The art of a half-eaten roti

(Published yesterday in Times of India, Crest)

“Frankly, I don’t think I have achieved much. That is an honest assessment.” Coming from someone who has won almost everything that spells success in the vast and varied world of contemporary art as it is today, the modesty seems suspicious. But from Jitish Kallat, hailed as the Boy Wonder as far back as in 1997, when he was just 23 and presenting his debut show at the Chemould Gallery in Mumbai, it is as true as truth gets, since he is astonishingly self-deprecating and disarmingly modest. Or perhaps it is just that he has set his personal bar so high that each honour and achievement is just a tiny step to where he wants to be, whenever he knows where that is.

Over the years, he has continued to wow critics in India and abroad with his creativity – the quirky magic of auto-rickshaws made of bones (resin), panoramic photographs and, now, food. His new show, to open in February at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London, includes scans of familiarity as seen on dining plates, from rotis to samosas. Kallat is one of the selected fraternity major artists to show at the enormous Christie’s-owned commercial art gallery founded in 2002, which represents well-known contemporary artists like Turner Prize nominee Zarina Bhimji, 2002 winner Zhang Huan, Bill Viola, Wim Wenders and others, and also has branches in Berlin and New York. And even as eyebrows begin to crinkle with doubt as Kallat speaks with enthusiasm about the innards of edibles, you cannot help being charmed by eyes glinting passionately behind the pebble-glasses, the not-quite-in-condition figure under the clinging white turtle-neck, the long-toed shoes that seem to stretch towards you as he explains…

He has said, “The scale of my work is humungous.” And it is. From the 200-foot 365 Lives, which has the sculpture of a life-sized car parked in the middle of the installation and surrounded by 365 photographs, to the “merely 50-foot” ‘short’ Anger at the Speed of Fright, some of his works “rely on scale to generate meaning”. And “It’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor,” he explained about these pieces. Just as with 365 Lives, where the viewer sees the various aspects of the work with only gradual realisation, from the blood and rusting car body parts to rushing traffic, vehicular and pedestrian. Some works need time and space to be even partially appreciated, like the 200-plus-foot long Public Notice II, which has 4,500 bones made of resin shaped into alphabets spelling our Mahatma Gandhi’s speech just before the non-cooperation movement was launched. Kallat’s Dawn Chorus paintings make the mind work overtime to catch up with the eye, showing street urchins at traffic junctions selling books – their hair is made of traffic and pedestrians tangled into the mess that is integrally Mumbai. These works are mounted on bronze reproductions of wall carvings from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, or VT station.

This time, in London, his works include Conditions Apply, a series of large photographic images that looks like seven large lunar formations. “Each is a progressively eaten roti, back lit, and it kind of glows.” A joke or art? Kallat says, “If there isn’t a spark of humour in all that disturbance, then that work is not complete for me. But then there is the experience that is about sustenance, the notion of nourishment, life, survival.” “The first roti was one of the simplest works I have ever made, scanned at 1200 dpi. The new rotis are a collaboration between Nisha (the house help) and me --- she took one of the pictures into the kitchen and tried to make all her rotis look just like that one, with the same amount of burning…!” Does it make sense to a non-roti-eater? “It gives the experience of a lunar cycle. But when you come closer to it, you see that it is not a normal moon. Even somebody who doesn’t know what a roti is can figure it is some kind of food, just from the particles and bite patterns.” And when does a gastronomic experience become art? Kallat explains that “Most of these images are sourced out of thoughts, notions, ideas, playing with metaphors and symbolic structures that then find a necessary vehicle in terms of an image. When that does happen, it becomes an artwork.”

Much of his thought process found practical expression in a pathology laboratory, Kallat says, and in collaborative efforts with a friend who is also an animator, a motion graphics expert. He used the lab to do “several 100 scans of various foods – the equipment you would use for, say, a chest X-ray, would have samosas or vadas being scanned on it! The entire staff of the X-ray department was with me, checking if what they were doing was right. The image making process begins in the lab or a kitchen, and then goes through the artistic process”.

Kallat has earned success that is rare for someone just 35 years old? And perhaps some of that rapid rise came from the fact that his life was not prescribed by his background or his family. As he puts it, “My parents didn’t tell me to become something or the other. If I was my dad I would probably have said that to me. Perhaps there was some grasp that what I was doing was what I should have been doing. There was nothing that I or any of us could fall back on; we were a typical south Indian middle-class family living in the far western suburbs of Mumbai. It was nice that my parents were extremely supportive and enthusiastic of the journey I was taking.” Though his father passed away soon after Kallat’s debut showing, “I feel that he did see a journey that he may have believed had some value.” But success is not what really matters, he believes. “None of anything today can be taken too seriously. You take pleasure in the processes and sit back and wait to see what the outcome is and decide whether it works for you.” And for him, it certainly did. “Looking back, I was fairly detached. But I was absolutely happy that Dad saw it happen, and when anyone told Dad that he was being silly in letting me do silly things…they could not say that any more.”

However complex his work may seem to the viewer or critic, for Kallat, “Art is not a complicated affair. “The roti piece, for instance, is all about the instant scan. The moment it is scanned, it is a ready artwork. Its intrinsic complexity will neither be related to the process that it went through, nor to the fact that either one will have a greater density of meaning.” As for art itself, “As simple as it can be would be better. And in its simplicity should be the concentrate of that meaning that you could dilute in parts when you want to, at will, at different historical times, hopefully. Maybe years later, a pinch of that work should be able to regenerate itself in a different form.” Which only means that “If the work has to be simple, somewhere you have to be simple. The rest of the time you are dealing with a world that is complex and you are busy decoding it.”

That fits neatly into the general perception that Kallat is a deeply intellectual artist who cannot be easily understood by his audience. Even as the complexity of his work can stun, each layer can seem almost childlike in its simplicity. He has said, “The work has several layers of meaning and you can enter from various places.” And he reiterates with “When I get down to making the work, or when I speak, I hope it is not complex. In a specific context, like an international conference, for instance, the theme looks complex, but I do hold my own. I don’t mind tolerating that language in pursuit of simple meaning. I am not looking to hang out with theoreticians because its complex, but hopefully in that complexity will be a simple meaning. At the same time, I try to make art that is simple, but which will have in it deep resonances of meaning to reinvent itself beyond me, after me, around me, without me.”

Without him? “As long as the work is self-rejuvenating, across time and people and retinas and cerebrums, it will be able to regenerate itself. All one can do when you do that effort when you set out to make art, is to have a strong belief that what you are working on can potentially become that. Anything that does reach this stage has journeyed along with you for a very, very long time. And unless your own assessment can live up to what you are, you are not there yet.”

( ‘Universal Recipient’ by Jitish Kallat opens at the Haunch of Venison in February)

Panning out

(Published yesterday...)

I was in love. I stood there, staring fixedly, even as people brushed past me in the aisle and muttered. It was just what I had always been looking for, even without my knowing that I was looking for it. My first true-blue piece of cooking equipment: a cast-iron pan, almost a skillet, wide and just deep enough, with a neatly fitted lid. It was a pristine enameled white striped nattily in gold, with a black handle and a little round button to lift the cover off. I bought it ($19.99) and admired it at home for a long time before I started using it. Then I left it on the hob too long and burned a hole right through the base. A rush trip back to the store earned me another, but in a less endearing blue. I still use that pan; it is heavy, non-stick, ideal for whatever I make in it, from pancakes to bhindi-ki-sabji to broiled fish to hash browns to semiya upma.

But age catches up with us all and I need to replace my treasure. So every time I see a home store anywhere, be it in a mall or in Lohar Chawl in town, I dive in, my bloodhound instincts working overtime. So far, alas, nothing has had the same impact. To be fair, I did trawl through my own kitchen, scanning all the stuff my mother had acquired over years, to no avail. There was gorgeous flame-orange Dansk casseroles, a heavy scarlet paella pan, an oversized orange iron skillet, even a vividly red wok, along with shiny steel Revereware and brightly enameled Silit along with some Amber Visions and Cranberry Corning, but nothing that was the right weight, the right size, the right non-stick surface and (this was an optional need) the right colour.

I found some options in the Indigo deli’s selection of Le Creuset. The colour was right. The heft made it. But the surface did not. And neither did the price – I wanted to buy cookware, not a first-class air ticket to buy it! A store at Atria mall selling heavy gauge pots and pans pulled me in; the stuff was gorgeous, the prices hideous and the suitability limited – I did not, after all, feed 50 people at every meal! And plus it was not any kind of colour that fit with my kitchen, I told myself and the salesman snootily. I have since looked everywhere, from Big Bazaar to Hypercity to Home Stop to a small shop in Matunga that I cannot remember the name of. I find good Indian brands, from Prestige to Jaipan to Hawkins, all priced very affordably below Rs1000, many in a nice colour range between orange and red, with reputable and lasting surfaces, good handle attachments and enamel finish, but none with the weight I so long for. Even if I am willing to be a little less Scrooge-ish and spend more, I cannot find the heft I want.

Until that happens, or else I come across another pan of the ilk of my cast-iron non-stick buddy, I keep looking.

An independent woman

I always tell myself and many others who are interested in knowing, that I am an independent woman. Or, rather, I used to be, when I worked full time and earned a decent salary. I went to work at what seemed to be the crack of dawn, came home at the dead of night, was wonderfully tired and ate all the wrong things and finally quit when I had more problems than I wanted to deal with at the time. Having got myself sorted out both physically and mentally, I now need to start seriously considering going back to work somewhere, but without the - greatly self-induced, I have to admit - trauma of the last experience. And, along with it, go back to the vestige of independence I so fondly believed I had at the time that my bank account got regular inputs and I bought lipstick without thinking about whether it suited me and I needed another shade of red that was not ideal for my skin tone. I battled with work in the office, work in the house and work to keep myself sane and afloat, without ever realising that I was doing none of the above with 1) any degree of efficiency and/or organisation and 2) no help at all.

Ok, having dealt out that double negative with masterly nonchalance and confused anyone who may be reading this and myself, let me explain...

AT HOME: My biggest source of support and strongest ally is Father. He not only manages all the money and all of us (himself, Small Cat and me), but also manages the home without letting me feel in the slightest way that I am not the one in charge. I do look after the culinary functions in the kitchen, but more because I like cooking than because I need to do the cooking, if you know what I mean. The maid looks after the dishes and the floors, though on occasion we need to do that ourselves - meaning that she plays hookey for longer than planned and while I am out at the gym or gallivanting in town, Father cleans up. The driver manages parking our car when he is available to drive us/me around, which at the moment is a bit of a sore point with us, since he too has decided to play hookey and gone awol. Of course, both Father and I drive pretty well, but have made a conscious decision not to need to, or to have to find space in our overcrowded city to park with the assurance that all the bits and pieces on our car will be there when we come back to it.

AT WORK: The only pleasure in being a wage slave, apart from the regular paycheck, is that someone else can call the shots. When decision-making is in your own power, it is a lot more fun, but considering the way that media works today and the fact that no-one that I know that works in media is in the best-fit position, it is generally the norm that you are directed by someone else with greater powers (though perhaps not intelligence or qualifications) than you have. In other words, most people follow orders, which makes it easier in a way, albeit a right royal pain in the somewhere impolite. So any ideas that you may have about being independent are best left where they belong, in a wonderful dreamscape that never really happens in reality.

So how does that, or did that, since the AT WORK part is now history - all of the above, I mean - make me an independent woman? Blast, another bubble burst there!

A new beginning

So it has finally happened. The new decade has begun. Newspapers, magazines and television channels have been going crazy doing special editions to celebrate first the end of the last year and decade and now the start of a new one. And most of them say that life can only get better now. But can it? And was it really that bad? And does a single moment, when past becomes present, make that much of a difference? As with any decade, the last one had its ups and downs - doesn't everything? There were terror attacks and deaths, a recession and many peaks in the sensex. There were successes and their counterparts: failures. It is all part of the game, isn't it? What goes up must come down and all that good stuff?
For me, as an individual, life had its share of good and bad times. I found friends and lost some, slid out of relationships, sometimes with great trouble and pain and sometimes more easily than I would have thought possible. And I made new bonds, meeting people I felt I had known all my life, going through the testing process of trying to know whether they could be mine or not, and finally adding them to the inner circle that we all treasure and protect. There were moments of intense joy and times I wish had never been part of my living memory - I lost my most precious ties in my mother and my cat, both with agony that no one ever should know. But in that I gained a central core that is strong, unbreakable, one that I will not allow anyone to enter without special permission. I worked on many projects, enjoyed a few of them and resolved, at the end of it all, when I finally took the decision to stop working full time for a while, to do only what would and could give me a satisfaction that would make me want to go back to it every day. It has not been easy, that last twist in my tale, but it had to be done.
Over the past year, a lot of growing up has happened for me. I understood what I was all about and became happy with what I was rather than craving what I could be if I really wanted to and if Fate allowed. I had always known that power did not come from a title or a paycheck, but lived that ethos in a way that made it my personal and governing principle. And even as I cursed that same Fate and mourned loss of various kinds, from people to ego, I liked the choices I made.
And the only resolution I will keep for the next year, the next decade, the rest of my life, is to be myself and happy with it.
Which makes a whole lot of sense, don't you think?