Abstract - Jessica Shaffer

This paper conducts a visual analysis of New York artist Chitra Ganesh’s Tales of Amnesia, 2002-07, and compares it to the popular Indian comics that Ganesh admired. Her work is examined in relation to Western and Eastern cultures, as well as feminist themes, and compared to the work of artists Öyvind Fahlström and Jess. In the late fifties and early sixties in the United States, these two artists were separately creating a new form of comic art that consisted of physically disassembling existing comics, frame by frame, and reassembling them in a new order.  Fahlström and Jess referred to their efforts as "performances" and "assemblies," respectively. The effect was simultaneously cryptic, surreal, and dada-esque, and was reflected in both the textual and pictorial elements of the reassembled comics.  Today, Chitra Ganesh has begun to engage in the comic medium, and the resulting work, Tales of Amnesia, evidences an undeniable extension of Fahlström and Jess's experiments. Embracing this tessellated format, Ganesh incorporates multiple rubrics included under “the postmodern umbrella” into her comic work.  Ganesh's "assemblage" of Tales of Amnesia occurs not in the physical cutting and pasting of another artist’s work, as Fahlström and Jess did, but rather in her piecing together of multiple cultures, sub-cultures, and ideologies through digital collage, painting and automatic writing. It is in this way, coupled with the very nature of the comic medium, that Tales of Amnesia becomes the ultimate representation of hybridization in contemporary art. This paper explores the possible ramifications of this parallel for further research in new media in this present age of hybridization. Ganesh crosses borders in her work, committing herself to no single dogma, but rather creating her own.  Like Jess, who was himself renowned for his early gay activism, Ganesh’s identification as a lesbian woman born to immigrant Indian parents in Brooklyn cements her outsider status and marginalizes her via her gender, sexuality, and diasporic identity. It is this feeling of separation from the mainstream that gives Ganesh the mobility to draw from multiple sources in both the media and content of her work. 

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