They Are Not Having Sex

I have been told by many people that my sculptures Lilith’s Flight and Eve’s Awakening are having sex. I have never quite understood why people say that to me. First, bronze metal cannot move, so if you turn your back for a minute, they will not start thrusting away; metal cannot have sex.

Secondly, bronze has no genitals; it is not real and not human. And while people can say the sculptures are depicting sex, the stories which inspired their creation did not include sex and I did not create them with the idea of them having sex in mind. And yet people still insist they are engaged in intercourse. I do not know what kind of sex these people have, or how they define it.

In Eve’s Awakening, Eve’s face clearly shows she is terrified and Adam is obviously unconscious and flaccid. I think that if you are a man and wake up in that situation then you should not be surprised if you hear sirens and are arrested after seeing a woman looking at you like that. If you are a woman and wake up to find an unconscious man in your bed that you do not know prompting you to make a face like Eve’s, I suppose you will be dialling 911 as soon as you find your clothes.

As for Lilith in Lilith’s Flight, the sculpture is about the politics of sex; thus she is sitting in Adam’s lap but it is not a position from which his genitals can touch hers. Yes, if he were a man and not a sculpture and if he were sitting flat on his bottom, they could have sex if they were feeling adventurous. But Adam is a sculpture and he is on his knees which brings his private parts down lower, so unless I made him hung like a sperm whale there is no way they could have sex. And again in this sculpture Lilith is not interested in him; she has said the name of god and is about to fly away, ending the whole “who should be on top” argument.

And so for those of you who inexplicably believe they are having sex, though it flies in the face of anatomy, in the face of the story which binds the sculptures, in the face of the woman who created them, I hope this puts your misguided ideas to rest. Let me say, I am not prudish, I do not think sex is bad, and in many ancient civilizations that were more egalitarian than ours it was considered sacred, so I would have no problems depicting it. I just don’t think people are ready for the idea of sacred sex (sex as a part of the power of creation and destruction, as a force of joining and dispersing, as natural and normal) when they see prurient images everywhere, even when they aren’t there.


P.S. I would also like to add that people have commented on the largeness of some of my Goddess’s breasts. Yes, they are amply endowed, yet they have breasts not to titillate but because in ancient cultures breasts were seen primarily as the things which feed children. I know that that is a strange way to look at them for some, but all I ask is that you try to see them for their original purpose. Goddess’s breasts were seen as representative of the abundance of food brought from the earth. So, large ones signified a good bounty. That is the way they were depicted in ancient times, and in Indian sculpture; therefore, that is the way I present them. Again, this has nothing to do with sex.

Ardhanarishvara

I made an Ardhanarishvara the other day. "A what?" you ask. "An Ardhanarishvara," I say:

It is a very auspicious Hindu deity. In essence it is the union of male and female, and is the combination of the Indian god Shiva (masculine power) and the Goddess Shakti (female power). It is also the embodiment of the Buddhist ideal that there are no dualities. "Oh," you say.

It is also the first idol I have ever made, in that it is the first representation of a living religious idea I have ever created. I have made “Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow,” and the Goddess Dawn, Nut the Sky Goddess and so on but they are from dead religions. People actually worship Ardhanarishvaras today.

I made it frantically as I make all my sculptures, (in almost a trance like state so that I usually don’t recall making any of my art work. It is akin to forgetting the pain of childbirth except with a lot less pain to forget). I made it for several reasons. I had been thinking of making some kind of androgynous figure for a while. I wanted to combine male and female in an attempt to erase the difference between them. I had already made a sculpture named “Soul Attire: The Skin You're in” to represent that the body you wear is just the clothing for the soul. That we are all the same on the inside, and that it is only a flip of a coin that determines what one will become. I think it is important for men and woman to realize that we are all people. The way a man feels about being abused or being loved is the same way a woman feels. She hates the first and desires the second. I felt that the story of Adam and Eve separated men and women so I wanted to join them together again. Some men always wonder why some women cannot accept their roles as fed to them by the Bible, but they never try to imagine how they would feel if the same roles were given to them. That is why I think reincarnation is the only rational belief for human beings. If you believed that after death you could by the flip of the coin become that which you hate, or have mistreated perpetually maybe you might see the light when it came to equality of all living things.

So with these ideas in my head, and the Toronto Art Expo out of the way, I was ready to make something just not something big. I wanted something small and easy to try my hand at, little did I realise that small and easy can be mutually exclusive things. So we (hubby and me) were looking on the internet on a web page about saris and there was the Ardhanarishvara. Shiva, the male side, holds a trident in his hand, which I had discovered was a symbol for creation and destruction. The snake he holds is symbolic of the Mother Goddess, the snake of eternal life. His hand was upheld to acknowledge the worshiper. The female side has a flower in her hand for boon-granting. It seemed to fit. I was just a little worried about the six arms. The arms are not real arms but show different aspects of the deity; still I was worried about the anatomy. And men’s rib cages are held at a different angle than women’s. And the face was a little troublesome. How do you make a face both male and female? I took time but I figured it out. All in all, I think it came out well.

I like it a lot and find it is a good meditative device. I have thought about it and I think it is a good representation of the Earth or Nature. These are personified as female nowadays and it is all well and good to make a divinity female, but the earth has no vagina, nor a penis, (nor does the sun either which many think of as male), but it has procreative aspects of both sexes. I think it is not good to leave anyone out of the divine. Men evidently wanted to have a male representative of the divine when the Mother goddess ruled all and that is why in the West we now have an exclusively male deity in heaven (I do find it strange, that God, who is supposed to have no form, no body, and be all spirit, is considered a male since maleness is a physical trait not a spiritual one). As a deity Ardhanarishvara is perfect and has left no one out of the divine and that is how it should be.

The Death of Art?

The other day my beloved and I went to Port Credit to drop off a packet for the Port Credit Art Walk, an event where local businesses host specific artists for a certain period, drawing visitors to their shops. The place where I was to leave my application was in a lighthouse which flashed merrily on the dismally white, rainy, Canadian spring day. We parked the car and discussed the best way to enter the building. I insisted we take the stairs up. I was right of course and we found the door to the building. But when we entered we were told that we had driven a long way for nothing. They were no longer taking applicants for the Art Walk.

It seems that businesses who wanted to host artists’ works were few and far between. My dearest was incensed (he had made up the beautiful packet) but because he is Chinese you could not tell. I, being Indian, thought “oh well, such is life” and we left. We sat in the car where my love informed me that he was incensed, then pointed out a loon or merganser floating in the choppy water of Lake Ontario (he can never stay angry for long). We sat there watching an abundance of geese and ducks float by the dock, and a little old lady feeding a swan from a cup.

There we began to discuss what is happening to the art world today. We concluded that we are entering some kind of Dark Ages where the humanities, those things that make us human like art, poetry, and the study of language and beauty, were going by the wayside. And that in the future many generations from now our progeny will look back and say: “My Goddess, those were bad times! The movies were derivative, the books and poetry were contrived and inept, and the art was psychotic and ugly. And what they didn’t do to the environment!” So to those future generations I say shut up. It is easy to see in hindsight. Stop tooting your horns, I saw it first.

But seriously, something is going wrong with our culture. The humanities are barely being taught in schools, funds for the arts have a slow leak, and mastery of the language and grammar are nil. How can we call ourselves humans if the only thing that differentiates us from the animals is the fact that we are sometimes bipedal when we are not hunched over the computer terminal like primates, rapping out what is essentially a bunch of grunts and nonsensical signs which rarely produce anything remotely like a sentence? I mean, even a monkey will eventually spell a word if he hits the keys with his bottom long enough, that does not mean it is good writing or should be published.

The same applies to the visual arts. All because a person calls him or herself an artist and balls together some scraps and says it represents the ethical determinism of the human race does not mean that ball of scraps is art. And in there lies the problem. In the art world I have found that the King has no clothes but everyone involved in the art world is afraid to say it, and everyone outside the art world just wants to avoid such a kingdom of fools. Thus the lack of merchants wanting to show art, the lack of buyers for it, the diminishing support for it, and finally the lack of people who care about it.

Art is the only profession in which one does not have to show any skill or aptitude in order to call oneself an artist. All you have to have is a new idea and a lot of indecipherable rot and you are a genius. I wish other jobs were so forgiving. It would be nice to dress up like a surgeon and walk into a hospital and start collecting $100,000 a year because I look good in greens. Or maybe I could walk into a NASA and get to go to the moon because I want to.

A lot of people say that that is what is nice about the art world--it is democratic; it is not judgmental. It may not be, but the rest of world is and it has judged art today to be a failure. Nobody wants to go a museum when a new artist is showing because they know it is going to be terrible. People go to see the Old Masters because they were good at what they did, and even though they had less than we have today and lived and died in worse ways, they still managed to leave behind beauty. What they made did not look like a three-year-old did it. They had skills. Look at the legacy they have left us. Look at the legacy we will leave future generations, cold sculptures of twisted metal, a fifty- foot flayed virgin Mary, glasses of urine with religious paraphernalia in them, portraits made of feces, and so on. The future will call us crazy and maybe we are, after all look at what we have done to the environment.

Discovering the Sari

I have discovered the sari. It is one in a long line of discoveries that have reshaped me as a woman. As a sculptor, I have had to search deep into pre-history for positive images of the feminine, for images of women before their forms were distorted by negative cultural ideas. During this search, I found many empowering things about women. We were the first to weave, to write, to create the science of agriculture. All these truths have been proven in the archeological record though they are scarcely discussed in textbooks.

It is also true that in the past women and fabric have been intimately entwined. In the myth of the Babylonian goddess Innana’s descent into the underworld, She is required to take off Her clothing and jewels as She enters seven gates. When She is stripped naked, She is powerless and dies. Clothes here are equated with women and power. While the sari, said to be a mere 5000 years old, is not as ancient as this myth, the story does show what clothing once meant to women and the men who worshipped them.

The sari is not called “six yards of heaven” for nothing. It is at once protective and suggestive, majestic and natural. It is a flower, a wave of water, the jewel within the lotus. It is versatile, with more colors than the rainbow. And though there is a legend which states that the sari was created by a man, I highly doubt it since there are a countless number of wraps with regional variations. In the south of India where there is a strong remnant of matrilineal, pre-Aryan culture, saris abound and I suspect that with such strong female egos around men would have had little say in what or how women wore their clothes. A man may have suggested one style but the wrapping of a cloth around a woman’s body is as instinctual as swaddling a cloth around a baby. I can even recall draping myself in sheets and curtains as a girl pretending I was a princess many times without the help or suggestion of any men. I was surprised when I wrapped my first sari decades later that I had done it essentially the right way as a child without knowing it (sans pleats of course.)

My love affair with the sari came long after I had left childhood though. I forget cloth for a time, put it aside as I nearly drowned in the onslaught of all Western Culture offered. As I look back now I can truly say that the things I knew as a girl, that I set aside for all the non-essential things I was taught to prize, were of more value than the things I replaced them with. Now I am scrambling to relearn the compassion and self-love that once came so naturally to me then and I feel the sari is an essential part of that.

The sari as a representation of one of the first arts women created, as a part of our power and our history, is very important. I believe that aspect of it overshadows any negative connotations the cloth may have picked up since the time of the Moghul invasions and subsequent British colonization in India. During this time the sari became an oppressive tool, and perhaps because of this it has come to symbolize subjugation or outmoded traditionalism to some who are unaware of its long history. The sari was worn before the Moghuls and British, and was worn usually without a blouse or choli. Before these invasions, women in India had more equality and freedom than they may have today in the West. Thus reclaiming the sari is akin to reclaiming that equality and freedom, and is one step in shedding the inferiority complex created by imperialism. We should not be discarding the sari as “backwards,” but hailing it as ahead of its time.

I try to think of the sari as a palace, that for a short time was turned into a prison, but its main purpose was to be a palace and it can be again. I understand that many westernized Indian women do not like to wear saris or feel they are for “auntie” or too old-fashioned. They walk past the palace and recall all the negative things that happened there, but I am third-generation in the West; I never heard the screams. All I see is the beauty of it, and all it can be in the future.

The sari to me epitomizes femininity, and not in the western sense of one who is weaker or silly, but in the true ancient Indian and feminist sense of a powerful woman confident in her self, her mind and her sexuality. As a truly one-size-fits-all garment, the sari is a feminist emblem. It holds all women no matter the shape or size or height or colour equally. It makes us all beautiful. And when was the last time any woman any where heard of such an idea as we are all beautiful?

In the West, advertisers make it their business to convince women to hate themselves. No matter what you look like you are ugly. Is your hair curly? Straighten it. Is your hair straight? Curl it. Are you fair-skinned? Get darker. Are you dark-skinned? You need to be lighter. How much do you weigh? No matter what you say, you need to lose weight. Your breasts are too small. Get surgery. Your breasts are too big. Get surgery. You are getting older. You need surgery. What kind of clothes do you own? They are all awful; you need to buy different ones. What kind of skin do you have? You need make-up. (Have you ever thought of why they call it makeup? What do you think you have to make up for?) I am not saying that women should not adorn themselves, but I feel it should be done in the spirit of gilding the lily, not dolling up Quasimodo.

The fortuitous death of my television started me sculpting again, but it also heralded in the time when I stopped being so depressed about my appearance. I began really looking at myself through my own eyes and accepting who I was. I also began contemplating what beauty means in the West. And I became convinced that the perfect woman is a heroin addict, or at least someone with a decent eating-disorder and the body of a prepubescent boy. Or so all those size-zero models would make us think. Or is it the size-zero models? Isn’t it the men in the fashion industry who are dictating to women what is beautiful?

That is why I feel the sari is so important: because it is a cloth, a thing created by women for women. It is time we women started defining our own beauty and not judging ourselves according to masculine ideals. In ancient civilizations, Minoan, Sumerian, and other Earth-worshiping societies, a woman’s body was sacred. She was the living embodiment of the Earth. She was the conduit through which the soul entered into life, as the Earth was the passage into death. She is depicted as slender in some places, plump and representative of plenty in others. Ancient women found themselves beautiful in all forms, from their brilliant brains to their life-giving breasts and yonis (I am not being prudish. I just hate the sound of the word vagina. The sound is so ugly for something so sacred)!

The sari is as of yet outside the touch of western designers, and unless they run around cutting off three yards from every one made, it will still make all women feel like queens. It will still wrap around us protectively, reminding us of how great we are with every stitch. Its power is that is requires us only to be ourselves--it will do the rest with what we have. It will tell us, we are sufficient, we do not need to change an inch to satisfy it. Beauty is not skin deep, it radiates from the soul. So, if a woman feels like a celestial being, she is one. If she feels like a Goddess she becomes one. If she loves her body, herself, then all others will love her too and the world will be a better place for it.

Many people have said saris are limited, but many people have also said that women are limited too. Believe me, if I had to climb a mountain in a sari, I would find a way to wrap the pallu around a rock and use it like a rope and get to the top before all the others who laughed at me or told me I could not do it. Then I would use the sari again to make a flag and name the mountain after myself. For thousands of years women have worn saris while cleaning, cooking, and taking care of babies. They wrapped them differently of course, sometimes making the sari into pants to take care of the everyday things, but they did it.

Nevertheless, I do recognize that today’s saris are completely different animals than the ones our foremothers wore of sturdy cloth and without constricting petticoats. (Has anyone thought that we should join the 21st century and chuck those prudish Moghul/ British contraptions and wear a sari as we would any dress?). Current saris are made of filmy georgette and crepe and net, things fit for celestial maidens who have servants, no children, and no laundry to do. They are special clothes and many rightfully want to treat them with respect and feel remiss at putting such loveliness in jeopardy. The especially gorgeous saris made with sequins and work are not for everyday wear, but neither is an $800 Western party dress. It is not the fault of the sari that it makes us look and feel like queens, or that our everyday existences are so mundane and colourless that it cannot be worn daily.

With this said, I try to find every possible occasion to wear one despite the odds. So I wore a sari for three consecutive days selling my work at the Toronto Art Expo in March. I wore it from six in the morning to twelve at night and I am still alive. Canada is not warm in March and saris are made for Indian weather, so I wore long johns and boots. I wore heavy-weight silk saris and wore them under wool coats outdoors which kept me very comfortable. I walked up stairs and an escalator, carried bags and bronze sculptures, all with my sari and my twisted ankle. And when I got to my booth my pleats were still intact--thanks to safety pins!

At the show people told me that I looked like a piece of art work and that the cloth I wore was the most beautiful they had ever seen. In fact, I was hugged more there by people than I had been in years. It was as if they were thanking me for wearing a sari. For three days I was lucky enough to don a sari, but on the last day, I wore Western clothes and what a world of difference that made! Conversations that had been respectful, enlightening and even surreal, degraded to school-boy banter about breasts. People even evinced surprise that I was a sculptor; I was no longer the worthy creator of my own work! I felt naked. I felt dethroned. So what is the moral of my tale? There is none. The sari is a cloth. It is a work of art. It is whatever we dare to make of it. Do we dare to try and bring beauty into our everyday lives by wearing saris at dinner, to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, Earth Day, or for any excuse we can make up (for example: I just want to, okay!)? Or do we accept the drab and ordinary because we are afraid to shine like the sun? I leave it to others to find their own answers. I am going outside in my sari (without a petticoat) to celebrate being a woman and to enjoy rivaling the heavens for beauty.

By the way, I also wear saris because my beloved enjoys them too; besides all the others reasons this is the one closest to my heart.