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)