KHOJ Residency, India

I just got back from 4 days in Bombay. As soon as I arrived there, I realised that my problems with Delhi arise from the fact that Delhi is sick, a place where a sane and healthy life is impossible. Cancerous urbanism is entwined with mass psychosis, and the patient is receiving open-heart surgery without anaesthetic.

11/9 – The weekend in Kashmir began with an unforgettable ride to the airport, and to Ashok’s many fine qualities I must now add ruthlessness and creativity. Sitting in the back seat was like watching gladiatorial combat, as he sliced, thrust and carved his way through a 6 lane tangle of hopelessly snarled traffic. Actually, the notion of lanes is rather abstract in Delhi, since if there’s a gap of any kind, you fill it with your car. That morning, even this strategy was inadequate, and at times we were bumping along the dirt bordering the highway, weaving through bushes.

There were a few extra security precautions at the airport, but it didn’t really prepare me for Srinagar, which is a city under full blown military occupation. There are check points or military bases every couple of hundred yards, patrols everywhere, and heavily armoured vehicles at junctions. It’s not what you’d call a hearts and minds policy. I caught a glimpse of what it must be like for the average Kashmiri when the next day I was visited on my houseboat by a soldier, who asked if I had any booze, and would I give him a small bottle. I was teasing him, illustrating increasingly tinier sizes of bottle, until he gave up and went away. Fine, I’m a tourist, and there was no real threat. But if he’d wandered up to my market stall and helped himself to a T-shirt, then it would be a different story.

Not that I think independence for Kashmir is the answer. With the whole of India currently remembering the atrocities of Partition in ’47, and with the recent example of Yugoslavia, you’d have thought the idea might have lost some of its attraction. Little details like that don’t bother the nationalists though, some of the most fervent of whom seem to be expatriates, like the gentleman I met on Saturday, who was visiting from his home in Los Angeles. He was a cousin of the effusive Mr. Butt, who manages the houseboats where I’m staying, and I suspect US$ bankrolled the operation during the lean years when Kashmir was really a war zone. While we were talking there was a major event taking place next door, involving a fair amount of amplified ranting. It was the tomb of Sheikh Abdullah, prime minister for a few years of a Kashmiri government after Indian independence. His son, a politician booted out a couple of years ago for gross corruption, was attending the ceremony to commemorate his fathers death, so the security presence was intense, with a mobile crane examining the trees along the street outside. Being a foreigner, I was able to stroll through the security cordon, and the fact that I was still wearing my pyjamas gave the whole thing a very dreamlike feeling.

The day I arrived, a Friday, all the mullahs were in full flow, and a lot of them sounded quite angry too. I’d love to record the public utterance of the major religions and play it back to a group who spoke none of the languages involved, to see what they thought was being said. On Sunday there was a visit by Sonia Gandhi, followed by a minister visiting the university, and I’m flying out on 9/11, so perhaps the situation was a little more tense than usual. But even if you manage to ignore the hordes of men walking around with guns or shouting through loudspeakers, I still don’t see how Srinagar earns this ‘Paradise on Earth’ tag that everyone is still so keen to ram down your throat. Okay, it’s got a lake surrounded by mountains. Switzerland is superabundantly endowed with mountain lakes, into which no-one throws their rubbish, but everyone simply parrots Orson’s stale gag. Reading the guestbook at the Butt’s Clermont you feel that there’s some kind of mass hypnosis going on. Some of this must be due to Mr. Butt himself, who is so keen to please, and so proud of the paeans of praise filling the previous 14 guestbooks, which you are more or less obliged to read, that you feel a single note of discontent might cause him to commit hari-kiri. This is terribly mean of me, because he is a very sweet man, and looks after his guests incredibly well. There is an entire room devoted to photos of the more famous of them, who have included Nelson Rockefeller, George Harrison and Joan Lafontaine. To some extent, the place is trading on these glory days, and the houseboats themselves have the slightly shabby elegance that was always popular with the British upper class. They’re moored alongside a flower filled garden, also rather English in style, and it was a great place to sit around and read Penrose’s “Road to Reality”. It’s rather like hacking one’s way through a jungle of mathematical notation, but worth it for the occasional clearing that one finds.

One day I took a car and driver. Leaving Srinagar, the air was sweetly scented by the marijuana growing wild along the verges, succeeded by fields of rice ready for harvesting, the leaves finely striped in yellow, green and red (isn’t that the Jamaican flag, curiously?), the colours optically combining into a fresh and luminous gold. We took the road towards Ladakh, turning left at Kangan, up to the roadhead at Narayan, where there are the ruins of a temple constructed from massive blocks of weather-worn granite. From here we walked, following a path uphill alongside a crashing mountain torrent of total clarity. The people we met were Guja, though this may just mean ‘mountain people’. More specifically some were Wakarwal, or a word like that. Some were living in settlements of low, square timber cabins with earth roofs, but others who crossed our path were descending from tents pitched way up on the summer pastures. It must be a tough life, but, had they told me this was paradise, I would have been more inclined to believe them. The women had a confidence of manner and a bodily freedom that was very attractive, in marked contrast to their sisters of the plain, hobbled by the repressive strictures of caste, islam or consumer fashion.

10/9 – I’m very conscious that I’ve scarcely mentioned the fourth artist of the Khoj residency, Rohini Devasher. She makes menacingly beautiful, dense, photoshop compositions of outlandish hybrid plants, operating on the border between chaos and order. As a Delhi resident, she has to commute three hours each day to the studio, and so there has simply been less opportunity for casual interaction, although during the first two weeks she patiently dealt with dozens of agitated phone calls from the two helpless Europeans. Rohini was also, as a part time staff member of Khoj, responsible for making contact with Delhi’s scientific institutions during the organisation of the residency. In the last ten days this has begun to bear fruit, as people return from holiday.

I was visited at the studio by Professor Anu Venugopalan, visibly alarmed by having had to pick her way through the mud and stinking, bloated bodies of rats that had drowned in the most recent downpour. When I told Abishek, later, he said “Probably another Tam Bram”, the highly educated and successful Tamil Brahmins who dominate a lot of the professions. I was painfully aware of how implausible the situation must have looked through her eyes, providing a further blow to my confidence at that point. However, we had an interesting conversation about the mental imagery that quantum physicists somewhat furtively use, although I was unable to freeze frame her thinking in the mini lecture on decoherence that I requested, and maybe I’ll have to record explanations in order to analyse them. I’m sure she was as puzzled when she left as when she arrived, but she very kindly provided an introduction to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

On Monday I went over to the Indian Institute of Technology, known as IIT, to meet Professor Thyagarajan. (The joke among more theoretical physicists, according to Abishek, is “What is the value of iit?” Quite funny, if you know a little maths.) He was a very engaging guy, in a book-strewn windowless den, whose shock of springy curls seemed to perfectly suit his intellectual playfulness. His work involves cryptographic applications of photon entanglement. I’m very tempted to explain it here, but I’ve also got to write about my experience of Kashmir, to which I escaped for the weekend. The conversation with Thyagarajan was very entertaining. I was astounded to discover that wave particle duality, as revealed by an experiment in which you fire particles through one or two slits, is still observable when you use C60 molecules, comparatively enormous structures composed of 60 carbon atoms, and tangibly solid enough that nano-engineers can actually build functional things using them. But in this experiment they behave as if they were simply vibrations of pure energy. It’s as if the Eiffel tower turned into a piece of music. From there we somehow got onto metamaterials, which can exhibit wildly unusual properties such as a negative refractive index, through being assembled at a molecular level. That suggested the possibility of modelling these structures at a macro scale, and investigating the resulting optical properties. I doubt that anything is going to result immediately from these ideas, but this doesn’t pose a problem now that I have redefined my project as a series of conversations.

Maybe visiting the Taj Mahal did provide a turning point in this residency, though the quiet, lush garden that surrounds it was perhaps more of a tonic than the architecture itself. Which isn't to deny that the building transcends the iconic status that it has been burdened with, exceeding expectations. Its architectonic restraint and relentless symmetry could be severe, but are relieved by the life within the stone itself, and the delicate carving. Since the Taj is always photographed without people, the most delightful discovery was how it acted as a luminously white backdrop to the saris of the many Indian visitors, astounding juxtapositions of colour that would pass unnoticed in city streets.

Joanna Hoffmann and I also visited the fort, which puts a rather different spin on the romantic story of the Taj, since the youngest son by Shah Jahan's much beloved Begum went on to murder all his siblings and seize power himself, locking his father up in the fort. All of which tells you a lot about the psychopathology of those who believe themselves eligible or entitled to rule over others, and suggests that the Taj itself might have more to do with political bling than true love.

People's ability to remain blind to what motivates them is astonishing. On Wednesday I had dinner with a woman to whom I had received an introduction from a friend in London. The whole evening was distinctly odd from the very beginning, since I had to telephone from outside the front door, after I'd been ringing the bell for 5 minutes, while a dog inside barked frantically. I was admitted to a gloomy, stifling room, and my host, stout with short silver hair, began barking orders at her two maids. A drink appeared after about three quarters of an hour of stilted conversation, when the chauffeur returned with a couple of bottles of beer. Now you are probably wondering why it didn't occur to me that I'd got the wrong day, but I'd had a text message from my London friend a couple of hours earlier, saying that she had just spoken to this lady about my visit that evening.

About the time I got the drink, one of the maids went out. She returned at about 9.30, and my heart sank when I realized she was carrying the ingredients for dinner. At the same time, the situation was so defiantly odd that I kept having to stifle the urge to laugh, and was curious to see what would develop. My host had a dachshund called Rana, outrageously glossy and healthy, and totally undisciplined. Its attention was totally fixated on the snacks placed on the coffee table, and would gradually manouevre itself within striking distance, at which point the lady would order one of the servants to take the dog away and put it to bed. Invariably, Rana would appear again after ten minutes, to be picked up and cuddled, and rewarded for his disobedience with a crunchy morsel from the table.

I started to notice that the maids would answer back their employer in a way that seemed rather familiar and, when the chauffeur came in to bum a cigarette from his boss and she practically lit it for him, the whole situation took on a tinge of tragedy. I'd discovered that the one subject that seemed to animate my host was talking about herself. Not that it was uninteresting. Her mother, she claimed, was the first daughter recorded in their family tree in 22,000 years. I did splutter and query this, but she blithely continued. Her mother's first child was a boy, and everyone muttered darkly that the curse had reasserted itself, but then, to much rejoicing, our protagonist was born. Apparently, a state holiday was declared. She was then brought up by her grandfather, a widower who doted on her, before becoming a classical dancer in Ravi Shankars entourage. A European diplomat, from an illustrious and wealthy family, smitten with her when he attended one of her performances, then pursued her for a year and a half before, at the tender age of 19, she agreed to marry him. He was 39 years older.

Postings to New York, Washington and Moscow followed, traveling the world by private jet. When he eventually retired to Switzerland, she had to learn, for the first time, how to cook. Then a car accident. He was driving. She was paralysed, in a coma, written off by the doctors. He refused to allow them to turn off the life support machines and, slowly, amazingly, she recovered. It sounds like magical realism segueing into Mills and Boon but, for the latter part at least, there was corroborating evidence and photos.

Aged 58 she was widowed, finding herself alone in a big villa. No children had resulted from this grand passion. She returns to India and, in a gated enclave, in a heavily fortified apartment, she creates this paid family, in which (unless this was Rana's role) she can act the part of the youngest child. The doctors have told her, she says, that she has a heart problem, meaning she shouldn't live on her own. A heart problem. Did she ever ask her mother, I wondered, why she'd given her precious girl child to be brought up by a grandfather? Had she never felt a need to know her mother's reasons? "No, why should I do that?"

I hope I've conveyed the tragi-comic flavour of the evening. I certainly don't intend to mock, since her derangement is perhaps caused by grief. Whatever the cause, I left feeling very uneasy about her future, since Delhi is not a city with much compassion for the weak, unless they happen to be photogenic ex-models, like the junkie prostitute who was recently 'rescued' by one of the daily papers. The ostensible reason for this long digression was the questioning of my own motives for being here. Like many other Londoners, I harbour the illusion that the metropolis consumes an unreasonable amount of my time in existential overheads. Part of the seduction of a 7 week residency in India was the idea of being able to concentrate exclusively on one project without any distractions. This has proved, naturally, totally deluded. Email means it is no longer possible to compartmentalize one's life, even if this were actually desireable. The positive side of this is the recognition that what one spends ones time doing is what one actually does. Painfully obvious perhaps, but to those who share my temperament, always willing to chastise themselves for failing to meet some arbitrary and impossible standard, a valuable lesson. The prolific exchange of emails over the last few weeks, with an electronics wizard I have never met called Mike Harrison, hashing out the details of another public art proposal, are part of the work done on this residency, not time stolen from some primary purpose. Likewise this writing. I don't know if itt's art, and these long screeds probably don't conform to anyone's idea of a blog, but it's taking a chunk of time, and helping to formulate and structure my response to this situation, as well as beginning to reconcile me to the idea of "the text", with which I have always been uncomfortable.

I've also learned something from the treacly resistance that has greeted my attempts to actually construct things, where my mule-ish nature has simply led to exhaustion and despair, as in my last visit to Chawri Bazar. It's made me somewhat envious of the hermetic, laptop environment in which the other resident artists do their imaginings. But I didn't come 4,000 miles to stare at a screen. The difficulties of this residency have simply confirmed my commitment to make work that operates on a sensual, material level.

With my face still stinging from the metaphorical gauntlet wielded by Professor Ranjit Nair, I watched one of Joanna Hoffmann's very beautiful short films. Reminding me of Melies, I realized that her dissolves and superimpositions are the visual equivalent of metaphor and that, in dealing with science, this need not be a dirty word, any more than "subjectivity". We need to articulate the space between the heart and the brain, and the individual and the cosmos, and I don't think it can left to scientists. Abishek Hazra's work appeals on a more cerebral level, transforming systems and structures of knowledge into poetic, playful narratives, a marvelous combination of ludic, Oulipo mischievousness with radical Bengali intellectualism. His commentary on Indian history and politics is always illuminating, even if his frighteningly vast reading means that one occasionally has to call for time out.

With these two as stars in the constellation by which I am orienting myself here in Delhi, my memory was directed to a piece about Mark McGowan that I read a month or two ago. I think he was in conversation with Richard Deacon, and the older artist was struggling not to appear discomfited as they discussed a work of McGowan's that had involved keying (i.e. scratching) random car doors. The economy, elegance and wit of McGowan's work lies in his manipulation of people's expectations, the gap between the real and the imagined, a kind of psychic judo.

In this witches brew, acourse of action is revealing itself, in the shape of a piece of work for the Open Studio day that springs from a direct, emotional response, entangles this with science in a devious manner, and assumes a form that engages the senses. I'm still committed to large-scale, carefully engineered work that is designed to last, where that is appropriate, but a more lightweight, ephemeral approach to other situations could only expand my practice.

Dense inscriptions. An impromptu lecture from Anu Venugopalan on photon entanglement, and the equally tortuous labyrinth of Chawri bazar.