Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

women the platform they seek, and in writing, where today, the larger number of writers and critics seem to be women. To create a new, image vocabulary: to find new strategies to represent the female body away from the male gaze, to re-represent the self-serving physica lly, reproductively and domestically accomplished extemality of women , which has been exploited in fi lm, television, advertising, kitsch art and pornography, is a part of their agenda. Meanwhile women artists have begun to speak in the first person and they do this mostly as individuals outside the feminist ghetto. Feminism however, in Indian art, seldom resorts to overt outrage at discrimination and harassment, and artists often prefer to express their anxiety in more subtle ways such as through art processes, or a pai nting within a pai nting, in wh ich a narrative within a narrative becomes implicit, leaving the viewer to un ravel meaning through metaphor, allegory and even visual pleasure. That in a largely patriarchal country the polarities of gender do not create the kind of fixed identities that become strident and polemical has to be understood in the context of its social, cultural, religious and historical background, and of the woman's psyche shaped by its particular patriarchal structures over centu ries - too complex a phenomenon to tackle here . G iven this framework o f coordi nates i t i s i nteresting t o observe that without dwelling on t he problems o f victimisation , feminism in I ndian art seems t o have passed beyond into empowerment, a much less alienating proposition. More and more do women artists feel the need to bond together now in the spaces of work and exhibitions and to create a sustained debate around the issues of their art practice . Cl early, the overriding concern of these activities is the complex pattern of perceptions seen i n the light of sexual differences. Women artists do not agree that by clustering together they wi ll be positioning themselves outside the establ ishment and its critical discourses and abetting their own marginal isation. This is probably because they do not construe such a position as a rejection of dominant art practice. At t he same time they deal with attitudes that range from patronising patriarchal ones to the more subversive ones of subsum ing women into the category of artists and then restricting them systematically by obscuring the significance of what they are doing. They a lso admit to the need to face up to the way their art is received ; to their enterprises and exhibitions being largely marginalised by the media, the collectors, the critics, the press, the a udiences and to the politics of the art world getting mixed up with the politics of gender. Through all this however, women artists continue to sustain a positive view of their i ncreasingly more visible profiles, and the inclusion - both national and i nternational - in exhibitions, debates, seminars, critical warni ngs and other sites of cultural defi n ition of their a rtistic interventions ranging from the subtle to the radical, that have so far been largely e ither ignored or colonised . It is necessary, with so many i ndividual women artists negotiating the somewhat u ndefined a rea of women's art with varying degrees of commitments, to piece together their efforts u nder an overarchi ng rubric that will help foreground order, development, expectation , sequence and critical evaluation, a l l essential for not only art historical study and documentation , but more immi nently, for clarifying a particular rationale whi ch wou ld help crystallise the so far isolated and somewhat amorphous but deeply felt needs of thi nking women artists. I nteresting convergences and divergences with what is happening in art i n other Asia-Pacifi c countries may b e thrown up a s a resu lt, a s wel l a s a number o f possible d i rections future curatorial efforts might take. 1 1 4