‘I don’t want to be a cliché I want to explore the whole world’ –
(‘a small town girl’ or ‘an imaginary Robert’ or ‘Pushpamala’ in and as ‘Phantom Lady or Kismet’, 1998)

How to escape cliché is an obsessive counter-thought in the performance Art Projects of Pushpamala N since mid 90s. That succeeded a sculptor’s exceptional experiments with subject, form and materials. She has proved in Indian Contemporary Art that speaking, doing and vindicating oneself in an apparent tongue of ‘the other’ can be very effective to escape cliché. As far as we are living in the world of stereotypical identities, and as far as it seems social revolutions are at a stalemate, there is a significant amount of exactable black humour in constantly confusing one’s presence and practice through mimickingly living out the very stereotypes. Ideological fantasies suddenly come up alive on the way only to expose their hidden awkward realities. Pushpamala obsessively conducts examination of certain schematic situations in life, using the very same objects, technologies or languages that are carriers of those situations, thereby testing the whole fantastic reality of a person’s political situation (as an ‘Indian’ and/or as an artist and/or as a woman and/or one who lives out life in post-colonial and/or globalising India. All these situations occur in multiples and mingling among themselves but often they crop up as if fixed typologies). Adding to it, there is an assumed amateurishness going well with Pushpamala’s dealing with the medium, checking whether this act of examination takes any easy en-rout into simple self-contained institutional habits of ‘Art’. Over a considerable span now, she deals with the idea, techniques and materials of kitchen recipes, sentimental photographic narratives, archival photographs, calendar pictures and plenty of melodrama. Provided these are supposed types of ‘lower’ and ‘superficial’ tastes, this artist projects ironic makeovers in the subjectivities of ‘rebellious female’ who wants to explore the world. 
Emerging as a noted young generation sculptor in late 80s in Indian Art scene, Pushpamala was evolving her interests through photo-performances, a genre she alone brought forth in Indian Art with an incessant political rigour in 90s. Lately, she is employing the medium of video to her continuing purposes.

1

Years through a sculptor’s notebook

Right from the beginning of her career as an artist there was a felt need to bring inner garments of mind onto the outside, onto one’s very body of work. One can find personal, political, institutional and intellectual arbitrations in its course. A little bit of biography will do, I hope, to explain the particularity of her situation.

Born and brought up in Bangalore, she attended evening classes of Art conducted by Bangalore based sculptor Balan Nambiar, during her bachelor degree in psychology, economics and English. There she did plenty of still life, life study and portraits. Lots of paintings were done using palette knife. She even bunked university classes and went for these Art classes. Reputation as a good student at both these places and Balan Nambiar’s recommendation both fetched her father’s appreciation enough to go to Baroda and learn Art.  In spite of a feeling that five years of further studies in Art would be too much for the daughter and though options were very well sought to finish it in two years and though ‘art’ was not looked as high as a profession like engineering, her educated family ambience was somehow congenial, with its own reservations to what she was supposedly searching for. ‘Being a good student’ was everywhere an advantage, it seemed. She went with doing BFA in sculpture with a scholarship from Karnataka government, here also earning a reputation of a student of first rate. During the foundation year itself she developed a taste for sculpture, enjoying working with hands on materials. Very few women used to think of taking up sculpture at that time. Sculpture supposedly demanded physical strength. And almost unwittingly she put up the doubt to the faculty member of sculpture department Raghav Kaneria if she could proceed with sculpture in the following years. He said, “look, you need mental strength not physical strength to do sculpture” and she was pretty impressed with that. 

Later in ‘sculptor’s notebook’, the dissertation submitted in the final year of MFA she explains:
‘I chose sculpture because of its physical ness: of the complete physical involvement that it demands for its making. Being a woman, and coming from a typical Brahmin background where manual labour is despised, it was fascinating for me to plunge my hands in wet clay, to feel the novel thrill of handling different tools and learning technical processes. At every stage instant practical decisions had to be made, problems solved using one’s wits and hands’.  
There was indeed an uncomfortable dichotomy of ‘the mental’ and ‘the physical’ that often square down women to confused conditions of limited subjectivity. So for a woman deciding to study sculpture was a choice with its own contradiction. Pushpamala chose sculpture because of both mental and physical attractions towards the whole medium and its practice, but then she had to project the dichotomy as sincerely as she could, since Art as an institution, then life at large, did not expect women as subjects but mostly as objects. And 1970s was an intellectually fervent time across the world. There was widely creating a whole lot of academic ambience questioning the institutional frameworks of Art where women find themselves outcasts and also conscious efforts were going on in recouping and claiming women who were unacknowledged participants in Art and history.

In 1977 when she joined the faculty of Fine Arts in M S University Baroda, ‘I was a ‘feminist’ and my agenda was very much ‘feminist’, she says in our ‘Up Close and Personal’ talk. As an avid reader, ever since Bangalore university time, she was part of the intellectual fervent in the local scenario of Bangalore also. As a person inspired by many writers like Germain Greer and Siemon de Bouvier and the like, straight away putting up the conscience-issue of living as a woman in a gendered world, there was very much a felt bond with the world but also with a found reality of an ‘irksome confinement to body’. Acquiring a language to examine this very state of being took its own course.

In Baroda, time was ripe with ‘the narratives’ bringing the whole attention to ‘here and now’ as against symbolic pasts. Pushpamala was also interested in ‘recording the experience of contemporary Indian life as we live it, define it, or present it’. It was a time of many influences ranging from Indian temple sculpture, Jean Arp, Matisse, folk art of Bengal, K G Subrahmanian, Bhupen Khakkar, Dumier, caricature etc. All through these, she was interested in sensuous use and qualities of materials. But it was also a realising time that ‘by wanting to be everything, one was becoming nothing’.

‘The immediate event that helped to crystallize my thoughts was seeing an exhibition of KG Subramanian’s  glass paintings. Here my natural reactions to people and things were echoed and substantiated in the form of art and it was a revelation to me. Suddenly the whole business of art and sculpture from being some solemn and serious ritual became something that could be fun, playful, and imaginative, while still saying important things. I was also attracted to his language of using popular forms and satire to deal with everyday subjects’. (‘Sculptor’s notebook’)
In Pushpamala’s words, sculpture department in Baroda in late 70s when she joined, was largely uninteresting refusing to explore such new ways breaking away from assumed solemnity. People were working in hefty medium often in the mould of Henry Moor sculptures that was roosting in the scenario. It was not a ‘happening place’, rather. All subversive efforts were going on in Painting. This laid back condition was however provoking enough new changes among the sculpture students of the time in Fine Arts Faculty. There was a felt need to take forms out of their restrictive pedestals. Heavy materials and similar forms were getting ignored by younger generation who studied Sculpture in early 80s in Baroda. Finding new materials to work with was one of the major concerns. At the same time there was a contained search for new attitudes to human body.
It was not simply of documenting ‘body in its context’ as it was proposed through ‘narratives’ projects, but a subjective reaction with crisp personal overtones and discretions regarding bodily presence of people around, that attracted Pushpamala.

My subjective reaction to the human body was not in terms of a Venus and a David, in the geometric analysis of the body, but more related to the Yakshas and Sundaris of Indian sculpture or even of the plump heroes and heroines of film posters.(sculptor’s notebook’)
More than an abhorable object of ‘male gaze’, the fantastic goddesses and heroines were acknowledged for the fertile lushness of them as images. ‘They were imaginary creatures representing a type, a feeling’.  With the political consciousness of being a woman artist in the age of widely spreading feminist vision of the world in the academics, Pushpamala also had always thought that her work was outwardly directed; that it was about society and other people; that it was in a sense, detached observation. Towards the end of the years in Baroda, writing ‘sculptor’s notebook’, she found to surprise that her work had extremely personal element. ‘The shapes, the forms, the content came out of memories and experiences’. It was definitely a time that instilled a search for ‘more uncertain abstraction of the personal into political forms’.

2

‘Excavations’ and beyond

By that time, being a ‘feminist’ was also turned out not to be an essential identity of anything in particular. For the creed of ‘rebellious woman’, it was also not a transit state of affairs or an interim relief till one finds space in the institutional framework. It was but much about gaining a particular vantage point to excavate and gather methods of living, as recognised by this sculptor to inhabit oneself in multiples, especially in counter-postures. In that sense we do not find Pushpamala in fraternity frameworks that some of the major contemporary women artists tried to project in late 80s or so. When artists like Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh or Nilima Sheikh associated in fraternal projections of female artists identity, we find Pushpamala in a differing realm though she was very much engaging with issues of gender and stereotyping. There was a substantial element of masquerade and critique that made her explore things in multiple tones.

Still before acquiring this multiplicity, there is an inter-mission of making self-contained identity of a woman in her confident body and its actions. One can find Rekha Rodwittiya in the scene very much assuming iconic coherence and assertiveness for identity as a woman artist. For Pushpamala it was a phase that went much further in exploring the paradoxes of male/female fantasising coherent identities.

When I first started doing my plaster busts of women in 1981, I was personally weak, without confidence. I wanted to be whole, confident, self-contained. As the sculptures took shape, I took shape. They were bold, audacious, full of a ripe sensuality. I worked with images of ripe fruits and vegetables, thin firm sun-warmed skin bursting with inner vitality. I needed an image of woman not as martyr or victim (as I felt then), but as a strong whole human being who looked straight at the world. The figures were awkward, fleshy, plump faced with bulges at belly and back. They were formed by my childhood memories of women’s bodies, of playfully pinching the fleshy rolls below the sari blouses of my mother and aunts, their plump arms and soft skin. Voluptuous, coquettish, they were also reminiscent of the bra ads that I saw in buses, the women of kitsch calendars, the heavy rounded limbs of Yakshis. They were made in plaster of paris because of its soft and porous surface, and coloured with powdered clay and oxides rubbed into the surface to give them a startlingly ‘real’ presence.(Sculptor’s notebook)

It is an ironic humour sense and frank engagement with the ‘everyday-everywhere world’ that enables one to wear mind on top of body, like ‘girl adjusting bra’ as a theme of public engagement, as one of her sculptures is titled so too. That enables one to return the irreverent (male) gazes with an unwittingly assumed self-consciousness. It escapes the possible closures and embarrassments, whatever, of ‘femme fatal’ reverie.

“Underwear has always amused and fascinated me – banians, lond striped men’s drawers, brassieres – an inescapable feature of urban life, they are everywhere: displayed in stalls and on pavements, in advertisements, on hoardings, on buses, in newspapers and magazines. One can see them recurring in my work, especially bras because they symbolize the modern woman.Bra advertisements are a comic sight but in India wearing a bra means a break with the past, it means modernity and urban culture.” ( ‘Sculptor’s notebook’)

Here emerges a curious aspect that often connects (women) artists and ordinary persons. One can simply randomly remember many instances of women who protest in their own ways and get inevitably featured in media as ‘mad’. It can be for instance a housewife who walked around the street in under garments in protest against her husband and family and eventually casted as ‘curious photograph’ in national media and consequently forgotten. She didn’t know how to use sophisticated equipments of the world like ‘Art’ to save her and gain her serious looks into the issue while demonstrating herself cool in public. On can say plenty of similar instances projected and consumed and deserted in the same manner. An artist can also bring attention of the public to ‘the personal’ in embarrassingly ironic terms without apparently risking her status. Still a woman taking the tongue or looking through the lenses of the silly melodramatic and mimicking types, there are people insensitive to the ‘Art world’ in families neighbours and relations thinking that she is doing all funny things and nothing serious in it. Pushpamala vindicates it from her experience too. Art world was but seriously taking up this artist however, and she got placed in major shows throughout in 90s whenever ‘Indian’ and/or ‘woman’ artists were showcased.

Something occurred as a conceptual interlude in her career where her thorough later strategies appeared latent.  The show called ‘EXCAVATIONS’ was landmark in that sense. The works were also shown in Johannesburg biennale curated by Gita Kapur. The show was made after the 1993 communal riots in Bombay, using poor materials to make shells of objects as images of fragility and survival. Rusted concepts of nation were attempted militantly to forge back into scene in early 90s India.

I try to investigate in my work the state of a society suddenly confronted with globalized capital and its consumer culture, which throws up all sorts of contradictions. Wihle the very idea of the national is questioned, rabid definitions of nation come up (artist’s note for ‘excavations’)

There is tongue in cheek minimalism in those works. Old notebooks, slates, graphic marks and simple boxes sublimate a tragic sense of particular time and its habits. Those objects were incomplete pointers to territories of imagination never drafted as such in Indian Art scene. Titles of ‘excavation’ art works were pointing to Pushpamala’s conscious employment of theoretical insights of walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcade Project’. There she picks up threads from ongoing shreds and narratives of modernism, the central preoccupation of which is commoditisation of things. Just like any other woman, an artist also can be lead to the kind of essentiality in terms of body that one lives in. But artist can be an active manipulator of typical narrative trajectories that essentialise a female body. So there is a great deal of cross navigation that this sculptor undertakes through both physical and mental schemas of gender ever since that show. It was not perhaps a stylistic shift for her. It is very much at an introspective cross-road where she took up the genre of performance and photography. Visible later is an exhaustive repertoire of stereotypes, mediums and technologies evolved through definite processes of patriarchy (theatricity, sentimentality, melodrama, mimicry, imitation, photography or film) with its own situations but counter-worked with a woman’s playful, willful and subjective participation that was not basically intended by the patriarchal processes at all.

PhotoStudio is a modern space. It is theatrical. It is illusory. It is made up. There are strict territories of foreground, focus and background. Classroom is a modern space. It is theatrical. It is didactic. It has strict territories. Fashion is a modern consciousness. It demonstrates. It has concealing and revealing mechanism that generates pleasure of looking where dress is a sign of self. There are quite a few such spaces of modern life with their own mechanism of alienation.

 Pushpamala makes use of theatric, performative and made-up situations in various contexts of ‘modernisations’ that Indian society has found itself engaged in. One can experience modern Indian history as an embedded space of ideologies of sexuality, nationhood and religion, through the obsessive examinations of archival materials that this artist undertakes ever since 1998 when she did a photoromance called Phantom Lady or Kismet. During 2001- 2004, she worked with Golden Dreams and Aunguished Heart, both were photo performance works. In 2004 she comes up with a project called Native women of South India with British Photographer Clare Arni, playing protagonists in a project exploring history of photography as a tool for ethnographic documentation.

3

Romancing and performing photographs

‘Smouldering within the decaying courtyards and moss-stained rooms of the haveli, invalid but autocratic, powerful, the mother is the proud reminder of an old family. Used to quiet obedience, she is now faced with rebellion’
(from ‘the story of a mother and two daughters living in gentele poverty in the heart of Delhi’ or ‘introduction to a collection of 10 postcards (to keep or send) titled as dard-e-dil /aunguished heart’ 2003)
In the meticulous fragments of ‘Arcade Project’, Baudelaire is quoted as writing on 'holy prostitution of the soul’ which gives itself wholly, poetry and charity, to the ‘unexpected’ that appears, to the ‘unknown’ that passes', it is this very poésie and this very charité ; which they (prostitutes) claim for themselves. They had tried the secrets of the open markets; in this respect commodities had no advantages over them. Some of the commodity's charms were based on the market, and they turned into as many means of power. Pushpamala confronts the very garments of ‘soul’ that makes woman of all walks of life, ‘love-ly objects of desire’. But it demands an assumed theatrical space for the woman if to look back at one’s own ‘garments of soul’ since they are as if so ingrained in one’s own body. When you keep distance from soul and its objects, things will take a different turn. It will become (nothing but) a ‘romancing’. When you keep a distance from soul and its objects, you are also making an inhabitable space for oneself as a consumer of soul (‘the mass of inhabitants who make it possible for the sexual object to become intoxicated by the hundreds of stimuli which it produces’) to perform the ‘soul’s rituals.

Thus occur perhaps, a woman’s introspection, a constant juggling of vantage positions as subject and object.
When my mother died in 1981 it seemed to me to mean the end of my childhood, of being a girl, a daughter. With a terrible nostalgia I searched the house for old photographs, family snapshots and childhood portraits. She had been my strongest link to the old Kannada culture and traditions, without her I felt I was floating, rootless. She was theatrical and had loved acting, although she had to limit herself to ladies club affairs, usually playing male roles because of her height. As children we were made to take part in tableaus and studio portraits. Life at home was also theatrical and melodramatic, exaggerated emotions and grand gestures – high melodrama (‘Sculptor’s notebook’)

When one looks at photo it can recreate and project the situation of the photograph. The medium of photo opens up areas into history memory facts details dreams and pleasures that had at a time duly operated in the making of the photo-material. It can live the life of citations. Sentimental narratives in a ‘photographic situation’ can not be simply stylistic ingredients, but a door and a pun to visual ‘taste’ of body and soul alike.  Then, as Pushpamala started doing the whole business of re-creating photographic situation, it is such that somebody comes up with performed photographs but not available as ‘a photographer’ to easily look up to. Somebody performs in it but not available as a performer outside of that situation. Somebody explores types but not an anthropologist making inventory. Artist is only a generic theatrical version of bygone photographic situations.
Accompanying the documented book of the exhibition of ‘Native women...’ project, Susie Tharu in her essay thoroughly defends it as not an inventory, explaining thus, ‘A cliché of colonial anthropology is cited as the title of an art exhibition. We note however that the colour and feel of the cliché, which is ofcourse precisely what interests these artists in their quest for the everyday every-woman, is a new phenomenon and immediately introduces the note of difference into the citation.’  (Native women of south India: manners and customs)

It is a curious romance proving very real, introspective exploring and an outright activity. Shot by photographers in photo studios at various locations in Bombay and Delhi, Pushpamala might find it difficult to explain her activity as either ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’ when both are fused in the same life as in the life of any woman in a gendered world. ‘Putting myself into these narratives or generic stories, perhaps my autobiography is intermingled with the stories of others, thus overturning the established narrative’, she says in an interview with Aditi de.

There are instances when Pushpamala’s mimicry of photographs was looked upon as nothing but unnecessarily further-enacted ‘photoshop’ activity. Presence of the artist with an ‘engaging gaze’ and fleshy languid smiles is disturbing particularly because it is a purposeful inhabitation within the fantastic images much familiarised as uninhabited spaces of ‘the feminine other’. Inhabit the supposedly uninhabited space was quite transgressing an act. Discussing Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s obsessive paintings of women, Griselda Pollock (‘Vision and difference’) observes that in the visual sign, in ‘the woman’ manufactured in a variety of guises in mid-nineteenth-century British culture, absolute difference is secured by the erasure of indices of real time and actual space, by an abstracted representation of faces as dissociated uninhabited spaces which function as a screen across which masculine fantasies of knowledge, power and possession can be enjoyed in a ceaseless play on the visible obviousness of woman and the puzzling enigmas reassuringly disguised behind that mask of beauty.

The theatrical framework in almost all of Pushpamala’s works disturb for the same reasons that the invasion of fantasy by the real artist herself effectively exposes the very lacking and blanking mass (male) gazes at beauty.

Then question arises as when, why and how theatre occurs? It might be when somebody wants to distinguish fact and fiction, real and imaginary when the personal and the political could not maintain their dignified poles and premises in spite of any fantasising mechanism like family freedom democracy etc. Still, what does theatrical acts like this produce, after all? one can somehow fuse the political into personal schemes of Art. Such personalising gestures were very much in prevalence in the art scene.  But if one abstracts and pours personal into the outer frameworks of the political, it can witness the contemporary reality of the ‘everyday-people’ living life within stipulated territories of power and pleasure. That is why, in spite of mockeries, men and women, habitual voyeurs, look at the whole photo stuff of Pushpamala curiously. There is an indulging amusement in the kinds of make-up, kinds of dresses, kinds of jewellery.  One is tempted to simply engage in an effort to find out what the real prop is and what the painted prop in the background is. Distinguishing the spaces between the small podium of lotus on which the two Lakshmis (Clare Arni and Pushpamala) stand, ‘the painted water’ spread on the ground and ‘the painted water’ hung in the background. A silly and dead-end effort to find out the artist’s crew’s mimicking tricks, slowly engaging as a viewer in one’s own silly gazes, thus it informs the futility of the whole exercise of fantasising on real bodies.

That may be perhaps why Pushpamala was posing a counter-method pretty different from women artists who engaged much simpler gender politics literally filtering into their personalising (art) practices. She seemed to have abandoned the emotional quotient of ‘inner worlds’ and taken up some strategies that always resisted sentimentalism by overdoing and even documenting the ubiquitous processes that go into the making of sentimental image. It is the wearing of an over-exposed and confused mind on body, wearing the inner on the outer structure. Her works could be at a time many things related to the personal, the inner, the outer, the self, the social. It could at once be identifying, fooling, mis-norming, misnaming, romancing and introspecting.
 It is also a practice through ‘found people’ and their arbitrations.

4

Working a thriller with ‘found people’ and ‘reverse gazes’
Being a misunderstood prophet does not interest me. I want my work to mean something to people, to be among people. The images I deal with are of ordinary life and not something obscure or esoteric. (sculptor’s notebook)

It is not an easy task to enact the polemics of photography and film as two major technological devises establishing illusory magic through mutually distanced subject-object relations. Interesting part of it is that in order to produce constantly objectifying, alienating and gratifying subject position of viewer for film or photography, there is needed a pretty large number of people’s real participation, communication engagement and arbitration. This is perhaps what Pushpamala lives out in front of us today – engaging with people through some intrinsic vehicles (one may rightly call them ‘stereotypes’ too) of communication.

Ever since started taking up trajectories of ‘photo-romancing’ and ‘photo-performing’ Pushpamala had taken up a typical ‘post-modern’ subjectivity, in the sense that one is assumed in class and gender,  then self-consciously and reflexively committing to the project of negotiating and personalizing norms. She goes on developing it in many ways. She wants getting photographed in each of the locations that she finds herself in. Even when chanced to visit Kochi for her film screening this August, she is eager to arrange for a near-by photo-studio there to romance her very being in there. ‘Post-modern subject’ had well learnt to do without totalising perspectives; instead it prefers living within various modes of discussing society. Over the years, it seems she integrated ‘the ways of discussing’ into personal life, some such matters like how Pushpamala loves to live life through examining tastes and twisting points of visions. There is an integral shift in meaning over the years that she achieved for our habitual ideas of ‘the personal’ through such ‘romance practices’.
Today she uses her performative devises in photography further to the making of video films. Her recent films are Rashtriy Kheer and Desiy Salad, a playful and ironic look at the modern Indian family as it imagined itself soon after independence, and Paris Autumn, a work of fiction in the style of a gothic thriller, which tells the story of the artist’s stay in Paris in the autumn of 2005. The narratives of her terracotta sculptures in late 70s linger in the new devises pretty much in disguises. If food, dishes and recipes had already been coquettish sculptural materials for her, they are witty methodological rhetoric in the film ‘Rashtriy Kheer and Desiy Salad’. Each of the constituents of a family has some mutually exclusive worlds and respective narratives of their own. They enter the fixed frame that has a blackboard in the composed centre space. They systematically deliver self-contained narratives on the black board. The video often fast-forwards like in an animated caricature. Here also there is an assumed simplicity and amateurishness.

‘Paris Autumn’ is a film made up of still photographs. But she takes up the complexity within the medium working it in a thriller format where there is an Indian artist’s reverse-gaze on a European location and its ‘found histories’. She takes freedom to ‘read’ mysteries in renowned paintings in Louvre museum in Paris through materials of both fact and fiction. ‘Working with found objects’ may now be a genre in itself in Contemporary Art. But Pushpamala has extensively worked with ‘found people’, so to say. Strangers give her enough excitement and useful stories too. A friend who was a stranger just a couple of days ago become a photographer for her or acted or performed as she wanted them to. The whole lot of seemingly static or unconnected situations are connected and animated by her through abruptly available sequences.

“I met Cedric Sartore my photographer for Paris Autumn by chance at the opening of the exhibition ‘Indian Summer’. He recognized me from my work on display and just came up to me and said he would love to work with me. He turned out to be very well read, and knowledgeable about music, cinema, theatre, which helped me a lot. I also met Cedric Vincent, an anthropologist who played the friend in the film that evening, who was also very friendly as he had worked on a project in Bangalore. The ghost, Gabrielle Soyer was a designer who I had met years before in Bangalore. But basically, the way I create, I work with whoever is possible in the available circumstances and edit and transform the raw material to get what I want. My friends or acquaintances who have very little time play the characters, flinging themselves with great interest into their roles! And sometimes, it turns out that there is a complete gulf. But I like the risk of plunging into the unknown, and the rough edges. I’ve never had a team of people to work with – but it’s a dream to have the perfect unit.” (e-mail to ‘up close and personal’)

Finding people and being open to various tastes can not in anyways be something schematized for an art project. It is a matter of living life with excitement. Pushpamala is very connected with whole lot of intellectual and cultural scenario right from the very beginning of her career. Academic, theatre, or film people for instance are read by her and she invites them to see her works and conduct discussions on each other’s work. She imbibes peoples and contexts irrespective of their schemes, range of things from ‘high’ to ‘low’. But there is an artist’s vigilant focus on life though anything and everything can enter there. It might be difficult to define this kind of ‘focus’ in any definitive terms. Still one finds that Pushpamala is interested in concept and technology of ‘the other’. It is a question of looking around to focus on certain things so she is always looking around for those things. Naturally it extends to public private and everywhere.

Yesterday I had a very interesting time as I went with Mr. Feroze Babu. He told me about this old man who makes cameras. It was lovely as I felt it part of a project called ‘travelogue’. I don’t know how the final product will be. It is a light-hearted thing. I don’t know what I’ll make from it, I am collecting materials. But it extends from my interest in ethnography and my interest in ‘Native women project’ which i get more and more interested now. I find people are travelling from 18th century onwards. I find this travel photography interesting. Earlier it was paintings and sketches, but after photography was invented you want to go everywhere and take photographs of natives and all that. So I find myself as a native in a sense and taking photos of natives and myself wherever I go. I keep it as a document of my travels as well.               

(From a telephonic chat held on 20th August 2008 for ‘up close and personal’)

One can very well recognize that by really living through ‘the other’s eye’, one is empowering and enjoying the freedom of living with one’s own purposes.

Earlier, I believed that India was a poor rural country and so artists should use poor or humble materials to talk about our reality. But in fact here I am a very metropolitan person who is a citizen of one of the highly industrialised countries of the world with a long history of modern technology. We are falling into an Orientalist stereotype if we seek reality only in the pre-industrial, Miss Rajyalakshmi. The art critic Hans Mathews made an observation which I like - that because photography and filmmaking entered India almost as soon as they were invented, they don't carry an oppressive colonial burden for us. We have our own history of photographic image-making - for instance, the early photographs painted like miniatures, ignoring Western perspective, the manorathas or pilgrim souvenirs made in Nathdwara in Rajasthan using painting and collage. What interests me about the photograph is its documentary aspect - it's ‘I was there’ part, and the possibilities of overturning and questioning this factuality. (from an interview with N Rajyalakshmi or an interview with  the other character invented by Pushpamala to shape tricky questions and answers by herself)

Meanwhile many important art gallery ventures had started making strong presence in major cities of India (Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore) in 80s and 90s. Pushpamala has fruitfully associated with some of them like Vadehra, Sumukha, Sakshi, Nature morte and gallery Espace. She is an artist among a few who also grew with a resurgent gallery practice in India that time. Most of these important Indian galleries started functioning and growing very much before the so called 'market boom'. The kind of academic and cultural politics actually brought in an extensive interest to 'art' as a gallery practice during those times. Economics of art was less articulated but there was a visible engagement of Artists critics and historians in particular Indian galleries at that time. Artists like Pushpamala with some articulate premises of 80s and 90s reminds us of lively ambience of visible  social participation of art, something that is not much attached and publicized in galleries today in the same old way. With an interesting flexibility of disciplines and discourses Pushpamala extends to a 'contemporary practice' wherein her sustaining priorities are getting re-formulated on and again. 
Akbar Padamsee saw my work as an MA student in Baroda and recommended me to Gallery 7 which Arun Sachdev had just started in Mumbai. With great trepidation he had a show in 1985 with myself, Atul Dodiya and Vasudevan Akkitham which became a big critical hit and led to him showing a lot of emerging  artists from Baroda particularly like Rimzon, Surendran Nair, Sheela Gowda, Nataraj Sharma, BV Suresh. This really revolutionized the staid art scene in Mumbai. But later we all moved away due to problems with the gallery. Shireen Gandhi had just taken over Gallery Chemould after an art curation course in London Whitechapel Gallery and she exhibited Alex Mathew and myself in 1991 which she recently said put her on the art map as a gallerist. It has been a long association with her, and more recently with Peter Nagy of Nature Morte, and Bose Pacia, New York. It’s a personalized thing for me, I like to work with people I get along with. But many important shows I have been in have been outside the gallery like ‘Seven Young Sculptors’ curated and organized by Vivan Sundaram or those by Sahmat. In Bangalore, there were no professional galleries earlier and we all used to show in the Venkatappa Gallery in the Museum. There were a whole generation of us from Karnataka – like Sheela Gowda, BV Suresh, Nataraj Sharma etc who came on to the scene in the late 1980s but neither Kala Yatra or Sakshi who came later, were not interested in showing any of us though we were courted by gallerists elsewhere. I organized the installation of Phantom Lady in 1998 in my studio because no one would give me a show. It is only very recently that Sunita of Gallery SKE and Premilla Baid of Sumukha are supporting and showing local and young artists. With my work, I have always worked in unconventional materials and most gallerists don’t like to take the risk of exhibiting it. Many galleries have a big show of experimental art once in five years because they don’t want to get left out of the latest developments. An important thing with the Bangalore Art scene is that most artists do experimental and new media work – it is a completely different scene from most centres in India. There are about 50 or 60 exceptional artists working there with no trace of an art market. They are exhibiting all over India and the world to critical acclaim.

Pushpamala’s sustained tentativeness in work and practice resists all efforts to zero in on any comfortable zones of the past or present or future. Functioning in a mutated continuum of mimicking performing and filming, she has twisted and thoroughly invalidated the privileges of a voyeur within the modernist regimes of erotic fantasy. Thereby she has been sensitizing art-viewers to yet another space of sexuality, ‘a pornographic self within’- something that is at once private and public and something that has to do with power and pleasure at once. Idea of ‘Indian modernity’ in her works now, is no more ‘a past’ replete with ’the colonizer’ and ‘the colonized’ as seamless categories. They are constantly interchangeable identities, very much part of an unconventional game.