WOMEN ARE NOT FROM VENUS-II

Yasra Daud Khoker

An 1864 sketch by Honoré Daumier shows two women visiting the Paris Salon, horrified at the display of academic nudes exclaiming, “Cette année encore des Vénus …toujours des Vénus!…
comme s’il y avait des femmes faites comme ça!” (This year, Venuses again…always Venuses!…as if there were really women built like that!). The upper middle-class obsession with academic art and the stereotypical image of women as fertility motifs began tiring people as the Renaissance had been celebrated and re-celebrated incessantly. Besides, portrayals of women as Venus were no longer appealing as the search for realism in art began. The human mind has always been plagued by idealization. The eye, afflicted with this ailment, trains itself to spot a universally accepted marker of beauty. Idealization persistently feeds on imagination, gnawing originality away. We seek uniformity and permanence in our version of the ideal, denying any scope for evolution. The idea of perfection has manifested itself in a visually diverse manner in the history of mankind. For instance, a comparison of the rectilinear Egyptian sculptures, cylindrical Mesopotamian sculptures, Polynesian ancestor figures, Nok culture figures, etc. broadcasts varied culture-specific concerns and concepts of the ideal, the powerful and the supreme.

The Acropolis in Athens is replete with idealizations of the female body and womanhood, like in ‘Porch of the Maidens’ of the temple Erechtheion, where six identical female bodies simulate Doric columns and appear nonchalant to the load weighing down on them. The stylistic treatment brings attention to her distinctively View of Lado Sarai Art Market, Photography by Girish GV K. Muralidharan, Vani, Mixed media on canvas, 42″ x 42″, 2006 Charan Sharma, Puppet Series-4, Water Color on Archie’s Paper, 22″ x 30″, 2012 037 classical posture where the rigidity of the engaged leg is negated by the slight bend in the knee on the other. The ideal Athenian woman was to bear responsibilities, endure hardships, conform to societal dictations of graceful behavior and deny any effort on their part with an archaic smile. Not limited to Athenian women, these expectations extend to the present, only concealed beneath layers of social mores and societal norms. Sunayani Devi; the sister of Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, comes to mind when one speaks of women artists and the conflicting duality of their lives. Like the caryatids, Sunayani Devi took upon herself he responsibilities and burdens of household life, and painted whenever she could, in between her perceived primal role as a woman, understood as a home maker. She painted as she was supported by her husband and shortly after his death, lost the passion for it and finally gave it up. The familial set-up we have devised around ourselves, works as per the convenience of a few; the selected few. The incongruity between the anticipated status of women in traditional and modern societies, and their actual status (or lack of it) has been the theme of a number of paintings by Charan Sharma, a umbai-based artist who uses puppetry as an analogy to narrate stories of the struggles faced by women. He sees people as puppets manipulated by the forces of society and depicts the melancholy of the Indian woman behind the façade of showmanship that reduces her existence to a pale, wide-eyed mask with a faint smile. Puppets, which have traditionally been used for story-telling and entertaining audiences with their exaggerated two-dimensional movements, become the story in Charan Sharma’s ‘Puppet series’. The puppets are seen celebrating, lying in despair, attending to their chores and staring at the viewer in anticipation of a silent dialogue.