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THE TIMES OF INDIA, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 1981 V

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ESTABLISHED 1838

International Scene

5

An Island Of Feminist Art

[[Image of Zarina, far left]]
Zarina: The feminist spirit comes through.

In California, Womanspace, a community art centre and gallery Woman's Building, pink and triumphantly feminine in gender, vocabulary declares gender in feminine mouthfuls - 'womannequins' who 'matronize'. LAKSHMI LAL meets Zarina, an Indian feminist artist in New York.

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Detail of a portable mural "Uprising of the Mujeres" by Judith F. Baca.

I HAD always approached art through the proper channels - museums, art galleries, exhibitions; led there mainly by media reports, reviews and informed hearsay. This time, in New York, the ripple of a wave, so to speak, touched me and led me quite unsuspectingly to an island of feminist art. The '70s saw the unmistakable rise and establishment of this school with its very own guidelines, guardians, practitioners and evaluators. After the initial, easily suppressed, reflex of scepticism - after all, art is by people not men or women-I learnt to see it as part of the general stand that women have had no alternative but to adopt.
All areas of human living have felt, to a greater or lesser degree, its churning forces. It is inevitable that in the creative arts where one's racial experience, memory, psyche and soul are called into powerful play, feminism would have its say and make itself heard.
Lucy Hippard, well-known spokeswoman for the feminist movement sums up the need for this separatism succinctly: "Women are still in hiding ... For this reason I am all in favour of a separatist art world for the time being.... until the point that women are as at home in the world as men are."
Zarina, an Indian artist, chose four years ago to come to terms with herself and her art in New York. Living dangerously in a Manhattan loft on 28th. St. between 7th and 8th Avenues, she works with, alongside and for the New York Feminist Art Institute. helping to shape its credo and co existing peacefully, though not always very comfortably, with the militant, struggling group of mainly coloured women as artists who are inching their way to recognition. Ana Mendieka, introducing a 1980 exhibition entitled 'Dialectics of Isolation' says: "Do we exist?... they failed to remember us. American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement."
"I don't know how I got involved in this movement," says Zarina. "When I decided to live here and become part of the artistic community, I didn't do it to champion a cause. I was merely involved in exploring a new technique which would fit my artistic statements."

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"Corners" (Cast paper) by Zarina.

Cultivated Thoroughbred

Zarina seems far from the bra-burning, trail-blazing image of the Western feminist - Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan-or even from the gentler and more persuasive voices of feminism like Doris Lessing or Simone de Beauvoir. Her personality comes garbed in the flowing, easy, relaxed lines of a Lucknow upbringing with the mannered gentleness of a cultivated thoroughbred. She could even be an embarrassment to the uninhibited, battling, embattled modern woman. Yet, the feminist spirit shows through in a statement here, an endorsement there in empathic support to her sister fighters.
Teaching at the New York Feminist Art Institute twice a week, she is also a printmaker of some repute-designing brochures, folders and pamphlets.
"I have to go into these ancillary fields to earn my living. They support my creative effort, allow me the luxury of creating what I please, how I please, when I please."
Zarina does not paint on paper. She casts paper, moulding it and impregnating it with a very limited colour range. Soaking cotton wool and pulping it, she gets a soft, plastic stuff which she pours into created moulds for casting. Placques of patterned reliefs emerge-images of nostalgia retrieved by her probing consciousness.
"To me, my past is a richness that is, in a way, out of reach. Each exercise is a salvage from receding areas."
Zarina's involvement in paper came early. Handmade paper in Sanghaner caught her attention. She followed the paper-art trail to Japan. "I became familiar with the whole process, saw the range and subtlety of the stuff of paper. When I arrived in New York, I was on the way to a new medium, and a whole new way of handling it."
"Well," "Spaces to Hide," "Corners", "Step Well"-the vocabulary of her titling is architectural and archaeological. Her art is not a mere assemblage of various separate skills. It is a handiwork, almost medieval in its approach to art materials; it feel, somewaat like the old frescoe techniques where the result is less a superimposition than a fusion.
Zarina avoids colour in her work. "I don't feel up to coping with colours and their relationships. Texture and relief are what I need for my artistic exploration."

Individual Articulations

Which is why her work confines itself to dull earth-reds and mineral-greys. Light and shadow, hollow and rise sculpt out, placque after placque, Zarina's highly individual articulations on life.
I had to ask the inevitable questions on feminism. What did it involve?
"O, lots of way-out experiences, lesbianism, bisexualism... It takes strength to be 'straight' (as I am) and be accepted as a sincere, believing feminist!"
"What established me is my hard work and original technique. Otherwise, the feminist scene is highly competitive-each one for herself. Being Indian doesn't help-it's one more hurdle."
Zarina seems to have pulled it off-being Indian, being 'straight,' living adventurously, doing her own thing-and above all, continuing to be her own self, while promoting a cause that relies rather heavily on herd and group movements. She has, in the New York art context, arrive - a commericial gallery recognises and sells her work and she has her work on show at the Museum of Modern Art.

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