http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 KHOJ Residency, India Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:59:09 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://sites.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 19/8 - At the end of the first week I have retreated to a swanky hotel for peace and coffee. One of the dominant themes of this first week has been the search for a bed, which proved to be an exhausting but illuminating test of the infrastructure, both Delhi’s and that of KHOJ, the art organisation that is hosting this residency. I’m sharing an apartment in the South Extension area of Delhi with two of the other artists participating in this Art Science program. Joanna is Polish, living in Berlin, and Abishek divides his time between Calcutta and Bangalore. For all of us the first week has been a bit sink or swim, as the briefing and induction process has been haphazard. This area is liberally equipped with expensive clothes boutiques, though it’s hardly what you’d call a posh neighbourhood, but apparently lacks any shops providing for more basic domestic needs, such as food. Any shopping trip becomes an epic quest, involving hours spent on massively congested roads, in one of Delhi’s thousands of jolting, farting, beeping, suicidal auto-rickshaws. Car ownership is soaring exponentially, with the result that most drivers have probably only been driving for six months or so, with predictable results. All of this is taking place in temperatures of about 35 degrees and relative humidity of 80%. Sleeping on a foam slab on the floor in these conditions is particularly sweaty. Abishek and Joanna, being younger and perhaps poorer, seem willing to endure it. After three sleepless nights, and a journey that went from haggling in tiny market stalls while cows snacked on rubbish piled up outside, to resisting high pressure brylcreamed salesmen in multi-storey emporiums of middle class gold brocade chic, I have ended up with an £80 assembly of sprung mattress and folding ‘charpoy’ frame, which I like to think demonstrates the combination of tenacity and adaptability required to operate as an artist on a residency like this. If only I had filmed the whole operation I would have a very entertaining piece of work, but as it is, the only audience for this performance was Arun, the tireless KHOJ assistant who accompanied me.It’s eleven years since I last came to India, but it has lost none of its power to perplex and surprise. At a petrol station I watched open-mouthed as a family of eleven people slowly unfolded themselves and emerged from the back of an auto-rickshaw. On our first day at the KHOJ building that houses the studios, the office was invaded by two very assertive women, one tall and plump, the other short and skinny, who kept clapping their hands insistently. The response from the KHOJ staff was a curious mixture of irritation and embarrassment. It turned out that our visitors were ‘hijeera’, a trans-gender community that specialise in extortion, appearing unannounced at weddings, house-warmings and other inaugural events, to demand money with threats of curses. Despite being as agnostic a bunch of arts administrators as you could hope to meet, the KHOJ staff seemed reluctant to offend this ill matched duo. Eventually Manoj, the accounts manager, lured them out of the office by holding a fistful of cash and, after a hushed discussion, they were paid an unspecified amount to go away. Afterwards, everyone was pleased to tell us that this was a very auspicious start to our residency.When daily life is this zany, it is extremely hard to focus on and believe in the stated purpose of this residency, namely to develop collaborations between artists and scientists. Although this kind of practice is well established in Western countries, and despite a booming art market in India, there is apparently no support or precedent for this kind of activity here. With very limited funding, and meeting a lot of suspicion from Delhi’s scientific institutions, KHOJ are trying to get things going. I’m here thanks to an Arts Council International Fellowship, administered by Gasworks from the Triangle Arts Trust. It’s a generous scheme, intended to allow artists to reflect on and refresh their practice in a stimulating environment, without the pressure of any final outcome or show. In reality, of course, there’s an Open Day at the end of the residency, and an expectation from KHOJ that there will be something to see, particularly on this pilot program.When I accepted the invitation it seemed like a perfect slow time of year to do something like this. Within weeks, I had landed a £95k sculpture commission, destined for the lobby of an office building that is now under construction. Alterations to the building are needed to accommodate my piece, so right up until I left I was frantically producing the necessary technical drawings. I’m hoping I’ve provided all the information they need before I return, but until I’d managed to sort out mobile phone and email connections here, I was getting pretty twitchy. Abishek and Joanna were, as media artists, demonstrating even worse withdrawal symptoms. It’s alarming to realise how totally dependent one is on an invisible technology over which one has no control at all. Work such as this commission, an array of very large lenses involving several sub-contractors, would be totally impossible without this infrastructure.Yet somehow, in the chaos of Delhi, world class science is being carried out. Professor Ramaswamy, a genial physicist whom we met yesterday at JNU, said that because it is possible, just, to make things work, using patience, rusty nails and elastoplast, the incentive is removed to seek more permanent solutions. Something in this conundrum suggests how to marry art and science in a way that engages with this specifically Indian context. Ramaswamy’s work involves fractal dynamics, and specifically the emergence of synchronization between aperiodic oscillating systems. This could be fireflies in a tree, prices on the stock exchange, or weather patterns, and the scope of his thinking reflects his interdisciplinary background, though he operates largely in the realm of mathematics. During the meeting an idea began to take shape, of a machine that would manifest hidden relationships, for example taking the din of the streets from different locations, and transforming this into interference patterns of light. On Tuesday we’re getting taken round the hardware markets, so now I have a shopping list. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 26/8 - At the end of this second week I feel I’ve started to get a studio habit established, helped in no small part by having taken on a car and driver. Since this costs about the same as a London travelcard, it doesn’t seem wildly extravagant. Ashok is a slim, bright young man from a farming family in Himachal Pradesh, and his car is a lovingly polished Hindustani Ambassador, lined and upholstered in Indian fabric. Crucially, it is also air-conditioned. This, together with his calm, assertive driving style and cat-like spatial sense, has transformed the experience of getting around the city, and it is a pleasure to assent to his proposal of “Go to Studio?”. Before this, every journey involved tedious negotiations over price, and multiple stops for the driver to ask directions. As a result, perhaps, I’ve been venturing further afield, and have been exposed to the full range of contradictory extremes that Delhi offers.At one end of this spectrum was Nizzamuddin’s shrine, which Joanna and I visited on Thursday night, when we had heard there was a regular session of quawali music, the trance inducing rhythms that are part of the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. Approaching the shrine was like jumping into a river of people, gathering pace and intensity as the dusk streets narrowed and then turned into a twisting covered alleyway, no longer lined by pleading, disfigured amputees but by stalls selling rose petals, interspersed with dealers in religious trinkets, the whole enveloped in a miasma of sweat and grilling meat. At every turn now, we were commanded to remove our shoes, but ignored this as long as we could see shod devotees returning in the opposite direction. Finally we exchanged our footwear for a token with a man whose beard was dyed that carroty shade of red that seems to be the only available option for Indian men who have tired of black.Pressing on in sticky socks, the river disgorged us into a blue tiled courtyard, where a huge stretched awning surrounded the shrine, a tiny, ornate and gilded building lit with fairy lights. Men, women and children thronged the space, eddying here and there. A couple of barbeques were in operation, and the atmosphere was something between an emergency and a party, with none of that hushed reverence adopted by Westerners in the presence of the divine. We were approached by an intense young man with the most luminously beautiful skin and eyes, the face of an El Greco saint. He pulled out a printed invoice book, and clearly wanted money, though the only word of English he could produce was “Mosque”, but before this could develop, he was ushered away by two older men.Without any announcements or marshalling that we could recognise, the faithful arranged themselves for prayer, calling to mind Prof. Ramaswamy’s ideas about synchronization and the emergence of global order from local interactions. We saw him again on Wednesday night, when he came to the presentations that we gave about our interests and previous work. A pretty good crowd turned up at the studios for this, mostly other artists, though little resulted in the way of questions or discussion. Perhaps they were simply there for the free beer. I was somehow elected to go first, and took the opportunity to announce that we had been here for ten days, still hadn’t been invited to any parties, and were open to any offers. Zero result, though KHOJ’s director, Pooja, has invited us all for dinner next week.But we haven’t just been sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. Last night (Saturday) we went to an opening over in Noida, at the Anant Art Gallery. A ten-lane expressway took us over the river, a vivid red from the setting sun, into a sprawling market full of towering racks of clothes, all lit by kerosene lamps. Improbably, around the corner from this, we entered a four storey, veritable palace of contemporary art, a newly built, white, modernist stronghold worthy of Saatchi, with uniformed staff handing out cold glasses of wine. The money and brains behind this are a really charming couple, Mumta Singhania and her husband. Three artists, all of whom had originally trained at Baroda in the South of India, had been given a floor each. Vinod Patel was showing a series of assemblages made mostly from refurbished motorcycle parts, absurdist micro-narratives that referenced everything from Picabia to Koons, via Kafka, killer androids and gym equipment. Upstairs, dreamlike large canvases by Alok Bal depicted the repetitive, shoddy boxes of the contemporary city in a palette of dirty greys. A ceramic artist, Vinod Daroz, occupied the basement, grafting elements of temples onto vessels that made explicit the links between sacred architecture and the body. The language barrier made discussions with the artists a little bit frustrating, but at the dinner afterwards we were joined by Hemant, the long-haired, motorcycle riding, somewhat punky rebel amongst the KHOJ crew, and a lively roundtable session ensued.As promised, Hemant took us to the Chadni Chowk markets on Tuesday, and I ended up returning twice more this week. Another Delhi experience that is compelling and a bit scary in its intensity. The main street is lined with shops, some of them no more than 5 feet wide, crammed with goods, often spilling out onto the pavement where this is not blocked by food sellers, necessitating perilous detours into the seething mass of rickshaws and scooters filling the street, while overhead a forest of signs competes for your attention, strung through with crazily knotted tangles of cables looping in every direction. Extreme specialisation is the rule, grouped into zones, so for several minutes one passes nothing but taps and plumbing fittings, before that gives way to dealers of aluminium bars and tubes of every possible dimension. Dark, narrow, and thankfully pedestrian, alleys lead off the main drag. We plunged into one of these somewhere in the middle of an area devoted to stationery, and were immediately surrounded by electronics components. It was still necessary to flatten oneself against the wall regularly, as convoys of porters steamed through, balancing enormous loads on their heads, both arms strung with thick coils of wire.For a total cost of around £2, I assembled a collection of small speakers and electric motors, which will induce vibrations in a blob of mercury, obtained by breaking open a boxful of thermometers. I brought with me from England a ludicrously powerful pocket laser obtained on ebay, and plan to bounce the beam from this off the vibrating mercury. I’ve got a rough idea what will happen, and if it does, then I can set about a more careful selection and tuning of the input signals.Trips to more local markets produced the foam, plywood, glass and other bits needed, but the saw from the Khoj toolbox proved about as useful as a butterknife, so on Saturday I ended up in Chadni Chowk Bazaar again. Finding, amazingly, a shop that advertised carpentry hand tools, I asked for a saw. No reaction. Vigorous miming accompanied by sound effects. After a pause that seemed to last about 30 seconds, the salesman shambled off into the recesses of the shop and disappeared. I began to wonder if they were operating in a different time dimension. Perhaps I’d stumbled on a portal to the Calabi-Yau spaces that I’ve been reading about. These contain the hidden dimensions required by superstring theory, which explains the properties of the smallest sub-atomic particles so far discovered or theorised (quarks, neutrinos and even weirder shit) by proposing that all of them consist of Planck scale (v. v. small) one-dimensional loops of energy vibrating in various modes and frequencies. Very elegant, but the only problem is that they are required to vibrate in more than the 3+1 dimensions o... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 For Google Earth addicts, here is the location of KHOJ studios. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 2/9 - Charging through the early morning countryside on the Shatabdi express towards Agra, a rare example in Delhi of something that works without a lot of shoving and hooting. I’m feeling particularly misanthropic at the end of a week in which several sources of discontent have come to a head. Perhaps it’s the alchemical nigredo of this residency, and the Taj Mahal will provide a crucible for the next stage of the work. And tea has just been served, which always improves the complexion of the moment. It’s bag in a cup, providing a nice, familiar BR feeling, rather than the rocket-fuel chai with which days at the studio are punctuated.On Wednesday we were invited round for dinner by Pooja, the vivacious and slightly vampy director of Khoj. It was the first social event of the residency, slightly tardy perhaps, but there was a nice bunch, including a german journalist, resident in Delhi for some time, who was telling me about having her breasts squeezed by suspicious hijeera whom she was filming on a pilgrimage, passing herself off as a transsexual.The buffet was delicious, wine copious and the apartment clean, comfortable and air-conditioned. It threw into relief the rather different conditions in which the resident artists are expected to survive. Lacking AC, sleep is only possible when lying directly under the ceiling fan turned up to maximum. Even then, one wakes sticky with sweat. On Thursday night both the electricity and the back-up supply failed. Almost instantly, it became like sitting in a sauna. The Khoj response was to send Ramesh to poke around ineffectually, and then suggest we spent the night at the studio. I opted for a hotel, and the following morning took advantage of being near a metro station to head for Chandni Chowk market again.The reason for this masochism was that the previous day I’d got the first mercury oscillator working. The Dead Kennedys vibrated the blob of mercury sitting on the tiny speaker into fascinating patterns of ripples. But bouncing a laser off it was disappointing, creating only faint blurry reflections. It seemed the fault lay with my use of window glass to encapsulate the device, so I was on the hunt for scientific glassware. You get the feeling that most things are available somewhere in Chawri Bazar, but it’s only through luck or personal connections that you’ll find them. I ended up with a slightly random collection of tubes, phials and microscope slides, on the way encountering a beggar with a total of one and a half limbs, rolling around on his back and groaning piteously. How do you ignore an appeal like that? Am I a moral pygmy because it takes that level of disadvantage to trigger my sympathy? It seems to me morality is a constantly negotiated process. We have an inherent facility for deception, and an inherent need to think well of ourselves.Whatever your buttons, they’ll get pushed here. The tragedy is the banality of one’s reactions. Is a religion that preaches karma a consolation or the root of the problem? How do Indians themselves tolerate these levels of inequality? Perhaps one should treat the whole bewildering spectacle like a Victorian circus, applauding the acts that revolt or fascinate the most. In which case the guy we saw at the station would win the jackpot. His feet were swollen to nightmare proportions, every toe the size of a fat banana, jiggling as he strode down the platform. In actual fact, he wasn’t asking for money.Situations and ideas like this are constantly challenging my belief that art-science collaboration has any relevance here. One’s experience of the city is so powerfully coloured by the apparent absence of shared social space, which we take for granted in European cities. In its place there seems to be only juxtaposed and competing, privatised fragments, characterising everything from driving styles to the discontinuity of pavements. Sure, there are the vast, grassy boulevards of Lutyens imperial masterplan, but they seem to bear no relation to the scale and needs of everyday life, evidence of a lack of empathy of another kind. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 Dense inscriptions. An impromptu lecture from Anu Venugopalan on photon entanglement, and the equally tortuous labyrinth of Chawri bazar. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 Maybe visiting the Taj Mahal did provide a turning point in this residency, though the quiet, lush garden that surrounds it was perhaps more of a tonic than the architecture itself. Which isn't to deny that the building transcends the iconic status that it has been burdened with, exceeding expectations. Its architectonic restraint and relentless symmetry could be severe, but are relieved by the life within the stone itself, and the delicate carving. Since the Taj is always photographed without people, the most delightful discovery was how it acted as a luminously white backdrop to the saris of the many Indian visitors, astounding juxtapositions of colour that would pass unnoticed in city streets.Joanna Hoffmann and I also visited the fort, which puts a rather different spin on the romantic story of the Taj, since the youngest son by Shah Jahan's much beloved Begum went on to murder all his siblings and seize power himself, locking his father up in the fort. All of which tells you a lot about the psychopathology of those who believe themselves eligible or entitled to rule over others, and suggests that the Taj itself might have more to do with political bling than true love.People's ability to remain blind to what motivates them is astonishing. On Wednesday I had dinner with a woman to whom I had received an introduction from a friend in London. The whole evening was distinctly odd from the very beginning, since I had to telephone from outside the front door, after I'd been ringing the bell for 5 minutes, while a dog inside barked frantically. I was admitted to a gloomy, stifling room, and my host, stout with short silver hair, began barking orders at her two maids. A drink appeared after about three quarters of an hour of stilted conversation, when the chauffeur returned with a couple of bottles of beer. Now you are probably wondering why it didn't occur to me that I'd got the wrong day, but I'd had a text message from my London friend a couple of hours earlier, saying that she had just spoken to this lady about my visit that evening.About the time I got the drink, one of the maids went out. She returned at about 9.30, and my heart sank when I realized she was carrying the ingredients for dinner. At the same time, the situation was so defiantly odd that I kept having to stifle the urge to laugh, and was curious to see what would develop. My host had a dachshund called Rana, outrageously glossy and healthy, and totally undisciplined. Its attention was totally fixated on the snacks placed on the coffee table, and would gradually manouevre itself within striking distance, at which point the lady would order one of the servants to take the dog away and put it to bed. Invariably, Rana would appear again after ten minutes, to be picked up and cuddled, and rewarded for his disobedience with a crunchy morsel from the table.I started to notice that the maids would answer back their employer in a way that seemed rather familiar and, when the chauffeur came in to bum a cigarette from his boss and she practically lit it for him, the whole situation took on a tinge of tragedy. I'd discovered that the one subject that seemed to animate my host was talking about herself. Not that it was uninteresting. Her mother, she claimed, was the first daughter recorded in their family tree in 22,000 years. I did splutter and query this, but she blithely continued. Her mother's first child was a boy, and everyone muttered darkly that the curse had reasserted itself, but then, to much rejoicing, our protagonist was born. Apparently, a state holiday was declared. She was then brought up by her grandfather, a widower who doted on her, before becoming a classical dancer in Ravi Shankars entourage. A European diplomat, from an illustrious and wealthy family, smitten with her when he attended one of her performances, then pursued her for a year and a half before, at the tender age of 19, she agreed to marry him. He was 39 years older.Postings to New York, Washington and Moscow followed, traveling the world by private jet. When he eventually retired to Switzerland, she had to learn, for the first time, how to cook. Then a car accident. He was driving. She was paralysed, in a coma, written off by the doctors. He refused to allow them to turn off the life support machines and, slowly, amazingly, she recovered. It sounds like magical realism segueing into Mills and Boon but, for the latter part at least, there was corroborating evidence and photos.Aged 58 she was widowed, finding herself alone in a big villa. No children had resulted from this grand passion. She returns to India and, in a gated enclave, in a heavily fortified apartment, she creates this paid family, in which (unless this was Rana's role) she can act the part of the youngest child. The doctors have told her, she says, that she has a heart problem, meaning she shouldn't live on her own. A heart problem. Did she ever ask her mother, I wondered, why she'd given her precious girl child to be brought up by a grandfather? Had she never felt a need to know her mother's reasons? "No, why should I do that?"I hope I've conveyed the tragi-comic flavour of the evening. I certainly don't intend to mock, since her derangement is perhaps caused by grief. Whatever the cause, I left feeling very uneasy about her future, since Delhi is not a city with much compassion for the weak, unless they happen to be photogenic ex-models, like the junkie prostitute who was recently 'rescued' by one of the daily papers. The ostensible reason for this long digression was the questioning of my own motives for being here. Like many other Londoners, I harbour the illusion that the metropolis consumes an unreasonable amount of my time in existential overheads. Part of the seduction of a 7 week residency in India was the idea of being able to concentrate exclusively on one project without any distractions. This has proved, naturally, totally deluded. Email means it is no longer possible to compartmentalize one's life, even if this were actually desireable. The positive side of this is the recognition that what one spends ones time doing is what one actually does. Painfully obvious perhaps, but to those who share my temperament, always willing to chastise themselves for failing to meet some arbitrary and impossible standard, a valuable lesson. The prolific exchange of emails over the last few weeks, with an electronics wizard I have never met called Mike Harrison, hashing out the details of another public art proposal, are part of the work done on this residency, not time stolen from some primary purpose. Likewise this writing. I don't know if itt's art, and these long screeds probably don't conform to anyone's idea of a blog, but it's taking a chunk of time, and helping to formulate and structure my response to this situation, as well as beginning to reconcile me to the idea of "the text", with which I have always been uncomfortable.I've also learned something from the treacly resistance that has greeted my attempts to actually construct things, where my mule-ish nature has simply led to exhaustion and despair, as in my last visit to Chawri Bazar. It's made me somewhat envious of the hermetic, laptop environment in which the other resident artists do their imaginings. But I didn't come 4,000 miles to stare at a screen. The difficulties of this residency have simply confirmed my commitment to make work that operates on a sensual, material level.With my face still stinging from the metaphorical gauntlet wielded by Professor Ranjit Nair, I watched one of Joanna Hoffmann's very beautiful short films. Reminding me of Melies, I realized that her dissolves and superimpositions are the visual equivalent of metaphor and that, in dealing with science, this need not be a dirty wor... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 10/9 - I’m very conscious that I’ve scarcely mentioned the fourth artist of the Khoj residency, Rohini Devasher. She makes menacingly beautiful, dense, photoshop compositions of outlandish hybrid plants, operating on the border between chaos and order. As a Delhi resident, she has to commute three hours each day to the studio, and so there has simply been less opportunity for casual interaction, although during the first two weeks she patiently dealt with dozens of agitated phone calls from the two helpless Europeans. Rohini was also, as a part time staff member of Khoj, responsible for making contact with Delhi’s scientific institutions during the organisation of the residency. In the last ten days this has begun to bear fruit, as people return from holiday. I was visited at the studio by Professor Anu Venugopalan, visibly alarmed by having had to pick her way through the mud and stinking, bloated bodies of rats that had drowned in the most recent downpour. When I told Abishek, later, he said “Probably another Tam Bram”, the highly educated and successful Tamil Brahmins who dominate a lot of the professions. I was painfully aware of how implausible the situation must have looked through her eyes, providing a further blow to my confidence at that point. However, we had an interesting conversation about the mental imagery that quantum physicists somewhat furtively use, although I was unable to freeze frame her thinking in the mini lecture on decoherence that I requested, and maybe I’ll have to record explanations in order to analyse them. I’m sure she was as puzzled when she left as when she arrived, but she very kindly provided an introduction to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. On Monday I went over to the Indian Institute of Technology, known as IIT, to meet Professor Thyagarajan. (The joke among more theoretical physicists, according to Abishek, is “What is the value of iit?” Quite funny, if you know a little maths.) He was a very engaging guy, in a book-strewn windowless den, whose shock of springy curls seemed to perfectly suit his intellectual playfulness. His work involves cryptographic applications of photon entanglement. I’m very tempted to explain it here, but I’ve also got to write about my experience of Kashmir, to which I escaped for the weekend. The conversation with Thyagarajan was very entertaining. I was astounded to discover that wave particle duality, as revealed by an experiment in which you fire particles through one or two slits, is still observable when you use C60 molecules, comparatively enormous structures composed of 60 carbon atoms, and tangibly solid enough that nano-engineers can actually build functional things using them. But in this experiment they behave as if they were simply vibrations of pure energy. It’s as if the Eiffel tower turned into a piece of music. From there we somehow got onto metamaterials, which can exhibit wildly unusual properties such as a negative refractive index, through being assembled at a molecular level. That suggested the possibility of modelling these structures at a macro scale, and investigating the resulting optical properties. I doubt that anything is going to result immediately from these ideas, but this doesn’t pose a problem now that I have redefined my project as a series of conversations. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 11/9 - The weekend in Kashmir began with an unforgettable ride to the airport, and to Ashok’s many fine qualities I must now add ruthlessness and creativity. Sitting in the back seat was like watching gladiatorial combat, as he sliced, thrust and carved his way through a 6 lane tangle of hopelessly snarled traffic. Actually, the notion of lanes is rather abstract in Delhi, since if there’s a gap of any kind, you fill it with your car. That morning, even this strategy was inadequate, and at times we were bumping along the dirt bordering the highway, weaving through bushes. There were a few extra security precautions at the airport, but it didn’t really prepare me for Srinagar, which is a city under full blown military occupation. There are check points or military bases every couple of hundred yards, patrols everywhere, and heavily armoured vehicles at junctions. It’s not what you’d call a hearts and minds policy. I caught a glimpse of what it must be like for the average Kashmiri when the next day I was visited on my houseboat by a soldier, who asked if I had any booze, and would I give him a small bottle. I was teasing him, illustrating increasingly tinier sizes of bottle, until he gave up and went away. Fine, I’m a tourist, and there was no real threat. But if he’d wandered up to my market stall and helped himself to a T-shirt, then it would be a different story. Not that I think independence for Kashmir is the answer. With the whole of India currently remembering the atrocities of Partition in ’47, and with the recent example of Yugoslavia, you’d have thought the idea might have lost some of its attraction. Little details like that don’t bother the nationalists though, some of the most fervent of whom seem to be expatriates, like the gentleman I met on Saturday, who was visiting from his home in Los Angeles. He was a cousin of the effusive Mr. Butt, who manages the houseboats where I’m staying, and I suspect US$ bankrolled the operation during the lean years when Kashmir was really a war zone. While we were talking there was a major event taking place next door, involving a fair amount of amplified ranting. It was the tomb of Sheikh Abdullah, prime minister for a few years of a Kashmiri government after Indian independence. His son, a politician booted out a couple of years ago for gross corruption, was attending the ceremony to commemorate his fathers death, so the security presence was intense, with a mobile crane examining the trees along the street outside. Being a foreigner, I was able to stroll through the security cordon, and the fact that I was still wearing my pyjamas gave the whole thing a very dreamlike feeling. The day I arrived, a Friday, all the mullahs were in full flow, and a lot of them sounded quite angry too. I’d love to record the public utterance of the major religions and play it back to a group who spoke none of the languages involved, to see what they thought was being said. On Sunday there was a visit by Sonia Gandhi, followed by a minister visiting the university, and I’m flying out on 9/11, so perhaps the situation was a little more tense than usual. But even if you manage to ignore the hordes of men walking around with guns or shouting through loudspeakers, I still don’t see how Srinagar earns this ‘Paradise on Earth’ tag that everyone is still so keen to ram down your throat. Okay, it’s got a lake surrounded by mountains. Switzerland is superabundantly endowed with mountain lakes, into which no-one throws their rubbish, but everyone simply parrots Orson’s stale gag. Reading the guestbook at the Butt’s Clermont you feel that there’s some kind of mass hypnosis going on. Some of this must be due to Mr. Butt himself, who is so keen to please, and so proud of the paeans of praise filling the previous 14 guestbooks, which you are more or less obliged to read, that you feel a single note of discontent might cause him to commit hari-kiri. This is terribly mean of me, because he is a very sweet man, and looks after his guests incredibly well. There is an entire room devoted to photos of the more famous of them, who have included Nelson Rockefeller, George Harrison and Joan Lafontaine. To some extent, the place is trading on these glory days, and the houseboats themselves have the slightly shabby elegance that was always popular with the British upper class. They’re moored alongside a flower filled garden, also rather English in style, and it was a great place to sit around and read Penrose’s “Road to Reality”. It’s rather like hacking one’s way through a jungle of mathematical notation, but worth it for the occasional clearing that one finds. One day I took a car and driver. Leaving Srinagar, the air was sweetly scented by the marijuana growing wild along the verges, succeeded by fields of rice ready for harvesting, the leaves finely striped in yellow, green and red (isn’t that the Jamaican flag, curiously?), the colours optically combining into a fresh and luminous gold. We took the road towards Ladakh, turning left at Kangan, up to the roadhead at Narayan, where there are the ruins of a temple constructed from massive blocks of weather-worn granite. From here we walked, following a path uphill alongside a crashing mountain torrent of total clarity. The people we met were Guja, though this may just mean ‘mountain people’. More specifically some were Wakarwal, or a word like that. Some were living in settlements of low, square timber cabins with earth roofs, but others who crossed our path were descending from tents pitched way up on the summer pastures. It must be a tough life, but, had they told me this was paradise, I would have been more inclined to believe them. The women had a confidence of manner and a bodily freedom that was very attractive, in marked contrast to their sisters of the plain, hobbled by the repressive strictures of caste, islam or consumer fashion. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 I just got back from 4 days in Bombay. As soon as I arrived there, I realised that my problems with Delhi arise from the fact that Delhi is sick, a place where a sane and healthy life is impossible. Cancerous urbanism is entwined with mass psychosis, and the patient is receiving open-heart surgery without anaesthetic. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 My journey from the airport to Colaba, at the tip of Bombay's peninsula, took one and a half hours due to congestion. There was some hooting, but usually recognisably necessary, rather than blindly imperious egotism. It was as hot as Delhi, but tropical heat that imposed a relaxed acceptance. The taxis are all spivvy little black and yellow Fiats from the 1960's. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 Bombay has boulevards with shady arcades, pavements for the use of pedestrians, night time streets where one can wander from food stall to bar to restaurant. Unremarkable, perhaps, unless you've been spending a month in Delhi. There is dirt, but this seems like functional dirt from the intensive use of a very high density environment, an equilibrium between waste and cleaning, not the pointless squalor of despair. And of course Bombay still has whole families living on the street. No way of knowing if they'd prefer to be in Delhi. But there's a kind of economic apartheid there that seems to be lacking in Bombay, where the city itself means that everyone has to rub along. At TIFR, the Tata institute for Fundamental Research which was the reason for my visit, most of the scientists seem to travel on the local buses and trains. No way would their counterparts consider doing so in Delhi. The inhabitants of Bombay identify themselves as belonging to the city, whereas in Delhi everyone tells you how many hours it takes to get to their village on the bus. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 When I arrived at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), a seminar given by a Nobel prize winner was just finishing. It’s that kind of place, a spacious 1950’s building reminiscent of the RFH in London, with gardens running down to the sea and corridors full of crates with tempting labels such as “Danger – Femtolaser”. I was greeted by C.S Unnikrishnan, a large South Indian with the smooth solidity of a rock, and introduced to his chum from college days, Sukant Saran, who now works as the TIFR publications officer. In that capacity, Sukant has produced over the years a very attractive series of posters for conferences on various topics, and recently decided to exhibit the images used in the posters as Scientific Art, a concept he was keen to explain. Whilst I sympathise with, or share, his aim of exploring scientific questions through art, I see no point in a proliferation of categories, since context is basically everything. Either by intent or co-option, art has to be part of contemporary discourse. Perhaps, as Sukant argued, everyone is an artist, but then I think most of them don’t know when. It’s about a capacity for self-criticism, really. TIFR have quite a fine collection of 20th century Indian art, donated by the founder Homi Bajba, though it doesn’t seem that anything is being added to it. They do, however, have regular concerts in their auditorium, and on Friday I was able to hear the renowned flute player, Shri Rupak Kulkarni. Unnikrishnan (or Unni, as I think I have permission to call him) was at the concert too, and it turned out that he had studied flute with Shri Rupak’s father. Back in his office, he showed me his collection of flutes, which are made from bamboo. He was experimenting with adding an extra hole to allow a smoother bridging between the two octaves that can be played. It was a nice illustration of the mixture of theoretical and practical curiosity that drives his research, a combination that is surprisingly rare in science. Other people that I met at TIFR were either focused on the technology, or pure maths theorists such as Sunil Mukhi, who freely admitted that his interests in string theory had no immediate correlation or relevance to the observable world. It’s not that Unni’s lab was short of technology. Two PhD students were manipulating an assembly nearly the size of a small car, at the heart of which was a Bose Einstein Condensate (or BC in lab slang), an exotic state of matter in which supercooled atoms collapse into a dense clump. This is trapped in the intersection between two laser beams, and experiments can then be performed on it, such as bouncing the BC off its own reflection. Since the jitteriness due to thermal energy and quantum effects is largely absent, other aspects of these interactions can be more clearly observed. What I particularly liked was that the output of the experiment was visual, a shadow pattern created by flashing another laser beam through the BC. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 The other set-up in Unnikrishnan's lab was an apparatus for measuring the speed of light, something that has been done countless times before. However, during a couple of evenings spent with Unni, I came to realise it was part of a quite radical program of research (see sidebar for context). He has experimental evidence backed up by theory, showing that the speed of light is only constant within the frame of reference provided by the mass of the entire Universe. This means the movement of an observer does affect the result of measurement, when done in a way that is not self-cancelling. He is calling this theory Cosmic Relativity, and it will force some major revisions in other areas of physics. The problem is that, a century after Einstein, Special Relativity has acquired the status of a religious belief. To question Einstein is heresy, and a scientist doing so has to tread very carefully indeed. I find Unni’s ideas exciting and profoundly significant, and in a way that I can respond to as an artist. It’s the rebirth, in another form, of the aether, that elusive 19th century medium of propagation for light. It restores an underlying reality to the Universe and a coherence to our individual experiences. Light, in its plenitude of rational and spiritual meaning, becomes once again part of tangible kinematics, rather than an abstract anomaly. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 During my stay in Bombay I had a skype conversation with Julienne Dolphin Wilding, an artist now based in Barcelona, and a human being of rare integrity and good sense. I was telling her about my plans for the Open Studio exhibition at the end of the residency, which involved creating a hellish cacophony out of sampled hooting and beeping, and painting “Inconvenience is Regretted”  on the wall in huge letters, a sign that adorns the construction chaos that is Delhi’s roads, and whose passive aggressive quality seems to typify the relationship of Delhi’s citizens with one another.Julienne suggested that rather than replicating the mess and frustration, perhaps I should consider an antidote to it. At the time, I baulked at the idea, feeling that honest anger was a valid response. Perhaps it was, but I’d been bothered by a feeling that somehow this wasn’t my own work, having no connection to more longstanding concerns. Her comments stewed in my subconscious along with a dense mishmash of ideas about Cosmic Relativity, and a couple of days later I enjoyed a bout of lucidity in which a new plan for the Open Studio was revealed. Perhaps being away from Delhi also allowed me to see the endlessly perpetuated cycle of anger in which I, along with many of its inhabitants, was trapped. I realised that I could feel compassion for the victims of this hideous, dystopian experiment instead, and that working from this position felt much better.I’m aware that my Buddhist credentials leave a lot to be desired, if I can’t achieve that realisation while immersed in the pain and ignorance, but I’m trying to be more forgiving with myself as well. Curiously, since returning to Delhi, I have been much less aware of being surrounded by anger. Perhaps I am simply becoming indifferent, but it seems more likely that a lot of it was the reflection of anger that I was carrying. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 Abishek had given me a list of Bombay galleries to check out. Staff at the hotel seemed clueless as to their location, even when provided with their addresses. However, at the first one I managed to find, I fortunately met one of the directors, Mort Chatterjee, who gave me directions to the other galleries, most of which turned out to be within a ten minute radius (on foot) from the hotel. For the benefit of others wanting to check out Bombay’s lively art scene, I have produced a gallery map, which should be available soon at all the serious Colaba galleries.The Chatterjee and Lal gallery is a lovely loft style space, which was showing the slyly funny paintings of Piyali Ghosh, which mock the mannerisms and pretensions of the ruling class in vicious human-animal hybrid caricatures. I also enjoyed the work at The Guild, two series of contrasting work by Praja Papotnis, one of glistening viscera, the other of gridded systems derived from the facades of apartment blocks.As I left Bombay, the 5 day festival of Ganpati was beginning. Everywhere in the city one met small processions following vividly painted plaster statues of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, accompanied by ear-splitting drumming. Temporary temples, lashed together out of bamboo and tarpaulin, accommodated larger statues and attracted a steady stream of devotees. In some districts these structures reach fantastic proportions, and actually become giant sculptures. Apparently, organised crime bosses use this as a way of marking territory and demonstrating their power. I saw a photograph in the newspaper of one in the shape of a cruise liner, about 200 feet long, funded (allegedly) by a £30,000 donation from a crime boss whose base of operations is a similar vessel, prowling the lawless waters off Malaysia. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 The week after getting back from Bombay was fully occupied with construction and painting. The work I am making is based on something called the Cornsweet illusion, which reveals how the brain determines what we see, not our eyes. It involves a field of uniform grey, bisected by a narrow strip in which a light edge meets a dark edge, both fading away into the grey background. The result s that we perceive the whole of the side with the dark edge being darker than the other half. It’s a variation or development of a phenomenon known as Mach’s Bands, described by the same Ernst Mach whose work on mass and gravitation provided the conceptual groundwork for Unni’s Cosmic Relativity. I painted a small wall in the studio as a test, and realised that I could improve on the version that one normally sees, by reducing the tonal difference at the edge transition. The result is that one sees a white square next to a pale grey square, with absolutely no indication that almost the whole area is actually exactly the same tone. It’s not an illusion that flips between two alternative ways of perceiving it. The brain literally refuses to let you see the truth. It’s because the brain is always tenaciously trying to construct a 3D model of the space surrounding us, from 2D images on the retinas. As a result the effect is far more pronounced when it forms part of a space, as in this installation, than in a printed or screen image. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 By Sunday, the work was near enough completion that I felt able to take the day off. With Joanna Hoffmann, and a scientist with whom she has been working, I went to the Aksherdam temple. I was a bit reluctant, but it turned out to be one of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen on this trip, a nexus of religion, art, politics, money and crime that encapsulates a lot of contemporary India. It’s vast, and only just completed. They claim 13 million man hours labour, and since nearly every square inch is hand carved, you can believe it. The central temple is supported on a plinth, around which there are 148 elephants carved at about half life size, illustrating various stories. There are illuminated fountains, bigger and better than anything in Las Vegas, and there are funfair style rides! One boasted “10,000 years of Indian Culture in 10 minutes”, an irresistible invitation to a philistine like me. It was a boat ride, through an enormous darkened building, past beautifully crafted tableaux illustrating the glories of Vedic culture. This place is Hindu Disneyland. And just like Disneyland, there are some rather dodgy subtexts. A group of ancient Vedic scientists and engineers were shown constructing primitive aeroplanes and spaceships, which would be funny if it wasn’t for India’s dick-waving stance on nuclear weapons. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of the bold assertion that Vedic scientists invented pi and atomic physics. The money behind it comes from Gujarat, I was told, and building temples is apparently a classic way of laundering money and buying influence. It’s been built without permission on land next to the Yamuna River, and court actions are in progress. But the chance of anyone who wants to stay in public office ordering it to be knocked down is less than zero. This is a country where ministers were in trouble a couple of weeks ago, for stating that the Ramayana (a story involving monkey gods and demons) was a work of fiction. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 During last week (17th – 23rd) there were a couple of art events. An opening at the Palette Gallery featured shallowly decorative paintings, with quotes from philosophers and statesmen printed on the gallery walls, inviting us to see the work as a profound statement on the human condition. It was not being ironic. The gallery is run by two fashion designers, and the crowd at the opening had a high opinion of their own importance. Of rather more substance was a screening at Khoj of a film about Kashmir. The film is being vilified and attacked by the Hindu right for its critical portrayal of Indias brutal military occupation., and the film makers have responded by organising scores of small screenings. Inevitably, that means preaching to the converted. The other problems were an absence of any formal innovation, or of any identifiable characters, and a bum-numbing 135 minute length. Now if it had sequences of soldiers singing and dancing as they torched villages, then it might have more of an impact. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898 Well, it’s the final instalment, though I may break it into 2 or 3 posts to allow adding more pictures. I’m on the plane heading home, just as the Delhi climate starts to become pleasant. I’ve got a trip to Birmingham on Tuesday, to visit the resin casting factory for the lens sculpture, and a meeting on Thursday about another commission, so if I don’t write the week up now, then it might not happen.The big event of the week was our Open Studio on Wednesday, but I’m going to save that till last. Whilst Abishek and Joanna were struggling with digital projectors, computers and DVD rigs on Tuesday night, I was able to swan off to another two openings. The Sanskriti Foundation was first, on the road out towards Gurgaon. It’s an area where you find what they call ‘farmhouses’, actually 8 bedroom modernist palaces set in vast manicured grounds surrounded by high walls and razor wire, more proof (as if it were needed) of the anti-urban mentality of Delhi’s uber-class. The Sanskriti Foundation, however, is open to the public, and houses museums of everyday craft objects and terracotta. They also offer studios and facilities for residencies, though funding is the responsibility of the artists.Shaun Cassidy and Kristy Verenga were the two artists showing work. Both had been rather surprised to find that they were the only two artists in residence during August, but had luckily enjoyed each others company, and produced some collaborative work. Shaun is Professor of Sculpture at Winthrop University and has done quite a lot of technically demanding large public art projects, whereas Kristy is a painter with a rainbow palette and an interest in myth and symbol. Hard to imagine the overlap, but the collaborative work was recognisably a product in equal measure of both their ideas and sensibilities. They’d cut giant circles out of the most gorgeously coloured fabrics, and photographed these laying on the ground in various locations around the city. I joked that the circles of colour looked like refugees from Hirst’s spot paintings. The wonderful and surprising juxtapositions in these large digital prints had a conceptual and formal clarity that was very distinctive, adding an interior, emotional dimension to fragments of Delhi space and time. I was rather jealous of the way that they had found to engage with the city.The other opening on Tuesday was at the Vadehra gallery, a massive, classy, white space in the industrial suburb of Okhla. Sumedh Rajendran was showing large figures constructed in a flat boxy style from the printed steel sheet used in product packaging. Dramatic poses hinted at the compressed narratives of newspaper crime reports, and the hinges and locks on the figures suggested the limited options in those blighted lives. Strong work, and I gather he’s already gone international. Top snacks and a slightly friendlier crowd than other galleries (more artists?) made for a very pleasant evening.A large piece of Sumedh’s was on prominent display in the private collection we visited on Friday. Anupam Poddar seems to be the proto-Saatchi of the Indian scene, with a lot of large, high impact pieces, such as Sudarshan Shetty’s car-humping Tyranosaurus. We only saw the work in Poddar’s house, but this included Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Raqs Media Collective, Jagganath Panda, Anita Dube, Sushant Mondal, Ranbir Kaleka, A. Bala Subramanyam and Bhupen Khacker. Poddar is buying non-stop, and there is a lot of work in storage, but from next year he and his team of curators will be organising exhibitions at his newly built Delhi Foundation. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/377898