(As always, I tend to impress myself with my own writing. This was a totally food-unrelated encounter, but the artist I had to interview was great fun. Here's how it went...)
You hear about Jitesh Kallat more than you actually see his work in Mumbai. Reports come in from Milan, Shanghai and London about the success of his showings and the prices his works command. Reviews are fabulously laudatory and everyone, but everyone, speaks raves about his latest…or his last piece. But showings in his home city of Mumbai are rare and works hardly ever debut here. As Kallat says pragmatically, “It’s tough to make this the debut place. Galleries in Mumbai have a quick turnaround – 21 day exhibitions.” The explanation is simple: “The scale of my work is humungous. I need a 200-feet space to house the 200-feet 365 Lives, for instance. I couldn’t do this on short notice.” In fact, the galleries had eight days of installing time for the current show.
The piece 365 Lives is on display in Sweatopia, Kallat’s new show. “It’s a humungous project – the sculpture of a huge car, life-size, will sit bang in the middle of the 365 photographs. It weighs almost a ton.” And there is a large Eruda, the sculpture of a boy holding books, about 14-15 feet high and “super heavy. The logistics are really beyond normal exhibition requirements. Which is why through the last two years, I have not been able to show the key pieces in my work.” He always knew it would happen, though.
Almost all of Kallat’s works are enormous. “The scale has always been integral to my work,” he maintains, even though he has created ‘smaller’ pieces that were “just about 22-24 feet”. Anger at the Speed of Fright was a mere 50 feet long. “There are some works that rely on scale to generate meaning” - 365 Lives, as you walk into it, seems like colour swatches, some seemingly repetitive, in some way seductive; the colours and images come rushing at the viewer. As Kallat explains, “It’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor. You start feeling that there is something of a law, something tragic. Then you realise that these are dented vehicles, nothing too tragic. Then you keep going through the piece and realise that somewhere along the way these actually evoke bodily wounds, dents, scars, rust marks…and then it changes meaning. Something cold and inanimate becomes a chronicle of the city’s heartbeat.”
Some years ago, artists in Mumbai complained that a lack of space was what stifled creativity and expression through sculpture. Kallat’s works would cover the area of a decently-sized apartment, and “Coping with lack of space in the city is tough,” he agrees. But “When you make these works, you don’t know what you’re going to do with them. A piece I am currently showing in Milan (Public Notice II) goes to over 200 feet”, where 4,500 bones shaped like alphabets spell out the speech that Gandhi delivered before he embarked on the non-cooperation movement. “The sheer realisation of it is not easy, but if you really want to do it, you do it,” Kallat says matter of factly. As for making smaller pieces, “One can create summaries, but then you never have a novel. You never have epics, you will have episodes. Certain works need the scale, if the meaning, the concept, the work, has to envelop you. One can compromise – the simplest way if to back out. But if you really want to realise it at the point at which it defines itself” – Autosaurus Tripos, for instance, an autorickshaw made of ‘bones’, had to be life-sized – “from the obvious, it becomes a curious object for which a meaning cannot be defined. That happens only at the scale at which it is done. Smaller, it becomes a model, a toy.”
The self was once the crux of Kallat’s practice, especially between 1992 and1999. “It started changing form gradually,” he says. In Artist Making a Local Call (2005), a panoramic view with multiple exposures, “envelops my core concerns, the whole idea of the human struggle, interspersed with small soft calamities which are in our lives everyday. The picture has several layers of meaning and you can enter from various places.” It will be set against a curved wall, with Autosaurus placed in front of it.
Kallat is often said to be an ‘intellectual’, his work deep with meaning and sometimes incomprehensible to the average critic and viewer. He feels, “‘Intellectual’ is a burdened word, loaded with things that you do not want associated with your work immediately. But that does not make it a non-cerebral effort.” He works hard, thinks hard and puts his understanding of himself and the situation into his work. “I have to unearth the sources of my practice, constantly build an analytical understanding of my own work, which is separate from the process of making the work itself.” And, along the way, it becomes a great adventure, where “the object gets empowered from your understanding of the world at multiple levels.”
The names of his show is, in itself, unusual. Kallat coined the word “by collapsing sweat with utopia, sweat being the constant toil, the idea of survival, aspirations of hope.” Each work speaks at various levels, for which an onlooker needs time and space and an open mind, a freedom that Kallat relishes. “You are allowed to miss things; there is no reason to believe that we can all always soak in everything a work holds. Many years ago Gieve Patel said something like, ‘If you understand the work, great; but if you misunderstand it, even better!’ Somewhere within it there is the fact that the moment you miss something, you have seen something else and added a layer of meaning that I could not have offered.”
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