Comics, Narrative, and the Unstable Other in Who’s Hump?

"MJ" from VidhuAggarwal

Vidhu Aggarwal

http://www.digitaljournal.com/a-and-e/arts/comics-narrative-and-the-unstable-other-in-who-s-hump/article/404406

Comics, narrative, and theunstable other in Who’s Hump? SPECIAL

Posted Sep 20, 2014 by Julian Chambliss

On September 24th Chicago’s LATITUDE gallery space will host a Winkelman-Milling Projects show called Who’s HUMP?, the latest in a series of WMP showsthat spotlight art and artists exploring boundaries in the windy city andbeyond.

Vidhu Aggarwal’s work draws from multiple arenas to create a uniquenarrative experience. Mediating modern technological paths whileunpacking the mythological legacy that informs our global urbanexperience, Aggarwal combines words and images to produce digitalpoetics that explore the fallacy of the machine and the struggle betweenalienation and connectivity. Aggarwal’s new project Avatara takes themodern day fascination/fetishization with representative objects as aninvitation to examine the shifting relationship between physical and digital embodiments. Thiswork interrogates the unsettling truth that the modern context allows the body to yield to ouryearnings in ways previously only imagined. The modern experience is informed by new spacesof fluidity around identity. Yet, our notions remain locked to established categories andtraditional expectations.

It is no surprise then that she would be drawn to comic narratives. For all the immaturityattached to comic books in the United States, the medium has and does offer a space forexperimentation, exploration, and expression that more “serious” counterparts can sometimelack. Aggarwal’s concerns mirror the work of her collaborator Bishakh Som. Som describes hiswork as investigating "the intersection between image and text, figure and architecture,architecture and landscape.” A quick examination of his previous comic projects in Hi-horse,Blurred Vision, and Pool demonstrates how his work builds on the legacy of autobiographicaland investigative comic narratives pioneered in anthologies such as Zap Comix, Arcade, andRaw. Som’s ideological roots link him to creators such as S. Clay Wilson, Art Spiegelman, andRobert Crumb. Like them, Som’s work examines society and uses the comic narrative to

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spotlight shifting boundaries.

Vidhu Aggarwal

Vidhu Aggarwal

Aggarwal and Som are busy on all levels. Aggarwal’s other job is full time professor of poeticsand founding editor of SPECS: A Journal of Arts and Culture, as well as managing twomanuscripts under review with publishers. Som has recently completed [i]Apsara Engine[/i], a200-page collection of seven short stories he too is sending to publishers for review. I caughtup with Aggarwal this week and got her to answers some questions about comics, narratives,and the unstable other.


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The cover of Lady Humpdori.

B. Som

Why collaborate on a graphic narrative now? What can this kind of project accomplished foryou?

In a recent piece in the New York Times, A.O. Scott laments the seeming end ofadulthood/patriarchy via an analysis of pop culture—he talks, for instance, of the


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popularity of comics among adults. Graphic forms definitely have this childhood andparticularly boyhood resonance in our culture—unlike say movies or painting. Also, bothgraphic narrative form and poetry can be done with limited materials (unlike say makingmovies) and therefore are available to the amateur. And I love that! Of course, Bishakh’scomplex, architectural graphic sequences could never be described as amateur! But“high-seriousness” is usually not a quality associated with comics—there’s a history ofsuperheroes and alternative universes. Scott McCloud describes comics as “a sequentialart”—one in which the gaps between panels is part of the meaning of the comic, much likeline breaks in poetry.

And I had seen some of Bishakh’s amazing interpretations of H.D. and D.H. Lawrence inthis literature/comic book anthology series called “The Graphic Canon.” So I was curiousabout collaborating with him. I had also commissioned work from Bishakh for two issuesof SPECS, a journal I edit—and his work has a thrilling architectural play between figureand ground, humans and technologies, animate and inanimate objects.

My own work, particularly the poems in The Trouble with Humpadori, concerns amonstrous, shapeshifting figure, which I call Humpadori—an entity that seemed tobelong more to a science fiction universe rather “Poetry” per se! Poetry associates wouldtell me they just didn’t “get” this idea of this weird kind of infantile monster that takes onthe properties of any number of objects, The Taj Mahal, unicorns, maps, etc? Where wasI, Vidhu Aggarwal, in the poems? So instead of a poem about me posing in front of theTaj Mahal, Humpadori becomes a monstrous, drooling version of the Taj Mahal. Thesepoems seemed to call for a visual rendering. Because this figure of Humpadori seems tobreak down the boundary between the figure and the background, I was really fascinatedto see how Bishakh might visualize this figure, given how the backgrounds in his work areoften as pulsing and alive the characters. The skyscapes can be fleshy.

You have a focus on identity and community in your work. How do you think your workreflects the contemporary debates around these issues? How much is your heritage identityinfluencing your thinking?

Well, I’m really interested in the violence of identity—how identity is imposed upon us


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beyond our consent. We are gendered, raced, and so on—in ways that are difficult toescape. The superhero comic was always a fantasy about excess or surplus identities. I’minterested in narratives of escapism, camouflage, and disguise. My hybrid poetrymanuscript Avatara is about an immigrant tech worker who finds a godlike gamingidentity far more compelling than life.

Part of my own experience as an Indian immigrant girl growing up in the South (NewOrleans and Houston) was picking up cultural codes in an awkward, piecemeal way—thedilemma of being a bad copy of an American where the racial landscape still had theresidue of the Civil War: black or white. There’s always the question of: What are you?

Much of my understanding of India growing up was filtered through Bollywood musicals.Similarly, I learned American English by watching television. I really felt like I waslearning about the U.S. through soap operas or Star Trek. Humpadori is my version of aBollywood spectacle combined with a New Orleans Mardi Gras float--the hybrid culturalmechanism that is identity. Humpadori is an identity performer. Humpadori is like alumpy, campy, and awkward Houdini—an escape artist obsessed with his bindings—themarkers of identity he invites the audience impose upon him.

Comics offer a complex cognitive experience for the audience; can you talk about how yourproject capitalizes on the graphic form?

What has been most fascinating for me in working with Bishakh is how his graphicinterpretation of Humpadori is very feminine. I gave him the manuscript and told him todo as he pleased without any instructions. I myself thought of Hump as alternatively maleand female depending on the incarnation (for instance Humpadori Unicorn is very male,Mermaid is female). I really did not know exactly what to expect from his initial drafts,but I was blown away. He combined the technological with the biological with vividumbilical cables uniting the bodies from different poems—lions, mermaids, playbacksingers. Like a giant cosmic desiring machine (a la Deleuze) but very womanly. Also hisfigures took on aspects of the Hindu (pre-Vedic) goddess Kali/Durga both violent andlife-giving. There was an aspect of these gods and creation myths in my work that hisimages really brought out in new ways.


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I wrote the poem “Lady Humpadori” as a specific response to Bishakh’s Humpadoriimages. And then Bishakh did this short comic book based on “Lady Humpadori.” I lovedhow the lines sounded completely different split into panels--took on different meanings.I thought the dialogue bubbles with the elevated lines were hilarious. I think Bishakh isparticularly masterful in writing dialogue. He often punctures the high-toned musings ofhis characters with great wit and he was able to do this puncturing with lines of thepoems. That poem and process was a total surprise—a real back and forth.

I see your work drawing on an urban aesthetics that engages with afrofuturism anddesifuturism narratives common in fictive texts, but becoming more widely seen incontemporary art and culture. How would you describe your aesthetic to those unfamiliar withthe ideological landscape you are working in?

I’m a fan of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monae, NnediOkorafor, Michael Jackson, John Jennings and Stacey Robinson’s project Black Kirby,Nick Cave’s soundsuits—they create alternative fictive spaces for black subjectivitythrough futures: wild techno-bodies, new familial modes, Afro-diasporic myths, andfantastical world building in fiction, music, comics, art. I don’t know of as many SouthAsians working in speculative modes, but what’s out there is inspiring. There’s MaryAnne Mohanraj and Vandana Singh, two science fiction writers. There’s also the poets,Monica Mody and Bhanu Kapil. You could also include the work of Salman Rushdie andAmitav Ghosh. There’s artist Rina Banerjee. And, of course, Bishakh Som, who drawsthese highly detailed futurist architectural spaces with South Asian motifs. A lot ofscience fiction has borrowed from South Asian mythologies—avatar, the word for digitalincarnation we get in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, comes from the word for theembodiment of gods into flesh. I was joking with Bishakh that the time is ripe for SouthAsian or desi-futurism given how many science fiction stories take on South Asian tropes(James Cameron’s Avatar, Ian McDonald’s Cyberdebad Days). Shouldn’t we outdesi-scape them?


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"MJ" from Vidhu Aggarwal

Vidhu Aggarwal

Is your work supplanting established forms or subverting existing systems?

I do think it’s a point in time where we are beginning to recognize the graphic narrativeas a high art as much as a popular medium. Art Spiegelman, Osamu Tesuka, AlisonBedchel, Winchluss, Junko Mizuno, Marjane Satrapi. At the same time poets areengaging with popular culture more than ever: Joyelle McSweeny, Tan Lin, Stephen Burt.There’s something in the air. Personally, I’m interested in a greater flexibility andmobility in poetry. I grew up thinking of a poem as a sacred object, and recombining myown work through video and comics is a way of smashing that idea.

Are we going to see further projects?

I’d love to work with Bishakh again and collaborate on a longer graphic narrative. We’ll


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see!

Aggarwal and Som will be signing a limited edition chapbook, Lady Humpdori, after thereading. Due to the anticipated size of the event, RSVP is requested.

Find out more about Winkelman-Milling Projects at WMP website.


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Comics, Narrative, and the Unstable Other in Who’s Hump?

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