Mithu Sen: Profile:2006/7

As an young, but already influential figure in the contemporary art scene in India, Mithu. Sen’s practice has drawn a lot of critical attention. Mithu Sen provides a dilemma in writing, defining and theorizing her practice, and yet the artist thrives on the ability of viewers/ critics to place her works within brackets created by concept-metaphors like 'feminism', 'sexuality' and 'radical'. In fact such bracketing fuels her belief that people feel insecure if they cannot put you in a bracket and then be able to turn around and tell you..."hey you, you are a feminist painter", or that "your works are rooted in the discourse of feminine sexuality". So that is the artist then. Over the years Mithu has consciously developed a persona, which survives in this 'age of brackets' through a play of tropes which are interwoven in her public persona, and in her works.

Linda Nochlin's seminal essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists"[1], written way back in 1971, suddenly seems like an important tool through which one can begin to understand Mithu, and her engagement with materials and aesthetics. Having been schooled in a space in which key agents of pedagogy have often (publicly) said that women don't know how to draw or carve[2], surely has had an impact on Sen's notion of materials or stylistic purity. In a sense Mithu's tryst with the term radical, first came when her persona and art, began to rebel against the monopoly that the Shantiniketan (Kala Bhavan) patriarchy had in disciplining, and formulating norms for good art. It is from those days that the artist began to use parody, satire and sensuousness as tools, though which to create traps of metaphoric discomfort. It has been acknowledged that her manipulation of found materials combine with her morbidly playful paintings to generate unusual and provocative associations around the subjects of gender, domesticity, sexuality, kitsch: themes that run through her oeuvre[3]. However, gender, domesticity, sexuality, kitsch, are thematic to her works only in the more traditional understanding of content. Rather, the artist constantly feels the need to mask her comments with the sensual, and the absurd.

"I use my self image in my works, because there are no copyright issues involved in it". This quote in a way could be said to summaries Mithu's artistic practice. It was in answer to a question about the use of her own image, whether it stops her from exploring the autobiographic. The artist refused to give a though-out answer: she used the moment to say something else, choosing to take the mind to an artist's use of found imagery and also the evolving notion of intellectual property. All said with a ‘page3’ seriousness. It is this manipulation of post modern role playing, and engagement with the surface, that defines Mithu's approach to art.  The drive to spoof is so strong, that the artist constantly feels the desire to recast her own work, subverting them in a manner that can only come through a schizophrenic detachment. This trait becomes to be more visible in her works from the time of the UNESCO residency in Brazil (late 2006), but reaches (a momentary) climax in her work ‘False Friends-2, a video installation. I a series of simple flash animations played in a loop, the artist recasts her recent works and imagery in a parody that borders on lampooning.

The artist is indulgent with her own identity, while constantly trying to transgress it. While using loaded metaphors, she refuses to let you take her seriously. If you are caught in the trope, then you are caught in the trap. Mithu creates this trap using the ephemeral dilemmas of morbidity, sensuality, the sexual and parody. The poetry emerges through the conflicting urges to be autobiographical, and constantly yearning to mask her self.  .   Many of her works seem to speak of the unconscious. Uncomfortable and trapped between the bold and the vulnerable, Mithu's works are often expressions of fleeting utopias, illusions of moments when there is no need to hide, mask or armour.

                                                                                                                                   

 

Her recent body of works, at the Bose Pacia in New York and Nature Morte in New Delhi, seem to continue recurring motifs, those that taken from within the body of work, questions the notion of female sexuality as it is theorized within patriarchal parameters.  Characteristically working across mediums, and mediatic expectations, she uses myths and gaze serotypes to deflect attention from a carefully told, yet absurdist representation of self. She ‘stages’ her own beauty of being a woman and creates allegories about pain, pleasure and desire; often using one to stimulate the other. There is sometimes a hint, pointing one to deeper darker secrets, zones between myths and experiences, containing stories about instincts of sexuality and how they inform histories of aggression. This positioning between zones of pleasure-desire-pain, anxiety-attraction, fascination-fear, is what creates the tension in her works. The quirky forms used by her confront the pain, fear and embarrassment related to female sexuality, of femininity, interiority, and eroticism.

This might seem definitive about her practice, but one comes a full circle when one is reminded that art for Mithu is at the end a fun vehicle which lets her pursue her idiosyncrasies, and maybe through  that be constantly defying our definitions of her art.

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[1] Alex Neill, The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Language, New York, 1995

[2] Even now, in various art colleges across India, the notion of a good drawing is dominated by modernist dichotomies, which are partial towards the (allegedly) masculine.

[3] Not used here in the modernist sense of an organic body of work, the term here can signify a fragmented inorganic mass of art works, linked through modes of production and artistic agency.