Jitish Kallat
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A profile
India Today, January 20, 2016
Gayatri Jayaraman
The self-destructing artist
Prolific artist Jitish Kallat is in an infinite loop with his shows, 'Sightings' and 'Covering Letter', and in his surrender to the letters of his words and the elements of his medium, is his evolution.
There is an incredible continuum to Jitish Kallat's diverse repertoire that loops back every now and then like a planet in one of those constellations he likes to create-whether out of fruit, in 'Sightings' (2015), or in the orbs of singed paper in 'Wind Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season)' (2015)-hitting its orbit. In the cryptic half messages scribbled on 'Wind Study', he resurrects a two-decade-old habit of leaving notes to his work, and in the metaphysics of the dental-plaster menagerie in repose, it is he who is the 'Infinite Episode', the title he assigns to his current exhibit on display at Gallery Chemould Prescott Road. Kallat is prolific and elemental. His 'Public Notice 2' (2007)-a work bought by UK billionaire Charles Saatchi in 2007 and bequeathed along with works such as those of British artist Tracy Emin's 'Bed', French-Algerian artist Kader Attia's 'Ghost' in the bequest of the Saatchi Gallery to the Museum of Contemporary Art, London-encompasses Mahatma Gandhi's entire speech on the eve of the Dandi March, and has just wrapped up in the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. His 'Covering Letter' (2012), using a missive from Gandhi to Hitler urging him to reconsider his violent ways (presciently written in 1939, five weeks before World War II broke out) is installed in Mumbai. The letter exists only in scrolling photons projected onto a curtain of mist in a darkened room towards which the viewer must walk and insert himself bodily into the work to pass through the other side. To cultural theorist Homi Bhabha, speaking at the vernissage, it evoked the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Installed in a public space in Mumbai, the work speaks powerfully of a dialogue between two historic extremes-of violence and peace. In as much as Kallat puts the public on notice, and in as much as Gandhi put Hitler and humanity on notice, the artist with his penchant for playing with the form of letters-burnt ones to cremate Nehru's words, bones to fossilise Swami Vivekananda's, and mist to vapourise Gandhi's-makes the viewer inserted into it question his personal equation with history. "Each of these public notices are sensorial provocations, not cerebral provocations," Kallat says. Where, after all does 'Public Notice 3' (2010)-which spells out Swami Vivekanand's speech delivered exactly 108 years prior to the 9/11 attacks in the LED lights of the Homeland Terror Alert coding system-exist, he asks. In light or projection or the form that receives it or impact? By challenging the form, he takes an oft-seen and little-spoken?set of words-each of these texts are easily available to the public in books or at Mani Bhavan in original letter form-and he breaks it out of its cliches and makes it speak to its viewer all over again. There is not one way in which art can be seen, he says, insisting on deglamourising words from the monopolistic grasp of erudition. "We assume that a historian walking through the letter would understand more of that artwork than somebody who doesn't know about the letter. We assume that all that citational information that this person carries is of greater relevance than a real, sensitive and physically present individual who can inhabit the shade and light of that moment...to just be in that remote knowledge of what Gandhi and Hitler signify for themselves," Kallat says. As viewers enter the dark, bathed in the letter of Gandhi's words towards the curtain of mist, they involuntarily bow. In all Kallat's works is a physical mise en scene of discomfort. In Public Notice 2 (2007), the text reads white on yellow, 4,600 bones in all. "The image retention is of bones and bones and bones and bones... collectively they have a condensed visceral experience. In 'Public Notice 3' (2010), viewers start moving to the edge of the railing, "because a word in red lumens leaves the after image of blue on the next word, and so there is this contradiction of colours regurgitating their own negatives in your own eye," he says. He achieves this resurrection again in the almost-dashavatar of sleeping animals. In evolution's many modes tamed to equanimity, he evokes a return to innocence. What he calls a "surrender of scale which comes from a space of prolonged speculation on what did we surrender and regain in the process of wakefulness last night?" In sleep is the near death of many things, but also the rebirth of many things, he notes. But it is in the six works of 'Wind Study' that Kallat pushes himself to elemental truths. Applying gum to the paper on which he draws graphite line drawings, he lays them outside his studio, under the tree, open to the sky and sets fire, line by line, orb by orb, to random lines of it. He watches as the barely perceptible movement of the wind in a three-second time frame shifts the direction of the flame from north to west, leaving the paper singed with self-illuminated back-lit golden lines of light that Kallat refers to as "sunsets on a line that no watercolour could replicate". In the standing there, in all the humility of a not-easy straining-against all artistic training, to surrender to this conversation between wind and with the symbolic metaphysics of the fire, is Kallat's supreme destruction of the self. "I'm completely an eavesdropper, almost an interloper, basically just convening a process where the drawing itself is a transcript," he says. The resulting image is what Bhabha refers to as a photography of sorts. Kallat agrees: "I have felt that these are pictures of things I cannot see." An image made by the elements of a day. The result is not just an image but an alteration to the state of control an artist possesses. "It tells you that there is a wider state of grace as an artist one can aspire to. These drawings carry extremely powerful and fundamental forces in small units. Any bigger a fire and I would not exist. Any bigger a wind and I would not exist. It's a very small unit in which this can occur. It's a humbling." It is also a lesson of harmony embodied in the infinitely-looping bow of traffic signage on the roundabout in Stockereau, Austria in his 'Here After Here After Here' (2015). "What is a roundabout but a non-place?" he asks, explaining that all exits to 'place' begin from 'non place'. It is the harmony in the face of the sleeping alabaster elephant, tensile tough, visually fragile and contradicting its own materiality. Like the mist of words that is infinitely scrolling, like the galaxies seemingly and visually forming around the 'beeja' or primordial seed of entire worlds upon the skin of common fruit at the Pali market, Bandra, evolution, he seems to say, is not in the mere revisiting of older selves and bodies. Historicity in itself is meaningless, but it is in destroying old ways of seeing, and resurrecting new forms, that we see them and ourselves, assigned to new meaning.
