2nd Generation: Permindar Kaur

Niru Ratnam 

Poor Permindar Kaur. Stuck between one of the hottest young stars of the British media and my good self on the stage of an ICA conference about contemporary British Asian thangs, she attempted to explain why going to Barcelona for three years had made her feel free from the cultural baggage hanging around her neck as an Asian Briton. Bad idea. Cue various members of the audience asking overly intrigued or plain angry questions about this. “What do you mean Ms Kaur?” “How do you mean more free?’ Aren’t we all supposed to be confronting, celebrating and exploring our wonderfully multi-faceted identities in this age where the marginal is central, the complex expected and football fans chant about curry instead of debunking to the continent Ms Kaur?’ The answer Kaur probably should have given was: “sometimes.” Occasionally, and reader, I’m only speaking for myself here, I must admit I feel the urge to take the Great Sawney off my CD player, stop the repeats of the Great Goodness Gracious Me on my video, flush the Great Kureishi down the khazhi and stop cooking the various curries that I’ve started obsessively making during the past two years. The crucial moment that I realised this was when I heard Keith Allen’s ridiculously misguided World Cup song – when you find your subcultural identity being appropriated by a balding has-been whose most recent televisual outing was as a naughty tooth-fairy in an instantly forgettable advert. Suddenly, Barcelona starts to seem more attractive.

Oddly, the first thing Kaur did upon reaching Spain was to make a work which explicitly referenced her Sikh cultural identity. Entitled Innocence, the piece consisted of a child’s orange Sikh ceremonial dress complete with ceremonial dagger. The work was a statement about national identity, yet none of its audience saw it that way, unable to pick up on the cultural signifiers of the piece – instead, they saw it as being about the unsettling juxtaposition of childhood and violence. Kaur has pointed out that not only was the Spanish reaction no less valid than an English one might have been but her own intentions when making it were less to do with Sikhism and more to do with struggles in Barcelona and Catalonia around issues of national identity.

After sunning herself in Catalonia for three years and having participated in several Spanish group exhibitions along the way, Kaur returned to the British art world partly in order to show in the British Art Show 4. It was a seminal exhibition that was to launch the crossover of Damien Hirst, Gary Hume et al into the establishment. There were some mutterings about Kaur’s inclusion in the show from the black art world – at least one artist, whose name Kaur diplomatically refuses to reveal, told her that her inclusion was because she didn’t do any political stuff. On one level this was true. By and large, Kaur’s work has tended towards the dreamy and melancholic rather than the abrasive and political. Felt puppets cascade down walls or sit with their head in hands on top of unfeasibly large chairs. Beds keep cropping up, either unmade, too tall or too small. A small truck carries a pile of ash on its back and small men (again felt) with crowns and boots are speared into walls.

On the other hand, such criticism is arguably problematic. Daubing political slogans on canvases, like standing on street corners handing out grimy photocopies, simply does not cut the mustard anymore. Not because there are no longer any worthy things to shout about but rather because everyone is doing so much of it that it has all become rather debased. Victim culture has become so widespread that day-time American chat shows have emerged as the prime sites for displays of ever more outlandish claims of victimisation. Each statement by the various dropouts, trailer trash and out of work actors is a claim for authority: the most abused wins the most applause.

The reason why Kaur was included in the British Art Show 4 (and presumably why her disgruntled critic was not) is not to do with the lack of political content in Kaur’s work. It is rather to do with the layers of meaning which can be read into her art. Now, this is exactly the type of empty phrase that art types churn out all the time, yet to prove (once more) that 2G’s art criticism is way ahead of the pack, I’ll put my mouth where my trousers should be in order to unpack this one:

Reading 1: Kaur’s work is melancholy. It keeps returning to the theme of loss, for example in the unmade and empty beds and the motifs of unsatisfactory dwelling-places. Therefore, it is all to do with the Diasporic emptiness and sense of exile that haunts all immigrants to this god-forsaken country.

Reading 2: Kaur’s work is melancholy blah blah theme of loss blah. Her artwork are classic signifiers of bad childhood vibes (playpens as cages, skewered puppets, toys carrying ashes). These are deeply paranoid works which invite us to collude in their restaged memories of childhood traumas whilst withholding ultimate meaning.

Even better if, as a particularly astute viewer, you happen to link readings 1 and 2. Then you’re the one who’s producing meanings around ethnicity that are traumatic, rather than having them rammed down your throat. (If you’re lost with number 2, you’re probably repressing – go see an analyst).

What Kaur’s work – in particular, her making of Innocence in Barcelona – shows is that context is crucial. Her work sits as easily in exhibitions based around ethnicity, such as her recent show at Nottingham Castle Art Museum and Gallery (where these piccies are from), as it does in exhibitions which have little to do with ethnicity – for example, the June show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, entitled Claustrophobia. In each, though, the work is inflected differently. This importance of context is not limited to which interpretative framework is used to present the work but is often integral to the works themselves. In Glasshouses, a work Kaur completed before leaving for Spain, various Indian and Sikh objects were laid out for display in large glass boxes, each of which seemed to have glass stairs going up their sides. The emphasis on these structures and the title of the work diverted attention away from the objects towards what held them, highlighting and undermining usual museum practices. Like her glove puppets in a show themed around Krishna or her strange speaker-like protuberances on a billboard in Scotland, her works provoke a question which, ironically, given her supposed lack of political content, is the quintessential question about immigrants: What is that doing here?

Niru Ratnam, ‘Art Kaur’ 2^nd Generation – Issue 9 (summer 1998): pg 58-59

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