Showing Off!

A Philosophy of Image

Jorella Andrews

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472534095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand, and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of those who control the means by which people and things enter into visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of those parameters of control- is to be at a disadvantage; hence, for instance, contemporary theorist Peggy Phelan's rejection of the idea, central to activist practices of the 1970's and 80's, that projects of political emancipation must be intertwined with, and are dependent on, processes of 'making oneself visible'. Acknowledgment of the vulnerability of visibility also underlies the realities of life lived within increasingly pervasive systems of imposed and self-imposed surveillance, and apparently confident public performances of visual self display. Showing Off!: A Philosophy of Image is written against the backdrop of these phenomena, positions and concerns, but asks what happens to our debates about visibility when a third term, that of 'self-showing', is brought into play. Indeed, it proposes a fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the ethical, one primarily rooted not in acts of open and non-oppressive seeing or spectating, as might be expected, but rather in our capacity to inhabit both the risks and the possibilities of our own visible being. In other words, this book maintains that the proper site of generosity and agency within any visual encounter is located not on the side of sight, but on that of self-showing - or showing off!

1

Would the film of your life . . .?

Image-world inclinations

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE¹

In this chapter – and before more directly addressing self-showing itself in the rest of this book – I begin my investigation of the contemporary image-world by delving into three circuits of meaning within Pushpamala N’s Indian Lady that I think highlight important image-world tendencies. It is often against, and always in relation to these tendencies that contemporary attempts at self-showing, and the ethics connected with them, must unfold.

Backstories

My initial description of Indian Lady was focused on its overt subject-matter: a sari-clad woman performing a Bollywood-style dance routine, coyly and amateurishly on a makeshift stage. This short scene was presented by the artist in the format of a repeating video loop; it might go on ad infinitum. Early on I also interpreted the work as a possible cycle of ‘appeal to, and retreat from, public scrutiny’ or of ‘ambition, and thwarted ambition, to express and impress’ – issues to which I will return later on in this chapter. But I also wrote that the energy and insistence of those repeated returns on stage embodied a determination to ‘lay claim to the visible’ despite the many difficulties and weaknesses that are associated with it. These difficulties and weaknesses include our sense that much of the visible realm operates outside of our direct control, even outside of our conscious awareness. Nonetheless, unless we intervene, it shapes who and how we are, and how we are perceived by others. Therefore, the first circuit of meaning I want to follow concerns the many circumstances or backdrops against which our lives inevitably figure and in relation to which they are invariably judged. Or, turning to the writing of American moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and in order to underline the unfolding, temporal character of these lived backdrops, the narratives that shape our lives. These backdrops and narratives, I would add, have the immediate appearance of being highly coded, predictable and overdetermined. But, if identified – they are often so normalized that they have become near imperceptible – if entered into and diagnosed from a lived, and not just an intellectual perspective, they inevitably open up and out. In any case, they compose the entangled and contradictory realm in which we are entrenched, and in which all manner of self-showing agencies, our own and those of the world, may be discovered.

In his 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre insisted that it was only through this lens of narrative that investigations of identity and agency, topics that were being much debated during this period, could be adequately pursued. Defining mankind as ‘essentially a story-telling animal’² in our actions and practices as well as our fictions, he also underlined that:

we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as both Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.³

For this reason, he insisted, ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’⁴ The ethical importance and impact of this question is clear. In addition, we need to understand that just as we tend to put ourselves centre-stage, even in those stories of which we have only limited awareness and control, so we are likely, at best, to be only on the periphery of other people’s stories. ‘In my drama . . . I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer.’⁵

Like MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but communicating through visual rather than word-based means, Indian Lady is an early example of how Pushpamala’s work in general brings into focus the complex, sometimes enabling but often profoundly undermining stories, agendas and practices that surround individual and collective life. The fact that Indian Lady is a silent film underlines the largely non-explicit ways in which those narratives become embedded in us, and we in them. In this respect her work is diagnostic, but the strongly visual character of her interventions opens up suggestive rather than explicit routes into otherwise difficult to access territory. In addition, and as discussed in the previous chapter, these are indirect routes that also loop back into our own situations as viewers. Positioned slightly off guard by the work’s capacity to direct our attention ‘elsewhere’, we find ourselves better able to consider the backstories and backdrops that shape and possibly also constrain our own lives. What are our imputed roles within those stories, and what alternative roles might we want, or need, to play?

Indian Lady’s ability to reposition us in this way is largely because of the literal way in which it repeatedly pushes its own background into the foreground. For the more we watch its image-loops, the more we realize that it is not only the woman’s performance but also the backdrop against which she performs that is important. In fact, the woman is on stage for only half of the video’s short duration. The rest of the time – a few seconds at the beginning of the image-loop and considerably longer in its final part – it is the backdrop’s painted city scene that fills the screen, its surface disturbed into ripples and billows as the woman, having exited the stage, now passes behind it from left to right. Then, as she pulls it aside somewhat in order to reappear on stage, we catch a glimpse of a third scene a little further back: what looks like a small portion of wall and two closed doors. In other words, the video reveals details of the everyday spaces and structures that surround and inform that performance on stage. Questions of staging, and of figure–ground relationships, are reinvestigated in much of Pushpamala’s later work. The encyclopedic photo-performance project, Native Women of South India: Manners & Customs (2000–4), made collaboratively with the artist Clare Arni, is a case in point.⁶

As indicated in the previous chapter, Indian Lady’s painted cityscape could be interpreted as a generic image of an idealized modernity, and as an aspirational image. To those in the know, however, it is also a recognizable representation of the Mumbai skyline. In fact, the backdrop image was sourced in a standard Mumbai postcard. Therefore, and given its visual prominence within the video, it is a small step for viewers of Indian Lady to interpret the video as dealing not only with the performance of an individual life but also with its embeddedness within conditions, aspirations and contradictions associated with the life and times of Mumbai, and of India more broadly, during a period when both city and nation were carving out places for themselves within a modern global economy and its increasingly globalized mass cultures.⁷ Here, extremes of wealth and poverty, esteem and misery exist side by side. This is partly due to the possibilities and problems associated with scale. During the 1990s, Mumbai’s already large population grew to above the 10-million mark, bringing it to megacity status. A decade or so later, it was among the world’s top ten such cities⁸ and in 2009 it was named an Alpha World City, that is, a city identified as having key global financial and commercial significance. It is now home to some of the world’s wealthiest inhabitants and, as noted, it is where the most glamorous and the most escapist branch of India’s film industry is located. But as Pushpamala herself has put it – she lived and worked in Mumbai during the late 1980s – the city’s harsh urban realities of wretchedness and hypocrisy and its long association with the convention of the ‘wicked metropolis’ are undeniable.⁹ This remains the case. According to a 2006 report – the most up-to-date report I was able to find – slum dwellers make up a staggering 54 per cent of Mumbai’s population.¹⁰ In addition, India, with a huge percentage of its population living below the poverty line,¹¹ finds itself positioned amidst the paradoxes of escalating globalization and privatization as one of the world’s biggest providers of cheap, but technologically advanced outsourced industrial and post-industrial labour.

But this is not all. Since India’s post-war Independence, and despite its status as the world’s largest democracy, the nation has been plagued by sectarian violence. Indeed, on 12 March 1993 (just four years before Pushpamala produced Indian Lady), Mumbai, which has been a site of ongoing Hindu–Muslim violence since 1947, was torn apart by bomb blasts that left at least 250 people dead and around 1,100 injured. Bouts of sectarian violence in the city some months earlier had resulted in the death of around 900 people. Arguably, therefore, it is difficult when watching Indian Lady’s shaking and billowing urban backdrop not to be reminded of what were, in 1997, still open wounds. Indeed, it was in order to engage with these urgent issues as proactively and powerfully as possible, and to take a stance against sectarianism as a prevailing cultural attitude in favour of new forms of liberal secularism and cultural critique, that Pushpamala’s artistic project – and that of several other contemporary Indian artists – evolved as it did during the mid-1990s, conceptually, formally and methodologically.

Also of note, of course, is that the contradictions and instabilities just described also characterize the workings of Indian Lady’s most overt reference: Bollywood. Bollywood is perhaps the most influential cultural backdrop to life in India and in the Indian diaspora and an industry so prolific that already by the 1970s India had overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest producer of films. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Bollywood, and Bollywood aesthetics, have circulated around the globe as a prominent, although by no means mainstream, brand.¹² This is despite the fact that Bollywood and its productions have frequently been described as second-rate when compared to Hollywood standards. In his 2006 book Brand Bollywood, for instance, the journalist Derek Bose described these productions as content-weak, upholding ‘a tradition of film-making replete with mindless songs and dances, star-crossed lovers, ostentatious celebrations of glamour and spectacle, lost and found brothers, convenient coincidences and happy endings’.¹³ They have also been described by others as narrative-weak in a Western (Aristotelian) sense. As film theorists Rajesh Devraj and Edo Bouman put it in the introduction to their 2010 book The Art of Bollywood:

Bollywood has given birth to a famously hybrid form of cinema that mashes together Indian and foreign influences. For Western viewers accustomed to their own traditions of storytelling, the Bollywood narrative often seems a mere device to present extravagant song-and-dance routines, high-strung emotion, comic interludes, fights, and a host of other elements. This kind of film is commonly known in India as the masala film, after the Hindi word for a spicy mix.¹⁴

Interestingly, as another film scholar, Ravi Vasudevan, has pointed out, a plausible reason for this may be due in part to Bollywood’s pre-cinematic links with the popular Parsi tradition in theatre. Vasudevan writes that although the Parsi community in India, which had migrated from Persia centuries earlier, were ‘an entrepreneurial group which developed close ties with colonial enterprise’ and were therefore regarded as figures of modernization, Parsi theatre ‘from the mid-nineteenth century displayed a number of linkages with pre-modern narrative and performance traditions’ and was characterized, among other things, by ‘a universe driven by a repetitive dynamic, rather than one governed by a transformative, conflict resolving logic’.¹⁵ This repetitive dynamic is of course also the overriding logic of Pushpamala’s piece.

In addition, Bollywood film-making is known for the often chaotic administrative and financial arrangements that underpin (or in many cases fail to underpin) it, making it vulnerable not only to inefficiency but also to exploitation, including financial and other entanglements with India’s criminal underworld. This was in part exacerbated by the fact that up until 2001 the Indian government had consistently refused to assign Bollywood legal status as an industry. Thus, until recently, Bollywood producers were unable to secure support and security from tax and other governmentally approved benefits.¹⁶ Furthermore, although, as indicated, a great number of films are made each year, it nonetheless remains the case to date that, partly due to low ticket pricing, the Indian film industry consistently generates a relatively small share of the global market where film revenue is concerned.

Returning to Indian Lady, then, it is also to this complicated cultural, economic and political world that the video refers, a world broader by far than that of the enclosed performance space that is more immediately presented to us. The referential richness of the video opens up still further, though, if the backdrop’s physical production and materiality are also considered. For Pushpamala reports that the backdrop was created by a hoarding painter whom she had employed to enlarge a postcard-sized representation of the city onto a large piece of cloth. This is significant. By incorporating this transaction into the rationale of the video-piece, she drew particular attention to the place and power of a commercial art form that has little or no contemporary impact in the West but which, still in 1997, and until digital methods began to take over at the start of the twenty-first century, had exceptional ideological force in India. As she has put it, in India hoarding painters ‘design everything . . . from public arches, temple architecture and ashram complexes to film sets and TV series, theatre backdrops, festival tableaus and political cuts outs’.¹⁷ Thus, they are continuously defining contemporary Indian culture ‘with their weird, kitschy, eclectic mix of images . . . creating a strange continuum between dream, commerce, reality and exploitation’.¹⁸ With remarkable throwaway precision, therefore, Indian Lady can now also be seen to be calling all of this into play.

Hoarding paintings also return us to Bollywood. Until recently, they were one of the primary means of promoting Bollywood films within urban and public space. Such enormously sized handmade works could promote these films via images created at a vast scale not easily achievable using pre-digital photographic techniques. (Beyond a certain size, for instance, unmanipulated photographic images of this kind would look distorted.) In addition, since each hoarding painting was individually produced in one or other of the numerous workshops located across India, it also allowed for a highly customized promotional approach to be taken. It enabled a given film, distributed nationally, to be advertised differently in different locations; hoarding painters would draw from a film’s eclectic content those aspects of it – the romance, perhaps, or the violence, or the comedy, or this or that film star – that would most appeal to the preferences of particular regional audiences, thus boosting ticket sales in a nation where, as Devraj and Bouman have put it:

Bollywood has colonized . . . popular culture thoroughly. For decades, filmi music was the only pop music in India, and the music industry condescendingly referred to non-film releases as ‘private albums’. Other arts were also pushed to the margins, and, today, Hindi cinema’s influence can be seen everywhere, from television, fashion, and advertising to the very language of the streets. Its images pervade the visual culture of the subcontinent, leaving their mark on religious prints and street signs alike. They dominate public spaces everywhere – Bollywood produces publicity images on a scale that has transformed the urban environment in India, turning entire cities into galleries for its giant displays.¹⁹

The rationale for Devraj and Bouman’s book is to examine these popular art forms, works that have been given very little critical attention by scholars, in order to understand more about the workings of Bollywood and of its hold on public imagination. But, in a different way, Indian Lady was already doing the same thing in 1997. It was highlighting aspects of the ideological constructions surrounding an individual life and an apparently simple performance. The inclusion of the hoarding painter’s work within a scene otherwise unfolding within what looks like an ordinary, enclosed space of display, underlines the way in which this intensely image-saturated urban environment plays a dominant, but often unnoticed – because naturalized – role, locking subjects into repeating cycles of escape into the realms of archaic fantasy. Again, what this does is direct us to consider our own different but not dissimilar situations in this respect.

Past–present

The second ‘circuit’ I want to discuss is provoked by a quality that imbues not only the paint...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: Trailer
• 1 Would the film of your life . . .?
• 2 Appearance is everything
• 3 Image wars
• 4 Sacred conversations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index