MAMI

Among those honoured at this year's Mumbai Film Festival was the Greek auteur Theodoros Angelopoulos. The hosts MAMI (Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image) apparently couldn't find a person worthy of presenting the citation to him, and opted to bring on a group that included Rohan Sippy, Ashok Mehta and the director duo Abbas-Mustan.


You can see the brothers Abbas and Mustan Burmawalla on the extreme left of this picture, dressed, as always, in white from shirt to shoes. They're listening intently to Angelopoulos's acceptance speech (thank you, Sankalp, for the info and pic).
After this interaction, I hope Abbas-Mustan familiarise themselves with Angelopoulos's films, starting, I suggest, with Ulysses' Gaze; Angelopoulos, meanwhile, ought to dip into the body of work created by those who honoured him on stage. Taarzan: The Wonder Car might be a good place to begin.
Next year, MAMI should felicitate Jean-Luc Godard, and ask Dharmendra and Jeetendra to present him with the award and speak of how influential Godard's vision was for them in the 1960s and 70s.

Volkswagen rewrites history

Volkswagen has monopolised the advertising in this morning's Times of India, including the entire front page and back page. The back shows an impressive looking factory, supposedly the mammoth plant built at Chakan, near Bombay.


A line at bottom right reads, "Images for representational purposes only. Terms and Conditions apply." What is one to make of that? Is the image a composite? It looks real enough, especially all those people walking along the road although a sidewalk is available. Strange.
Elsewhere, Volkswagen is decidedly economical with the truth.

In this ad, the text states: "In the late 1930s, when the world was busy focussing their engineering minds (sic) on large cars with large engines, we scratched below the surface. We racked our brains and dwelled on what the people really wanted. The solution was the Beetle, a small car that would not just take them from point A to point B, but make the journey memorable as well."
Memo to copy writers: when selling German products, DO NOT mention the late 1930s. Because, like, some might respond to this ad by saying, "Wait a minute, was the Beetle the result of a car manufacturer considering what people really wanted? I remember reading that Adolf Hitler ordered Ferdinand Porsche to produce a small, inexpensive car. It could be built only because of subsidies provided by the state. And wait a minute, there was something about the design being stolen from a Czech model, for which Volkswagen later had to pay substantial damages."

Mobiles and Tamiflu

Since November 1, prepaid connections have been discontinued in Jammu and Kashmir. The Home Ministry ordered the prohibition because it felt vendors were issuing connections without vetting applicants properly, creating a security threat in the troubled state. J&K's chief minister, Omar Abdullah, is protesting the move, but the Centre rejects the idea that the entire population is being punished. Just get postpaid connections, says the Home Minister, they're equally cheap.
The principle, though, is plain unfair. If the Home Ministry found, during random checks, that connections were being given to customers without proper verification, it should have penalised service operators and vendors. But governments in India, whether state or federal, are perfectly happy to prohibit a range of services because of fear of their possible misuse.
A great example of this is the ban on the sale of Tamiflu across the country. No chemist is allowed to stock the potentially life saving drug, though a generic version is manufactured in vast quantities within India. A few hospitals in each state hand out the tablets, after tests confirm a patient has swine flu. Now I'm no doctor (those readers who are, please verify the accuracy of what I'm saying about Tamiflu), but I've heard that Tamiflu should be taken within 12 to 48 hours of the onset of flu symptoms. The first stop for most people when they have fever is their GP. He prescribes the usual medication, and only elevates the case if the fever does not abate. By the time a patient gets to a hospital, is diagnosed, and tested for swine flu, the 48 hour mark is long gone, and Tamiflu is virtually useless.
So why aren't doctors allowed to prescribe Tamiflu, and chemists to sell it? For fear of misuse, which might lead to resistant varieties of the virus emerging. Dozens of Indians have doubtless died already because Tamiflu was not presribed in time.
It is true that, once the drug is available at the local chemist's, all and sundry will walk in and buy it, with or without prescription. Nothing will be done to address this laxity. I recall seeing the Gus Van Sant film Drugstore Cowboy, in which Matt Dillon and his fellow addicts break into chemists' shops to get their hands on prescription drugs. My reaction was: just come to India, you can buy all the prescription drugs you want, no matter how lethal, over the counter.
Even if the authorities clamped down on the sale of scheduled drugs without prescription, it would be easy enough to get one from most family physicians. When I first travelled to England as a student, I was asked to fill out a form listing ailments I'd suffered from, and get it signed by my GP. There was nothing serious in there apart from a bout of Hepatitis I'd suffered a few months previously. My doctor looked at what I'd written and said in a troubled voice, "Why did you put in the jaundice? They may not give you a visa." I told him I didn't think the visa would be a problem, but since I'd heard some kinds of Hepatitis were chronic, it was best to provide the information just in case I had a relapse.
This grew into an argument, with him insisting I should lie in the form, and me telling him it was my concern, not his, whether or not I got to England. Astonishingly, he refused to sign the document, and I had to get a signature from another doctor, who knew nothing about my medical history, and was not concerned about my prospects.

What waiters should never do

Bruce Buschel has compiled a list of 100 things restaurant staffers should never do. I've supplemented this with a list of my own geared to Indian restaurants. Please add your own pet peeves.

DO NOT

drag furniture across hard floors while setting tables if some guests are already seated.

form chatting huddles at the counter or in corners.

proffer plastic bottles of water for temperature checks.

watch the cricket match on TV instead of attending to guests.

crouch, or place a hand on a chair and lean down to speak.

automatically suggest the most expensive item on the menu when asked for recommendations.

presume guests will order a particular dish because they have done so the last dozen times they visited.

insist on helping guests place napkins on their lap after they indicate they are capable of doing it themselves.

be stingy with menus by having two guests share a card and then snatching it away at the first opportunity.

place the bill before the male rather than at a neutral spot after a couple finishes dining.

Serve red wine warm (room temperature in Bombay is rather higher than room temperature in Bordeaux).

Title Trend

These are the titles of some recently released Hindi films, along with a couple of high-profile movies due for release soon: Blue, Wanted, Wake Up Sid, What's Your Rashee?, London Dreams, Acid Factory, Let's Dance, Paying Guests, New York, ShortKut, Luck, Life Partner, Daddy Cool, Do Knot Disturb, All The Best, London Dreams, Jail, 3 Idiots, Kites and My Name is Khan. It's as if all the Hindustani words in the dictionary have been used up.

London round-up

Having failed to produce a post each day as I'd promised, and with the London trip already a couple of weeks behind me, I've decided to wrap the thing up with a single post consisting of jottings about different exhibitions. Most are still on view as I write, meaning if you're headed for England around now, you can catch them live.

Damien Hirst: After the pasting he's got from critics, it seems appropriate that black and blue are the predominant colours in Hirst's show. Its title, No Love Lost: The Blue Paintings also sounds prescient.


Most of the twenty-five canvases were produced for the billionaire Ukrainian collector Victor Pinchuk between 2006 and 2008, and are being displayed until the end of January 2010 at the Wallace Collection, a museum in central London best known for 17th and 18th century paintings and objets d'art. Hirst has painted every image himself, eschewing his usual practice of outsourcing that side of art creation to employees. The setting inside a grand museum, the reference to Picasso in the title and to Francis Bacon in the imagery, point at hubristic ambition almost impossible to live up to. Outside that context, and the rumoured 50 million dollars paid for the pictures, I liked the work, particularly the two triptychs, of which one, titled The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth is pictured above. The moody blue-black brought to mind a poem by D.H. Lawrence called Bavarian Gentians.

I hadn't been to the Wallace Collection before, and found it an exceptional group of artefacts, the only drawback being its concentration on the 18th century, which in my opinion is a low point in the history of European painting. In delivering lectures summarising the history of art, I'm flummoxed when, after considering Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian; and then 17th century masters like Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Velazquez, I arrive at Watteau and Boucher. I skip quickly past them and neoclassical artists such as David, to find relief in the 19th century, in Gericault, Delacroix and Turner.

The Collection also contains a substantial armoury, which includes Tipu Sultan's sword. But owning Tipu's sword is like owning Sachin Tendulkar's bat. There are so many of them. Vijay Mallya bought one a few years ago, and another was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of:

Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts. The show is high on atmosphere, but low on spectacular or unusual display items. Barely worth the ticket price for anybody familiar with the V&A's collection and those of major British and Indian museums.


Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery: A number of shiny pieces crying out to be bought. I saw this show on my first day in London, and was rather irritated by its overt commercialness. After catching the survey at the Royal Academy, I felt more generously towards the Lisson works. Kapoor employs a couple of dozen workers in his studio, and large projects like Svayambh probably don't provide him substantial margins. The man has to make money somewhere, and I'm sure his admirers are eager to acquire easy-to-display items.

N S Harsha at Victoria Miro: Harsha did the sensible thing, showing his new, somewhat expressionist explorations at Sakshi in Bombay, and sticking with the tried and tested -- delicately brushed images using repeated motifs -- for his London exhibition. He created, also, a fine installation on the upper level, though it was overshadowed by Grayson Perry's giant tapestry on the top floor.

Rina Bannerjee and Raqib Shaw at Thomas Gibson Fine Art: The two make a good pairing, since both are interested in decoration. Shaw, in my opinion, really gets it, pushing ornateness to its limits without apology, and combining it with violent, morbid imagery.


Bannerjee, meanwhile, muddies the waters, uncertain of how critical she ought to be about the decorative values she employs. A strong set of paintings nevertheless.


RAQS Media Collective at Tate Britain: This group came to the art world as Amar Kanwar did: through the intervention of Okwui Enwezor, who selected RAQS for Documenta 2002. They produce video and web based pieces that often incorporate historical or other documentary material. The three, Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, are super-intelligent, but I have always found their work visually uninvolving and their texts pretentious. This was certainly true of The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet (the title itself gives an idea of the preciousness that puts me off) at Tate Britain. I don't have the voice-over from this video to provide as an example of what I mean by pretentious, but here's a randomly selected extract from the texts on their website:
"First, let a map be drawn. Let a cadastral reckoning be inked of who owns what, who owes what to whom. Let empty lots yield. Let letters and numbers do the talking. Let the land be silent.
Who has ever heard the land speak?"
They are fond of using immense rhetorical questions such as, "Who has ever heard the land speak?"
RAQS also featured at Frieze with a sculptural work, a clock containing words instead of numbers, words like epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, and so on. Again, pretentious is the first word that sprang to mind.


But RAQS have featured at some of the most prestigious exhibitions and museums in the world, so maybe there's something in their output that I'm missing.
At Tate Britain, they were provided a prominent room right next to:

Turner and the Masters: The show juxtaposes works by Titian, Rembrandt, Canaletto and others with canvases by Turner. Plenty of seriously good stuff, but my biggest take-away from the show was the ineptness of Turner when it comes to faces. He's Britain's greatest artist, no doubt, matchless when it comes to atmospheric landscapes, but he produced few, if any, memorable portraits.


The show demonstrates that the paintings which inspired Turner often contained really interesting countenances, but his own versions relegated these to tertiary status. Even when he did give such figures prominence, he usually did a far better job with the background.

Subodh Gupta at Hauser & Wirth

"Oh no". That was my first reaction on entering Hauser&Wirth's gallery in Old Bond Street and glimpsing Et Tu, Duchamp?, Subodh Gupta's larger-than-life-size bronze sculpture on a marble plinth.


Back in 1919, Marcel Duchamp sketched a mustache and goatee on a cheap reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. He subtitled this new artwork L.H.O.O.Q., a pun on 'Elle a chaud au cul', meaning, literally, "She has a hot ass".


The self-consciously juvenile desecration of the image was part of the artist's questioning of the iconic status accorded to certain artworks.
By casting a monumental version of L.H.O.O.Q., Gupta signals that Duchamp has achieved the sacred reputation he appeared to decry. But Duchamp's art was always double-edged, too deeply ironic to be reducible to a manifesto of anti-art. He made miniaturised editions of his early output, and carefully supervised reproductions of lost works, evidence that he did not view them as throw-away jokes, and that he was not averse to a place in the artists' pantheon.
All this is well-established now. The question is: what has Gupta added to the discourse by creating Et Tu Duchamp?
For a while, I wondered if the Gurgaon-based artist, influenced by Rhonda Shearer's thesis that L.H.O.O.Q. merges Duchamp's self-portrait with La Gioconda, had created a sculpture that borrowed his own features. After looking closely, though, I concluded that the bearded woman's slightly masculine visage was an accident of the transfer to three-dimensions rather than an art historical intervention.
The inspirations behind Gupta's art tend to be very simple; he is instinctive and emotional rather than cerebral. This has served him excellently in the past, but a more intellectual approach was called for when he decided to cite fellow artists. The other such work in the show is Jeff The Koons, and consists of multiple casts of the box in which Koons' puppies are packed and dispatched.


There's an echo of Warhol's Brillo boxes here, but little to keep one looking at the work beyond admiring the way frayed cardboard has been rendered in metal. The same question that sprang to my mind in the Ducamp room was accentuated by the Koons work: What is the point of this?
The point, if there is any, is that Subodh is trying to navigate away from his signature stainless steel pots and pans. There are stainless steel works in Hauser & Wirth's Piccadilly space,


but the show as a whole takes off in far too many different directions. Apart from the Duchamp and Koons strand, there is an axe with a neon tube coiled around its handle; a fibreglass tree breaking through a wall; ; a series of Yves Kleinesque body prints of the artist's genitals, titled Master Bet (not the only bad pun in the show); casts of potatoes and mangoes; and fans with swastika blades.


The black and white pairing indicates the two different meanings of the form: auspicious in India, a symbol of hatred in much of the world. The room with the ceiling fans also has two massive stainless steel spoons nestling on the floor below, and is the most elegant section of the exhibition.
The word 'transitional' kept coming up in conversations about Common Man (that's the show's title), but as one expert (who probably does not want to be named) pointed out, a major solo in one of the world's leading galleries is the worst possible time to produce transitional work.

Anish Kapoor and India

Of the two dozen or so shows, big and small, that I took in during my London stay, the most exhilarating was undoubtedly Anish Kapoor's mid-career retrospective at the Royal Academy. The artist presents visitors to Burlington House with an astonishing play of colour, texture and volume, from the gravity defying metal balloons in the courtyard,


through the illusory optics of his signature mirrored stainless steel, to a room filled with coils of cement placed on wooden pallets, and another occupied by a rusted steel hull.


Among the newest works on view are two that use a mix of wax, red pigment and vaseline. Shooting Into a Corner consists of a cannon that is fired every twenty minutes after being loaded with a cylinder of compacted wax.



The second 'waxwork', titled Svayambh, is a 30-tonne red block on tracks, moving slowly up and down five rooms of the museum, slathering the arches and floor with goop as it goes. It is sculpture reinvented, occupying time as well as space, challenging the attention spans of room-a-minute viewers and rewarding the patience of those who stay through its journey. It is a train, a closing door, an eclipse, a phallus.
This last association is hinted at by the work's title, which calls to mind svayambhu (or self-generated) lingams worshipped in temples across India, and emphasised by the indentations created in the massive block by edges of columns in the Academy's arched doorways.


The incursion of the lingam within the negative space of classical arches inside one of Britain's most venerable institutions is an audacious postcolonial gesture, though one that has been entirely ignored by British critics. Svayambh has been displayed before in France and Germany, but it is as if those were just rehearsals for its proper staging at the Royal Academy.
It is unsurprising, perhaps, that the political associations of Svayambh and Shooting into a Corner have been overlooked, because Kapoor is not known as a political artist. Among the most frequently cited quotes by him is, "I have nothing to say". But he also stated, in the same interview and almost in the same breath, "I hate formalism, because formalism implies a death of the subject and the subject is the only reason to be an artist."
With Svayambh, it is as if Kapoor is consciously re-acknowledging the Indian side of him, a side manifest in his early work, later downplayed as he sought to evade the label of 'Indian artist', which can now emerge again in a manner that is not reductive.

Saffronart discussion

Last Thursday, Dinesh Vazirani, Amrita Jhaveri and I were on a panel at Saffronart's London space, talking about 'Junctures and Departures: Locating Modern and Contemporary Indian Art Today'. The hourlong discussion has been uploaded on Saffronart's website, along with a transcript, and can be accessed here.

Thoughts on Frieze and the thawing market

The dealers who had rented booths at the Frieze art fair this year played it safe. There were paintings, and more paintings, and yet more paintings. Damien Hirst, showing a suite of canvases elsewhere summed up the mood: "paintings are easier to shift – even in a recession people like paintings". Critics didn't like Hirst's paintings; in fact, it is fair to say they hated them, but I'll leave details of that show for another post.
Frieze is just seven years old, and still fairly small, but appears to have lost its edge. Maybe that is part of the process of growing up, but the link between the recession and conservative choices needs further consideration. Experimental art is supposed to be subversive, to question the established order, yet it flourishes most when the rich are awash with cash. Enron Corporation amassed one of the best collections of ultra-contemporary art in the years it was profiting from deregulation and scamming its way to near the top of the Fortune 500. Many of the financial geniuses who drove the world to the brink of bankruptcy last year are major art collectors. It's about time critics stop pretending that avant-garde-ish art serves some revolutionary political purpose (Indians are particularly prone to this belief).
The only Indian gallery featured at Frieze this year was Project 88, in the 'Frame' section reserved for new spaces. Sree Goswami showcased Sarnath Banerjee's amusing cartoons in her booth, and displayed a cute piece by Neha Choksi in the sculpture park nearby. Choksi's A Child's Grove was given a privileged position, between works by Louise Bourgeois and Paul McCarthy. According to news reports, a number of Sarnath's works were picked up for prices around USD 10,000 - 12,000 each, which is pretty good going.

There were few effects of the recession visible in London in the week I was there. The city seemed as busy as ever, all the restaurants and shops I visited were overflowing, and commuters in the Tube were more smartly dressed than I remember. Friends tell me that March and April were awful months, with 'To Let' signs on every second window and a doom-laden atmosphere. Obviously, a corner has been turned, though too late for Gordon Brown to survive as Prime Minister beyond next year's general election.

A year ago, it seemed that fundamental changes would be necessary to get the global financial house in order. Those hopes (or fears) have faded, and business as usual seems to be the order of the day. But what if the crisis does result in a long term restructuring of priorities in terms of consumption versus saving, and executive compensation? In the US thirty years ago, the average CEO of a large corporation received a wage about 50 times that of the average worker. If that seems high, consider that in 2007 the figure had changed drastically in favour of the rich: the average CEO earned more than 500 times as much as the average worker that year. A similar pattern played out elsewhere, and income inequality showed a significant rise in most regions of the world (It is worth mentioning that income inequality between regions declined in this period, due mainly to the development of China's economy). The growing wealth in the hands of very few was a crucial factor in fuelling the boom in art prices at the high end. If a situation were to arise in which the richest 10% earn a progressively smaller portion of total income, it will probably mean a long term recession in the art market.

Speaking of the Indian scene, I've heard that a couple of art funds are about to reach maturity, and are carrying a large stock of work. I've long believed that the substantial share of total purchases controlled by art funds in India will lead to a greater drop in this country relative to other markets because, unlike individual collectors who tend to hang on to works till prices turn upwards, funds with set redemption dates have to sell at whatever price they can get. Even as supply is constrained in mature markets, it will be unrestricted in India. Among readers of this blog, the very knowledgeable Torntash has suggested that funds will find arrangements outside of conventional direct sales to dispose off their assets. In a few weeks, we should have a hint of how successful such unconventional methods have been.