ARTISTS TALKING

# 19 [1 October 2007]

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.

# 18 [1 October 2007]

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.

# 17 [27 September 2007]

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.

# 16 [27 September 2007]

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.

# 15 [26 September 2007]

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.

# 14 [26 September 2007]

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.

# 13 [23 September 2007]

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.

# 12 [23 September 2007]

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.

# 11 [20 September 2007]

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.

# 10 [18 September 2007]

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.