PINK

Pink is a hybrid, by definition a figment. At its most basic red and white woven together, pink is an artificial structure with parts bound to our most essential life forces — milk and blood. Of the shades formed from diluting the pigments of the primary triad with white, only pink has emerged as a standalone idea, abounding with an independent, exuberant personality. And, saturated with subtle modulations and bold meanings in contemporary art, the color has transcended an on-palette cosmetic intermix to become its own subject — PINK.

Pink has been subjected to an historical bias of chromophobia (1) in the west, normalized globally in the second half of the 20th century after fashion tastemakers like Elsa Schiaparelli (who coined 'shocking pink'), and connected in contemporary culture with love, femininity, and consumptive frivolity. Its history in India has tread a steadier path, enmeshed in visual culture and daily life — sewn into wedding clothes, thrown at holi, and eaten as gulab (rose) twinned with jamun (purple) as the sweet taste in a favored dessert.

In painting, pink has proliferated: it surfaces at Ajanta, popularizes with the preferences of rulers like Ram Singh II of Kota, and recurs as miniaturized Deccani rocks, healthy elephants, and sandstone forts. However, it was only in the 1970s that Bhupen Khakhar introduced pink as PINK into Indian art. Employing bright, bold colors previously confined to kitsch calendar art and middle-class homes and shops, Khakhar's chromatic range opened avant-garde painting to the actualities of life in India.

While Khakhar used pink liberally and inventively in representations of daily happenings and male sexuality through the 1970s and 1980s, the color became his subject in the 1991 painting Pink City, legible as an ironic translation of Jaipur. So nicknamed for the aping tones of its 18th century stucco buildings constructed in simulation of sandstone, the capital city of Rajasthan now teems with tourists attracted to the mythology of its pink architecture. In this conversion of the urban panorama, however, 'pink' is not a modifying descriptor of the 'city,' as Khakhar divides a layered pool of color from the shore of the town itself. Consciously withdrawing from the hot palette developed earlier in his career, Khakhar here layers muted, expressive tonalities, imaging a sophisticated employ of organic, fleshy, even orange-y pinks.

Pink City is best interpreted as half of a pair — in cutting, linguistic play with Ghost City Night of the same year. If Pink City is titled after Jaipur, Ghost City advertises Akbar's quickly abandoned and remarkably preserved urban invention of Fatehpur Sikri. In Khakhar's circuit of Mughal tourist sites, signifying palatial landmarks of these planned cities are abandoned for amorphous backlanes and small-scale ordinary structures; because the referents to real places are abstracted and semantic, neither work builds architecture from its namesake city onto the canvas. Pink City and Ghost City seem to present, alternately at day and night, the same small-town locale with a central color field. In both, people appear as faceless shadows, though if by sunlight the anonymous crowds engage in predictable, ordinary errands, at Night the city's activity becomes spare, illicit, and random, as bodies' edges dissolve into acts of anonymous, homosexual love in the foreground.

Creating abstracted works principally about color, Polly Apfelbaum's artificial pink velvet flowers elaborate formal concerns with a free, blooming composition. An elision between painting and sculpture, Apfelbaum's floor installation Pink Crush disorients the sensory expectation upon reaching a field of wild flowers. The strewn arrangement of her fluorescent 'fallen painting' garlands Khakhar's fleshy cityscape with delirium, in coincidental homage to the lifetime of happiness inspired by his own synthetic bouquets. (2) As in Khakhar's invocation of a fake floral iconography, Apfelbaum's pink petals playfully intertwine ephemera and permanence.

Distilling and recreating pink with vessels that imagine disembodied sources of endless blood and milk, Sudarshan Shetty contrives his pink too from the dialectic of natural and artificial embedded in Khakhar's plastic flowers. Shetty's work, Stain, locates pink primarily in the everyday transactions of the marketplace, where it is commodified foremost to sell love. He sardonically reduces constituent red and whites to bodily fluids, allowed to recombine and marry into pink only after falling through a glass trough.

Similarly, Bharti Kher markets bindis and an artificial panther in rinky dink, which publicize, as a pair, the commercial patterning of bright 'shocking pink.' Her pink panther is at once elegant, aggressive, and anticipatory, fabricated in ironic reference to the lead character of an eponymous American cult cartoon of the 1960s and 1970s. Balanced with a near-magenta bindi, Kher alludes also to the gender bias of pink and its association as an emblem of homosexuality; the hot pink motif is held behind a layer of sperm-like abstraction, bespeaking hybridized subversion rather than femininity as the bindi ordinarily signifies.

Against a deceptive gold wallpaper design of framed primates in pose and winged eagles in flight, Thukral and Tagra's Pan Troglodytes conflates the layers on its surface into ambiguous dimensions. Titling the work with the scientific term for a common chimpanzee, a flattened industrial pink shadow of the equatorial species swings from the top of a stylized baroque frame; as the animal reaches down to the stark white bottom of the canvas, he picks a flower sprouting in the same commercial pink as his own form. The opacity of the monochromatic pink-pop-chimp is broken only briefly, imaging a transparent window into the fictive three dimensional sky painted into the frame.

If Shetty swirls a liquid pink from human processes, Kher's figural constructions are sheathed in animal skin, and Thukral and Tagra make-up creatures with commercial cosmetic, for Yogesh Rawal pink exists and emanates from the corporal interior. Building the ‘canvasses’ of his Untitled collages with fine layers of geometrically-edged translucent papers set with varnish, tissue is both a formal medium and his bodily stuff. Rawal seeks the spiritual and sublime in compositions that privilege sensitive intonations of light and color, escaping the limits of naturalistic representation and the temporal gravity of the external world.

Tushar Joag's pink, by contrast, grounds us solidly in the contemporary real; phrasing two global, semantic contexts of the color, it transforms into a vehicle for an activist's social vision. Through the angled perspective of twin periscopes, 249 Meters Under Water - Pink Slip 1, and 249 Meters Under Water - Pink Slip 2, forbid the world to be clouded behind rose-colored lenses. Drawings foregrounded by the instruments' blush glass critically report the disenfranchisement of communities submerged by the local politics of dam building along the Narmada River, and a sky-facing, spinal orientation enacts their sunken status. Joag's pair of drawings Pink Elephant (People's Car) and People's Car (Pink Elephant) address the inverted, ironic hypocrisy of a proposed Tata Motors' model intending to make cars accessible to the masses, but which has forcibly reclaimed the people's land in West Bengal for its manufacturing plant. While conceptually drawing on local protest, the silhouette of figures crowded into Joag's 'elephants' trace to historical India, owing stylistically to painted miniature forebears and iconographically to the trope of the navanari kunjara, an elephant comprised of the bodies of nine women.

Joag's invocation of Rajput painting inadvertently parallels Anandajit Ray and Shahzia Sikander's often-political abstractions of miniature vocabularies. Ray's Revisit Violence 2 controls and manipulates the conventions of Mughal painting, with an imposing salmon pink geometrical frame riven by a centered, vertical outline in rising waves of gray. Sealing an unlikely coterie of objects within the nucleus of a closed envelope, a knife lain at the surface brings bloodshed to the fore of meaning. Revisit's pink wash complements and exaggerates the blush of a molded fleshy ham and flattened detached breast, prefiguring a violence that is at once immediate, artificial, and surreal.

In Anchor, Shahzia Sikander spins her own earlier manipulations of miniature painting onto a simplified ground of recessive, beige pink and rectangular swatch of deep green. Compositionally identical but chromatically distinct from the artist's eponymous acrylic-on-wall mural executed in New York in 1997, a hovering, embellished mannequin in a translucent petticoat at left reveals the layered answer to a question previously posed by the artist (in the title of her 1997 Cholee kay Pechay Kya? Chunree Kay Nichay Kya?). That garment echoes the tresses of white that fall from a background building to drift over and veil a stylized Radha-Krishna pair. Engaging a technique sourced in Mughal artistic practice and adapted often in her work, Sikander overpaints multi-colored (even pink) stray dots onto the surface of the couple to suggest a competing duality of conceptual flatness and planar layering within the print. (3)

Of the multivalent meanings and myths engaged in PINK, only Arpita Singh images its leading cultural stereotype — as a sign of gender. Parallel to the long-term bias against color itself in global art, pink represents the domestic feminine, even as it picked up that prejudicial baggage only in the 20th century (a cultural reversal, as pink had earlier used its derivation from fierce red to boast masculinity). In watercolors that set translucent blue lines against desaturated stains of pink, Singh details personal iconography from an everyday environment, intimating dream-like allegories at varied distances of emotional reality. In Aeroplanes Fly Through the House of Cancer, a multi-armed, weighty goddess figured in obsessive pink hovers in planar abstraction, charting a horoscope through the unmarked interference of crowded airspace. An Untitled watercolor, by contrast, forces an effeminate man in an unbalanced bright pink suit against the uncomfortable front of the picture plane, the depressed expression of his unfocused blue eyes veiled behind a grid of lipstick-like marks on his face. Another Untitled watercolor recedes into a domestic and mental interior, in which pink worn close to the skin of an isolated seated woman is overlaid loosely with skeins of blue fabric; trying to detach herself from surrounding anxieties, only the pink hand of a floating male figure grazes her with physical contact.

When light red dropped from the spectrum into its own color concept, magenta-hot-rose-shocking-blush-bright PINK was born. An independent idea with distinct tones of meaning and shaded valences, the color has betrayed its hybrid origins, blended and imagined into an irreducible element: pure pink.

Beth Citron
Mumbai, July 2007

Beth Citron is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Based in Mumbai, she researches and writes on contemporary art in India.

1 David Batchelor. Chromophobia. (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
2 Cf. Interview with Ulli Beier in which, when asked about his painting Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1975), Khakhar replied, “A bouquet of plastic flowers is eternal joy for the eye.”
3 See Homi Bhabha in Shahzia Sikander. (Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1999).