bollywood hunk referenced by Sheba Chhachhi in ‘Warrior/Saint’. For BV Suresh the popular emerges as a shared archive in ‘Retakes of the Shadow’, and as a quiet interrogation by Kriti Arora in some of her images. Atul Bhalla explores the space of popular ritual in his work, but represents it in non-populist terms. There occurs a parallel appropriation of the ‘art work’ within the realm of the ‘popular’. Although the two operate in different spaces, there is often a straying over to the ‘other’ side. What emerges is not so much a binary as a negotiable difference, in terms of space, intention and representation.

This exhibition poses a patriarchal, hegemonic, homogenous ‘masculinity’ in opposition to more ambivalent, fluid spaces encompassed in a plural conception of masculinities, less dependent on gender or the male body.