Pushpamala N. and the ‘Art’ of Cinephilia in India

Abstract

The ‘things’ to which Walter Benjamin refers imply a world of objects and images that participate in our social life and ‘organize our private and public affection,’ as Bill Brown explains. For Benjamin, ‘art’ is a way of seeing inside the very things that, on the opposite side of his backslash, are also the subject of popular art. I want to explore a compelling example of Benjamin’s triangulated and relational sense of ‘art’ in the works of Pushpamala N., a contemporary artist in India. Since the mid-1990s, Pushpamala has gained an international reputation for photographic projects in which she uses her body to impersonate a wide range of subjects from popular media and film. While artists regularly engage with media images around the world, my argument will be that Benjamin’s sense of art goes largely unrecognised in modern and contemporary art. This is primarily because art’s ethical and cultural value is gauged not by its affective relationship to things but by the degree to which art is able to separate the human sensibility from the world of affective things. This ‘disinterested’ approach, well-known as Kantian aesthetics, informs the politics of modernist art criticism and art practice to which Pushpamala belongs. Unsurprisingly, the modernist assumption frames my essay as well, and provides a point of departure for my analysis of flow. I will try to prove that it is indeed Kantian aesthetics that sets the exact limit which prevents Pushpamala from taking a dip into image worlds that scholars of Indian popular culture explore as what Christopher Pinney calls ‘corpothetics’. But then I shall also try to prove that in Pushpamala’s work the Kantian terms, including ‘art,’ come surprisingly close to Benjamin’s embodied sense, and leads to a kind of flow we could call art-flow that has largely remained dormant and frozen in modern and contemporary art practices, as well as poorly understood both in media studies and art criticism.