Jonathan Meese, 2007

This interview with the German artist Jonathan Meese was published in a catalogue accompanying his solo exhibition at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke. Most successful artists develop a spiel, a particular interpretation of their own art, and grow increasingly reluctant to deviate from it. It becomes difficult for an interviewer to get anything from them that they don't also say to every other interviewer. In Meese's case, the problem is compounded by the fact that he's an enthusiastic propagandist for a cause. Any questions regarding details of his work he brushes aside, preferring to concentrate on what he calls the dictatorship of art. Its a concept that can appear naive, even puerile, at first glance. Probe it from different angles, however, and it reveals interesting contours. I'm very pleased with this interview, because I think its great length is justified by the gradual deepening of Meese's ideas in response to the questions.

Talking to Meese was a welcome change from interviewing Indian artists. He is passionate and crazy, while Indian artists are, almost all of them, sensible, worldly and rational. Having a bunch of Jonathan Meeses around would probably drive everybody nuts, but I wish there was a little more madness in Indian art and artists. It became apparent during the conversation that Meese and I have at least one thing in common: a shared contempt for the idea, extraordinarily well-accepted in India and within the biennale circuit despite the lack of any shred of evidence to back it up, that contemporary visual art can be an effective instrument of political transformation.

The Baby Animal of Art

I met Jonathan Meese on a crisp October morning at an address which had till recently housed his gallery, Contemporary Fine Arts, in the revitalised Berlin Mitte district, a focal point of the city’s dynamic art scene. Meese greeted me warmly and led me to his living room one floor up within the same building. We made small talk for perhaps a minute before he plunged into the issue that concerns him most: the ‘dictatorship of art’. I attempted to impose some chronological order on the interview, but he was more interested in putting across his view of art at large. To make sure his message got across, he repeated it frequently, and returned to the same themes when we picked up the conversation the next day in a neighbourhood café, before strolling to his warehouselike studio a few blocks away.

Meese takes propaganda as seriously – and as playfully – as painting, sculpture and performance. Like many Germans, he speaks excellent English. And, like many Germans who speak excellent English, he believes he speaks it badly, and apologises more than once for this perceived shortcoming.

You were born in Tokyo, I believe. How long did you spend there?

I left it as a young child. My father served in the British air force during the war, and moved to Japan afterwards. My mother’s sister also lived in Japan and my mother went to visit her, that’s how she met my father. But quite soon after marriage she grew homesick and brought us to Germany with her.

I saw a video of one of your performances in which you were dressed like a samurai in a Kabuki play, with perhaps a touch of the geisha as well. So you’ve obviously retained some affinity for the land of your birth. That performance seemed very spontaneous to me. Do you rehearse much beforehand?

Not at all. I take some stuff with me, some masks for instance, and toys, and then it just happens. But the art doesn’t go through my body. There is a secret skin between me and the art. I never express anything of myself, the art is what it is. It is not a part of me, it is a part of itself. If you see a painting by me, it’s impossible to say something about me by looking at it.

So you reject the idea that art is an expression of personality…

I think that leads to nothing. Art is something very normal. It’s a function like blood flowing through your veins. Everybody can play, we don’t need geniuses.

But surely some art is more impressive than other art, surely there has to be some differentiation made, some judgment.

True, but judgments are wrong because we cannot prove them. You can always say that Picasso is this or that, but you don’t really know. It’s always mysterious. If somebody says that he knows the way, then he’s a liar, or else he should be the dictator of art. But there is no artist like that. Art itself is the dictatorship. Art is so strong, it is above everything. I think it will take over power, real power. The next revolution will not come from the street, but from art itself. I believe we are in a very important situation now. The only alternative is art. Art will be the power of the future, even in parliament. Not as decoration but as a principle.

And through that, what will humanity gain?

It will be the first time in history that something will reign over us. We have always had kings and leaders. We should give power to an abstract entity, it will change everything, because then our ego will vanish. We have too much faith in human power. There are some who believe in religious power, but that is nostalgic. It’s already happened and it didn’t lead us to something new. We have to give something power that was never in power. Art will take the power anyway, but we can be humble and we can play and then it will come much quicker. And I as a human being want to see this revolution to come, I want to see that art takes over.

This reminds me of what some Marxists believed, namely that the revolution will come anyway, but one has to act to ensure it comes quicker. So there’s a role for free will within a larger deterministic structure.

But what we can do is very unclear. Maybe just play. Play and be humble. Let the thing happen. Don’t give your taste a chance. Don’t nail your opinion to the gate. Just play like a baby animal. And what happens to you while playing is not that important. Maybe you produce art, maybe not, you don’t know. The revolution is a logical consequence of such play, but we never allowed it in the past. We always wanted a group of people to be in charge, or a king, or a certain party. But art is the party. It’s not desirable for artists to create a political party, because art is the party. It already has a name; you don’t have to found it.

Does art need to be political in order to bring about this dictatorship of art that you speak of?

Not at all. Art is political, but in its own way, not in my way. The artwork is not interested in whether I’m happy, ill, right-wing, left-wing , bad, good. That is not its business. I cannot blackmail art by my ability or talent. Art has its own ability. It is its own fantasy, its own talent, its own politics, its own love, its own hate, its own strength. I can be weak, but the art made can be very strong. Moreover, it’s not important that I make it, what’s important is that it is made. Once it’s made it is free, it does what it wants to do, develops its own consciousness. This also means that art cannot be taught. Art teaching is just something funny, a kind of game. Art professors are useless. It’s OK they exist, but they should not have power.

Did you reject art teaching while still in art school? Is that why you didn’t complete your degree?

Yes, I felt it was senseless to give me a degree, because the things I made wanted to be in the world anyway. Whether I’m an artist or not, I don’t know, because art doesn’t tell me. I just produce my toys and throw them out and people take them, or art takes them, and says thank you.

You entered art education quite late. What did you do before that?

I was in art school between the ages of 23 and 28. Before that I did what my mother wanted me to do. She wanted me to be a banker so I started studies in that direction, but I was no good.

Were you a misfit in art school? Did you have a lot of friends?

I did, yes. I wasn’t the arrogant type, so people liked me, but I enjoyed working alone. I thought of the school as a ghost castle. I went there very early in the morning or very late at night, even slept there, which was possible at the time.

Did you do well academically?

It was not an issue. At one point I refused to take an exam, but they said, “it’s OK, it’s not necessary for you anyway.” At that time my art school in Hamburg was very good about such things.

Joseph Beuys is obviously a big influence on you, and he taught for decades, so schools can’t be that bad…

I don’t say they are, but I taught for a while, and I noticed students had so much fear, there were so many rules. I believe it’s very important to say, “I don’t know.” We are all humans playing a game.

I am intrigued by the way you combine the idea of the artist as instrument with the notion of art as a game. The belief that art speaks through the artist who does not have much volition is a romantic, mystical view. It goes with a valorisation of nature and instinct. On the other hand, those who speak of art as a game tend to be urbane, ironic, self-conscious, very unromantic and unmystical. In your art as well as your discourse, there is an unusual merging of the expressionist element with the pop attitude.

In the game of art you cannot use a recipe book. There are no rules and there is no rituality. People often say that my performances have ritualistic bearings, but this is not a fact. Because in art there is no God, there is no way to address this god. You just play, your limbs work around, but you have no control. I am not a madman, I am not in a trance or on drugs. Of course, I drink a lot during some performances, but it’s not about me, this whole game is not about me.

You must be more pleased sometimes with the way things turn out than at other times. Is there a feeling within you that you now recognise which indicates that something good is going to emerge?

That happens, it’s in the nature of being human, but I always tell myself it is wrong. You feel, sometimes, that this is going to be a big thing. But you should just work like an animal. Do it for the thing. If I should say what I did twenty years ago is not as good as what I do now, I’d be a liar. Because then I’d think that I am more important than the art.

When we were walking up here we passed a collection of early works by you and you were rather dismissive of them. I thought they were powerful images, but you said there was too much Picasso in them.

I should not have said that. I’m a human being and so I do such things, but to say something like that is not humble enough, it gives me too much importance. Art is important, the artist is not. When I die, there’s still something there, which is beautiful. There are artists who destroy their early work. I consider that unfair, because how can you judge? You do what is necessary and then let somebody other judge. Animals don’t think, “Wow, I just did something much better than what I managed yesterday.” Maybe they do, but I like the idea that you just do your duty.

One of the central ideas in Indian thought is somewhat similar to what you’ve expressed. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises Arjun, who is a warrior, to do his duty, which is to fight without distraction. Krishna says one must act without thinking of the fruits of one’s actions. It’s a sentiment often expressed in India but seldom truly acted upon.

For me the idea comes from the Nibelungen. Do your duty whatever happens. It’s the law of the thing itself. What you say tells me it’s not particularly German. But it’s true, we think too much of the fruit.

Speaking of which, we live in a pragmatic world, with the art establishment and the market. You have to work within this framework and yet you have to tap into a different side of yourself in creating your art. In a performance for instance, you go out there and are one thing, then come out of it and are in a different world. Do you find the switching difficult to handle?

What’s difficult for me is the fact that the revolution is not here yet. But in the game I’m never really unhappy. The art market is just a side game. I think people should put all their money into art and nothing else. All the money of the whole world should be put into art. One drawing should cost 100 billion dollars, as much as the whole income of a state, to show how absurd money is. And that will lead us to the next stage. We still think art is decoration. But we humans are the decoration. We don’t really believe in the power of art, that’s why we make connections between art and politics.

The last documenta was interesting in this connection. Activists have fought for years to ensure certain groups – women, third world artists, sexual minorities and so on – are better represented in museums and prestigious shows. documenta 12 was a great victory seen from the perspective of such representation. What was surprising was the framework within which political artworks were exhibited. Their placement, it seems to me, required us to view them as ‘mere art’. I use the phrase in a nod to artists who connect their work with political movements as a way of validation or justification. When judged by the criteria of art, much of their work is found wanting, as documenta 12  proved.

At the moment I think art is very weak. It is just an illustration, a documentation or an archive of what is happening. But it never provides utopian ideas. There are other people, teachers, say, or bureaucrats, who can illustrate what’s happening. Artists should look into the future and think about the alternative.

It’s as if art is trying to catch up with history, history has overtaken art.

I have opinions, everybody has them, but art should be more than opinions. Or else we should have 60 million documentas. In Germany, many people talk about private mythologies or private obsessions of artists, I think that’s a contradiction. Something private can never be mythological, and if something is mythology it means it is beyond your personal life. It is above you or underneath. It is something bigger or smaller. This concept about the private obsessions of artists, which I think was invented in Germany, just makes you want to weep.

I am interested in art that contains social or political ideas, and I include your work in that category, but not art which proposes it be viewed on the basis of criteria other than those that belong to art.

I ask myself why these artists don’t enter the political scene. Because they are more politicians than artists. Or human rights people. It’s great to be a human rights activist, but then be that rather than wear the uniform of ‘artist’. If you really want to change something in reality you should do what’s necessary for that. But not under the code-name ‘art’.

These developments in art that you speak of, how do you keep abreast of them? Do you enjoy visiting art fairs or biennales?

I went to all of these things in the past but I’m not doing it any more. I try to keep myself informed in other ways, through magazines and things, but I cannot go to a fair, because I cannot go ten meters without meeting people I know.

I visited Frieze just before coming to Berlin. It’s amazing how art fairs have gained prominence in the past few years. Now they’re at the same level as major biennales.

They are potentially more interesting than biennales because biennales are often based on the personal tastes of one person or a few people, which can become very one dimensional. But artists should not go to fairs. Our work should be there, and we should go there once or twice for the experience, but then we should just do our work and let our gallery handle that. There are too many ways to keep one away from work. Too many parties, too many shows, too many fairs.

Germany has a well known history of political extremism, and an equally deep but perhaps less well known tradition of what might be termed artistic extremism. In the aftermath of the second world war, the country programmatically eliminated all forms of extremism, and perhaps artistic extremism was a victim of this purge. Only a few artists, like Werner Herzog, for example, carried on the tradition. Since you express yourself in extreme terms, I see in your proposal of a total separation between art on the one side and life and politics on the other, the desire to sidestep a connection with German political extremism.

What you say is somewhat true. After 1945 it was required that every extreme thought should be rejected. Understandable, but now it’s sixty years gone, and we are in this very weak situation. We should give power back to art, to literature, to cinema. We had Fassbinder, Beuys, Baselitz, a few people, but only a few. The conviction that you as a person are the most important thing, that if you feel good the world is good and if you personally feel bad the world is bad, this dominates our society at the moment. It’s such individualism that makes our art so weak. We have standard art everywhere, which we never wanted.

That’s an interesting paradox, of how societies glorify individualism but become more generic in the process. It brings me to a prominent feature of your persona, the uniform. You always wear dark tracksuits made by Adidas, a big German multinational, precisely the kind of corporation accused of spreading the uniformity you abhor. Is it an ironic gesture?

No, a uniform allows me not to think about what I wear.

But anything could become a uniform; the fact that you chose to make one from the product of a German multinational is surely significant.

If everybody dressed the same, something would change. The fact that we all dress differently makes us even more the same than if we had a uniform. I really believe that. Personally speaking, I am afraid of reality, that’s why I need security. And these stripes somehow define me, provide a limit to my body which I like.

James Joyce spoke about how the German word ‘Leib’ has a sense of wholeness, while the English ‘body’ is broken into two…

We have a skin to secure ourselves. It’s our natural frontier. And it means something. We should keep to our possibilities. In certain ways we extend everything into total weakness, and forget to make the really good things strong. I’m here in Berlin and they say, “the art scene is boiling, everything is strange here,” but nothing is strange. People are all the same, they produce the same stuff, they all behave the same. OK, then, why not accept that and start over. There is no difference in colour, there is no difference in behaviour, there is no difference in religion, it is all just simulation. We are all the same. Blood going through our bodies, we have to eat, digest and breathe, that’s all. We are not the powerful element of things. The power is outside, not inside. I don’t believe in soul. We put our soul somewhere else thousands of years ago. We took it out of our body because we felt so individualistic. And it never came back, it’s somewhere else.

This is important for the work in the sense that I want to create overkill. I have no problem doing drawings, sculpture, performances, stage design, I even did a theatre play on my own, I want to make films, I want to do everything.

Your work is singular, and yet you have collaborated a fair amount with other artists. How did these collaborations come about?

I love other artists, really respect them. If I work with Albert Oehlen or Daniel Richter or Joerg Immendorff, it’s like I’m meeting captains of other ships, and we do something together and then go our separate ways. I’m very open to collaboration. It’s all about putting your own importance aside and doing things. Better to do things than to think about them. Too much theory is bad because theory always comes after the deed. Now in art school they say, “don’t do this, don’t do that, this is already done, you shouldn’t paint, sculpture is not possible in this age, or don’t do video, don’t do film, it’s not art.” And I think, “How do you know? How do you know so much?” (Laughter)

For me art is like children’s birthdays. You celebrate birthdays with your friends, and those are the people I work with. We have a lot of good food, we do some strange things, then we separate and the next day something else happens. I like these people; they are their own rules, their own law.

Have you faced a lot of criticism for your absolutist statements? There’s an argument originating in Siegfried Kracauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler, which sees a connection between art forms like Expressionism and authoritarianism. It sees expressionism as ready to embrace dictatorship. It’s been a very influential thesis.

I am criticised a lot for talking about the dictatorship of art. People always think that I am speaking about a human leader. Or they say it is not acceptable to use a Hitler salute in art, but I always say it belongs to art, it should not come to reality. It should be on stage or in books. We didn’t do that 100 years ago, or 80 years ago, which was a big mistake. I always discuss these things with my mother, because she was born in 1929, and lived through the war. I ask her, “Why did this happen? Why were the artists not strong enough?” And she says, “That’s not the point.” (Laughs)

What does she think about the dictatorship of art?

She doesn’t like the word. For her dictatorship is always negative. But the dictatorship of nature is not negative, it’s something we accept as normal. If we go too close to the sun we will die; the sun is a dictator. Like water. Water will take us down, it is the dictator of the situation. It’s not bad, it is just what it is. I think it’s important to give these words a chance to develop into a new direction. A word cannot be bad, we only think it’s bad. We have to give it a positive direction.

There have been instances of words being reclaimed in the manner you suggest. African Americans did that with ‘nigger’, for example. There was a moment when it was an interesting political act and then it became banal. So in a way the process of reclamation is continuous. You reclaim a word, it becomes banal then you move to something else.

I wait for the day when in the Bild Zeitung it says, ‘DICTATORSHIP OF ART’. It has to be claimed, it has to be said, and then you can move on. But it has not reached the people yet, we have to wait till it reaches them and then we can open a new book. You just have to let words play with themselves. This is only interesting as long as it is not in everybody’s mouth.

To get back to Kracauer, for a minute, I think he and others were positing something fairly subtle. It wasn’t a critique of artists who said they wanted a dictator but a critique of art which manifested a desire for a higher authority of some kind. Your statements seem to fit that definition.

The only authority that is useful is the authority of art. We always think we are the centre of the world, the main figure in the game but the game is the main figure itself. We are just side figures. I believe art existed before human beings and it will exist when we are gone. We are just in-between

It’s interesting you don’t even consider the existence of humans necessary for the existence of art… It brings up the larger question of what you think art is. You were saying humans are like instruments, but without humans what is the instrument through which art is expressed and appreciated?

I think nature is much more humble towards art than us. Like a river: it knows how to behave. Like animals: they know what has to be done. And the hills. Mount Everest is art in itself. Some crystals are art. Maybe some human beings are art, we don’t know yet. When we are gone, art will live on. We always think that the fact that we look on something is so important. But for example in the sands of Egypt there are sculptures lost for 4000 years. Then we drag them out of the ground, but they were art even when they were in the sand. It’s not so important that we look at them. The best time in a museum is when all men and women are gone, when the paintings can talk to each other, which is more beautiful because they have so much to say to each other. We are the weakest thing in the whole game.

You’re very interested in the medieval tradition, both the tradition of chivalry, of knights and also the religious and mystical side of it, the quest for the Holy Grail. Can you speak about that a bit?

Art is like alchemy and the medieval age was the great age of alchemy. I think we have to go back to that, because art is something very simple, very geometrical. There are perhaps just four elements which you mix and art is produced. We always think it’s more complicated, because we look into the mirror and see ourselves. We should not look into the mirror, let art look into its own mirror.

Your paintings and sculpture, don’t strike me as simple in the way you’re describing. There’s quite a lot happening there.

I work very fast, faster than anybody I know. I’m the fastest person in sculpture, people tell me that in the foundry where the sculptures are cast. You go there, you do it, you finish it and then it’s done. Not so much thinking involved.

The sculptures of yours I saw in London at the Frieze art fair had the feel of some of Otto Dix’s paintings. The ones he made about the first world war with the shattered soldiers.

They are guardians of art, according to me, or children of art. It’s all about these strong figures. Knights, children, vampires, animals. More and more we have to look at animals. We have to look at Scarlett Johansson, she should be the dictator of beauty.

Not many people will object to looking at her. Why do you think she should be dictator of beauty?

For me she is a key figure at the moment. This baby animal is about volume. This body is filled with necessity. The skin is so thin it’s like water. She has done with herself what is necessary. She’s no human being anymore, but a standard, a good standard. Marquis de Sade, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Scarlett Johansson, this is the chain.

That’s your canon, the great tradition (Laughter). You’ve used a lot of references from film in your paintings and installations, even before you became fascinated with Johansson. You like horror flicks, obviously.

I was always a big collector of films, magazines, books. I think I have about 5000 films, 20 to 30 thousand books and countless magazines. I might buy something because of the title, because of what the cover looks like. I buy it, sometimes watch it, I need it around me. I like radical things like pornography, military items, religious stuff, manifestos, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, all these major figures, I need them around me.

Even when you use a figure from English literature, you pick Ezra Pound, who was well known for his fascist sympathies. Wagner, Nietzsche, all these controversial figures from cultural history aside from dictators. These are acts of provocation, right?

But it’s so childish! What I do is so exaggerated, I think it’s difficult to see a provocation in it. People should understand it’s just a game. I never want to provoke. Art can never harm you because it’s another world. It is not reality. If you feel offended there’s a problem in you. I’m saying come on play with me, play with Nietzsche, play with Wagner, because art is the only playground where you can do that. It was a mistake not to play with Wagner when he was alive. Nietzsche, of course, was like a baby animal himself, because he was so funny.

Why not, for instance, use figures like Gandhi or Mandela?

(Long pause. This is the only time during hours of talk that he stops and thinks after a question and phrases his answer with evident care)

It’s the belief that art is stronger than dictators, and that you can prevent Hitler from coming by building up the strongest art that is possible. Stalin on stage is good, Stalin in reality is not good. The strongest art piece possible is the dictatorship of art. If it would have been there in the 20s, 30s, 40s, Hitler would have had no chance. I absolutely believe that tyrants flourish because art is not strong enough. We have to write better manifestos than what these politicians said, stronger than what Lenin or Stalin said, Caligula said, Nero said. I have total respect for Mandela and all these others, but I don’t need to fight them

One of the canonical figures you mentioned was Andy Warhol. He said he’d have liked to be a machine, and called his studio a factory. But after his death his co-workers revealed that he would spend long hours closely supervising the work. He was very hands on and detailed in what he wanted and how he wanted it. So he had cultivated a persona, a mask of indifference which disguised his actual dedication. I’m interested in knowing how much of your work and your rhetoric is a mask.

You’re right, Warhol had the perfect mask. I also have a mask. I want to be the baby animal of art. That is my role. But if you were to take this mask away there would be another one. If you took away one million masks then maybe my real face would come up, but then I’d be dead in every way. When I go out on the street I lose one hundred masks. When I go to an art meeting I lose a thousand. Because these things take so much strength away. I have to find new masks all the time and this I can do best when I’m alone.

And the mask can be more interesting than what’s behind it. The desire we have to strip away the mask to see the real person is pointless.

Yes, the uniform is more interesting than the skin, it is protection that is needed, like animals have. Turtles have a shell. With the mask, with the uniform, one is alert, prepared, like a weapon. When you are playing you are always alert. What Warhol showed us is that it’s not about egoism, it’s not about the human. He said the machine was OK, and strangely the machine was very human. He positioned his work so cleverly. He didn’t take art and put it under the ass of a politician, but made a political volcano, a political art volcano. Es war der Zentralorgan der Kunst, die Zentralmaschine der Kunst, die Machtzentrale, die Kommandozentrale, das Dynamo der Kunst, der Motor der Kunst. It was like a building, like architecture, like a U-boat, like a torpedo. When I think of Warhol, I never think about a human, I always think about stronger material. I think of metal, of light, of illness, of wigs, so many nice things!

What about his counterpart in Germany, Beuys? You combine Beuys the Shaman and Warhol the Popmeister. So let’s talk about Beuys.

They are two sides of a coin. They were never human, they were just coins. If you toss this coin, Warhol will come face up more often than Beuys. The side of the coin which represents Warhol is lighter. Because I think Beuys weakened as he grew older, Warhol did not. Beuys thought too much of his own importance. It was a big mistake for him to go into politics, founding the Green party. Actually it’s unfair for me to say this, because I don’t know how deep he went into it. He’s a giant, and its all right when you’re a giant to lose a finger, because you have thousands of them. If Beuys had a thousand fingers, he lost one, Warhol never lost a finger. I’m sorry, this is such a childish way of explaining things!

I love Beuys. I think he looked so beautiful. If you look at his face, there’s something so special and wonderful in it, not in the manner of genius but in a normal way. When you are in the public eye so much you’re bound to make mistakes. It’s part of the beauty of an artist to talk rubbish to make mistakes. Nowadays many artists are afraid to say anything for fear it might harm their career. They are so under pressure to do the right thing. Beuys said such childish things, and that’s beautiful.

What are you working on right now?

It’s a group of paintings for a show in France. I’m working around the theme of the Count of Monte Cristo.

That’s very popular in India.

(Surprised) Really?

Yes, it has a rags to riches story, betrayal revenge, the works. 19^th century novels make great soap operas, it’s been adapted quite often. This show obviously has a French slant. Do you try and connect what you create with the place where you’re showing?

I always refer to the French revolution anyway, Robespierre, Saint-Just and others. But I will also use German words and English ones, it should not be purely French.

You seem to work on numerous paintings side by side.

Yes, in fact I was filmed while working on these.

So you don’t have a problem painting with somebody watching?

Not at all. Because there’s no secret behind it. It’s very important to show how simple art is. Art is not about working long on something or trying to show you have certain skills. It is not about something that you learned, so you feel, “I am now able to do it”. Because if you know how to do it, it is not necessary to do it any more. You might as well stop.

This is why development in painting is not possible. The moment you notice, “Wow, I am developing,” it is finished. Development can only mean stiffness.

You spend a lot of your time in here?

Yes, I’d like to just stay in here and play, and throw out whatever results, and my gallery people can come and take it away and throw me some food and alcohol in return.

I study the paintings lying on the studio floor, flick through a book on Scarlett Johansson that he hands me. I think I have enough material, I tell him. “Are you sure?” he asks, doubtful, as if three hours of talking is far too little. I am certain, I say, thanks a lot, see you in Bombay. He wants me to pose for a photograph before I leave. Picking up an old instant camera, he begins clicking at a rapid pace. As I look on, bemused, he dances around the studio, taking pictures from all angles till the roll is exhausted. Even the act of photography is a performance, imbued with the childlike playfulness and excess in which he revels.

Atul Dodiya, July 2003

This profile of Atul Dodiya was published in Man's World magazine in July 2003. I wrote another profile of Atul last year, in advance of a show at Chemould Prescott Road gallery. It was published in Time Out, and took the story of his development forward. I've made a few modifications to the draft on my machine, can't recall what, if anything, was changed by the editor before publication.

Atul Dodiya

Atul Dodiya is severely jet lagged when I meet him at his studio in Ghatkopar. He has slept afternoons and woken nights for a week since returning from New York, where his solo show at the Bose Pacia gallery was very well-received, as all of his exhibitions are well received. The first public presentation of his work in 1981, at the annual Monsoon Show hosted in Bombay by the Jehangir Art Gallery, received a rave notice from Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, art critic of the Times of India: “He devoted a whole column to my paintings, and wrote, ‘I would put him at the top of the ladder’”, Atul recalls. Two of his four canvases at that show found buyers, fetching 2000 rupees each. Ever since, the orange-red bindis that signify the sale of a work have featured prominently at his exhibitions, as have accolades from the press.

Atul’s career moved into a higher gear after a landmark show at Gallery Chemould, Bombay, in 1995. In the eight years since then he has repeatedly demonstrated his mastery over oils, expanded his range to watercolours, and created impressive three-dimensional works as well. While inserting a heavy dose of popular culture and humour into his imagery, he has also sensitively explored personal relationships and, more recently, taken a hard look at the state of the country in politically oriented works. He has established himself, arguably, as the premier artist of his generation. Even those who would contest this assessment would agree that no other contemporary Indian artist under the age of fifty has achieved a similar combination of critical acclaim and commercial success.

Since early 2001, Atul’s career graph has shown a distinct international slant. He didn’t travel abroad until the age of 31 in 1991, when he was offered a French government grant for a year-long stint in Paris. He says, about the delay in experiencing world art at first hand: “I never applied for a scholarship to go abroad after graduation, even though I loved Western art very much. I felt I needed a strong base here. I had noticed that when a few friends returned from residencies in Paris or London, their work showed a lot of confusion. I felt I should know my people, my surroundings, my neighbourhood; I shouldn’t go as a student.” Eight years after the Paris stay, he spent a few weeks in Italy on a fellowship. But his first showing abroad had to wait until 2001, when he was selected to create works for the Tate Modern’s Century City show in London, a giant exhibition that featured a decade from the art of nine global cities, of which one was Bombay (1992-2001). 2001 also had Atul presenting one-man exhibitions in Berlin and Tokyo, and participating in group shows in Yokohoma and Montreal. The following year, his work was showcased at the prestigious Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and he participated alongside other Indian artists in Vancouver, Vienna and Manchester. In 2003, he was invited to exhibit in Oslo and Chicago, before his solo at Bose Pacia in New York in May.

Now, he sits before me in the flat where he grew up, a modest, single-storey chawl in D.K.Wadi which has served as his studio since he, along with parents and six siblings, moved to a larger flat nearby in 1987. His family was not wealthy, and he studied in a Gujarati medium school. From an early age he demonstrated an exceptional talent for drawing, and by the time he was twelve he had decided to become a painter. He loved film too, a medium whose images were to become part of his repertoire. He remembers the impact made on him as a seventh grader by Satyajit Ray’s ‘Nayak’, when it was telecast on Doordarshan.

Despite a conviction that his future lay in art, Atul was initially pressured to become an architect. But he was terrible at maths, and failed the SSC examination twice, putting paid to any ambitions his family members may have had of nudging him into a technical profession. His father had indulged his love of painting, even buying him a first class train pass valid for travel downtown so that he could view exhibitions. Atul was, after all, a son born after four daughters. When the time came, his father agreed to let him join the J.J.School of Arts.

He found J.J. bereft of inspiring teachers, apart from the abstract painter Prabhakar Kolte. The institution had a tradition of placing technical excellence and painterly values in the forefront unlike, say, the Department of Art at M.S.University, Baroda, which laid emphasis on political and historical issues. J.J. also had a good collection of books on art, though reading them was a problem: “I realised that almost all the books were in English. If I couldn’t speak that language or read it, I’d be missing a lot.” Atul devoured the images in these books and doggedly taught himself the language in which they were written. Throughout his time at art school, however, he wrote examinations in Marathi rather than English.

At J.J. he met his future wife, Anju Bhatia, one of the ‘south Bombay girls’ who crop up frequently in my conversation with him. Girls who spoke convent-school English; who were bold in approaching eminent artists for discussions; who always admired Atul’s ability and helped him improve his English skills; girls who, for the most part, married and stopped painting, though some were talented enough to make an impact.

Anju Bhatia was never going to give up painting. As Anju Dodiya, she has managed to carve out an important niche as an artist, playing a crucial role in the reinvigoration of the medium of watercolour. Anju lived on Malabar Hill (“in the same building as Vinod Khanna”), a locality much further removed from Ghatkopar than the physical distance between the two would indicate. Her father, a qualified chartered accountant, owned a factory in Nashik and a travel agency as well. Atul’s gold medal from J.J. didn’t exactly qualify him as the ideal son-in-law, but he promised to get a job teaching art which would provide a steady income. He never did accept offers that came his way, confident that his painterly vocation would come good in due course. Meanwhile, he made ends meet through a few tuitions, “teaching south Bombay girls”.

Abstract painting was the dominant tradition at J.J., and mysticism the dominant attitude. Atul wasn’t keen on either: “Abstract painters concentrate on aspects of colour, form and texture. But I felt this was also a limitation, making good looking abstract paintings; it needed to be broken somewhere. If you spoke to J.J. graduates about their work they would say, ‘It’s visual art, it has to be experienced, what can you say about it? What can you say about blue? Blue is blue!’ Then many would go into some kind of spiritual explanation. I was interested in literature, Gujarati as well as Marathi. Writers and poets speak about people, about their surroundings; I wanted to do that in painting. We used to listen to P.L.Deshpande and read his humorous writings, but could one have a sense of humour in visuals?”

For four years after graduation, he searched for a form that would enable him to address these concerns. The purchase of a camera in 1986 proved a turning point: “I found that the photographs I was taking worked more like a sketch for my painting rather than interesting images in themselves. If you take the way the world looks and change it a little bit, you can create an interesting visual.” He began to make paintings that had affinities to the realistic style of the British painter David Hockney, and were influenced by the humour in the paintings of the Baroda-based Bhupen Khakhar.

Two solo shows followed, in 1989 and 1991, and then the year in Paris, which precipitated a new crisis: “I was totally baffled by the great paintings I saw in Paris, from the early Renaissance to current work. Seeing all that had already been created, there was a time when I thought I would stop painting. When I returned home I was afraid that I’d do something which is just a repetition of some western master. It took me three years, from 1992 to 1994 to get out of this mode of thinking.”

It gradually dawned on him that he shouldn’t try and define what he was going to paint, but rather paint what he felt like, and let that define him. An eclectic series of pictures began emerging: “I could paint something related to my sister’s illness; or a self-portrait influenced by a poster for the film ‘Baazigar’. But there was a common thread running through it. The images were autobiographical, social or involved popular imagery.” Another consistent feature in his work was art historical reference: “I wanted to meet the artists whose work I loved, but I couldn’t, so I thought I’d have an imaginary dialogue with them by including, say, a Picasso reference or Matisse reference in my painting.”

His next jump was to paint a series on Mahatma Gandhi. The first major Gandhi painting was triggered by an invitation to participate in a show commemorating fifty years of Indian independence. After this he considered creating a suite of works on the Mahatma, whose life and thought had been a major influence since his school days. But the idea of a Gandhi series was onerous: “I knew that painting Gandhi, whether you like it or not, has a lot of political connotations. Then I came across a quote from Gandhi where he said, ‘I am an artist of non-violence’, not a philosopher of non-violence. That led me to see that in all his acts, his wearing of khadi, the Dandi march to make salt, the structure of his ashram, he was like a conceptual and performance artist, a little like Joseph Beuys.” Atul also changed his favoured medium for the Gandhi series, a courageous decision vindicated by the results: “I was always doing oils, while I’d watched Anju doing interesting watercolours. I felt the kind of attentiveness you require working with watercolours, the precision and spontaneity, was appropriate to the subject; also the fact that water is pure and transparent. Even your posture while you paint changes, and so does your whole way of looking at art and life.”

He continued working with the medium in a series of large-format watercolours titled ‘Tearscape’. These pictures, subdued in tone, and often bitter in spirit, were dominated by a hideous, skeletal old crone looming over a map of India. The hag of ‘Tearscape’ was a major departure from Atul’s familiar photo-based realistic figuration. The paintings created around this time proved, if proof were necessary, that the artist made no compromises for the market, although he was happy when his works sold. Many of the paintings revolved around defecation, decay and death, hardly the stocks-in-trade of saleable art. And yet even these works found willing buyers, usually serious collectors interested in art as exploration rather than decoration.

At around the same time, he was engaged in creating the first of his ‘shutters’ for the Century City show in London. Inspired by the experience of a curfew in which all shops downed their shutters, Atul crafted a series of two-layer paintings: the first image would be on the corrugated metal of the shutter and the second behind it. The shutter could be rolled up to reveal the painting underneath, or brought down to hide that view. A major source of the shutter paintings, as well as the Gandhi and ‘Tearscape’ series, lay in the sectarian violence which tore Bombay apart following the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and in the inter-communal tension which has become central to India’s contemporary politics. The mosque demolition and the Bombay riots had been followed by a serial bombing of important Bombay locations, in which three boys from Atul’s neighbourhood died.

Death pervades Atul’s recent creations, notably a sculptural assemblage called ‘Broken Branches’ which consists of nine display cabinets with bones, prosthetic limbs, simple tools and photographs arranged carefully within them. Some of the photographs are of Atul’s father, whom he often painted and sketched since his days at art school. The photographs used in ‘Broken Branches’ were taken during a terminal illness which claimed his father earlier this year.

As Atul speaks of his father, an image crystallises of a charismatic man with an impressive moustache who was always ready with an anecdote, in some ways a throwback, or a link with a vanished past. His expression in these final photographs, which display and sometimes zoom in on his horribly distended belly, combines dignity and helplessness in equal measure. ‘Broken Branches’ also continues to address Atul’s preoccupation with Gandhi and communal violence, managing a remarkably seamless combination of the personal and political.

Looking back on his development, Atul reflects: “Sometimes I feel doubts about my lack of consistency. After painting a serious picture related to Apur Sansar, I went on to a lemon yellow work with Gabbar Singh on it. I wonder how I can have such a range. It’s as if I like everything, and can handle everything… but is it a kind of showing off? When I finish a work, though, I find it is satisfactory, for instance I am very happy with the cabinets.” All this is said with a transparent earnestness which characterises all his speech. As I leave I ask him about the burgeoning ‘school of Atul’: The paintings of Prashant Salvi, who won the Bose Pacia Emerging Artist award a couple of years ago, and Ratnadeep Adivrekar, who bagged the Harmony Emerging Artist award earlier this year, show unmistakable echoes of the Dodiya style. And there are many more like them. “Let them use aspects of my work if they want, I’ll have changed by the time they imitate something,” he says, making a dodging manoeuvre with his hands.

Rashid Rana, 2010

I am including this essay about Rashid Rana in Conversations though it contains no quotes from the artist, because substantial portions of the text are based on Rashid's account of his development. The piece appeared in 2010 in a book published jointly by Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal. Originally, I was to offer a personal interpretation of Rashid's work, but when it became apparent that none of the writers was covering the entirety of his career, he requested me to take on that task. I hesitated, because there was so much he had created that I hadn't seen, but he said a long interview would fill the holes. The conversation was delayed by weeks as he travelled to Paris for work on an upcoming show at the Musée Guimet. Ultimately, he transferred a PowerPoint presentation containing about 200 images, and talked me through it in the course of an enlightening three-hour Skype conversation between Lahore and Bombay.
Reading the essay now, it feels in need of breathing room. The original brief was for a 2000 word piece and, though the assignment's nature changed, I didn't want to go over that limit by too much (I overshot by 50% in the end). Producing a 5000 word whopper risked unbalancing the volume and crowding other contributors, among whom were friends like Kavita Singh and Quddus Mirza.
Still, the slightly cramped narrative aside, it's a reasonably good skeletal account of Rashid's trajectory from 1991 to 2010.

SEEING DOUBLE

On 18th October 2007, Rashid Rana switched on the television to watch a broadcast of Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming. Her return to a frenzied welcome after an eight year exile brought hopes of a brighter future for Pakistan. As Bhutto’s parade wound slowly through the streets of Karachi, Rana left for a slaughterhouse in his home town Lahore. The abattoir revolted him, but eventually he was able to focus on his task: taking pictures of animals being led to the knife; kids lying with their throats slit; blood pooling on the floor; and carcasses being readied for the kitchen. That night, suicide bombers struck Bhutto’s convoy, leaving 136 dead, three times as many injured, and turning the artwork he was planning, an ornate Pakistani-Persian carpet composed from photographs of violent killing, into an unnervingly prescient conception.
The opposition between beauty and death integral to Rana’s Red Carpet series has been explored by generations of artists, and sometimes overturned. The Symbolists, at their most decadent, replaced truth with death in Keats’ paradigm, asserting that beauty was death, and death, beauty. In our own time, we have grown familiar with that dazzling marker of our last end, Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, produced in the same year as the first Red Carpet. Rana’s take on the theme accords with his practice of first engaging viewers with iconic, picturesque or monumental images and then revealing these easily recognised and digested views to be constituted of mundane, gruesome or explicitly sexual details. He sets up contrasts that sometimes appear simplistic, but possess an undercurrent of signification, one usually related to the conditions and confusions of the subcontinent, that destabilises categories which seem mutually exclusive.
The photomosaic and the carpet share the property of elaborateness, though one is crafted with the help of high-end software and the other through a painstaking technique barely changed for millennia. Our curiosity about the manner of the print’s manufacture leads us to consider the same for the carpet it depicts. This brings to mind the fact that carpet weavers and butchers aren’t that far apart: they ply traditional trades and mostly struggle to make ends meet. Such interplay between the big picture, its components, and the nature of their creation, breaks down an initially perceived stark opposition into a complex pattern of relationships, differentiating the image from, say, photomosaics of George Bush made from visages of dead US soldiers. Those are startling and effective in their own right, but not amenable to interpretation beyond the immediately obvious.
Rana’s dialectical compositions hinge upon a series of binaries: time versus space; two dimensions versus three; conceptual versus political; wholeness versus fragmentation; handmade versus machinemade; abstraction versus Pop; and artifice versus illusionism, to enumerate the most persistent. His earliest mature works, created at the Massachusetts College of Art where he studied after gaining a degree from Lahore’s National College of Art, were austere compositions of vertical and horizontal lines of varying thickness. His professors saw a belated homage to that arch-modernist form, the abstract grid, but Rana intended an echo of bar codes on the one hand, and, on the other, a reconciliation of Islamicate geometric, symmetrical rendition with the concerns of post-War American art. In the latter pursuit, he was following his teacher from NCA, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, one of the moving forces behind the renewed attention paid to miniatures in the 1980s and 90s. The neo-miniaturists, who became the best-known representatives of Pakistani art by the end of that period, adapted the decorative delicacy of Mughal art to contemporary subject matter, but Akhlaq’s own paintings were more intellectually distanced than theirs. The synthesist side of his search, which the neo-miniaturists largely ignored, was taken up and brought to fruition by Rana. This came to pass, however, when the guru was no longer present to witness his disciple’s achievement. In 1999, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, the gentlest of men in the account of all who knew him, was shot dead in his own home by a distant acquaintance. The killer first fired at the painter’s daughter Jahanara, and then three others, for reasons never made fully clear, though professional jealousy had some role to play. The impact of those gunshots on Rana’s later work, while unquantifiable, cannot have been negligible.
The artist’s contribution to a show mounted as tribute to the fallen professor was a piece of wrapping paper, a generic floral print, stuck on board. A painting made soon after, Love is Eternal for as Long as it Lasts, contained a similar grid of roses smudged in the brushing so as to recall bullet wounds. Beauty and death. Rana’s use of commonplace kitsch to express profound personal sentiments was his first public engagement with the possibilities of Pop. While the neo-miniaturists ruled Lahore, Pop flourished in Karachi through the work of Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi, Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth. Their efforts bolstered Rana’s resolve to let found images seep onto his painting and sculpture. He drew on childhood memories of the movies, whether broadcasts of Hindi films which could be seen in areas of Pakistan near India, or made-in-Lahore productions. As his work began to access more of the world, it became more accessible itself.
In 2000, he presented a series of canvases, interrogations of machismo, centered on negative images (in the formal sense of tonal inversion and colour reversal) from Pakistani movies. The two most significant works produced that year, though, had no connection with cinema. What is so Pakistani about this Painting and Who is Afraid of Red, possessed a defiant irony encapsulated by their titles. The first was divided into three sections, with the left and right showing a positive and negative copy of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s The Dance, randomly appropriated as a signifier of academic art history. Between Carpeaux’s gambolling nude figures was a piece of fabric with a flowery print, chosen in the Duchampian manner, with a total absence of good or bad taste. The only things definitively Pakistani about the work were its visualiser, and the prominent title painted upon it, part English and part Urdu transliteration, questioning the impulse to slot art by nationality.
The artist was to return to the theme of Pakistaniness four years later, through A Day in the Life of Landscape, a mosaic print in which photographs of urban traffic and crowded streetsides combined to create a vista of the sort favoured by members of the Punjab Landscape School. The landscapists, led by Khalid Iqbal, frequently painted perspectives of semi-rural areas on Lahore’s outskirts, where panning a few degrees left or right would ruin the idyll. Rana’s montage brought in everything they were intent on leaving out. The derivative of French Impressionism that Iqbal and his acolytes purveyed, normalised as authentically Punjabi, was not just an import, but a greatly attenuated one. The best Impressionist paintings, particularly those by the movement’s foremost exponent Claude Monet, involve a significant shift when seen close up, a dissolution of topography into abstract daubs and swirls of colour. Though Rana’s photomontages are resolutely representational, the shift between the long view and close up arguably allies them with impressionism at a level deeper than that achieved by the Lahore landscapists. The frozen moments in the cameos also relate to an Impressionist ideal of capturing an instant in time. This buried genealogy adds a typical, art historically loaded layer of irony to the debate about identity generated by A Day in the Life of Landscape.
Who Is Afraid of Red, which referenced Barnett Newman’s magisterial series of canvases, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, consisted of a length of rich red fabric embroidered with an Urdu transliteration of the title and flanked by two halves of Rana’s wedding Sherwani. The work treated personal trauma, in this case the artist’s separation, in a considerably more sophisticated manner than his memorial piece for Zahoor ul Akhlaq, signalling how far he had progressed in one year.
In 2002, he created his first photomosaic, titled I Love Miniatures. Snippets from advertisements were carefully put together, without the aid of the sophisticated software he would later discover, creating a profile of the Mughal prince Khurram. Though the title sounded flippant, the artist must have felt keenly his outlier status. With conventional painters like the Lahore landscapists popular at home, and neo-miniaturists dominant abroad, there seemed no place for his kind of complex negotiation of identities. The mood of the world, however, was changing, thanks to two fallen New York towers. Conservatives embraced Samuel Huntington’s idea that civilisations are in constant conflict motivated by essential differences. In response, the Left gradually abandoned extreme cultural relativist positions and began emphasising common ground between societies. Where international curators and collectors had sought culture specific creations representing something akin to a different language, they now grew interested in cosmopolitan styles inflected with local dialects. The two subcontinental artists whose work possessed the perfect balance of local and global at that moment were Rana and India’s Subodh Gupta, and they were to lead the unprecedented boom in contemporary art of the subsequent years.

2

If Rana’s mosaics are usually about opposites revealed on deeper examination to be co-existing realities, a reverse movement occurs in his pictures of twins in irreconcilable conflict. In the Middle of Nowhere, completed just before I Love Miniatures inaugurated this theme, a natural extension of his interest in symmetry. The artist himself is posed, almost naked, holding the slumped body of a fully clad doppelganger, against a sylvan landscape adapted from photo studio backdrops and Pakistani truck painting. It was first exhibited as part of Aar Paar, a collaboration between Indian and Pakistani artists, the context heightening its allusion to the rivalry over the Kashmir Valley which has bedeviled relations between the neighbouring nations since they split apart. “No war is a war until a brother kills his brother”, says the arms dealer Marko in the Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s epic film, Underground. Rana’s twins take that bitter logic a step further.
Ten Differences (2004) was a short, looped video, its single frame split laterally. The artist’s persona entered at both ends, pointed a gun, fired, was himself shot, and fell back dead. One side of the mirror image lagged the other by a few frames, giving the duel the feel of a proper narrative. The two channel video Meeting Point (2006) obliquely referenced the September 11 attacks, showing identical airliners, projected on adjacent walls, seemingly about to crash into each other. A loud jet engine roar and animated lines behind the planes provided an illusion of movement, but the machines stayed suspended in their sectors, perpetually deferring the expected collision. Rana added a kinaesthetic dimension to visual and aural illusion in the gigantic Departure Lounge, installed within Singapore’s City Hall as part of the 2006 Biennale. The building, slated for conversion into an art museum, had witnessed the Japanese general Itakagi’s surrender to Lord Mountbatten in 1945. Lee Kuan Yew had announced Singapore’s final separation from Malaysia there, unfurling the nation’s flag as the new national anthem played. Rana aimed to evoke reverberations of such large historical events without direct allusion. A six channel video of an airplane’s wings was projected on facing walls; they appeared to turn constantly rightwards, taking along the entire hall and those inside it.
While the employment of illusions broadens the appeal of Rana’s creations, he ensures they are subordinated to coherent ideas. The same is true of his citations of pop culture artefacts. In the photomosaic When He Said I Do, He Did Not Say What He Did (2004), two heavily armed Arnold Schwarzeneggers stalk an unseen enemy against a calm grassy plain stretching to a line of mountains in the distance. The landscape is laterally inverted, but the Schwarzenegger figures are not, nor are the tiny details, drawn from media coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. On the viewer’s approach, the landscape flattens out, as if moving from traditional recessive depth to early modernist rejections of perspective. Illusionistic space is entirely eliminated when the miniature battle scenes become clearly visible. Geopolitical and formal enquiries unravel side by side, even as the playful Hollywood borrowing prevents the implied association between militaristic cinema and real militarism from hardening into overt statement.
Offshore Accounts – 1 (2006), a seascape composited from pictures of sailing ships and landfills, is set in a purpose-built niche, widening as it gets closer to the corner, giving the impression of a flat, perfectly rectangular composition when seen from a distance. Rana’s most ambitious optical illusion was See Through, a site-specific project created at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2006. On the high glass doorway of the institution, the artist pasted photographs, printed on Dura-film to eliminate cast shadows, of the immediate exterior of the gallery. Seen from a certain spot in the atrium, the print perfectly simulated the pediments and columns of the buildings outside, but detached itself to become a ghost image when viewed from other points. Up close, it was revealed to be composed of cheek-by-jowl edifices of Lahore. Both Offshore Accounts - 1 and See Through dealt with postcolonial themes. The former, perhaps the artist’s most explicit averment, sided with influential critiques of neo-liberalism in tying the history of imperialism to the wastefulness and environmental decay associated with modern consumer society. The latter, less manifestly political, evoked issues of cultural exchange, of migration to and from the subcontinent.
Rana had employed architectural motifs before See Through, but at this time the subject took on a new prominence. Two-dimensions and Twins (both 2007) presented the front elevations of high rises, marking a return to the abstract grid he had investigated in the early 1990s. Pakistani buildings may have compared unfavourably with European ones in See Through, but the vignettes from Lahore’s streets used in Two-dimensions and Twins felt imbued with character, in refreshing contrast to the forbidding facades of the concrete, steel and glass towers. In the Dis-Location series (2007-08), colonial era buildings from Lahore were paired with stills taken at different times of day and night around the same spot, adding the dimension of time to space, and sparking a dialogue between built form and use value. The series raised a number of questions: What precisely was the dislocation being cited? Was it situated in the form of architecture, imposed in a region unsuited for it? Conversely, was the aural and visual noise of the surroundings a betrayal of the sophisticated planning that went into the buildings and roads? Or was it the time that was out of joint?
Rana has noticed that viewers who are not part of the art world spend far longer scrutinising his photomontages than insiders, who frequently move on, with an I-get-the-idea attitude, after a cursory look. Desperately Seeking Paradise (2007-08), though, demanded careful attention from all who confronted it. A stainless steel cube with sides nine feet across, it was equipped with vertical slats placed aslant to reflect the environment from certain angles, and, from others, to let spectators look in on images of tower blocks and low-rises pasted on the surfaces. The shape of the structure, and the circumambulation required to absorb its contents, was suggestive of the Kaaba, a site adored by Muslim seekers of paradise, desperate or not.
The artist believes in a serial monogamy of styles, but in the years between 2006 and 2008 he turned polygynous. A new entrant to his zenana was a form of photosculpture made by glueing all-round views of objects onto acrylic boxes. The Stove was a pixilated image of a stove stuck somewhat perversely on a box the size and shape of a stove. Pixilation, associated with movement, was here employed for the humdrum and the static. Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase replaced the undulations of chinaware with the geometry of two acrylic cubes. The pattern on the vase was retained precisely in the transfer, while the flowers were pixilated to the point of unrecognisability. Through these manoeuvres, Rana was taking on an entire history of representation. One-point perspective attempted to translate three dimensions into two through the illusion of depth. At the climax of the modernist revolt, Cubism posited a radically different approach to capturing all-round views onto a plane, but lost the sense of embodiedness in the process. Rana’s Plastic Flowers were a wry and elegant comment on that impossible but enduring impulse to depict the totality of objects. They marked a return to formalist exploration, but a return accomplished concurrently with the visceral Red Carpet and the flamboyant Desperately Seeking Paradise.
By early 2008, after years of hectic and rewarding creation, the artist was in demand in a fashion he could scarcely have dreamed possible at the turn of the century. He was in the process of putting together a final, gigantic Red Carpet, when he stopped. He gave up on that photomosaic, halted his other projects, and took a break from an art circuit grown delirious. Through the years, he had retained his commitment to teaching, and now gave his students the time and attention they craved. A few months later, the markets collapsed, leading to a period of fear and trembling before a measure of sanity returned to the world.
The break didn’t alter Rana’s central concerns, but his recent digital C-prints demonstrate a more straightforward engagement with art’s history and with political violence than he previously ventured. In Origins and the series What Lies Between Flesh and Blood, he conjures up adaptations of Rothko and Courbet from wounds and goose pimples. In Transposing, death turns into arousal through the mediation of the pixel. Instance-Anatomy has fragments of bodies becoming fragments of photograph. No film heroes, Edwardian buildings, carpets or seascapes beguile the eyes of the uninitiated, and there’s little playful irony to take the edge off graphic and pornographic images. This is not art for anybody who’s afraid of red.

Sudhir Patwardhan, 2001

I am a huge admirer of Sudhir Patwardhan, the painter and the person. His remarks on art -- his own and that of others -- combine lucidity and depth in equal measure. For this interview, published in Art India in late 2001 or early 2002, we spoke about two paintings that rank among his greatest achievements.

Sudhir Patwardhan: At the Edge of Conception and Perception

Two monumental canvases dominate Sudhir Patwardhan’s new solo exhibition at Sakshi gallery. Ulhasnagar, a four-panel panorama, traces the path of a river as it curves past an industrial township on the outskirts of Bombay. Lower Parel, which portrays the city’s erstwhile industrial heartland, contains three structures: a bridge in the foreground, one of Bombay’s inoperational mills immediately behind it, and a high-rise building in the distance. The river in Ulhasnagar appears to traverse different times of day in the course of its journey. In contrast, Lower Parel gives the impression of one moment frozen in its tracks. These two large paintings are accompanied by a number of charcoal drawings, studies of figures later incorporated into the large works. Patwardhan spoke about his new paintings at his studio in Thane.

Panoramic painting relates to the idea of the picturesque. Were you conscious of working within, or against, this tradition while painting Ulhasnagar?

I suppose there is another kind of panorama, Altdorfer’s visions of battlefields and some paintings of Brueghel. Brueghel’s Tower of Babel was very much in my mind while painting the central section of Ulhasnagar. But the picturesque is something that attracts me very much, particularly the works of Poussin and Lorraine, their use of light.

Can you speak a little about the origin and development of the image in Ulhasnagar?

The Ambernath-Ulhasnagar belt is a very different kind of industrial landscape from what we find in the city proper. You see a lot of greenery there, but also scattered industrial structures. The experience of seeing this landscape was with me for many years but I wasn’t sure what it actually meant. When one tries to use such an experience as an anchor around which to create art, one suggests a meaning to that experience that takes it beyond just the local. And one brings in other elements, it could be the light in certain Venetian landscapes, for example. So the painting is always something different from the experience but, if it is successful, something of that original experience will be captured in it. The particulars one brings in will prevent the experience from evaporating into a generalisation. That’s the balance I wanted to maintain.

In the second panel from the left, there’s a kind of ripple painted using a bold, expressionistic red. It draws one’s attention immediately. What led you to choose this colour?

There are actual streams you see in places like Ulhasnagar where the pollutants discharged into the water give it a weird colour. In one way these polluted streams form extremely attractive sights. On the other hand we are also conscious about the fishes dying in the water as a result of the effluents. Something similar happens when one sees a layer of heavily polluted air with clear sky extending above it, that’s an amazing sight. I’ve always been interested in this contradiction, and used it in that part of the painting which, in any case, represents the darker aspect of the landscape.

Did you conceive of four panels right from the start?

No, the idea evolved after I began my sketches and studies. I considered an evenly lit panorama to begin with, but then I felt that a movement from morning to evening in the light might work well. This tied in with the different stages of industrialism, starting with the non-industrialised periphery and moving to the dense built space in the centre. A kind of historical time is present in the painting as well.

Both Ulhasnagar and Lower Parel appear to be very confident works, confident in the validity of the medium. Have you moved beyond a period of doubt about the potential of painting?

If you are referring to my trying out media apart from simply paint, that was a phase when I needed to investigate whether there were limits to what painting could say, and whether I could overcome these limits by using other materials. But I increasingly feel that the medium is just that, a medium, and what you say, you say through it. The idea of the language or the medium defining what you can or cannot say has loosened for me. What I’m saying is a half-truth. Of course it matters to some extent what the medium is. But what I am certain about now, is that my own practice as a painter, and the personal as well as larger history of that practice, offers me a density which is more important to me than the variety offered by different media.

Like Ulhasnagar, Lower Parel also shows layers of historical time appearing in one frame, as indeed they do so often in India…

With Lower Parel, again, I was going back to an experience that has been with me for years. On the one hand it was the visual experience of those bridges -- not just the one at Lower Parel -- that had made a considerable impact. My early experience of the area in the 1970s was a charged one, there was a wholeness to it, provided by Marxist ideology. One knew the people there belonged to a certain class, that was part of the experience of seeing people, which gave it density. Later, that feeling gradually dissolved and one could no longer create the same sense of that place.
And yet there were things I wanted to paint there. I wanted to try and discover what was still alive from that initial experience and to make sense of the changed circumstances. At a basic level, just the architectural complexity of the bridges remained constant, of course, providing a starting point for the painting.

You speak about that early experience with a great deal of nostalgia, but no nostalgia clouds the work. I find that quite remarkable.

When I started the painting -- I wouldn’t call it nostalgia -- but there was a kind of anger in it, about all these skyscrapers coming up and displacing what existed before. The figures, too, had a stressed-out look to them. But I felt a definite false note there. I had wanted to make the painting dramatic, with the dying mill in the centre, but none of it was working. I actually re-did the sky more than twenty times. It seems a simple, clear sky now, but I was stuck with the original idea for a long time.
Also, the figures just did not seem right. In a way this was a continuation of an old problem I’d faced for the last ten years, that the figure sometimes tended to stand for something, it came down as a sign rather than a fact. Before this crisis, however distorted my figures were, I used to feel there was a factuality about them. In painting Lower Parel, for the first time I started using photographs as a basis for the people in the painting. This created its own problems, I had to escape from the particularity of the people in the photographs, so that the figures in the painting related to each other, held together as a group.

Did your ideas about this part of Bombay change as the painting progressed?

I realise that many of the people one now sees in Lower Parel, often sons and daughters of mill-workers, are trying to make the best of the changes which have taken place in Bombay, and the new opportunities these provide. I think there is no going back on those changes, apart from a few piece-meal measures that might be possible. I don’t believe what’s happening is such a terrible thing.

Is the act of painting itself, for you, a way of coming to terms?

The act of coming to this studio, to work regularly is very important for me, I feel uneasy if there’s a gap in the habit of painting for any reason. At that level, I’d say yes. But I’m not sure whether painting allows me to discover something about myself, of which I was earlier unaware. Coming to terms occurs at different levels, some of these prior to the act of painting.

You spoke of using photography for the first time as a basis for your figuration. Many painters in India today are using photography-based and photo-related imagery, often in a hyper-realist style. How do you place yourself in this context?

I am interested in art where there is a tension between the act of painting and the image being painted. A lot of photography-related painting being done today is conceptually oriented, where the image relates mainly to other images. These paintings can work, provided the concepts underpinning them are complex and rich. But I am interested in painting things that I can see, and in painting them as I see them. In this respect Cézanne has always been a touchstone for me, particularly the relationship between the mind, eye and hand in his work. He painted at the edge of conception and perception, and that’s important for me, it’s what I aim to do.

Subodh Gupta: January 2007

In late 2006, Sangita Jindal, who owns Art India magazine, launched Arre, a peculiarly named publication that lasted just two issues (or was it three?). Though I wasn't keen on the content or design of the journal, my Art India connection meant I could hardly refuse to write for it. Zehra Jumabhoy and I had interviewed Subodh Gupta as part of a project that was later aborted, and I wanted to use the material before it grew dated. I therefore offered Arre a profile of Subodh based on that interview, and I believe it turned out rather well. Since nobody bought the magazine, the article remained unread, but I did manage to use bits of the piece in other writing and in lectures, so the effort wasn't entirely wasted.

Subodh Gupta

Subodh Gupta is 42 and lives in a high rise in Gurgaon with his wife Bharti Kher and their two children, having moved six years ago from a modest flat in Mayur Vihar. Although barely known outside the small art community, he’s an international star, as his recent track record demonstrates. In 2005, he showed at the Venice Biennale and London’s Frieze art fair, and had solos at Sakshi Gallery in Bombay, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Gallery inSITU in Paris. In January 2006, he was among eight nominees for Cardiff’s prestigious Artes Mundi Visual Arts Prize. Three months later, an untitled painting by him sold for 80 lakh rupees at auction. The same Saffronart sale saw a collector pay 60 lakh for Two Cows, an aluminium, bronze and chrome sculpture of bicycles slung with milk pails, one of an edition of three. In June that year Subodh made an impact at the world’s largest art fair, Art Basel, with Across Seven Seas, which consisted of cast aluminium luggage items moving endlessly round an airport carousel. That piece, displayed by the Geneva-based Art & Public, was snapped up for just short of a million dollars. He rounded out a bumper year with showings in Paris and Lille, and at the massive Arario gallery in Beijing.
It is improbable enough that such success would visit a boy from Khagaul in Bihar whose enthusiasm for painting led to a BFA from Patna’s College of Arts and Crafts. The story’s even more unlikely considering that, little over a decade ago, few credited him with being one of Delhi’s outstanding young artists. Subodh admits his beginnings in the art world were not promising. “When I first came to Delhi, I was making some good paintings, but also a lot of crap stuff. But I was selling it. Meeting Bharti changed everything. She told me, ‘Subodh what you’re creating is no good’. I realized that if I continued to do what I was doing, I might sell, maybe even make a name, but I wouldn’t be doing myself justice.” He attempted to change his style and, in the process, lost what patronage he’d enjoyed. “For two years, 1994 and 1995, I put out really bad work. It was a frustrating period. Galleries stopped taking my paintings, I was totally lost.” He eventually found a way out of the slump by creating an installation called 29 Mornings which used low wooden seats, or patlas, with a variety of objects placed or painted on them. These objects, such as a length of folded red cloth, burnt wood, an umbrella, coins and a torch were connected with nostalgic memories or associable with Hindu mourning rituals.
Installation art was a novelty at the time, having sailed in with the tide of globalisation which also brought to India Subodh’s future wife, an artist who’d spent her early years in the UK, and his future dealer Peter Nagy, who had established a name in the New York art scene at a remarkably young age, before briefly losing his groove and deciding to start afresh in Delhi, helping build the nascent market for experimental art. Few Indian collectors were buying installations then, but new avenues had opened up in the form of international biennials, workshops and residencies which favoured explorations outside traditional painting and sculpture. Whereas, in previous decades, Indian representation in shows abroad would be decided by the official state fine arts council, the Lalit Kala Akademi, artists were now contacted directly by independent curators at the helm of international displays.
Subodh flourished on the workshop-residency-biennial circuit dominated by new media art and installation, the latter often site specific and perishable. He set himself apart through a use of organic materials intrinsic to Indian culture, notably cowdung. My Mother and Me, which he constructed in 1997 during a workshop conducted by the Khoj Artists' Association workshop at Modinagar near Delhi, was a cylindrical structure ten feet high made from cowpats. A layer of ash on the floor inside added to the feeling of being in a space connected with ritual. He was painting as well, and his images were now simpler, more direct. Three canvases of cows shown at Bombay’s Gallery Chemould in 1999 had a coating of dung as their background. There was also a self-portrait, underneath which small red lights spelt the word ‘Bihari’ in Devanagari script. If this image ironised the stereotyping of his home state and its citizens, the show’s centrepiece, titled The Way Home, indicated that some of those stereotypes weren’t far off the mark. Consisting of a cow sculpture surrounded by plates and glasses, among which were casually strewn replicas of country made revolvers, the installation suggested that crime and violence had become part of daily life in Bihar.
Looking back on The Way Home, it comes across as an important transitional work. It was composed, perhaps, of too many elements, a contrast with the spareness that Subodh had found in his paintings, and would soon achieve in sculpture. The cow at the centre linked with the artist’s previous output, which evoked an Indianness conceived around tradition, ritual, family and a pre-industrial lifestyle. The Way Home was made, however, from non-organic materials: fibreglass and stainless steel. Over the next few years, he shifted to working with corrosion resistant steel and aluminium rather than cowdung, cloth, ash and wood. In the process, he envisioned a different kind of identity, one that was modern but inflected in distinctively Indian ways, an identity predicated upon class, caste, migration and consumption.
Was The Way Home, then, the first sign of a move away from home as a source of inspiration? Not quite, because the town of his birth contained features relating to Subodh’s early installations as well as his later sculptures. In an otherwise insightful essay in the July 1998 issue of Art India, Roobina Karode referred to Khagaul as “a small remote village”. It isn’t really that. Khagaul and its twin Danapur are a short train ride from Patna. Danapur was one of the earliest British cantonments in the country and is one of the divisional headquarters of Indian Railways. Most of the inhabitants of Khagaul work for the railways, including many of Subodh’s relatives. He says of his home, “Due to the railway, it was more than just any small town. We had two swimming pools, and people used to go to the club, which had a billiards room. The railway cinema screened English movies every morning. And there were lots of art activities; no less than seven theatre groups were based there.” His childhood memories are at least as much about sleek tracks and locomotives as about cows and dung-smeared walls.
In stainless steel, Subodh settled upon a material which evoked a common set of associations across the country. His paintings of shops displaying shiny pots and pans played on these associations. “I use materials that are connected with collective memory”, he explains. “I remember when I was in school, stainless steel was so desirable, to eat on it at an uncle’s house was the height of luxury. It was more expensive than brass at that time.” The alloy has become cheaper and gone down market since then, but also attracts the interest of high end designers, as it has intermittently done since the heyday of art deco. A range of class associations therefore comes into play when responding to one of Subodh’s sculptural pieces or paintings.
The fact that stainless steel in Indian homes relates to cooking, eating and bathing brings in notions of ritual purity and impurity connected with caste. He attempted to explore these concepts through an exhibition titled Jootha in 2005. A row of kitchen sinks stood along a wall accompanied by an audio track of metal dishes being washed. There was also a video of guests at a reception gorging themselves. If Jootha wasn’t entirely successful it could be because it adhered too closely to what it represented. Subodh likes the objects he uses to be “the same, but not the same” when displayed. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, and his kitchen sinks looked too much like plain old kitchen sinks to be carriers of any larger idea. A series of wall mounted dish racks titled Curry was better actualized, the gleaming array of thalis seductive enough to entice even the most affluent spectators.
If the artist’s stainless steel pieces revolved around domesticity, his sculptures in aluminium created in the same period explored the world of commuting and migrant labour. He had casts made of luggage typically carried by workers returning from the Gulf, and placed these on trolleys cast in bronze. A cloth bundle elaborately tied with string came to look like a precious object in its sculptural version. The metamorphosis was appropriate given how much the contents of such packages meant to the owners. As Subodh describes his encounters with these returnees, it is apparent the mid-air meetings made a deep impression on him. “Sometimes I have taken the route via the Gulf on my way back from Europe. The kind of people who sit next to you after you change at Dubai, they are your people – but different. I’d talk to them, tailors, bus-drivers, building workers, cooks. The luggage they’d have, it was so colourful, the suitcases, the bundles tied with string. And when you see that, your emotions get stirred. Come on, they work so hard, and look at the way they tie those bundles! What must they be carrying? Some cash, a radio, some gifts… whatever it is, they tighten it so hard, no normal person can open it.” He made paintings around this theme too, snapshot images of men with their backs to the viewer, or only their torsos visible, loading packed TV sets onto carriers of ambassador taxis. Men whose sense of self-worth was contained in what they had brought back for family and friends from the Emirates, from Oman, from Bahrain. Men who were the lowest of the low where they worked but gained status in their community back home by buying rare branded goods.
While Subodh’s art has always had a political dimension, it has never seemed committed to an ideology. Freedom from dogma was crucial in the creation of his gulf worker series. Politically oriented Indian artists – and there are many of them working in media art and installation – tend to view with suspicion any kind of attraction to commodities, categorising it as a form of false consciousness. When they take up subjects like migrant labour, the result is images of pure victimhood. Subodh focussed on the desires of the subalterns, so to speak, and showed how the poignancy of their lives was most visible precisely in the fulfillment, however partial, of those desires.
The shift in expression seen in his work following The Way Home came at a propitious moment. During the nineties, many among the art world’s intellectual elite had glorified local cultures and traditional ways of living as a profoundly important antithesis of the homogenising impulse of globalisation. After the World Trade Center towers collapsed, this extreme multiculturalist perspective also began to crumble. Curatorial tastes moved away from the previous valorisation of ethnic, organic art to a preference for a less exotic look. Subodh’s work was composed of precisely the right mix of similarity and difference. He made sculptures of Vespa scooters and Ambassador cars, vehicles which, while still common on the roads of twenty-first century India, had acquired a niche, retro-chic quality in Europe. When he turned to the natural world, it was to create ironic transpositions similar to what he did with luggage: making the humble look precious. He placed before viewers an aluminium wicker basket holding bronze cowpats; or ‘Colgate’, a silvery copy of sticks used in Indian villages for cleaning teeth. An additional level of irony was provided by the extraordinary prices at which these sold.
By 2005, even as he was poised for take-off internationally, his work was at a crossroads. The bicycles and scooters, the bartans and dish racks, appeared a little played out. The manner in which he moved to a new stage illustrates very well his mode of imagining. 2004 had begun with a catastrophic tsunami, and 2005 produced the Bombay deluge and the breached levees of New Orleans. He responded by making a dramatic car sculpture, Everything Is Inside. It consisted of a taxi, cast metal luggage on its carrier, its bottom half cut off so it looked as if it had sunk into the ground. Or was being overwhelmed by rising water.
Seized of the flood theme, he created a series titled Hungry God which looked entirely different from anything he’d done before. The stainless steel pots and pans were back, representing not goods to be coveted but possessions washed away. An installation in a church in Lille had vessels pouring into the centre from every surrounding niche, choking off escape routes. Another in the series was installed for twenty-four hours in a Parisian church in October 2006, part of an all-night arts festival called Les Nuits Blanche. It was bought by Francois Pinault, one of France’s richest men and owner of Christie’s auction house. A giant skull made out of utensils, the sculpture related to the venerable Christian tradition of the memento mori, as well as modern special effects extravaganzas like The Mummy. Subodh had managed to take a ubiquitous symbol and make it meaningful anew, an enormously difficult task that could only have been accomplished by a consummate artist.

(The interview with Subodh Gupta was conducted in conjunction with Zehra Jumabhoy, who also transcribed it)

Jitish Kallat, January 1998

I've written more articles about Jitish Kallat than about any other artist, and this was the first, a profile that appeared in Art India in 1998. It might well be the first thing published about Jitish, though maybe a couple of papers had carried short reviews of his maiden solo.
At the time, it seemed Jitish's success was a harbinger of a new era in which a number of very young artists would break into the big league. Recent graduates did receive more opportunities to exhibit in the noughties, but I suspect this remains the only profile of a twenty-three year old in an Indian art journal.
When Jitish read the draft I sent across, he expressed discomfort with the quote about feminism and my focus on phallic imagery. I don't recall if the quote was changed in the published version, and can't find that issue of Art India to check. If the line was retained, it's the only politically incorrect public pronouncement Jitish has made. But he has deniability, since I've lost the tape of our interview.
The Web was a novelty at the time, and required explanations that appear redundant today. The document on my computer begins ATTENTION ANUPA, NALINI, meaning it was faxed to the magazine office and re-typed, rather than emailed. I've altered some of the really clumsy phrases in the draft, but there are too many of those to rework without changing what character the piece has.

The Profile

Jitish Kallat’s debut solo exhibition, P.T.O., displayed recently in two Bombay galleries, was also placed on the Internet. The virtual paintings had a washed-out feel, retaining little of the quality of the originals. Perhaps this was a deliberate effort to save on downloading time by lowering the resolution of the images; but it seemed like proof, if yet more proof were required, that Walter Benjamin was misguided in contending that mechanical (and, by extension, digital) reproduction would efface the ‘aura’ which original works of art traditionally possessed.
Paradoxically, the twenty-three year old Kallat’s work also reveals the continuing relevance (fallacious futurology apart) of Benjamin’s essay on the impact of technologies of image reproduction. His paintings freely use these, notably the camera and the photocopy machine. Running a sheet of paper repeatedly through a copier, he achieves an over-inked reproduction of the image he needs, usually a photograph of himself or a picture of an Indian monument. This copy is then rubbed onto the canvas, where it leaves an impression. “When I need an image of myself in perspective the process is lengthier”, he says. “In this case I take a photograph, photocopy and enlarge it, place it on the wall and shoot that from the required angle, then make a photocopy of this”, before transferring the image to canvas.
To add irony to paradox, while the canvases on the Net seem impoverished, the paintings themselves have a bruised and blistered, patched and peeled feel, very much like the walls and buildings of his city, Bombay. Kallat explains his journey to grittiness: “I use a lot of mixed materials – binders, textile powders – so my paint is always a little tacky. From early on I used glycerin and starch mixed with acrylic, and rubbed the paint off the surface with cloth. Now I use a blade or a knife for the thicker canvas surface.”
“From early on” may seem like a strange phrase in the mouth of such a young artist, but his work does reveal, very ‘early on’, a remarkable control over the material at hand. A little over four years ago he painted, for the first time, a self-portrait. It was accompanied by the slogan, ‘I am a potato’. The potato was a personal emblem, soon to be joined by the pedestal, the elephant, and the coconut tree. “By saying I was a potato I meant that I had eyes, and could see what others couldn’t.” Here, then, was an artist confident of his particular vision, but diffident enough, or aware enough of our unheroic age, to ironise his own ambition by encoding it within the bathetic symbol of a potato.
Donning the armour of self-deprecation, Kallat can venture into the most dangerous battlefields. Paintings like I Wish It Came with the Food I Eat and Believer Picture literally idolise the phallus. As he puts it, “the whole feminist retaliation against men has produced a kind of counter-retaliation in my mind.” Irony also allows for theatricality, allows the self to adopt the grandest of roles, to appear in the robes of the Buddha, or posterised like Che Guevara.
In a painting from P.T.O. called Guardian Column, “where the painter is a sort of protector of a whole tradition”, we see the same two sided, ironic vision of the artist, a phallic pillar juxtaposed with a photocopied temple. Invoking Benjamin once more, Kallat’s view of his cultural tradition, like that of many of his peers is derived almost entirely from books, from mechanical reproductions of the original cultural artefacts. Kallat’s achievement is that he has found a formal solution to this strange intellectual condition. His pilgrims carry haversacks, but their journeys lead them mainly through a jungle of art publications. Ajanta and Ellora, the palaces of Mysore, the gopuras of Tamil Nadu, the artist has never seen any of these. They are all part of an abstract tradition and receive correspondingly abstract representation in his work.
The elephant, native of Kallat’s home state Kerala, is, like temples and palaces, a symbol of tradition that the artist uses repeatedly, or, as he prefers to put it, “recycles”. In Son, You Can Always Feel Young, the protagonist holds an elephant on a string, but tradition turns out to be less a puppet than a hypnotic pendulum (Rather than depict the pendulum swing in a Futurist manner, the picture shows the protagonist being swayed). The title of the painting brings into the equation a more modern form of brain-washing – that of American pop psychology, the cult of the do-it-yourself book.
Opposed to the gullible figure of Son, You Can Always Feel Young is the bespectacled self-portrait, May What Is Threatened Not Become Fact. The presence of spectacles is a sign, in Kallat’s lexicon, of “the wise, viewing, non-blind self”. The monumental head at the centre of May What Is Threatened Not Become Fact strikes a more sombre note than most of the other paintings in P.T.O. But the canvas also recycles a couple of the artist’s favourite motifs, such as the elephant who, in this case, is toppled from his pedestal. Well-worn phrases such as ‘toppled from his pedestal’ and ‘expanding the mind’ are often evoked by Kallat’s work, and he admits that many of his images “are guided by texts and captions: well-known phrases, song-titles, which, if proclaimed, would be too direct. These are very simplistic, dry, dehydrated thoughts. I maintain them like that for convenience, like a store of canned ideas. They only come alive when I use them as images.” To put it another way, “I think images, but I store words.”
The close relationship of words, ideas and images is central to Kallat’s work. His titles, usually written on the canvas along with other stray phrases, tend to include playful puns (‘Bulb Fiction: Strange Enlightenments’, ‘When So Many Spectacles Happen I See-Saw’). It is hardly surprising, then, that the painter’s first models were advertisements, which traditionally combine clever copy with striking images. The sleight of hand performed by commercials is that they sell you a brand, while you have to buy the product. The brand is the fantasy, the product is banal and real. Jitish Kallat’s paintings, too, have a few tricks up their sleeve. They combine, within the same cluster of images, promise and denial, proclamations and recantations. But if you choose to buy the paintings, you can be certain that what you see is what you get.

Minal and Dinesh Vazirani

This interview appeared in Take on Art magazine in October 2011.

Dinesh and Minal Vazirani founded Saffronart during the dotcom boom, and have guided it through a number of peaks and troughs since then. They envisioned Saffronart as a Web-based vendor, retooled the business model to focus on auctions, and expanded to include physical exhibitions. They have recently diversified into auctioning real estate and jewellery. They answered my questions with candour and insight.

Girish: It is eleven years since Saffronart was founded. Could you mark the main stages of its development?

Minal: The first phase was about building awareness. Conducting transactions for art online was something new not only for India but anywhere in the world. We also reached out to the Indian diaspora, which didn’t have access to Indian art. There were very few good publications or curated exhibitions exhibited internationally at that time.

Dinesh: The next stage, I’d say, was just survival. We seriously considered shutting down Saffronart around 2003, because building awareness had entailed mounting big shows in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and London, and that almost broke our back. Venture capital had pulled out after the dotcom bust, so there was no additional funding available. We took loans from my father, from banks, sold a substantial part of our personal collection, in order to stay afloat. But this was also an inflection point when the market as a whole started growing rapidly.

Minal: Yes, 2004 and 2005 were very important years for our growth. Saffronart had over 35% of the auction market at that time. Then, from 2006, there was a great deal more investment, more players came in, there was more interest from international auction houses, and it felt like the market was getting its own legs. It turned out to be short-lived, of course.

Dinesh: Interestingly, our most successful auction in these 11 years was in December 2006, when we garnered about 17 million dollars in one sale. So if you look at the market size, it was probably at its largest at that point. The following year, the market carried on at the same kind of level but there was no dramatic growth.

Girish: Prices for contemporary art rose substantially in the final phase of the boom, didn’t they?

Dinesh: That’s true. I think, though, that Indian galleries representing contemporary artists were too enamoured with the West. A lot of Indians wanting to buy art in those days would be told, Oh, the piece is going to this collection in Europe, or that museum. Gallerists sold to foreigners who posed as museum collectors but were actually dealers and traders. Whether it was Charles Saatchi, Frank Cohen or anyone else, their collections would all come back to the market at some point. When foreigners pulled out after the financial crisis, there was no Indian collector base left behind, which is why contemporary art has taken the biggest hit.

Girish: To continue with the phases, the third one was the boom…

Dinesh: For us, that was a period of consolidation. We expanded quite dramatically, established a space in London, a larger space in New York, planned one in Delhi. Of course, nobody expected what happened after the financial crisis, and since then we’ve been back to the survival stage again.

Girish: It’s been that bad?

Dinesh: It has, yes. If you look at the peak auction of 17 million in December 2006, and then at March 2009 which was a million and a half, that’s one tenth of the sale amount. We had the same overheads, we didn’t cut down our staff, we didn’t close our spaces. We were hopeful that the market would come back. But because so much buying was for investment, it’s been difficult to get buyers back, and have them collect for the right reason, which is to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the art and hang it on walls rather than store it in garages.

Minal: I think one dramatic change, which hasn’t had an effect on the value of the market yet but is very important, has been the rise of Indians who are collecting with a view to institutionalise their collection. The museum Kiran Nadar has set up is a great example. Unfortunately, there’s no government incentive associated with arts-related philanthropy, no tax benefit or anything of that kind.

Girish: Since you mention government regulation, could you spell out for me what changes you’d like to see in that area?

Minal: One of the good things that’s happened is the reduction in sales tax for art transactions in West Bengal; it’s now 1%. I hope other states follow.

Dinesh: Import duty is an important concern. If a canvas is painted in India, acquired by somebody outside the country and then bought by an Indian, why should the duty be 17%? I think people should be encouraged to get cultural products back into India. If we have import duty, let’s have a nominal rate like in the UK and other nations.
The third thing I’d look at is changing the Antiquities Act. It’s killed trade, and because trade’s been killed, so has education and expertise. Today, most experts in Indian antiquities are in London or New York, there are hardly any left in India.

Minal: If you drive business underground, there’s no way you can build infrastructure. Unfortunately, the Direct Tax Code that’s coming in has a 1% annual wealth tax on the market value of one’s art collection.

Girish: You just criticised galleries for their Western fixation, but I’ve heard gallerists criticising you for undercutting prices. You began with a model where you worked through partner galleries, and then you became in a sense a competitor to galleries. Is there a lot of friction in the relationship currently?

Minal: We still work very closely with galleries and dealers, I don’t think that’s changed much. Even the exhibition spaces we have were conceived mainly to provide a plaform for galleries to showcase their artists through us.

Dinesh: There’s been some friction with a few galleries, for a simple reason. As an auction platform, our prices are dependent on the dynamic between buyer and seller. Whatever the price settles at is what it settles at. It’s fine when the market’s going up, because galleries keep marking their prices higher whenever the hammer price for an artist’s work rises in the secondary market. But when hammer prices fall below primary prices, galleries find it difficult to handle artists they represent. Artists ask, ‘How could Saffronart sell a painting at this price?’ And the gallerists accuse us of lowering prices. But we don’t raise or lower prices, the market does. I think perceptions have changed as the same thing has happened at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Girish: Would you say a bit about the role art funds played in the downturn? Obviously we couldn’t have avoided the crash, but Europe and the United States, which have such dreadful economies, have healthier art markets than we do today. Is the Indian market doing as badly as it is because art funds encouraged investors over collectors?

Dinesh: Every market needs different constituents. We need a strong base of collectors, and people with capital who will build the market, and also institutional buyers. So art funds are a legitimate constituent of the art market. I think what became detrimental was the volume of capital that they controlled in a small market. The auction market peaked at about 140 million dollars in annual sales. In that year, art funds raised 60 million dollars, which was too large a quantum of capital given the market size as a whole.
I think two things really hurt the market. First, it was Amit Judge’s decision to shut down Bodhi. We all tried convincing him not to, but it was purely a business decision for him. He really raised the bar in the years he operated, but when Bodhi closed, international collectors lost a lot of confidence. If the biggest player in a market goes under, it sends a strong negative signal. Then there was the Osian’s crisis. Neville Tuli built the organisation with a lot of passion, but when he got into a mess with his fund, it reduced confidence in the market. Between Bodhi and Osian’s, I think they touched pretty much every important buyer in the world.

Girish: Finally, what’s with all these Nandis by H G Arunkumar you feature in your auctions? Is it a mascot of some sort? I see you’ve got an astroturf one here.

Dinesh: (laughs) Any colour, any material, any size, we’ll sell them. They’re actually pretty tough to source.