| Story Text | [{"record_id":"0","storytext":"Anupam Sud (b. 1944) is one of the foremost printmakers of contemporary India. Educated at the College of Art in New Delhi, and then The Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1970s, she is best known for her prints in dominant shades of black and grey\/white, which she employs to investigate her own changing identity as a woman in a male-dominated environment, and the role of gender relations in society. This work from 1995 presents a summation of her feelings on the subject, to which she also brings a lifetime of technical expertise with printmaking, etching in intaglio and using figurative drawings in tandem with an urge towards abstraction. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":"Ankan Kazi"},{"record_id":"1","storytext":"In this etching, titled \u2018Between Vows and Words\u2019, we see a couple\u2014as suggested by their clasped hands\u2014with the male figure standing at the back gazing outside the picture frame and the female figure seated at a low table in front, her head titled almost wistfully, as she meets the gaze of the viewer. Words in English and Hindi are written over the surface of the image, as if verbalising the hidden or secret (sub)texts that often underwrite such relationships. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"2","storytext":"Words like \u2018Tenderness\u2019, \u2018Desire\u2019, \u2018Love\u2019 and \u2018Union\u2019 suggest common platitudes necessary for a successful heterosexual union or marriage (enforced through \u2018vows\u2019), whereas \u2018Physical Relations\u2019, \u2018Vulnerable\u2019, \u2018Freedom\u2019 and \u2018Pavitra<\/I>\u2019 (Purity), the last two written pointedly on the woman\u2019s body, suggest the attempt to create a cynical script or textbook that can list the exchange value for each human need from our partners.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"3","storytext":"Sud was taught at New Delhi\u2019s College of Art in the 1960s by two prominent printmakers of the time who were pushing the medium towards encountering new political and formal challenges: Somnath Hore and Jagmohan Chopra. Both contributed to the artist\u2019s employment of the medium and her longstanding devotion to it, helping her finding new, formal ways to express her political reading of gender relations in India. Her stint at Slade\u2019s printmaking department later emphasised these orientations in her practice.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"4","storytext":"Photography has been a constant source of support in her work, with some suggesting that her prints and etchings themselves embrace an almost photographic realism. She has used photoprocessing in her work as well. She bought her first camera while studying at Slade in the early 1970s and, before that, used one given to her by her father. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"5","storytext":"The tension between figuration and abstraction is mediated by her choice to transcend the implicit limitations of both. Thus, even while employing photographic impressions and formal printmaking techniques, she seeks to exceed the photographic condition by merging it with formal innovations through text, repetition and by complicating the spatial integrity of the scene she envisions.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"6","storytext":"This image bears an ironic relationship to a stereotypical double-portrait composition format that can be widely seen in many Indian middle-class homes where the patriarch of the family stands with an authoritative gaze while a subservient wife is shown usually seated next to the man. In this work, many of those tropes are imitated and parodied, but the firm clasp of the two pairs of hands is intended to signal a different attitude toward coupled, heterosexual gender relations, where each is imbricated in the life of the other instead of one claiming a higher position of authority.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"7","storytext":"The presence of several clothes hangers in the background alert us to the artificial mechanics by which gender difference is asserted in society: by having men and women \u2018dress their parts\u2019 properly. This how we \u2018know\u2019 the figure seated at the table to be a woman, while the pressed suit visible at the back appears to be intended for the bare-chested man, each a sort of packaging to signal socially recognized forms of occupying gender roles.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"8","storytext":"Towards the right, however, a knot of hangers appear to be suspending human heads, transforming the innocuous household item into something dangerously akin to a hook at a meat-shop. Packaged gender relations are as much about commodifying complex human experiences for men and women into consumable tropes (such as \u2018husband\u2019 and \u2018wife\u2019), according to Sud, that can be mindlessly reproduced through heteronormative unions.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"9","storytext":"The steel rod at the top is a variation on the familiar frame that enters into many of Sud\u2019s compositions. It gives structure to the picture and suggests the space of a closet within which both figures are trapped, mannequin-like, unable to leave their roles behind and emerge from their designated positions. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"10","storytext":"Suggesting heads and faces to be similar in social function to clothes signifies that Sud may have thought of them as masks (an object that recurs in some of her other works, especially after her encounter with Japanese Kabuki theatre) that people put on, echoing T. S. Eliot\u2019s famous line from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock<\/I>: \u2018(t)here will be time\/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.\u2019 As a heightened statement of urban and social anomie, this picture highlights the loneliness of men and women within social relationships where scripts are needed to perform their roles accurately.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""}] |
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| Art Artist Names Single | Anupam Sud |
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