Spell of the self-portrait

The self-portrait, artist Anju Dodiya's central pre-occupation since her first solo exhibition, continues to exercise its fascination over her. RANJIT HOSKOTE examines whether her recent images are symptoms of a transformation to come.

AN exhibition of Anju Dodiya's recent paintings, held at Gallery Chemould in Bombay (Mumbai), demonstrated that the self-portrait, which has been the artist's central preoccupation since her first solo exhibition in 1991, continues to exercise its fascination over her. For a decade now, even as she has dedicated herself to the delicate nuances of watercolours in preference over other media, Dodiya has explored the nuances of what might be described as autobiographical fiction, involving the staging of a pageant of real and imagined self-images, a series of movements through realistically rendered situations and dreamlike ones.

These self-images and situations may be drawn from a variety of sources: in the course of her elaborate painted masquerade, Dodiya has successively assumed the flamboyant, and even bizarre, personae, among others, of a fashion model, a woman in Turkish robes, a character from the Tarot, and a participant in an allegory of the creative act, approaching the unmarked surface with a Staedtler pencil and eraser.

Instructively, the word persona is derived from the Latin word for an actor's mask, a device originally used in ancestor-worship ceremonies, from where it passed into archaic theatre. What, then, do Dodiya's changes of costume imply? Do they conceal a secret self behind the sumptuous games of appearance, or do they in fact reveal it to us through disguise?

Two conspicuous impulses govern Dodiya's art. There is, first, her insatiable curiosity for novel instruments of self- presentation. Since the entire universe offers itself as an archive or museum to the metropolitan artist in the age of globalisation, Dodiya finds the resources of every period, culture, style and region arrayed before her.

This is an outward movement of expansion: her paintings are coded with references to diverse orders of visual discourse and experience, including the Japanese ukiyo-e prints, art cinema as well as popular movies, Renaissance paintings and medieval illuminated manuscripts.

But if this sophisticated exercise of choice suggests indulgence, it is held in check by her equal, and opposite, impulse to retreat into her inner reality, and to expose the haunting disquietudes of that reality: her uncertainty as to the self's purpose and direction.

At the core of Dodiya's project of self-portraiture lies the act of painting, the will-to-art: her playing of roles testifies to a knowing dialogue between the narcissism and irony that simultaneously attend such artistic dedication, a desire to proclaim the privacy and interiority of the artistic consciousness as well as a need to move beyond the claustral particularity of the individual self and its desires.

Dodiya's continuing project of fictive self-portraiture prompts us to pose a number of questions to the artist. Without suggesting that she abandon her concern with the narrative self, the self that creates and re-invents itself through story, fable and legend, it may well be asked how much further Dodiya can develop this trajectory of self-dramatisation. At the level of iconography and surface, it would appear that her strategies have not substantially changed over the decade of her public activity as an artist.

While the paintings have grown steadily in technical finesse, her recent works rhyme with her earliest ones in various ways, whether through the attention she invests in the self's costumes, or the allegorical import of the situation, or the manner in which she uses the mise-en-scene as a pretext for passages of painterly fantasia. And while they provoke the viewer's curiosity through an accomplished interplay between what we know of the artist's personality and what we are told of her inner reality, Dodiya's works continue to be marked by a characteristic defiance of interpretation combined with a frank exhibitionism.

If these recent works, executed over 2000-2001, depart from the trajectory that the artist has established for herself, it is through the manifest feelings of rage towards the self that she articulates here. In these recent paintings, Dodiya often subjects her self-persona to violence: in "Hunt", she sits on her haunches, holding her throbbing head, uncertain how to use the axe she possesses; in "Vigil", one of her self-projections watches as another one is strung from a gallows-frame by her heels; in "Rain", she tries to protect herself against a flailing shower of swords.

Is it possible, we ask ourselves, to construe these images as symptoms of a transformation to come? Is Dodiya in the process of mapping a wider landscape for herself, one in which the dramas of the individual self are located in a perspective that includes other crises, other relationships, the recognition of other viewpoints? The body, sings Kabir, has many owners; it is by acknowledging the effect of others on the self, more overtly than she has so far done, that Anju Dodiya could work her way out of the no-exit situation that confronts her idiom of fictive self- portraiture.

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