Art and Embraces : Mithu Sen

There are many ways to practice art today. Privileged typologies of artistic production have turned more like open variables embracing things of all kinds - people, materials, sites and situations that still hope to fascinate by ‘an artistic process’ of ‘an artful mind’. Artist can be just any 'other', anything like blogger, graphic designer, community worker, academician, social networker, a chat-mate, activist, street walker or repairer of sorts. Multiple entry-points are there into a contemporary artistic field. All are equally valid. If potentially re-oriented, it is equally probable for anything in life to assume an art-frame work too. Still one may keep calling something ‘alternate’, ‘participatory’ ‘site specific’ ‘installation-like’ ‘conceptual’ or even ‘white cube’, but differences made by these pointers can not any more be as categorically political as it used to be around ideological genres or simple lingua-franca of ‘art world conveniences’. Our chaos is only increasing. It is time to see those who brave up to encounter it and device means not reductive. Many things can push erstwhile privileged frames (art galleries, museums and a large number of assumed ‘alternative spaces’ being part of it) fall in their place and get ready to start political dialogues with the arbitrariness of life. Those privileged spaces otherwise would have wanted to surpass, suppress and control. So a dialogic insight to form multiple spaces, with all its random nature frankly kept up, transforms our very idea of ‘political context’. New forms of documenting transacting archiving and writing art are also demanded by this condition. 
It is in this fluidity of contexts and artistic procedures that Mithu Sen with a frank and bovine spirit, seem to reinitiate the politics of ‘emotions’ in a contemporary art world that still largely flaunts its disinterested pleasures.  
The legacy systems of science have always tried to employ the idea of ‘artful mind’ as a behavioural singularity that has caused the greatest scientific embarrassment for they appear to indicate an unexplained discontinuity between us and the entire rest of life [1]. The legacy systems of aesthetic philosophies have also invariably prescribed isolation – in terms of a distance between subject and object - as basis for art, a disinterested pleasure state of being derivable from a high pedestal object with inherent properties. This is a predisposed state of affairs imagined in relation with a distanced and opaque object-entity and with the perennial ‘seeing/watching viewer’, also with the subject matter essentially invested with mysterious properties. This is isolation in the service of nothing but the institution called art wherein a viewer is not supposed to touch or come towards a dialogue with the art work but relentlessly see or buy (possess) or get ‘possessed’ by it. He/she may try to read the gallery literature or do contemplations with due reverence and courtesy to the system.   How far those perceptual rituals and cordial regiments take those artful isolations into a social or psychological communion that wants certain amount of reality and viscera?
‘The system feeds neither the body nor the heart: many are condemned to starve for lack of bread and many more for lack of embraces’ thus writes Eduardo Galeno (on Hunger /2, BOOK OF EMBRACES). This really happens in a different ‘system of isolation’ that Galeno describes like this: Look out for number one. Your neighbour is neither your brother nor your lover. Your neighbour is a competitor, an enemy, an obstacle to clear or an object to use. Art work / world often turns such a neighbourhood.
So there are other forms of isolations for want of body and heart that demands not simply seeing and dialogues. Further called forth is something that can be called ‘embraces’. They do not emerge from obscured coherence derived from disinterested pleasures. They arise from reasons pretty different from those prescriptively ‘aesthetic’ and unified framework of art. They in turn arise when the unified systems fail to acknowledge the human being’s potential quality to embrace, let me put it in words of lowest possible keys, i.e. to evoke interest amongst.
This different kind of isolation is a fall out effect of living ‘Life’, being or imagining free from everything and accepting the truth, gliding through its choices, its neighbourhoods, its peoples, materials, things and plenty of its familiar and unfamiliar formats and destinies. This ‘life’ is also the ‘other’ imagined by most of those ‘embarrassed disciplines’ of science and art that have largely hushed and blamed the visceral out of their ideal ambit of reason.  
This other kind of isolation is not simply a modern state of ‘artful being’. It is an attempt to inevitably encounter life, turning it into a better communicating social exercise generating fresh stories and sensors because it definitely contains multitudes of ever-changing temporal and spatial relationships, visited and re-visited. More than distanced contemplation, this evokes embraces of various kinds, materials and characters. This also involves artist’s allowances to characters, participants (be it bleeding birds or busy woman in Delhi or soft man in New York or cold rain or hot rain ),their timings, survivals and fights to come into existence.
Mithu Sen exercises her aesthetic embraces wonderfully into our social machinery of human isolation that thrives on competing identities and archetypal binaries. That is why this ‘Up close personal’ wished to feature her. But how could one respond to an embrace? It is difficult to write on or off the art of embraces because the writer once transmigrates, will start writing poetry instead of an essay! Whatever it may be, one has to either allow for an embracing system or leave that system for fear of its chaos. I opt for the first because in Mithu Sen’s art practices (like in a select few of other artists too whom I will hopefully present in the forthcoming issues) without reducing anything to mere spectacle, there is a complex crucible of gender race and commodity identities with contesting sectarian emotions. All the time during our e-mails and chats, almost like in a capturing cam, I could see that objects and stuff that spiralled were embarrassingly exposing and at once pleasuresome.
But that is the way embraces work. We are not contemplating on any outsider stuff called ‘art’. We are within it once we ‘embrace’ the artistic.

Touch the invisible? Experiment with the visible

Embraces weave the visible and the invisible together so that everything deep-ridden seems to surface for the embracer’s pressing touches. Perhaps there is no acknowledgement of a cordial order. No biography of the artist will be forwarded like in the familiar ‘portfolio professionalism’. But there will be skeletons, veins, intestines and excretions on the way to slip into, touch and tame. You can’t escape all these and witness a genre of ‘figuration’/ ‘interview’/ ‘installation’/ ‘collage’ or something from this artist.   
Little art school -‘It was a space for dreams happiness and confidence’.
Childhood and its idealist wanderings being pretty consciously sustaining in Sen, it is very difficult to sit with a set of straight questions in jacket for an ‘up close’ with Mithu Sen. one has to assume a ‘no beginning no end’ mode of conversation. So, a ‘run Lola run..’ state of affairs follow. Sen pretty much pauses in life with a childhood of imaginations and inputs in the sense that irrespective of one’s age and maturity markers, one makes things and gives shape according to one’s desires. While in the regular art schools there were drawing classes of boring symmetries, a little art school with super hero art teacher who was almost like a magician was a place where she went for not really colour or art but for a space for herself. ‘It was a space for dreams happiness and confidence’.
Palm tree teacher - ‘Used to learn nature study from him’
As landed up in Shanthiniketan ‘it made my life for the first moment’, she says. And ‘who were the teachers inspired’ will be just another regular question because those who teach art to somebody are generally very difficult to get recognised. Some times the most influential teacher was that palm tree inside the deer park, next to the forest. ‘Used to learn nature study from him, the palm tree teacher’, she puts it.
little ‘Kopai’ and vast ‘Khoj’ – ‘phonetically they are beautiful’
Sometimes the ‘Kopai’ (the little brook at the end of the township) will teach, especially when no drop of water in summer. One from non-Bangla may irresistibly stretch the word to some familiar ones. The etymology of the word ‘kopai’ ? But we can’t really translate it in any language, Mithu says. ‘kopai, ‘khoai’(a landscape with brick red clay and stone) etc are very local names. ‘No clue to their origins but phonetically they are so beautiful’, She muses.
The extra ordinary teachers in Mithu’s life (possibly in anybody’s life) are anything ranging from pathways ... streets ... people ... men ... women ...  rickshaw pullers ....  clothes ...  gestures ...  fishermen ... paddy field ... winter ... rain ... warm rain ... cold rain ... mist ... ‘my bicycle’ ... ‘my room’ ... room mates ... ‘my professors’ ... their big books ... their thin kurtas...
“I discovered so many things and people that may seem so ‘unimportant’ to others”
Then one wonders how one will express them in a scheme of ‘important things’ for they yet need a frame, a familiar material and language, to embrace us in isolation. It shall not yet a matter of ‘be all and end all’ of surface and image or object and space. The skill of an artist in materials and techniques may become pretty visible and graphic for others but that won’t be all of artistic stuff that is demonstrable.
At various points of formalist and conceptual dead ends, artists have recouped that realm of ‘imagination’ to remain engrossed in a state of ‘art’ not of its ghost memoirs. Engrossing art is at once emotional. That is perhaps a realm of never dismissible passion. A realm of flesh into which one may try to delve deep only to delineate the skeleton. There is pretty much in skeletal graphic!
“You know today I made a little bird....whose stomach is coming out. He is looking very calm even with a drop of blood oozing from its beak. But when I make an image against a white surface they start fighting. Both are like my children. I don’t know whom to support”
Let me not put this as a friction between image and surface, neither a crazy blabbering on a typical poetry-state. From the white blankness, Mithu slowly inflates many latent genres of ‘doing art’, sometimes scissor-cut, sometimes image-cloned. It is not mere skill of photo collaging. In most of her white paper and photo-deriving lampoons like ‘False Friends’ series, the genres often speak typologies of sentiments, mostly female sentiments. An emotional complex of seduction and repulsion (resisting ‘interpellations’ that makes somebody an ontological captive, as Nancy Adjania observes). Like a woman imagining her face out of a mannequin, (‘Perhaps You’) Mithu undergoes the very same process in a woman’s gendered imaginations, in all its details and clumsiness, oozing out the deserted ‘animalesque’ counters out of those racist/sexist grids but finally making up a lively image sunk in strange exuberance. So lizards fall on face. Slimy lips in pink are smashed in blood. The ‘sundari’ smiles with bubble-gum-tooth. The bazaar eye of a foreign/ other viewer who suddenly turns slapstick on coming across an ‘exotic woman’, some mixed emotion of be-wilderness that dark skinned Mithu (again like many of us Indian beauties) evoked very much during her European visits.   Like hair, the gendered imagination is an elongation of dead cells but in all its length makes an erotic material, as Mithu conceptualised her ‘hair works’ too.  
She demonstrates no institutional anxiety of avant-guard (something again sprouts out of a feeling of dead cells and dismissive oldness in one’s present), rather she counter-dismisses all those existential anxieties, opening up altogether different follow up of tastes memories and an insistence on those ‘common place’ but mostly hidden imaginations. That leads her to think fresh on certain hidden premises of ‘art-world exchanges’ recently.
So there is a vulnerable frankness on the way. One looks at a witty ‘woman-zen’ who rejoices in moments that dilute the lumbering ubiquity of imagination that human situations are largely found in. Just like checking the match of a blouse, one can check a macho man’s muscles under one’s own photo-face cut and pasted! Then titling it as ‘working class hero’ further adds to the exuberance of the dark skinned female face, often the artist’s own. There is a suggestion elsewhere in title that it can be ‘perhaps you’.  She presents horny deer-woman wearing sari and demonstrating her lovely paws. Or like we say ‘eyes can speak’, she works out crowning around two darkened and almost watering ‘photo graphically sentimental’ eyes with strange coiffures of internal organisms floating like vignettes or flower illustrations.
There are some elusive pleasure-spaces that this artist emulates in all possible means as water colours or photo collages or objects placed in front or real / virtual projects.
As artworks these definitely transact in a separate institutional order of art. They are but not necessarily ‘representations’ or ‘sign system’ of any simple order. They sprout from within those dark recesses, mostly hidden, of human brain in relation with its promiscuous and visceral rejoicings of energy and liberation. Varied body states like ‘as-if body states’, ‘filtered body states’, are enacted.   

Simulated body states

‘Feelings arise from any set of homeostatic reactions, not just from emotions. They translate the ongoing life state in the language of the mind. There are distinctive ‘body ways’ resulting from different homeostatic reactions, from simple to a complex state of pain, and thus distinctive core feelings. There also are distinctive causative objects, distinctive consequent thoughts, and consonant modes of thinking.’
-Antonio Damasio, ‘What feelings are’
It is a different kind of wisdom to know that art making is actually small and unimportant activity in comparison with one’s fundamental experience of being. Ironically, such an estranging negative wisdom has turned very liberating for some artists. Most of the artists of the past and present emerging from any under-privileged conditions of sorts would have this undercurrent. But this is almost inherently a gendered wisdom. Women have made distinct takes on this perhaps because of the regimens of interiorisation, those under-rated and fragmented physicality from hair to nails that by and large no woman escapes. There was once Frida Kahlo whose bodily disintegration was a long internal process, visible only in her paintings’. ‘That is why she could paint her own abortion, her broken back, her bleeding heart and unhealed wounds from her operations’ [2]. It was pain, pleasure and so many possible ranges of emotions germinated from living the life of a woman that Frida painted out. Quite a few women in Indian art have expressed the haunting presence of their interiorised subjectivities. If to touch upon a few of them, Arpita singh almost needles the brush work through middle aged bodies, those organs internal and organisms external. Nalini Malani has explored the viscosity of medium that comes forth only through a layered repeated touched sensitised and focused activity. There was Rumana Hussain who projected deep and graphic ruminations over female body as a contested site of patriarchal domination. There was Nasreen Mohammedi who abstracted with draughtsman’s tools. And there is Pushpamala who performs ‘self’ as a sentimental subject caught in the orders of truth and beauty only to masquerade in those orders in favour of body as a playground of sentiments. It is also in her practice that anybody can play in the other’s shoes and thereby alter the scope of ‘self’-experience.     
Mithu Sen’s art practice is but an open play that incessantly maps feelings, perceiving the body as ‘being in a certain way’. ‘Feeling’ as she works out is extremely elusive so that it is not a collection of thoughts or ideas labelled in systemic discourses where often mind is the sole boss/loss of body. The perceived stereotypes of mind are not evoked or even parodied to resist, masquerade or contest with, in Mithu Sen’s practice. It is as if she has gone past with those ‘feminist’ strategies and has directly entered an era of total guts.
Emotion, as charted through her trajectory is interestingly re-oriented into a corporeal realm from the terrible recess of ‘reason’. Rather it opens up some other reasonable questions pertaining to our embarrassing sensorium and its economy. If safely and religiously oriented in a contesting dualism where emotion could be an absolute terrain of mind, ideas and ethics it would have been much standardised and sanitised kind of art practice. But Mithu works inside out of body as if in a search to capture its brain stimulations generating images and signalling an array of feelings. In her words, the materials of body are mostly capable of revealing ‘a psyche involved with sex’  
The lost and rolled hair
Rolled hair, a bunch of jolted hair, came to my mind as a metaphor from a daily practice.   I feel that a woman's identity is bound to the confines of the hair ring. for instance the form of a ring itself is similar to the form of her genitals, her gender identity .the unconscious act of rolling discarded hair is an inherited domestic habit ,a mechanical act which has become almost like a ritual habit and is a myth of our own making. There is also a suggestion of  self-gratification or masturbation in the act of rolling hair around ones finger. In some of my works where I have embroidered with hair on to cloth, there too is a connotation of sex in the act of   piercing the needle. (on Mithu’s series of installed art works with her own lost hair – ‘Unbelonging’)

Signals thus hailing from the body form political state of mind in society. Signified by its actions on body conceived in parts, the social fabric constantly employs mind and body in a competitive game of sliding privileges and imposed humiliations on female body and other complexly privileged sectors of human existence.
Signals hailing from body are on one hand denounced as ‘pornographic’ by the exercise of mind on parts of body and almost tyrannically wants to subsume all those embarrassing other, the physicality. On the other hand body is glorified as ‘beautiful’ for their artfully obscured object hood. So the moment one decides to be ‘truthful’ towards direct simulation of body-states as Sen does in all her projects, it will not correspond to either ‘pornographic’ or ‘beautiful’, the perceived ‘realities of body’, not full figure works but the latent eros in part of body’s speech.  
With strong underpinnings of empathy, she creates a range of simulated body states.
I feel the image of this hair  and the act of rolling it or giving it a new shape , is a threatening  vocabulary  of silent tension , suspicion, anger, anxiety, paradoxes, secret desire, sentiment, suppression, fear , hatred…………….
She experiments with the states of mind for us so that the viewer is evoked to guess the state of mind with all his/ her ‘visual association cortices’. And it definitely varies as we viewers are from varied social and physical classes. Yet all over it, we respond to many common states of mind that are signalled through many ‘reality props’ (like photographs, actual materials installed, virtual interaction provoked- to write letters of love as in ‘free mithu’ project, etc) that Sen strategically uses for arousal of sensations memories and stories in the persons who come in relation with her works.

‘Free Mithu’

....the sweater of yours is much precious to me than anything..*
The art world much driven by market recently has created a new array of art lovers across the world. From passive ‘lovers’ many of them dared to turn themselves into buyers who can purchase / possess art as a distinctive transacting object, as a haunting/speculative presence in their emotional / economical accounts. Profit from art is at once a profit from emotion, not necessarily derived from ‘contemplating the object of art’ but from the very etiquettes of transactions often turning out to be experiments in human relationships. These entire active transacts of art thus opened, not necessarily and directly involve money. But the values of symbolic capital definitely are projected and debated.
The ‘Free Mithu’ project that is on for the last couple of years, is an interesting test case of what remains ‘as of now, the present’. And it raises many questions regarding the kind of fulfilment that art world is supposed to offer for its inhabitants.
The website www.mithusen.com was made active in April 2007 wherein Mithu Sen, a much sought after artist of the very young generation of Indian declared a ‘summer dhamaka’. She asked just send a letter with love to her. And the offer/ ‘GIFT’ back to the respondent is ‘original artwork done by her, unique edition, select style from gallery, conditions apply’. The site declared that it was an interactive project. She invited people from her mailing list- friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And they were free to forward it to their mailing lists too.
As Beth Citron, who entered this project among some others vindicates:
Mithu and I had gotten to know each other more closely during her stay in New York the previous month. During a shared day at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, she told me about “Free Mithu” and said that she would like to gift a work to me if I would send her one ‘letter with love.’ She also told me that she liked the simple black cardigan sweater I was wearing, and we made plans to go shopping together to buy one for her when she got back to New York and had some free time. As our shopping date never took place, I thought to send her my sweater – along with a few spare words – as my warm letter with love and contribution to “Free Mithu.” This began a still-ongoing informal dialogue between Mithu and me about her art, generosity, “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde, the concept of ‘free,’ Shah Rukh Khan, love, attachment, curtain repair, visual icons, private and public gestures, hospitality, and many other hopelessly complicated and hopefully irreconcilable topics.  As Mithu then asked me in summer 2008 to contribute some words to the public life this project, I am presenting parts of our correspondence, my reactions, and understanding of this project – excerpted from our exchanges and friendship – to “Free Mithu.”
For almost two years, Mithu has collected various forms of ‘letters’ – including two diaries, a box of mangoes, a sweater, the dictation of a letter, a conversation shared over lemon cake, and works of art – from a wide range of participants across the world.
Some doubted it is a mockery. There were plausible doubts regarding a ‘trading of LOVE’ in exchange of art work. The whole pinkish and garish naughtiness of the site might suggest it too.
A GIFT is a GIFT is a GIFT for ever… This project is thinking of those friends who cannot AFFORD an artwork they truly desire….and here the definition of 'afford' goes beyond purchasing power, market or mediator ….it could be anything….time, gratitude, love, respect, care, sincerity, passion, bondage….. ....money can only get out of a relationship by pricing it as a commodity.......when we give or receive a gift it shows our personal bond, care and relationship between us.....gifts establish a feeling, a bond between two people. This bond may not be social....it could be spiritual or psychological as well. (Mithu clarifies on ‘Free Mithu’ Project’s message board)
The message board is an interesting site of contesting ideas and response tonalities that are generated by this project among people, mostly those familiar people in most of our mailing lists perhaps. Some analysed bit theoretically while some ruminated over the essential ingredients of ‘gifting’  
gifts make friends. reciprocity is often delayed. but sometimes it fails and then the circuit itself goes out of operation, extinguishing itself, imploding. gifts and love letters are very similar in that way. peace and love, alex : replied on 18.08.08 posted by Alexander August Keefe
To be honest, i love getting gifts from loved one's, who doesn't? but if i ever know that there is an intention or a sinister motive, it would just depress me : replied on 27.07.07 posted by Puneet Shah
MAX WEBER in his seminal volume, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, describes how gifting was an important social act, crucial in building social relationships, and has described how gifting played important roles in securing social prestige, alliances and also facilitated the movement of capital in the feudal economy. it may be observed that in our late capitalist times, apart from its economic role, all the roles pointed out by weber remain valid : replied on 21.06.07 posted by Rahul Bhattacharya
The message board discussed seminal issues like: How about getting a warm honest effort from a friend (or an unknown friend) in an old fashion way by receiving a human-touched letter/note on this cyber days? Is it uncomfortable to provide a letter with LOVE (what is it!!)in a personal way to get an art work by an artist friend? Should art always consider 'money' as a 'price'? How can we reach to those art lovers too who cannot afford an art work from market by reaching them directly in a more sensitive way? Should art be 'free' from market (sometime!)? Is a gift unconditionally reciprocal?
Interestingly, ‘affordable art’ is here a double edged butt of desire for an art-respondent crowd. It is devalued at some contexts and it is a desired existential situation at some other. An art gallerist perhaps discourages this ambiguous test case by an artist who is fairly rated and priced. An amateur art lover with money to buy priced and valued art works may wonder at this ‘offer’ and even feel it offending an investor in art. Still some others may wonder how to write ‘letter with love’, the basic demand from artist. A very busy man in Delhi offered Mithu ‘his time to dictate his letter to the artist so that the essence doesn’t get disintegrated in the mail’. A woman requested Mithu to collect her letter from home so that they can spend a few relaxed moments over a lemon cake.
Now one may look at what happens to this project over its two years course of time. The interiorated realm of private letters, and intimately shared objects between the artist and the art-respondents at some particular stage is getting exteriorated as Mithu decides to mount her collected ‘letters (by now proliferated into range of objects like sweaters and mangoes, mailed suggestions etc.) with love’ as separate exhibition on its own. Some artist-friends of hers even sent their own art works to Mithu. She mounts the whole stuff in public as a ‘Khoj’ project titled ‘Free Mithu’. Now all what was supposedly private became public. But the artist purposely has gift-wrapped her ‘GIFTS’ to be sent while she mounted the parcels and letters from friends in public space, making it ‘an inadvertent exhibition’ for her artist-friends.
There is a contestation of ‘conventional’ and the ‘experimental’ within the project as observed by Beth Citron thus: ‘The artworks that Mithu will gift through this project are mostly traditional “Mithu Sens,” meaning mostly the drawings for which she is best known as an artist. While the project overall is experimental and radical, these works are intentionally not, as they are metaphors of the exchange and connections between the artist and participants. It is also at heart a psychological game, in which Mithu must figure out what to give to each participant, to discover their desire and need, and attend to whatever they may have asked her for – directly or inadvertently’.
There arise questions like, what is the relation between emotions and economies? What has the flamboyant economy of ‘rare art’ got to do with the very idea and scope of affordability, availability and embraces of art? What is the relation between artwork and its artist? What is it between an artwork and a ‘respondent to artwork’ (in terms of its lover/buyer/interpreter/critic)?  Over supply can hamper an artist’s value, in sheer terms of economics. But what is an artist’s value when there is least demand for art for reasons not fully of ‘art world’? Mithu in 2007 was projecting a futuristic open forum by this virtual project. Question of affordability comes only next to the idea of high pricing. In the market downturn, the emotional/economical aspirants may turn hopeless and there is chance they step back as old world passive lovers who are again not very moved even by ‘affordability’ to put them back in ‘active mode’.
Perhaps there is something still very positively retained and active in our art world scenario. What is it? The emotional ruminations evoked by an art work? Oh! what remains is just those echoes of ‘promises’ once were floating in art world? Or is it that promises of art can not ever be judged in the worldly reasoning at all? Or it can still be judged? Disparate documents of mutual correspondence of love, admiration and intimacy between the artist and the art respondents remain still active as the private realm of letters, emails, chats, sent gifts, shared words of positive energies, sentiments and solidarity?

Mithu Sen makes our brain’s playground active, I should say. It is done by many artists around, one can again say. But Sen employs some fresh politics of untamed ‘emotional spaces of art’ that many around us are not yet prepared to do.