By Sunday, the work was near enough completion that I felt able to take the day off. With Joanna Hoffmann, and a scientist with whom she has been working, I went to the Aksherdam temple. I was a bit reluctant, but it turned out to be one of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen on this trip, a nexus of religion, art, politics, money and crime that encapsulates a lot of contemporary India. It’s vast, and only just completed. They claim 13 million man hours labour, and since nearly every square inch is hand carved, you can believe it. The central temple is supported on a plinth, around which there are 148 elephants carved at about half life size, illustrating various stories. There are illuminated fountains, bigger and better than anything in Las Vegas, and there are funfair style rides! One boasted “10,000 years of Indian Culture in 10 minutes”, an irresistible invitation to a philistine like me. It was a boat ride, through an enormous darkened building, past beautifully crafted tableaux illustrating the glories of Vedic culture. This place is Hindu Disneyland. And just like Disneyland, there are some rather dodgy subtexts. A group of ancient Vedic scientists and engineers were shown constructing primitive aeroplanes and spaceships, which would be funny if it wasn’t for India’s dick-waving stance on nuclear weapons. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of the bold assertion that Vedic scientists invented pi and atomic physics.
The money behind it comes from Gujarat, I was told, and building temples is apparently a classic way of laundering money and buying influence. It’s been built without permission on land next to the Yamuna River, and court actions are in progress. But the chance of anyone who wants to stay in public office ordering it to be knocked down is less than zero. This is a country where ministers were in trouble a couple of weeks ago, for stating that the Ramayana (a story involving monkey gods and demons) was a work of fiction.
The week after getting back from Bombay was fully occupied with construction and painting. The work I am making is based on something called the Cornsweet illusion, which reveals how the brain determines what we see, not our eyes. It involves a field of uniform grey, bisected by a narrow strip in which a light edge meets a dark edge, both fading away into the grey background. The result s that we perceive the whole of the side with the dark edge being darker than the other half. It’s a variation or development of a phenomenon known as Mach’s Bands, described by the same Ernst Mach whose work on mass and gravitation provided the conceptual groundwork for Unni’s Cosmic Relativity.
I painted a small wall in the studio as a test, and realised that I could improve on the version that one normally sees, by reducing the tonal difference at the edge transition. The result is that one sees a white square next to a pale grey square, with absolutely no indication that almost the whole area is actually exactly the same tone. It’s not an illusion that flips between two alternative ways of perceiving it. The brain literally refuses to let you see the truth. It’s because the brain is always tenaciously trying to construct a 3D model of the space surrounding us, from 2D images on the retinas. As a result the effect is far more pronounced when it forms part of a space, as in this installation, than in a printed or screen image.
Abishek had given me a list of Bombay galleries to check out. Staff at the hotel seemed clueless as to their location, even when provided with their addresses. However, at the first one I managed to find, I fortunately met one of the directors, Mort Chatterjee, who gave me directions to the other galleries, most of which turned out to be within a ten minute radius (on foot) from the hotel. For the benefit of others wanting to check out Bombay’s lively art scene, I have produced a gallery map, which should be available soon at all the serious Colaba galleries.
The Chatterjee and Lal gallery is a lovely loft style space, which was showing the slyly funny paintings of Piyali Ghosh, which mock the mannerisms and pretensions of the ruling class in vicious human-animal hybrid caricatures. I also enjoyed the work at The Guild, two series of contrasting work by Praja Papotnis, one of glistening viscera, the other of gridded systems derived from the facades of apartment blocks.
As I left Bombay, the 5 day festival of Ganpati was beginning. Everywhere in the city one met small processions following vividly painted plaster statues of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, accompanied by ear-splitting drumming. Temporary temples, lashed together out of bamboo and tarpaulin, accommodated larger statues and attracted a steady stream of devotees. In some districts these structures reach fantastic proportions, and actually become giant sculptures. Apparently, organised crime bosses use this as a way of marking territory and demonstrating their power. I saw a photograph in the newspaper of one in the shape of a cruise liner, about 200 feet long, funded (allegedly) by a £30,000 donation from a crime boss whose base of operations is a similar vessel, prowling the lawless waters off Malaysia.
During my stay in Bombay I had a skype conversation with Julienne Dolphin Wilding, an artist now based in Barcelona, and a human being of rare integrity and good sense. I was telling her about my plans for the Open Studio exhibition at the end of the residency, which involved creating a hellish cacophony out of sampled hooting and beeping, and painting “Inconvenience is Regretted” on the wall in huge letters, a sign that adorns the construction chaos that is Delhi’s roads, and whose passive aggressive quality seems to typify the relationship of Delhi’s citizens with one another.
Julienne suggested that rather than replicating the mess and frustration, perhaps I should consider an antidote to it. At the time, I baulked at the idea, feeling that honest anger was a valid response. Perhaps it was, but I’d been bothered by a feeling that somehow this wasn’t my own work, having no connection to more longstanding concerns. Her comments stewed in my subconscious along with a dense mishmash of ideas about Cosmic Relativity, and a couple of days later I enjoyed a bout of lucidity in which a new plan for the Open Studio was revealed. Perhaps being away from Delhi also allowed me to see the endlessly perpetuated cycle of anger in which I, along with many of its inhabitants, was trapped. I realised that I could feel compassion for the victims of this hideous, dystopian experiment instead, and that working from this position felt much better.
I’m aware that my Buddhist credentials leave a lot to be desired, if I can’t achieve that realisation while immersed in the pain and ignorance, but I’m trying to be more forgiving with myself as well. Curiously, since returning to Delhi, I have been much less aware of being surrounded by anger. Perhaps I am simply becoming indifferent, but it seems more likely that a lot of it was the reflection of anger that I was carrying.
The other set-up in Unnikrishnan's lab was an apparatus for measuring the speed of light, something that has been done countless times before. However, during a couple of evenings spent with Unni, I came to realise it was part of a quite radical program of research (see sidebar for context). He has experimental evidence backed up by theory, showing that the speed of light is only constant within the frame of reference provided by the mass of the entire Universe. This means the movement of an observer does affect the result of measurement, when done in a way that is not self-cancelling.
He is calling this theory Cosmic Relativity, and it will force some major revisions in other areas of physics. The problem is that, a century after Einstein, Special Relativity has acquired the status of a religious belief. To question Einstein is heresy, and a scientist doing so has to tread very carefully indeed.
I find Unni’s ideas exciting and profoundly significant, and in a way that I can respond to as an artist. It’s the rebirth, in another form, of the aether, that elusive 19th century medium of propagation for light. It restores an underlying reality to the Universe and a coherence to our individual experiences. Light, in its plenitude of rational and spiritual meaning, becomes once again part of tangible kinematics, rather than an abstract anomaly.
