The Naked Truth About Sushil Kumars Striptease
The artist explains the bare facts behind the controversy
Im a poet, a failure I took the UPSC and failed, I took the Jamia exams and failed, I tried to get into film school and failed, so there was nothing left to fail in but art. Sushil Kumar watches for my reaction. I watch him right back, because Im not sure whether this is honest biography or just an example of performance art.
He doesnt reach for the matches, however, which is reassuring. In past performances, Kumar has set fire to: a papier-mache tortoise, a circle of grass, sketches on handmade paper, three sticks, a wooden fish, and most recently, peepul leaves.
What he does when hes not setting things on fire still counts as highly inflammable. There was the time he painted a frozen fish red and displayed it as part of an installation/ performance where he also recited subversive poetry. That, unfortunately, took place in the Soviet Union in the eighties, and Kumar and his friends were summarily given a day to leave Mother Russia. Now hes trying to interview 50 rickshaw-pullers to commemorate Indias 50th year and attempting to ride the crest of controversy simultaneously.
In the course of the next few minutes, the 30-year-old artist recites surprisingly good poetry of his own invention, lets a cascade of slides avalanche onto the table where were seated, expresses his opinion of the artistic establishment with a succinct gesture, and displays an aesthetically honest picture of himself in the nude to me and anyone else who cares to look. Im not sure whats going on: it definitely isnt art, but it is one hell of a performance.
The bare facts
The man who calls himself one of Indias first performance artists has been in the news recently for his desire to bare all at a recent exhibition in New Delhi. Sahmats Gift for India exhibition invited artists to start with an empty box, and create anything around or in it that they chose. Kumar received an invitation from the organisers Vivan Sundaram, Ram Rahman and Shamshad. Sundaram had shared a platform with him in 1996, when a show devoted to offbeat artists was featured at Delhis Kamani auditorium. Kumars exhibit was an intriguing arrangement of fishbowls balanced carefully on chairs.
The Sahmat invitation offered, in part, a non-committed, alternative space where they hoped to sponsor a radical intervention through the arts.
And radical intervention is more or less what they got, in what could be considered an extremely alternative space. Im not an artist, says Kumar blandly, and Ive never called myself one. Im a performance artist, so when I received the invitation, I decided to perform a work-in-process. It consisted of four stages, submission, retreat, fire and left-overs, Kumar explains.
Submission: Kumar walks around the gallery in the nude, offering each visitor a peepul leaf and a red ribbon and asking them to tie them together. He didnt make this clear in the proposal he submitted to Sahmat, and when Vivan Sundaram discovered his intentions, he summarily put an end to this striptease.
Retreat: Kumar, still in the buff, takes the leaves back from the visitors and places them in the gift box. He got to do this part but fully clad. And Sahmat refused to let him use a life-size photograph of himself as a proxy. In a gesture of protest, he had a small photograph of himself in the nude dangling from a red ribbon round his neck.
Fire: Symbology comes into play here in a big way. The leaves represent the current cultural scene, the red ribbons represent the contradictions between the world and unworldly things, and the naked Kumar represents something, but the artist wasnt very clear about what it was.
Left-overs: Sahmat gets to keep the ashes of leaves and box, or of culture in a larger context, depending on your point of view. Sushil Kumar gets to keep a white shirt that he invited visitors to scribble on when he was denied an opportunity to strip to the essentials.
The classical nude figure
These are transcendental image strategies, sighs Kumar, groping in his portfolio for the controversial picture. Its an appropriation of the image from classical sculpture, see? Clothing is only your second skin.
The picture shows Kumar with hands outstretched in a classic Mahavira pose, cradling peepul leaves. His only garment is a red ribbon, which is slightly incongruous it makes him look like an oddly gift-wrapped package. He looks pained. No, no, the ribbon around my body signifies growth mothers tie threads round their babies in India and slavery. Its a .., he searches for the right words, ... dichotomous juxtaposition! he finishes triumphantly.
Dichotomous or not, he has a point. If you can have two-dimensional nudes on the walls, three-dimensional nude sculptures in the garden, surely you can have just a common or garden nude. I ask him whether hes attempting to present the human body as a work of art. Its not a question of nudity, says Kumar, thats like saying the many villagers who tie a red thread to peepul trees are worshipping a phallic symbol.
But is it art?
No, say Sundaram, Shamshad and Ram Rahman firmly. Kumars proposition looked more like exhibitionism than an exhibit to the three organisers, who also pointed out that he didnt make his intentions clear at the outset.
Yes, says Kumar, who thinks that Indians have a peculiar hang-up about nudity. I have been naked in Europe Germany and France and there its not such a big deal, he says matter-of-factly. Naked in public, he amplifies, again in the cause of performance art. (The Germans were unimpressed. The French said that they hadnt seen too many Indians naked, but werent otherwise bothered.) No, say I firmly, but thats because naked men in a gallery tend to put me off the paintings.
In the same week that Kumars naked plea for revolution sent Sahmat scurrying for cover, an exhibition of works by young British artists opened in London. Among portraits of the child murderer Myra Hindley and other such edifying works, one British sculptor had displayed a frozen plaster-of-paris head. The contents were unusual, to say the least nine pints of the artists own blood, which he had siphoned off over a period of a week. Would you do that for art, I ask Kumar. He considers the question seriously. That, he says slowly, is nothing more than a cheap gimmick, I think. And there you have it; the naked truth, at last.