Abir Karmakar | Within The Walls,2008

Within the Walls
ABIR KARMAKAR
October 1 – 21, 2008
Gallery Espace, New Delhi
N o v e m b e r 8 – 2 2 , 2 0 0 8
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai

Within the Walls
Gayatri Sinha
Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the
woman in me. Art isn’t a wholly masculine
occupation, you know.
Willem de Kooning
Abir Karmakar’s primary intention is confessional. He lures
the viewer into a secluded world where attitudes of erotic
desire are performed before our gaze. The domestic
space or the nondescript hotel room becomes for a brief
period of time a stolen habitation which reveals the performing
desiring body. Let us briefly compare his paintings
with the larger body of practice by male contemporary
artists, which tends to move up and out from the private to
the public domain, assuming a powerful masculinist view
of cities, building sites, symbols of growth and the urban
landscape in transition. Here the Indian artist appears to
be grounded in responses to mediatic information, global
economy, social discourse. In contrast, among his male
confreres, Abir Karmakar appears to move in and down,
into a psychological space, a miasma of sexual fantasy
and personal expressivity. Locating himself as the subject
of his painting within middle class domestic spaces, he
works with tropes of realistic painting, mannerist portraiture
and the soft porn style of tabloid pin ups.
In this process Karmakar presumes numerous sites of
recollection and association. Karmakar’s inspiration draws
from western painting, its conventions and treatment of
physical states, and the human body. In his incisive study
Emmanuel Cooper identifies a number of titans of the
Italian Renaissance – Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli,
Verrocchio, Pontormo, Bronzino and Caravaggio, who presented
the male body as an arcadian ideal of ambivalent
sexuality. Even within the framework of courtly or church
patronage, such artists drew upon the larger Greco-Roman
tradition of the glorification of the male body but expanded
beyond its conventional rendering. In Renaissance painting
the beautiful and the desirable were male attributes; Vasari
spoke glowingly of Michelangelo’s Bacchus (1496-1497)
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as revealing “a certain fusion (milestone) in the members
that is marvelous and in particular – both the youthful slenderness
of the male and the fullness and roundness of
the female.” (1550). In recent decades scholars have described
Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) paintings – The Musicians,
the Lute Player, Bacchus and Boy – as homoerotic.
However his biographer Maurizio Calvessi argues that the
works reflect the tastes of the patron and not the artist.
By an extension of this argument, Karmakar compels us
to examine the nature of the gaze as it is directed on his
body, and herein lies a vital clue to how we read his work.
What is of interest is that unlike the Greek and Renaissance
model of sexual indeterminacy, of the androgynous
Ganymede, Karmakar emasculates but does not beautify
the male body. Instead, he allows us to recognize its
awkwardness, its passivity and its desire for self-expression.
Again while the ambivalent sexuality of the male body
traces to Renaissance painting it is in the modern 20th
century psychological rendering of the nude that the artist
appears most vested. Contemporary understanding of
sexuality presumes the exploration of a variety of acts and
behaviours that were in traditional cultures or in 19th century
Europe defined as ‘perverse’. It is in the articulation of
these that we gain an understanding of individuality. What
Karmakar demonstrates is that masculinity is made and
not born; when freed of social constraints it can be unmade
or subsumed in a different gender. In this sense, the
spirit of Egon Schiele is recalled, for his vaunted effeminacy
in his painting as much as the melancholy and angst
that he was known to possess. Arthur Danto, writing about
Egon Schiele – who like Karmakar used photographs of
his own nude body as cues to painting – believed that he
had “found a style that sexualized eroticism.” In Schiele’s
work writes Danto, “the human body expresses its sexuality
as artistic truth.” There is also a stylistic and emotional
connection with Balthus (1908-2001) and the centrality of
a sexual dimension, borne of both lust and cruelty. Karmakar’s
bound and taped body recalls the helpless male
figure of Paula Rego (b.1935) in works like The Family
(1988) with a suggestion of dominance and sexual role
reversal. With Rego, Karmakar shares the propensity to
overturn the conventional order, inscribing the brooding
needs of figures that are not accorded any modicum of
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psychological relief.
To unravel his “artistic truth” Karmakar uses several devices
to create a particular symbolic badge of individualism.
By locating his (feminized) body within a private domestic
space Karmakar places it outside the realm of the
public masculine sphere. Through such personal and individual
inflection, space is politicized: the artist’s body, indoors,
reveals and exposes itself, mimicking in this way the
male gaze as it pursues the female body within domestic
spaces. Within these closet-like interiors the body cowers,
poses, and presses itself to mimic the female form. The
perversion of the familial space for the auto/homoerotic
body and the denial of the propagative familial function
hover through the work. The male artist’s appropriation of
feminine tropes is not unusual. We may reference here
the work of art as sexual mimicry in George Chakravarty’s
Olympia where the artist’s male body stretches out languidly
on the couch, while an older male figure offers him
a bouquet of flowers (video, 1997).
Karmakar speaks about a continuing referent in his painting,
of the “loss” of masculinity especially about the “ordinary
male body”, such as he sees his own. He speaks of
this body as the marginalized body – one that is marked
by its unexceptional, nondescript ordinariness and which
is never distinguished by recognition. No bill boards, advertisements,
poems, films or paintings are ever dedicated to
the unremarkable male body. By turning the gaze upon
himself Karmakar empowers his (own) body with mutable
desire. The imperfect body gains attention, even celebrity
as an unexpected subject of art. Here then is an argument
for the expansion of masculinity through the trajectory of
the ordinary into the feminine, one in which Karmakar assumes
his wife’s role and enacts both persons through a
mirrored performance. In this way, the gaze and the (desiring)
bodies are split into two halves. The image of a nude
man gazing at himself lifting his skirt is the most graphic
representation of this role playing – a what-if possibility of
cross dressing as a stimulant. Karmakar pushes suggestive
sexual ambiguity to a consummate level. That he is
both the figures, who seek and reveal, complicates this
tableau of libidinal excess. The nude male figure crouching
in the toilet with a discarded doll suggests fetishistic
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behaviour, longing and guilt. Acts of domination appear to
be invited on the prone figure, bound and gagged on the
bed, the room’s perspective careening as if with an assault
of an excess of vertiginous desire. In the triptych (Within
the Walls 1, 2008) the walls reign in, compelling closure;
they suggest closeted space, which allows the enactment
of psychological difference, and which simultaneously
makes this difference unbearable. In such a performative
narrative, Karmakar evacuates a sexual self; by locating
it outside the masculinist body he allows it to attract the
speculative homoerotic gaze. By conferring such attention
he also restores to its bruised ego the recuperative power
of wholeness.
Through the compelling, even difficult encounter with the
paintings the artist forces another realization; that the body
stripped and brutally exposed is the site for psychological
expressivity removed from the erotic. In postures that infantilize,
or even degrade the body he assumes a protective
foetal state, one that allows for the return to primary
innocence. In this reversion to an earlier state maleness is
abandoned – what is emphasized is rejection and guilt that
stands in contrast to erotic flagrancy. Karmakar presents
these postures as if on a continuum of sexual behaviour.
However in every case it is a gesture of excess, of exaggeration,
that serves to emphasize its unnatural state. In
this condition of physical and psychological closure, the
drawn drapes and indoor lights confirm his isolation from
the larger world.
How do we compare this suite of paintings, Within the
Walls (2008) with earlier bodies of work? I particularly have
in mind the series that lead up to the present works, the
2005 paintings titled from my photo album which image
a woman figure, presented like a mannequin. That series
stands in comparison to a later body of paintings titled Interiors
where Karmakar consummately appears as his own
doppelganger. Here the figure appears to split – between
his own clothed body representing the urban, heterosexual
normative male figure and the other/self seen in postures
of flagrant seduction or feminized role playing.
Through their enactment we are being drawn into the intimacy
of domesticity, the sharp details of living and bed-
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room spaces, the bathroom or the remnants of a meal. It is
against the predictability of the humdrum that the intensity
of this fractured self image is played out – for Karmakar
wants to play out an alternative self before his own gaze.
Here our reading of Karmakar’s paintings, their sexual
and by extension moral content is determined by his artistic
choices. The western painterly style that he adopts
is closely allied to the value system of the Judeo Christian
tradition, of associative deviance and guilt. Michel Foucault
elaborates on the earlier Greek tradition of accommodation
of sexual difference, and of the nuances of pain in
pleasure in sexual relations. He writes about the admixture
of these states “for the Greeks there could not be desire
without a certain amount of suffering mixed in, but the appetite,
Plato explains in the Philibus, can be aroused only by
the representation, the image or the memory of the thing
that gives pleasure.” He concludes that “there can be no
desire except in the soul, for while the body is affected by
privation, it is the soul and only the soul that can, through
memory make present the thing that is to be desired…”
(p43). The desiring and desired body, as alternately bound,
gagged or abjectly rendered is uncompromising in its
sexual location. More recent examples in postmodern
practice exploit the tropes of shock and difference. While
the sexual confessional photograph has gained currency
– Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin’s images of the
gay and transsexual communities in Boston are significant
referents – the deliberated sensuosity of oil painting
delivers images of psychological abjection and sensual assertiveness
and links Karmakar with an older tradition in
art. However in Karmakar there is posited on the same
body both the maleness and the femaleness of experience
– a mutual cathexis that allows for a narrative of selfplay
to unfold. In this dialectic there is the separation of ‘nature’
and ‘culture’ even as the viewer’s sexualized gaze is
challenged.
Abir Karmakar’s forebear in homosexual images in Indian
art is of course Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). In response
to the masculinist heroic models of his modernist
Indian forebears, Khakhar presents for the first time a domesticated
model, of gay bonding. Khakhar’s work which
reached an efflorence in the mode of the self- confessio-
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nal painting helped elevate the homoerotic body to the level
of an iconic articulation. Stylistically Khakhar drew from
the linear style of pop graffiti of New York of the 1960s,
but inspirationally turned to India’s class fragmentation to
elevate the middle class and middle age as typically the
iconic subjects of homoerotic love. Khakhar is also a celebrant
– the acts of passive frottage and surreptitious sex
as observed and participated in are pasted into the conventional
sites for Indian celebration.
In the process Khakhar creates a re-gendering of the street,
compelling a realization of public spaces as a zone for homoerotic
contact. The gurus, charlatans and bhaktas that
co-mingle on the street, the passing lumpen elements and
hawkers become in his work a natural and accepted site
for a sexual subculture. Khakhar then presses for a universalism
of acceptance; he appropriates these spaces
and his world subsumes cross-dressing and the simple,
often unremarkable fact of everyday gay domesticity as
welcome pleasures.
In contrast, Karmakar breaks with the universalist position
to withdraw indoors. The twilight hues of Khakhar’s streets
and public parks are replaced by interiors with drawn
drapes. The pop elements so appropriate to the street have
no place: if Khakhar reflected on the unremarkable middle
aged figure – occasionally mutilated – Karmakar obsesses
on the invitational gaze, directed towards his own body,
one that responds with desire. Through this direct engagement
of the gaze, he makes the viewer complicit in the act
as voyeur. If Khakhar appears to paint like a casual diarist,
Karmakar’s painterly style, drawing on a wealth of domestic
detail, is highly mannered.
Here Karmakar speaks of two strains that graft onto the
making of the body: the first is an obsession with flesh,
painted flesh, specifically the deep hues of Rubens figures,
fulsome and fleshly in their presence. In the series I Love
Therefore I Am (2006-07, oil on canvas, set of 11 works,
30 x 30 cm each) there is the compulsorily intense visual
encounter of seeing the artist in close up, as he licks different
body parts in auto erotic excess. The luminous hues
of the surface recall de Kooning’s comment “Flesh was
the reason oil painting was invented.” The other influence
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is the realization of his own body as a site for resolution.
The sexual self is not covered away for the acceptable social
gaze. Rather it is rendered with a brutal expressivity to
enact, expose and question its limits. For both the viewer
and the artist, the essential clause of pleasuring the body
will come with acceptance; that all desire is born from the
freedom to enact the self.
Gayatri Sinha
August 2008
New Delhi
Gayatri Sinha is an independent curator and art critic.
References:
The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 years in the
West, Emmanuel Cooper, 2nd ed. New York, Routledge.
The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality Vol.2 Michel Foucault
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Within the Walls I, 2008, Triptych, oil on canvas,183 x 366 cm / 72 x 144 inches

Within the Walls II, 2008, oil on canvas, 183 x 336 cm / 72 x 132 inches
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Within the Walls III, 2008, oil on canvas, 183 x 275 cm/ 72 x 108 inches

Within the Walls IV, 2008, oil on canvas, 183 x 228 cm / 72 x 90 inches
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Within the Walls V, 2008, oil on canvas, 183 x 228 cm / 72 x 90 inches

Within the Walls VI, 2008, oil on canvas, 92 x 122 cm/ 36 x 48 inches
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Within the Walls VII, 2008, oil canvas, 92 x 122 cm / 36 x 48 inches

Within the Walls VIII, 2008, oil on canvas, 122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 inches
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Within the Walls IX, 2008, oil on canvas, 122 x 183 cm / 48 x 72 inches

Line Drawing I, 2008, Diptych, oil on canvas, 30 x 60 cm /12 x 24 inches
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Line Drawing II, 2008, oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm / 36 x 36 inches

Line Drawing III, 2008, oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm / 36 x 36 inches
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‘ I Love Therefore I Am ‘

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‘ from my photo album‘

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‘ Interiors ‘

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‘ In The Old Fashioned Way ‘

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A B I R K A R M A K A R
Born 1977 in Siliguri, India
B.V.A. (Painting), Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata
M.A. (Fine Art, Painting), Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda
Solo Exhibitions
2008 Within the Walls, Gallery Espace, New Delhi
and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2007 In The Old Fashioned Way, Aicon Gallery, London
2006 Interiors, Galerie Heike Curtze, Berlin
2005 from my photo album, The Museum Gallery, Mumbai
Recent Group Exhibitions
2008 Gallery weekend at the Baumwollspinnerei Factory Complex, Leipzig, Germany
2008 A MAZ ING, curated by Anupa Mehta for Harsh Goenka/RPG Academy of Art
and Culture, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai
2007 1st Anniversary Exhibition, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2007 The Harmony Show, organized by Tina Ambani, Nehru Center, Mumbai
2007 Reality Bites, CIMA Gallery, Kolkata
2007 Beyond Credos, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata
The artist lives in Baroda.
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Exhibition & Catalogue: Abir Karmakar, Gallery Espace & Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke
Essay: Gayatri Sinha
Concept & Creation: STRENGER & FRIENDS COMMUNICATION INTERNATIONAL
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