(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine)
'When Will You Be Happy’ is not a real-life question, but a kind of existential musing hidden deep within “a simple line that you can even scribble on a piece of paper”. It is the name that Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat has given his latest work, a 100-foot (30-metre) long installation that is on its way to Pilane, Sweden, for the annual sculpture show, Skulptur i Pilane. As the artist himself says, the line “does make you think”. And the location of the site, an ancient burial ground, “makes it a little more urgent. Happiness is often here now and we end up postponing that moment.” And the urgency becomes almost mnemonic when “you inscribe it in a burial site - it reminds you that you cannot postpone life”.
The Pilane show, curated by Peter Lennby and opening on June 12, also includes Belgian Wim Delvoye, Icelandic artist Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, British artists Laura Ford and Tony Cragg, Nils Ramhøj from Gothenburg, Sweden, Ursula Von Ryding from the USA, and Swedish artists Leo Pettersson and Jonas Holmquist. The site itself is home to about 90 judgement circles, raised stones and other such relics, some still visible, that date back to the Iron Age. The landscape, with cultural artefacts that have been dated back to the Stone Age, has been extensively restored and, with its gently hills and verdant pastureland, is the perfect setting for large sculptures that have an almost organic form, rooted in times long past and seeming to rise out of the earth into present reality. The works are completely in concordance with the Pilane terrain and ethos. As Kallat put it, the show is “all very dramatic and wonderful. Some really interesting pieces have been shown.”
His work has been lauded by critics and audiences alike ever since his debut show in Mumbai in1997, when Kallat was all of 23 years old. Over the years, his creativity has managed to provoke not just comment, but wonder, with its scale and vision. And the articulate, expressive, thoughtful, introspective, occasionally philosophical artist never fails to come up with something new, combining painting with sculpture with photography with technology and, in his last works, with food. A prestigious and successful show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London earlier this year had a quirky twist as art was created with scans of edible objects, from rotis to samosas. And now he returns to a recurrent motif: bones. This time, in the perfect setting.
Kallat’s work is known for its humungous scale and vision. While Anger at the Speed of Fright was merely 50 feet ‘short’, 365 Lives stretched to 200 feet and had a life-sized car parked in the middle of an installation composed of 365 photographs. He has said that some of his works “rely on scale to generate meaning; it’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor”. Some pieces, like the gigantic 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, need time and space to be even partially appreciated. Others, like the Dawn Chorus paintings, require cerebral overtime, showing street urchins at traffic junctions selling books – their hair is made of traffic and pedestrians tangled in archetypical Mumbai style.
For Skulptur i Pilane, Lennby’s original choice of Kallat’s work was Eruda, the figure of a boy selling books. But “Somehow I was not convinced that it was right,” Kallat says. After all, “The place is quite loaded in meaning. I wanted to conceive something ground up, so to speak.” It took a while to think up what he considered to fit the site and its historical importance and significance. “I receded from the project for a few months without committing, until I came up with something that I felt was closely connecting to the site and to my work.” It had to fit not just the atmosphere, but the scale and terrain as well. Kallat explains, “I found that the landscape is very beautiful, but the subterranean reality is that of burial and the notion of death, somewhere hidden underneath.”
He started working with the thought of “beauty and happiness and all that in the way the landscape appeared”. And came up with “this simple line that gets embedded into the landscape: When Will You Be Happy. We will actually be digging, it will seem as if it is being excavated, part of it still in the earth.” And with the size of the installation, “When you are close to it you feel like it is fairly large scale bones, but from different vantage points could make it seem as if the words are emerging from within the grass and you can touch it, make art a tactile experience.” It was not easy; in fact, it was “somewhat challenging to deal with both experiences – great distance and closeness at the same time”.
Bones are a recurring theme in Kallat’s work. Public Notice II- the Gandhi speech, Aquasaurus - a seven-metre long water-tanker and Autosaurus Tripous – an autorickshaw, all made of resin bones, are just a few examples of his forensic passion. According to him, I am interested in what is not visible, what is there but you don’t see it. Bones don’t reveal themselves until way after a person’s death. They form the innermost element in the human body. In some ways it connects to concrete or haptic poetry, where essentially the way the alphabets are modelled adds a layer of meaning.” This is the story of Kallat’s need to know more. “I am interested in using text, where the alphabet itself is sculpture. The act of inscription itself has immense meaning.” For Pilane, “Given the spread-out prehistoric landscape of the site, I wanted to work with the primeval and corporal image of the bone. It is at once evocative of one’s physicality as a living being and a reminder of one’s mortality.”
Kallat has said, “As long as the work is self-rejuvenating, across time and people and retinas and cerebrums, it will be able to regenerate itself.” Sort of like the earth within which his bones will be held.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
A man of Modesty
(Published in The Hindu Magazine, May 22)
She could be the poster girl for new-age feminism. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of her existence is the way she can do a powerful drop-kick wearing an exquisite designer gown and priceless pearls, fight and kill the bad guys, find and save the good guys and then have a little weep, just to show that she is, after all, only human. And perhaps it is Peter O’Donnell, her creator, who should take the credit for knowing what a woman is all about, embodied in the sleek, strong almost superwoman character he called Modesty Blaise.
Born in London on April 11, 1920, O’Donnell’s inspiration for his heroine came from a chance ‘meeting’ with a young girl he came across when he was in the army. It was during the war in 1942, when he was a sergeant in northern Iran; he and his men had just finished eating when they saw a child of about 12 years of age, dressed in rags, warily watching them. She seemed to be a refugee, perhaps from the Balkan region, and on her own, but somehow not a pathetic figure. The soldiers offered her food, which she ate, and then gave her all the supplies that they could spare. She packed up the tins that they had left for her, smiled her thanks and walked off into the desert, going southwards, O’Donnell recalled in interviews and in his introduction to the series, ‘She walked like a little princess.’ And when he was looking for a frame to fit Modesty Blaise into, ‘I knew that child was the story.’
The impression was indeed strong. O’Donnell’s heroine featured in the comic strips that he drew (with collaborators) for the The London Evening Standard for almost 40 years, ending in 2001 and syndicated internationally. In the books, of which there are at least 12, starting with Modesty Blaise and ending with Cobra Trap, he gradually reveals tiny bytes of information about his leading lady, building up a personality that was honed by hardship and a life of crime in northern Africa, the Middle East and parts beyond, a woman who ‘retired’ in her 20s and never settled into happy domesticity, as women of that time would have likely been expected to do. Instead, she used her well-earned money, her skills and her contacts to fight crime in ways more complex and unexpected than the conventional, often for the British government via a gentleman called Sir Gerald Tarrant.
In I Lucifer, she came across a delusional young man who could ‘predict’ death; in The Impossible Virgin, she believed for a while her partner Willie Garvin, who called her ‘Princess’, was dead, but managed to stay strong enough to win the nastily fierce battle against the villains of that particular piece. In Pieces of Modesty, the action is quicker, the stories shorter, O’Donnell proving that to tell a story of the kind that he specialized in, an entire novel was not necessary. And in Cobra Trap, Modesty Blaise is killed, but leaves behind a tiny hint of a possible rebirth in some form. Along the way, she meets people, often men she has love affairs with, some good and some…well…who don’t find her good side.
The comic strips showed her as a curvy woman flaunting a deep cleavage, clad in clinging clothes, high heels and lots of eye-black. The books give her a more sophisticated image, with a svelte body, long legged elegance and refined taste. The story that The Daily Express in England had commissioned and then rejected because it did not want a heroine who started her career as a significant member of the underworld as she ‘lacked propriety’ became so popular that though it went out of print, Penguin published a ‘retro’ edition a couple of years ago. Movies have also been made, none of note, but it is known that, like writer Kingsley Amis, director Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan who wants to use one of the stories for a film; in fact, he has a character in his Pulp Fiction reading a Modesty Blaise novel! And there was a less diabolic side to creativity as well – the man who wrote of the most horrendous ways to kill also wrote 19th century romance novels, using the pseudonym Madeleine Brent.
O’Donnell died on May 3, at the age of 90, leaving behind not just his wife of 70 years, two daughters, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, but a character who is, in her own way, ageless: Modesty Blaise.
She could be the poster girl for new-age feminism. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of her existence is the way she can do a powerful drop-kick wearing an exquisite designer gown and priceless pearls, fight and kill the bad guys, find and save the good guys and then have a little weep, just to show that she is, after all, only human. And perhaps it is Peter O’Donnell, her creator, who should take the credit for knowing what a woman is all about, embodied in the sleek, strong almost superwoman character he called Modesty Blaise.
Born in London on April 11, 1920, O’Donnell’s inspiration for his heroine came from a chance ‘meeting’ with a young girl he came across when he was in the army. It was during the war in 1942, when he was a sergeant in northern Iran; he and his men had just finished eating when they saw a child of about 12 years of age, dressed in rags, warily watching them. She seemed to be a refugee, perhaps from the Balkan region, and on her own, but somehow not a pathetic figure. The soldiers offered her food, which she ate, and then gave her all the supplies that they could spare. She packed up the tins that they had left for her, smiled her thanks and walked off into the desert, going southwards, O’Donnell recalled in interviews and in his introduction to the series, ‘She walked like a little princess.’ And when he was looking for a frame to fit Modesty Blaise into, ‘I knew that child was the story.’
The impression was indeed strong. O’Donnell’s heroine featured in the comic strips that he drew (with collaborators) for the The London Evening Standard for almost 40 years, ending in 2001 and syndicated internationally. In the books, of which there are at least 12, starting with Modesty Blaise and ending with Cobra Trap, he gradually reveals tiny bytes of information about his leading lady, building up a personality that was honed by hardship and a life of crime in northern Africa, the Middle East and parts beyond, a woman who ‘retired’ in her 20s and never settled into happy domesticity, as women of that time would have likely been expected to do. Instead, she used her well-earned money, her skills and her contacts to fight crime in ways more complex and unexpected than the conventional, often for the British government via a gentleman called Sir Gerald Tarrant.
In I Lucifer, she came across a delusional young man who could ‘predict’ death; in The Impossible Virgin, she believed for a while her partner Willie Garvin, who called her ‘Princess’, was dead, but managed to stay strong enough to win the nastily fierce battle against the villains of that particular piece. In Pieces of Modesty, the action is quicker, the stories shorter, O’Donnell proving that to tell a story of the kind that he specialized in, an entire novel was not necessary. And in Cobra Trap, Modesty Blaise is killed, but leaves behind a tiny hint of a possible rebirth in some form. Along the way, she meets people, often men she has love affairs with, some good and some…well…who don’t find her good side.
The comic strips showed her as a curvy woman flaunting a deep cleavage, clad in clinging clothes, high heels and lots of eye-black. The books give her a more sophisticated image, with a svelte body, long legged elegance and refined taste. The story that The Daily Express in England had commissioned and then rejected because it did not want a heroine who started her career as a significant member of the underworld as she ‘lacked propriety’ became so popular that though it went out of print, Penguin published a ‘retro’ edition a couple of years ago. Movies have also been made, none of note, but it is known that, like writer Kingsley Amis, director Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan who wants to use one of the stories for a film; in fact, he has a character in his Pulp Fiction reading a Modesty Blaise novel! And there was a less diabolic side to creativity as well – the man who wrote of the most horrendous ways to kill also wrote 19th century romance novels, using the pseudonym Madeleine Brent.
O’Donnell died on May 3, at the age of 90, leaving behind not just his wife of 70 years, two daughters, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, but a character who is, in her own way, ageless: Modesty Blaise.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Meet Carrie...
(Crest, TOI, May 22)
Almost like a Karan Johar film, or perhaps inspiring it, the high-fluff Sex and the City soon became SATC – not easier to say, but quicker to type in. And as the television show progressed into a movie and then another, a quick churn-out of books was inevitable. As were the questions that segued into a prequel: The Carrie Diaries, starring the character made iconic by a fashion forward Sarah Jessica Parker and her shoe closet.
Carrie Bradshaw, or Bradley, as her friends in high school called her, is from a small town called Castlebury. Life is all about attitude for the young woman, who craves, as do all teenagers – myself and my classmates included – to belong, but to still stand out by way of word, deed, personal style or, indeed, boyfriend. So for Carrie, making out with the boy that every other girl wants is paramount, though a future career as a writer comes a close second and losing her virginity follows fairly close behind.
And so her life proceeds. The handsome, desirable and hot Sebastian Kydd comes back into her life and – oh wow! – chooses her as his girl. For a while, anyway. For Sebastian, as it must be for any hormonally overcharged teen male, quantity and scoring with girls who matter rules over quality and any genuine emotional bond. But Carrie believes that she is the One and Only, and is shattered when she finds that her man finds horizontal bliss with her best friend.
Typically young adult American, with behaviour perhaps seen in a tiny select circle translatable into an Indian context, Carrie and her (former, by the end of the book) best friend Lali, Maggie, the bitchy Donna LaDonna, Mouse, Danny, Walt with his secret life, Peter, sisters Dorrit and Missy, George and a cast of other characters slowly build up to the next stage in Carrie’s life. She finally finds her way to Brown University, but first heads to New York City, still a virgin, for a course in creative writing. An occasional surprise pops out of the fluff and does work. And as the last page ends, Carrie starts making the friends so familiar to SATC watchers.
Does a book like this one deserve to be written? Perhaps, yes. After all, the readers, most fans of the show, craved more information, from how Carrie Bradshaw started her career as a writer to how the four women became so closely bonded, to…well…where those shoes came from. As a shoe aficionado, I can understand the last point, but for the rest - I just about managed to read the book.
Almost like a Karan Johar film, or perhaps inspiring it, the high-fluff Sex and the City soon became SATC – not easier to say, but quicker to type in. And as the television show progressed into a movie and then another, a quick churn-out of books was inevitable. As were the questions that segued into a prequel: The Carrie Diaries, starring the character made iconic by a fashion forward Sarah Jessica Parker and her shoe closet.
Carrie Bradshaw, or Bradley, as her friends in high school called her, is from a small town called Castlebury. Life is all about attitude for the young woman, who craves, as do all teenagers – myself and my classmates included – to belong, but to still stand out by way of word, deed, personal style or, indeed, boyfriend. So for Carrie, making out with the boy that every other girl wants is paramount, though a future career as a writer comes a close second and losing her virginity follows fairly close behind.
And so her life proceeds. The handsome, desirable and hot Sebastian Kydd comes back into her life and – oh wow! – chooses her as his girl. For a while, anyway. For Sebastian, as it must be for any hormonally overcharged teen male, quantity and scoring with girls who matter rules over quality and any genuine emotional bond. But Carrie believes that she is the One and Only, and is shattered when she finds that her man finds horizontal bliss with her best friend.
Typically young adult American, with behaviour perhaps seen in a tiny select circle translatable into an Indian context, Carrie and her (former, by the end of the book) best friend Lali, Maggie, the bitchy Donna LaDonna, Mouse, Danny, Walt with his secret life, Peter, sisters Dorrit and Missy, George and a cast of other characters slowly build up to the next stage in Carrie’s life. She finally finds her way to Brown University, but first heads to New York City, still a virgin, for a course in creative writing. An occasional surprise pops out of the fluff and does work. And as the last page ends, Carrie starts making the friends so familiar to SATC watchers.
Does a book like this one deserve to be written? Perhaps, yes. After all, the readers, most fans of the show, craved more information, from how Carrie Bradshaw started her career as a writer to how the four women became so closely bonded, to…well…where those shoes came from. As a shoe aficionado, I can understand the last point, but for the rest - I just about managed to read the book.
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