Half an hour to leave for my University, I wonder what to wear. But the choice is not simply of ‘what to wear’ but of ‘what to be’. Should I be ‘the-typical-JNU-kurta-and-jhola-type’ or ‘the-jeans-heels-bag-type’? This thought of ‘putting on’ stays with me; I know I will be perceived to be ‘what I put on’. Not only will I wear my identity; I will be stereotyped by what I wear. Does one actually wear one’s identity? Does wearing one’s identity become a valid proposition because one gets stereotyped by what one wears? By wearing, here, I obviously don’t mean just clothes but an attitude, a personality and everything that goes with that personality that is not naturally one’s own self but an add-on, a ‘put-on’, a make-over and a mask.
This stream of thought automatically leads us to the concept of ‘masquerade’. Arguably, there is a certain role-playing in everybody’s life, where one ‘acts’ according to what people’s idea/notion of that individual is: one ‘acts out’ fantasies of otherness. An attempt to disentangle the paradox of ‘self x stranger’ leads one to explore how does the self become a stranger, how does the stranger become the self, and how does the self become determined by a stranger?
Interestingly, it is this game of enactment, stereotyping and masquerade that is both used and questioned by the artist Pushpamala N. I am referring to her project jointly conceived with photographer; Clare Arni called “The Native Women of South India- Manners & Customs”. A range of stereotypical images of women from newspapers, popular-studio photographs, film-stills, and advertisements are recreated as photographic ‘artifice’. For what is interesting is the construction of these images: physically, with the help of elaborate sets, costume and make-up; and also conceptually, decoding the idea of stereotype again using the same tools. The mise-en-scene plays a crucial role in evoking the memory of an already familiar image, of suggesting its past, reminding us of its context. Therefore what the artist constructs is only a part of what is finally constructed and made relevant through the viewer’s recognition of the image as a type.
Pushpamala says “the final photograph will be a copy of a copy--from original to the printed image which is then photo-copied and used as a reference for the set painter--to the painted set which is then photographed, and then to the final form of the image”.
It is in the process of this construction of a type that the artist or her ‘self’ becomes a ‘stranger’. For by stepping into the world of the stereotype, Pushpamala subverts the stereotype. The development of the artist from her ‘self’ to the ‘type’ involves a masquerade, and opens up a range of issues about the drive in favour of mimesis.
In the 1929 article, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’[1], Joan Riviere argues that womanliness “could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not the stolen goods.” She concludes by saying that there is no difference between “genuine womanliness” and “masquerade.” Judith Butler makes an interesting point by saying that gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity. In ‘Gender Trouble’[2], Butler says that gender is a performance. It is what one does at particular times rather than a universal identity of what the person is. And therefore if gender is socially constructed, in part through femininity-masquerade is an inescapable part of female lives and therefore here a stranger or the idea of what one has to be becomes the self.
One can’t help but compare Pushpamala’s work with that of Cindy Sherman who in her works; Untitled Film Stills explores a range of stereotypes. Sherman uses cosmetics, costumes, setting, gestures and expressions to bring out the clichés she wants to evoke.
Stereotypes are tags given to others because of this obsessive need to classify, typify and compartmentalize. And, creating then demystifying these stereotypes is exactly what Pushpamala’s work aspires to do. Through the various manifestations of masquerade she is not only ‘masking’ herself to become somebody else but also ‘unmasking’ in the deconstructionist sense of exposing and critiquing that stereotyped stranger. The question of how a stranger determines the self is precisely the underlying thought behind her ‘stereotypes’. The work takes a playful turn when the characters are displaced and are given a new setting as in The Popular series. For example, when the ‘Lady in Moonlight’ from a Ravi Varma painting transforms into a modern day woman wearing dark glasses, when the Toda woman playfully points a gun to a man or when the goddess Lakshmi becomes white-skinned. And this mix-and-match generates the situation for alternative identities to emerge.
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