KHOJ Residency, India

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.