The issue of time in the work of Sutapa Biswas
Michael Asbury - 2008

No matter how eclectic they may seem, the works by Sutapa Biswas brought together here present certain issues that the artist has been investigating throughout the years. One such issue is time, whether it be a time inextricably linked to everything related to cinema, or subjective time, i.e., memory, the longing produced by the departure or the death of loved ones, or yet the maternal experience of loss brought by the gradual separation between mother and child. It is precisely this subjectivity that leads viewers to understand the coherence between Biswas’s paintings or drawings, and her films. Another leading thread in her work is that of art historical reference that ultimately is a way in which to address the issue of time. The intimate, subjective, feminine experience is thus superimposed onto art history – traditionally a Eurocentric and masculine domain. This referential dynamic lends a critical character to the work, thereby imparting a sense of instability to its apprehension.

Biswas’s video The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker (1997) shows, for instance, just how this process operates by means of certain inversions. British art critic Guy Brett had already noted that this footage presents a visible paradox in the artist’s use of the filmic medium characterized by the capture or, rather, the illusion of movement, and the almost motionless filmed subject: a middle-aged man, standing naked in a room, looking out the window.1 Another inversion established in this footage can be easily identifiable: the pair of shoes is set on the floor in such a way that one leans slightly on top the other, thereby making a clear reference to Edward Hopper’s painting A Woman in the Sun (1961)2. The shoes on the floor are part of this inversion process: they are men’s shoes the tips of which are somewhat overlapping, rather than the heels. The two compositions seem to mirror one another: the woman in Hopper’s painting is facing right, whereas the man in Biswas’s video is facing left. There is, therefore,a critique of the traditional relationship between artist and his model that, without a doubt, draws on the Biswas’ training and her contact with theoreticians such as Griselda Pollock. Nevertheless she is never restricted to a singular critical standing; we cannot define her simply as a feminist artist. Historical references are featured in distinct ways in her different works, as for example in Birdsong (2004), a film projected on a double screen – a complex work that draws on various sources and offers multiple readings. Particularly noteworthy, in this case, is the artist’s insistence on the equivalence of her formal and aesthetic concerns with other issues such as motherhood and historical citations.

In an interview she gave to the author, Biswas stated that she devoted considerable time to researching the desired aesthetics for this film.3 In her description of the origins of the work we can see just how the historical and conceptual references merge:

To begin with, the starting point for this piece was a conversation between myself and my son who at eighteen months of age uttered his first sentence, in which he stated his wish to have a horse living with us in our living room. The idea took me back to a painting by the English landscape artist George Stubbs titled, Lord Holland and Lord Albermarle Shooting at Goodwood, 1759, in which we see a black male servant tending to the horses whilst his masters are at play. My son's words took me by surprise on many levels, not least because for a child his age there was no clear distinction between reality and the imaginary, but also because to him, the idea was neither implausible nor impossible.

So in the making of Birdsong, I set about trying to create the kind of interior that echoed a sense of a colonial past keeping to the palette as used by Stubbs in his painting. I was very particular, and so looked for authentic period furniture that might belong to the context of such a colonial-style home. To assist me with my use of palette, I referred to the swatch colour cards that are compiled by English Heritage, the different colour ranges of which echo different key colours used for historic interiors and buildings. What was equally key to me, was the fact that by trawling through countless prop houses, I was able to locate the actual objects used by English Heritage in their original swatch colour publicity photographs, and some of these objects are present within the frame of the room in my work Birdsong. The painting of the room 'pea green' from the Heritage colour range, was also a reference to the poem by Edward Lear who wrote about a tale of an unlikely marriage between ‘the owl and a pussycat’ who traveled to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. So in the context of my film installation, the reference to diaspora and history is an implicit one. What the film itself in its edited form goes on to achieve is much more.

Birdsong is “framed” by the mythological figure of an origami winged horse shown spinning on a string. According to Laura Mulvey, the mythical figure of Pegasus is featured in this footage in several ways.5 In a formal sense, its movement marks the tempo of the film, as if it were a metronome. In its turn, this timing plays a symbolical role in determining the increasing separation of mother and son. Ultimately, Pegasus is a means of transport offering the possibility of evasion, which in the footage takes viewers from the domain of the real to that of the imaginary while at the same time conveying a maternal anxiety about potential loss.
The issue of flight is therefore crucial, not only in this film, specifically, but also throughout Biswas’s oeuvre. It accounts for the recurrent theme of birds in her work, whether it be in titles such as Birdsong, or in her drawings, paintings and sculptures. According to the artist, there are numerous reasons for this, but the most influential are related to her own childhood memories and her journey from India to the United Kingdom at age four. In this way, she relates in her work the themes of migration, the temporality of the seasons of the year, and the memories of her father’s frequent travels as part of his work for development agencies.

As we can see, the references to the history of painting that appear in her films also function in reverse. Biswas’s paintings and drawings also seek a dialogue with film, where the issue of time becomes similarly invoked both in mechanical and subjective terms:

I began to draw birds as a way to set time. A bird a day, like Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, a painting a day. The birds I painted are restless. You look at them for a while and they are no longer beautiful; they are startled or even threatening, like real birds. The association with Hitchcock is immediate.

Brett, G. “Spaces Inside Time”, in: Campbel, S. (Org.), Sutapa Biswas, exhibition catalogue, Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) & Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, London & Portland, Oregon, 2004, p. 42.
This allusion is taken from the interview that the artist gave to Stephanie Snyder. Ibid., p. 8.
Sutapa Biswas in an interview given to Michael Asbury, in: Asbury, Bueno, Ferreira & Machado (Org.), Arte & Ensaios review, n. 14, “Transnational Correspondence” special edition, PPGAV-UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 2007, p. 21.
Ibid.
Mulvey, L. “Birdsong”, in: Sutapa Biswas, op. cit., p. 52-53.
Sutapa Biswas in an interview given to Michael Asbury, op. cit., p. 13.