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Literary Review
The real and the representative
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Digital imaging allows a text to become endlessly transformative. In Vivan Sundaram's hands, it enables the restaging of the Sher-Gil family archives, with stunning insights and revelations, says SHOHINI GHOSH.
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Amrita Sher-Gil inside her painting: photomontage by Vivan Sundaram.
THIS book comprises 37 digital photomontages by Vivan Sundaram based on the "photographs of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954)" and those "from the Sher-Gil family archive". The primary protagonist of the series is the exceptionally talented painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) born to Hungarian mother Marie Antoinette and Indian father Umrao Sigh. Vivan Sundaram is the son of Amrita's sister Indira who, along with her parents and sister, is one of the major protagonists in the photomontage series. The "contrived ensembles", as Vivan describes them, are a reconfiguring of his own family photographs. The re-ordering, disruption and layering re-tells family and personal history in a fashion that is simultaneously interpretative and endlessly open-ended. The photo-texts are accompanied by fairly detailed annotations providing information of the different visual sources as well as insights into the digital manoeuvrings.
Digital photomontages are re-stagings of photographs. In his introduction Vivan Sundaram describes Umrao Singh as "the essential photographer" whose work he has reorchestrated with a "digital wand" some half a century later. This "wand", he writes, allows the artist to "slip between and behind the paintings" while the "painted figure can be seen to be real, as real as the artist or the model." Digital imaging allows for new insertions and juxtapositions resolutely destroying the possibility of absolute closure. All visual texts defy foreclosing because readings can be as diverse and plural as the readers themselves. But digital intervention makes the text itself endlessly transformative. Post-photography and the emergence of digital imaging has been extremely effective in significantly changing the ways we perceive our relationship between the world of the images and that of lived experience.
Vivan Sundaram's photomontages are constitutive of multi-layered intersections of different space, time, cultures and geographical territory. The photographer and his subject, the artist and her paintings coexist simultaneously with real and representational characters. The disruption of space, time and chronology displaces familiar practices of image production and exchange. Take the photomontage on p.16. Amrita lies languorously against a haystack waiting possibly for a romantic tryst. Her nephew waves his "digital wand" to materialise Amrita's parents and sister in the backdrop. They seem immersed in their own interaction while at the same time waiting to witness the culmination of Amrita's tryst. Amrita's husband Victor Egan took her photograph against the haystack somewhere in Southern Hungary in 1938 while the photographs of her parents and Indira were taken by a professional photographer in Budapest in 1932. The family archive is therefore not one of visible "documentary" evidence, but a fantasmatic reimagining of people embedded in unexpected space-time juxtapositions.
The photomontage on p.17 shows Marie Antoinette holding her cat as Umrao Singh, his hand pulling the string of the camera shutter, looks on. Their daughters, appearing somewhat apparitional, stand behind their parents and watch. The annotation reveals that when the photograph was taken "Amrita was dead and Indira married." This was a "visit" that would have made the elderly couple happy, as at the time, the family had been estranged. Chronology and mortality are reversed in order to create a wish-fulfilling family portrait. Similarly, p.49 depicts a self-portrait of Umrao Singh in his bedroom-cum-study in Shimla where Marie Antoinette had shot herself. His wife's liminal presence is marked behind him on the wardrobe through which the bullet had gone. Here, death and time are reversed to re-stage a haunting and hallucinatory vision.
The photomontages therefore seem to evoke a dream-state, bringing to mind the cinematic experiments of the "psychodramatic trance mode" of the 1940s American avant-garde and in particular the dreamscape of Maya Deren films. Like Deren, Vivan Sundaram is interested in exploring the confrontation of multiple selves through the deployment of mirrors, paintings, reflections, duplications and the masquerade of staging and performance. These thematics appear most powerfully in the photomontage on p.36-37. A continuous relay of mirrors and reflections show Amrita, Indira, Marie Antoinette, Umrao Singh and Vivan himself in a complex web of relationships. It is as though the family were gathered in a mirrored backstage, consuming themselves in order to stage an elaborate performance. Vivan the child is seated on his grandfather's lap holding a twin-lens reflex camera. Indira is seated with her back to us and we see her face reflected in the same mirror whose corner captures her father and son. (Indira's photograph was shot in Paris in 1933.) Marie Antoinette stands in the middle dressed in an "oriental robe in Lahore 1912" studying her own reflection in a mirror that reflects yet another mirror with a woman looking into it. (The mirror within the mirror is a painting by George Hendrik Breitner titled "Small Earring" made in 1893.) The mirror in the extreme right shows Amrita posing in a saree while her digital clone stands next to her in European clothes. The elaborate multiplication of mirrors and the self-reflection of the players become an iconic representation of the entire project. Perhaps for this reason. Vivan begins his introduction with a discussion of this photograph.
The photomontages are not just re-stagings of the body but also of interlocking and diverging gazes. The labyrinthine relay of "gazes" within and across frames inaugurates various erotic possibilities. On p.28-27, an Umrao Singh self-portrait incorporates Amrita in a party dress while her lover, painter Boris Taslitzy overlooks the tableau from a painting on the wall. (The portrait of Taslitzy was made by Amrita in 1930). Several times in the book father and daughter appear in sensual juxtaposition. They are inextricably bound by their respective preoccupations with performing the body. Their shared impulse converges through a new visual experience "presented" by the nephew/grandson who has inherited the legacy of both painter and photographer.
The homoeroticism of Sher-Gil's paintings is heightened in the montages through both the "look" and intratextual layering. In one montage Amrita, in a photograph taken in Budapest in the early 1930s, poses against the backdrop of one of her most sensual studies of the female body, "The Reclining Nude" (1933). On p.12 she merges partially with another of her nudes, posing thereby as a couple. Similarly, on p.26, she poses "pin-up poster style" with her "Self-Portrait as Tahitian". Vivan writes, "in her reference to Gauguin's painting of erotic women there is an ironic reclamation of lost ground: the desire in woman." The irony intensifies in the light of Amrita's desire for women. While the written text elides any explicit reference to her bisexuality, a queer reading of the photomontages are inescapable.
Umrao Singh, as Vivan points out, is one of the pioneers of modern Indian photography. His technical and aesthetic photographic experimentations along with his desire to stage, perform and preserve his own family archive are now transferred to his grandson. With the help of newer technology, the family archives are re-staged yet again. This time for stunning insights and revelations.
Retake Of Amrita: Digital Photomontages, Vivan Sundaram, Tulika, 2001, p. 56, Rs. 400.
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