Women Seen and Remembered in the Drawings of K. G. Subramanyan
R. Siva Kumar in collaboration with Seagull Foundation
Looking at an aspect of an artist’s work—say, of Van Gogh’s still-lifes, or Cezanne’s bathers—in isolation brings certain features to the fore and compels us to focus our critical attention upon it. It is a way of saying: This is important, we need to pay attention to it. However, it can also distort our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre, because what we isolate for our attention was originally conceived in conjunction with works in which other motifs or themes were explored, especially when these works are part of a larger category.
In this exhibition, for instance, we are offered a selection of Subramanyan’s images of women, but can we know them well without also considering his images of men? And, going a little further, can we consider his images of men and women without also considering his images of animals? And, for that matter, can we consider his images of animals (including men and women) without also considering his images of nature?
Any one aspect of an artist’s work should, therefore, be viewed against the backdrop of her or his oeuvre in order to gain a more dependable perspective.
In the context of Subramanyan’s oeuvre: images of women occupy a predominant place. In the two available volumes of his drawings, and which we may consider representative of his oeuvre, nearly one half of the images are of women or those in which women predominate.
Of the other half: roughly 50 per cent are of men—on their own or in the company of women; the other 50 per cent is more or less equally divided between drawings of animals and nature. This does make a case for an exhibition such as this, focusing on his images of women; however, about 80 per cent of his animal figures are visibly male, thus making up for the lower number of human males in his oeuvre. Thus things are a little more complex than the consideration of any one aspect of his work in isolation might lead us to conclude. So it is with this caveat in mind that we now turn to consider the images of women featured in this exhibition.
The works on view can be divided into three groups. This division, as we shall soon notice, is both chronological and typological, with, as with all such divisions, a few overlaps. A handful of Subramanyan’s early drawings are studies from models, of the kind that art students practise, as sometimes do teachers by way of pedagogic demonstrations. Subramanyan’s are of the latter variety, their main aims being training in observation and an accurate rendering of the visible. Such training tends to suggest that accuracy of observation and rendering are objectively measureable although they are in practice highly variable. What is considered representational accuracy at one point is often considered deficient at a later point, and vice versa. Giotto, for instance, was considered a master of realistic rendering by his contemporaries but as a primitive in the field of realistic painting a hundred and fifty years later. Conversely, the Impressionists who were considered miserably inadequate in representational skills by their contemporaries were seen as incorrigibly naturalistic by artists of the next generation. So there is an underlying subjectivity in what the artist observes in the model and how he renders it visible. A certain number of drawings in the exhibition are of this kind, and they tell us something about how Subramanyan perceived the human body.
It is not uncommon for artists to analytically unpack the body into various units. This helps them to develop a method of construction of the human figure, especially when they are not drawn from a model. The breakdown is certainly guided by what is anatomically feasible; where the flesh folds, where the bones join, which joints are moveable and which are not, in what direction a limb can or cannot be bent or moved, which parts are concave and which convex, and so on. But there is also an affective side to all this, and that is what makes one artist’s image of the human body different from another’s. Subramanyan tends to underscore the joints and give a certain independence to the component parts, as if they were puppets or mannequins. This allowed him to manipulate each unit independently and with a certain freedom, especially the hand and its gestures. This is something we also notice in a lot of Indian art, especially in miniature drawings; but while retaining and making the puppet-like movements more visible, Subramanyan emphasized the sensuousness of the body in a manner seldom seen in traditional Indian art. Combining the stiffness of the bones with the sagginess of the flesh, he turned his bodies into animated rag dolls. In some of his early figure drawings, we see him laying down the vocabulary of this visual language that then runs through the rest of his life’s work.
This visual vocabulary that he lays out in certain drawings from the sixties and early seventies marks the first consolidation of a vision, or an arrival, rather than an absolute beginning. The earliest drawings in this exhibition trace his way towards that arrival. Connected with his paintings in the manner of compositional layouts, in these colour breaks down the figure in a post-cubist manner, not anatomically but pictorially, and sinuate lines integrate the segmented body into a whole. These are followed by drawings in which bodies are segmented and parts decoratively linked by staccato or lyrical lines and almost no colour. Subramanyan once described his early paintings to which these drawings are related as an apotheosis of the ordinary. This lent a certain iconicity to the figures (also visible in his early drawings) but one which gave way, by the mid-sixties, to an animated theatre wherein human bodies of uncertain sexual identities bobbed in and out of a stage of indeterminate abstract shapes.
This loss of the human body was, as it were, a step back to leap forward. The vocabulary established, the human figure re-emerges in the mid-seventies from the post-cubist figure-ground tangle into which it had disappeared in the mid-sixties. The focus shifts from the language of art to the subject of art—in this case, woman, seen from the perspective of a male artist or a male viewer. This said, there are two things to be taken note of. One: that she is seen through a screen of cultural signs, appropriated, especially, from the Ukiyo-e prints and the approximately contemporary popular glass paintings. Subramanyan’s gaze is mediated through the stylistic devises used by these artists to articulate the sensuality of the body and the everyday pleasures of the floating or transitory world. The Ukiyo-e artists did this through a highly suggestive and performative staging of an exaggerated interplay between body and clothing, between gesture and accoutrement, and the suggestive artifice of wrapping and unwrapping. The recognition of the interlocutory role that the erotic vocabulary of an earlier culture plays in his drawings and paintings of this period is important. If we do not notice them, and do not notice the way in which he connects them to other modernist appropriations of those or similar traditions, we will be misreading his images.
Two: the appropriation of the visual devises used in the Ukiyo-e prints was Subramanyan’s way of pointing out that we, men and women, stage ourselves. Through our clothes and deportment, we opt for an identity and then try to project it, an identity we desire, an identity we hope others will recognize and respond to. We are animals who, besides having bodies, also promote a certain idea of the body through our sartorial choices, postures and gestures. We craft ourselves into images to be semiotically read by others. To Subramanyan, the whole world was on display; as a person he was indulgent and mostly empathetic but as an artist he found it amusing, sometimes even bizarre. His gaze was oblique but he was pervasively attentive—his was not the aggressive, debasing gaze associated often enough with the male viewer but an incisive one, sharpened with shades of wit and satire.
Let us turn to some of the images he recorded, not in his drawings but in his late poems, where he translates images into words, to see how his act of looking works. Let us begin with the image of an art journalist who visited him:
[She] notices an open book
On the top of the working table
Titled Art and Artifice.
Settles down in a moda chair
Pushing her rather meagre butts
Into its yawning soap-dish seat.
Then lifting up her glassy eyes
Asks, What does it talk about?
I say, I haven’t read it yet;
Presume it tries to tell apart
What comes to us with an inborn urge
And what we wilfully contrive.
Through most of the things we do
Fall somewhere between the two.
The first is like the artless art
Of the comely features of your face.
The other the diverse things you do
To make them much more explicit,
Like a dab of powder or dash of paint,
A practised look or gait or gesture
Or a cultivated smile.
This makes Neera self-aware,
Run a tongue on her shapely lips,
Smooth with hands her ruffled hair;
Then fixing her eyes on me
She asks, What does it say about the artist’s art
Is that inherent in the artist’s bone and flesh
Or attains its final shape
From practised skills and exercise?
Then there is the image of Neeli, ‘the wise one’, who with her probing fingers at the age of nine initiated him, ‘a witless dud’, aged ten, to the mapping of the human body, and who later grew into a social scientist making road maps for the progress of African communities. Like everyone else, he observes how she is transformed by age:
Neeli wears gold-rimmed glasses
Her hair has now silver streaks.
She is surely close to fifty;
Doesn’t look what she once was.
But her eyes have still the naughty glitter
That they had when she was nine,
Her nose is shapely, the ears are tender
And her smile still rings a bell.
And we have a third image of someone identified only as ‘G’:
See G.
There she comes waving her unsleeved arms.
Is dressed in a saree
That seems a coarse bed-spread
Patterned with ugly roses
Resembling bleeding sores.
And her awkward gait confirms
Her thighs are fat.
She stops and smiles.
And asks me how she looks;
Adding, I am on a diet
For one full hungry month.
(Surely on chocolate cream!)
I smile back and say
She looks just fabulous
(Without a clue what fable I refer to.)
But, again, all his images are not women. Consider, for instance, this male neighbour who visits:
He turns up now and then.
But these days rarely.
He is leaner now. His cheeks are hanging loose,
His eyes are sunk in shadows. His loud voice
Is stuck deep in his throat,
To let out which his mouth has to open wide.
Today he has his black bitch on a leash.
Cool quiet thing; covered with limp black hair.
Has mind-melting eyes. She is now twelve, he says.
[. . .]
He sits on the sofa chair.
Crosses his leg.
Then with every breath
Crosses the left on right, the right on left.
This is compulsive
It puts his mind at ease.
Till finally he pulls out a cigarette
Lights it up and fills his mouth with smoke.
Then throat and lungs and nasal passages.
This alters the focus of his fidgeting.
He sneezes, coughs and wipes his mouth and nose.
But the legs have some rest.
Too brutal or too brutally honest one might say yet he is no misogynist or misanthropist, for each of these images is accompanied by self-reflection—each incisive look at the other is accompanied by an equally earnest introspection. As he considers Neeli’s ageing face, he also speaks of himself:
My face is now criss-crossed with wrinkles
And caught within their puzzling maze,
My senses continue to search and wander
For a speaking shape or coloured word.
After his frank description of ‘G’, he adds:
But G is a nice girl,
Concerned, affectionate;
Does a lot of good to people
And offers help
When I am in a fix.
‘Why should I upset her
By saying how she looks
On this lonesome, luckless day?
Honestly, no one feels
Or looks the same each day.
On certain days
G is a tiresome bore
(Like I too tend to be).
Similarly, as he looks at his neighbour, he also looks at himself:
I sit back and watch.
And start wondering
Where does my voice sit when I start to speak?
Inside the throat? Or cheek? Or on the tongue?
Is it stentorian or a petty squeak?
And when I visit others and sit on their chairs
Do I crack my knuckles,
Or dance my feet
To put my mind at ease?
He does not mince words but neither does he fail to see both sides of the divide. His gaze is sharp and sometimes unflattering but, like Rembrandt, he scrutinized himself with the same objectivity with which he looked at others. If in life he avoided the aggressive, debasing gaze that reduces the other into an object, in his art he embraced the Sartrean idea of the other as a disruption of one’s self, a reflective being like oneself who decentres one’s egocentric sense of the self and pushes towards a dialogue. In the oscillation between loss and assertion of subjectivity that occurs while encountering the other, Subramanyan’s gaze became the gaze of the one returning the gaze of the other:
You can’t meet another without the ego’s thrust
But you can’t mix unless you lose it first.
To gain you have to lose. To see you have to look
The other way with free unfocused eyes.
Looking at the world without immediate instrumental intent involves an element of pleasure and desire. A rustle of eroticism—and sometimes more than a rustle—runs through all the viewing that brings us pleasure. Yet at the root of desire lies a sense of inadequacy. This is not necessarily a phallocentric view of the world but, rather, a human truth of our engagement with the other, as Siri Hustvedt notes:
Of course women are sexual objects; so are men. Even while I was hugging that book of feminist rhetoric [Sisterhood is Powerful] to my chest, I groomed myself carefully, zipped myself into tight jeans, and went after the boy I wanted most, mentally picking apart desirable male bodies like a connoisseur. [. . .] American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth. There is a hard, pragmatic aspect to this. It is impolitic to admit that sexual pleasure comes in all shapes and sizes, that women, like men, are often aroused by what seems silly at best and perverse at worst. And because sexual excitement always partakes of the culture itself, finds its images and triggers from the boundaries delineated in a given society, the whole subject is a messy business.
Subramanyan, who was familiar with the erotic plenitude of ancient Indian art, knew this is a messy business too, knew that it couldn’t be as neatly ordered as puritanical reformers would want to, knew that culture modifies and civilizes but does not wipe away the biological. As an artist, he did not have to subscribe to sociobiological theories to recognize that connecting human and animal worlds can unleash new imaginative powers. Subramanyan, who both sexualized and humanized his animals and birds, used it as a source of expressive and revealing metaphors and knew that it makes us more wise—not more beastly. Stepping into his world is like going to the Zoo with Bert Haanstra.
However, not everything he did, nor every work in this exhibition, dealt with looking at the other, with the seesaw between the objectification of the other and the assertion of subjectivity involved in such looking. Many of these works concern the human world where sometimes ‘men are beastlier than beasts themselves’, where the other is turned into an object over which power is violently exercised. These were inspired by events in our world just as the earlier group was by his encounters with individuals in his circle.
In the first group, the figures are in control of their image; he is merely unravelling the semiotics of the image they present. But in the second group, the bodies are immersed in situations beyond their control.
There is also a small group of drawings in this exhibition, done between 2005 and 2007, which are more corporeal and more erotically charged than the rest. Subramanyan’s later works have more bodily materiality than the earlier ones, and they occupy a space between drawing and painting, between the moving eye and the sensing fingers. In this set of drawings, there is, I believe, something more than explicit corporeality. The dates correspond with the few days before the death of his wife and soon after. Eroticism, Hustvedt notes, ‘thrives both on borders and on distance’. Death is the ultimate border that separates the one who is left behind from the one who has departed; it cannot be crossed. These drawings, charged with a flush of erotic fantasy, were not done in isolation but along with drawings exhibiting a rush of other conflicting emotions, especially about birth and death. They are also, I believe, related to his late poems; collectively, they represent a private world of imagination and memory, where the artist is reliving past moments and conversing with the one who is absent.
Absence and memory are two obvious themes in these poems. ‘Sue is not there,’ he says in one; and ‘her absence darkens both the earth and sky, / Snuffs out all animation,’ he declares in another. Of the poems themselves, he wrote:
Strangely I wrote no verse
When Sue was still around
No rhyming epistles, no songs of love,
No romantic odes, effusive serenades.
We were sewn to each other
With various inspun threads
That left no place for words.
Mute looks were good enough
And their viewless magic web
That kept us intimate
Across dividing walls
And the spaces spread beyond.
And if some words there were
They came to fill the gaps
[. . .]
Or punch the secret keys
Of the mind-board set below.
To record the inner stories
Of the gropings, reaching out
The inborn thirst, the outward responses
The flow of fluid flesh
The giddy flights of sense
Their counter wheeling drives
And the trails they left behind.
Now that she is not there.
I try to dig these up
Straighten the tangled loops
Restore the time-worn links
Replay the faded score.
Subramanyan, who kept his own personal world to himself, who rarely shared his inner life even with his close associates, perhaps as the defensive strategy of a person to whom the hieroglyphs of the world were too legible, over the last fifteen years or so allowed this inner world to come tumbling out in his poems, in a medium that is fluid and in which recollection and imagination, confession and fantasy cannot be set apart. This act of recall and laying oneself bare, done with the desire to keep the absent one alive, is different from his other works. For the rest of his life’s work, he was an observer and transcriber of the self-fashioning and display of others, not a participant. In these poems, however, he is the participant—not the observer.
His poems and late drawings narrate the story of his exploration and discovery of the geography of the human body and the landscape of inner emotions. Thus in them the viewer and the viewed are inextricably intertwined. That they—especially the inner landscape of emotions—were consciously kept out of his work and confabulations for most of his life lend these a confessional ring and an aura of newness.
Santiniketan
20 August 2017
