She who must be obeyed

[Guest guest]

She Who Must Be Obeyed

 

The year's most powerful exhibition reveals the eroticism, violence

and spiritual intensity in the lap of the Indian gods, writes

Sebastian Smee

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November 04, 2006

Goddess: Divine Energy

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until January 28

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/sub/goddess/

 

BREASTS of unimpeachable heft and bounce, bloody garlands of severed

heads, a menagerie of wild animals and images of mesmerising

spiritual intensity combine to make Goddess, the new show at the Art

Gallery of NSW, the greatest exhibition mounted in Australia this

year. An exploration of the roles of goddesses in Hindu and Buddhist

art, it is one of those rare, transforming shows that should not

only excite the public but, with any luck, set ablaze the

imaginations and ambitions of local artists and curators, too.

 

The exhibition, as with the 150-odd sculptures and paintings it

displays, is as many-layered as an onion. Parts of it can seem

esoteric, even befuddling. But don't be discouraged. The exact role

and spiritual significance of every figure in the complex Hindu or

Buddhist pantheons is not something you are required to master.

Revel in the exhibition's atmosphere of rich, decorative profusion,

its scope and variety, its narrative richness, its humour, its

intimate serenity and at times its near-overwhelming eroticism.

 

Why goddesses? After all, a common ideal of Hinduism and Buddhism is

the overcoming of earthly dualities and divisions, including the

division between male and female. Isn't it therefore a bit perverse

to focus on just the female? Not really. In Hindu mythology, the

highest gods in the pantheon - Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu - may be

male but the masculine principle is regarded as passive, static,

even invisible without shakti, or female manifestations of the

divine.

 

These are active, kinetic and highly visible: ripe, in other words,

for artistic representation.

 

" When Shiva is joined with Shakti, " South Indian sage Adi Shankara

wrote in a famous hymn to the goddess, " he is empowered to

create./If the Lord is not thus, he is indeed unable even to move. "

Goddesses, in other words, add energy and lustre to the divine

realm, and to the earthly realm, too.

 

The works have been selected by curator Jackie Menzies from some of

the great museums of Asia, the US and Europe, including New York's

Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the Asian

Civilisations Museum in Singapore, the National Museum in New Delhi

and the British Museum. The catalogue is simply marvellous: rich in

original scholarship, it is also entertainingly written and

beautifully laid out.

 

What is important to keep in mind as you walk through the show is

that in the thrillingly elastic world of subcontinental mythology,

not everything is as it first appears. In most cultures, a figure

with an erect penis, for instance, would indicate priapic desire.

But in Hindu iconography it can signify yogic restraint. And just as

the explicitly carnal can have a profound spiritual dimension in

Hindu and Buddhist belief systems, violence - even the most

ferocious kind - is usually seen as part of a necessary cycle.

Destruction almost always implies regeneration.

 

When a figure, for instance, is shown chopping off her own head, the

artist wants us to think not about a horrific moment of suicidal

insanity but about the defeat of egotism. Similarly, the severed

head of Brahma in the hands of a god making love symbolises infinite

compassion. Go figure.

 

Indian folklorist A.K. Ramanujan divided the female Hindu pantheon

into goddesses of the breast and goddesses of the tooth. There are

goddesses, in other words, who perform largely subservient roles as

wives and mothers to male gods, then there are goddesses who are

unmarried, fierce, rebellious, murderous and erotic.

 

Unencumbered by Christian mortification, Indian art is deliciously

frank about the differences between male and female anatomy. Where

Michelangelo and even the flesh-loving Rubens so often painted women

merely by patching on breasts and dimpled bums to otherwise

muscular, masculine forms, Indian art relishes all the distinctive

characteristics of the female body and values its unity.

 

See, for instance, some of the sculptures of yakshini, or Hindu

nature goddesses - divinities associated with fertility and

auspiciousness - on display in the early part of the exhibition. A

terracotta figure made in West Bengal about a century before the

common era has full breasts, clearly marked genitalia and wide,

circular hips. All are unmistakable symbols of fertility, as is the

remarkable floral headdress, reminiscent of the Greek goddess Flora,

on the slightly smaller figure from Pakistan of about the same time.

 

A much bigger female figure in sandstone from Madhya Pradesh, more

than 1000 years later, is remarkable for the grace with which it

makes the figure's full breasts and curvaceous backside

simultaneously available to the viewer's gaze. Picasso spent decades

trying to find a way to do this; he never got close to matching the

ecstatic elegance - completely lacking in pornographic crassness -

in evidence here.

 

At this point the accent of the show switches from the heft and

substantiality of sculpture to the refined flatness and narrative

subtlety of small-scale painting. In a room devoted to Radha, the

divine consort of Krishna, a row of exquisitely coloured paintings

displays scenes illustrated from the Gita Govinda, a lyric poem of

the 12th century by Jayadeva. The effect of these works and their

accompanying texts is to transform the exhibition into an experience

that is not only erotic but intensely intimate, too.

 

Radha is one of a bevy of nubile cowherds, or gopis, who, in early

accounts of Krishna's philandering, is mysteriously unidentified.

There is, explains Indian academic B.N. Goswamy in a riveting

catalogue essay, an episode in the Bhagavata Purana, a sacred text

for followers of Krishna, in which the god disappears from the crowd

of amorous cowherds, " causing great panic and confusion " . No one

knows if he has gone off to cavort with one among them or, indeed,

if that one is Radha. But Krishna soon returns and the cowherds, in

full seduction mode, begin " that mystical circular dance, feet

moving in cadenced steps, smiles flashing, braids of hair loosening,

garments fluttering " , which is represented in one of the most prized

works in the Art Gallery of NSW's collection, the Circular Dance of

Krishna and the Gopis.

 

It is not until Jayadeva's Gita Govinda that accounts of this

episode identify Radha, transforming her into a heroine and thence a

goddess of enormous power and ubiquity. The transformation occurs in

the course of a love story drenched in jealousy, lovesickness,

choked appetites, hankerings and utter absorption. It is illustrated

here in exquisite paintings of embraces and couplings in secluded

groves, surrounded by blossoms and lotuses.

 

After Krishna and Radha make love, he " paints a leaf on her breasts,

puts colour on her cheeks, lays a girdle on her hips, twines her

heavy braid with flowers, fixes rows of bangles on her hand, and

jewelled anklets on her feet " . Later, in a transformation that

signals not only the intensity of their erotic bond but also the

Hindu ideal of non-duality, the lovers seem to merge with each

other, losing their sexual differentiation. One painting even shows

Krishna dressed in women's clothes while the other gopis watch from

around the corner.

 

The next section of the show is devoted to Parvati, the beautiful

consort of the supreme god Shiva, and thus the most important Shakti

of all. Although Shiva and Parvati together represent conjugal bliss

in the Hindu pantheon - several sculptures here from Nepal and from

Tamil Nadu during the Chola period are lovely representations of

grace in partnership - the story of their union is rather

unexpected.

 

Shiva, originally sworn to asceticism, was matched with Parvati

thanks to the intervention of Kama, Hinduism's version of Cupid or

Eros. They never had children together; although they made love,

Shiva had such yogic concentration he never shed his seed. Thus,

John Guy of the Victoria and Albert Museum explains: " The widespread

patriarchal belief that all goddesses are mother goddess is ...

explicitly contradicted by the goddess Parvati herself. "

 

Through various complicated supernatural means the couple did become

parents to Skanda and Ganesha but these children were not strictly

their joint issue. Together, despite their pre-eminence, the four

gods of this divine but dysfunctional family are not intended as a

role model for the Hindu family. Rather, they separately represent

the various forces of the universe with which humans must contend.

 

Some of the most fascinating sculptures here depict a sort of divine

androgyne, who is half Shiva, half Parvati.

 

The Victoria and Albert Museum's striking Ardhanarishvara Addorsed

to a Linga, for instance, shows a sandstone figure with one breast,

one curving hip, and an erect penis (signifying both arousal and

Shiva's good old yogic restraint). Kali, the goddess famed for her

destructive ways, features in the next section of the show, in a

series of surpassingly gruesome and violent pictures. Bhadrakali, a

17th-century image from the collection of Howard Hodgkin, the

celebrated British painter and devotee of Indian art, shows Devi, a

manifestation of Kali, holding the four severed heads of Brahma in

one of her four hands, a huge sword in another and the limp bodies

of Vishnu and Shiva in a third. With her fourth hand, she stuffs

several corpses into her mouth. Around her waist is a belt of

severed hands.

 

It sounds pretty horrid. But Bhadrakali, which means Auspicious

Kali, is celebrated for her power over time and death. The severed

hands symbolise individual karmas from which their owners have been

freed. (Phew!)

 

The section that follows features the similarly violent but

infinitely more lovely Durga, slayer of the buffalo demon. Durga,

whose name means " hard-to-get " (to which the only possible response,

once you see her in action here, is " Indeed! " ), is represented in

some stunning carvings and a very fine painting from the Museum

Rietberg.

 

After this, the show gets more abstract and esoteric but, if

anything, more beautiful. We see an array of mandalas and various

paintings packed with cosmic symbolism. And this leads into the

final sections devoted to goddesses in Buddhist art.

 

The Buddhist images are more static, frontal and hieratic, but they

are splendid, rich things all the same and, especially in the works

derived from Tantric Buddhism, they are extremely sensual, too.

Tara, the goddess regarded as a universal mother and guiding light,

has many arms and large breasts and is often seated in the same pose

as the Buddha.

 

One of the show's most compelling exhibits is a gilt bronze

sculpture with inset turquoise gems and pearls depicting the

Buddhist couple Kalachakra and Vishvamata locked in a thrusting

embrace. I have admired it since it came into the collection of the

Art Gallery of NSW last year. Here it finds a perfect context: a

parade of paintings and sculptures quite breathtaking in the visual

and symbolic intensity of their elaboration.

 

The exhibition deserves to be a roaring popular success. It is as

beautiful, as serious and as fascinating a display as I have seen in

this country.

 

She who must be obeyed

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