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Lot 95

 

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Jitish Kallat "…is among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community; he examines the life of labour, commemorates the cyclerickshaw puller and the load-bearing porter. And he records these phenomena, not as... Jitish Kallat "…is among the most attentive chroniclers of the postcolonial city seized by the crisis of globalization: he studies its pathologies of violence; he dwells on the fortuitous groups, the crowds of rioters or the assembly of people waiting for a train, that have replaced the cohesive community; he examines the life of labour, commemorates the cyclerickshaw puller and the load-bearing porter. And he records these phenomena, not as impersonal socialscientific memoranda, but through the tender, terrifying immediacy of the painted surface" (Ranjit Hoskote, Alchemy, Art Musings Exhibition Catalogue, Mumbai, 2005, not paginated). His art "...has assumed the adulterated nature of the image and its status as a free-floating entity in the limbo of mass culture and cyber space. His practice would appear to be based on the idea of a transfer, taking the word to mean not only the technical procedures for incorporating found images but also a kind of continual displacement-and collision-of visual...signs." (Deepak Ananth, "Scare Quotes: Jitish Kallat's 'AgitPop'", Jitish Kallat, Nature Morte Exhibition Catalogue, New Delhi, 2005, pg.4)

Kallat's art serves as a palimpsestic documentation of urban life as it unfolds every day. Art critic and historian Deepak Ananth has drawn parallels between Kallat's art and the pictorial language that evolved in art in the 1950s and 1960s-that of the 'flatbed picture plane', theorised by Leo Steinberg. The flatbed plane encompassed a shift in orientation from the vertical to the horizontal plane and served as a receptacle of objects and data, either in a cohesive form or in chaos. Ananth argues that while the underrepresented form the subject matter in Kallat's art, similar to that of his Indian predecessors, he takes this a step forward with a style that is "...street-wise, slangy, hectic and rapid, impatient to register the myriad contradictory signals that come within the precincts of its scan" ("Delirious Entropy", Jitish Kallat: 365 Lives, Arario Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 2007, pg.8). This chaos which is so aphoristic of urban Indian life seems to be transcribed into the current lot.

In its theme, this lot echoes a prior set of works executed in 2007. Kallat frequently turns to the citydweller, either as part of a crowd or in isolation, to comment on their resilience to the harshness of Mumbai. He spoke of the origin of those works in an interview with Beijing based critic and curator Huang Du-they were photographs he had taken of young children selling books at traffic lights in the city, which gave rise to "...a thousand colliding stories; a complex narrative of 18 million people living on a tiny island of 468 square kilometres" (the artist quoted in "Reality Filter: Huang Du's Interview with Jitish Kallat", 365 Lives, Arario Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 2007, pg. 26). Each of the boys in this lot expresses unbridled joy, contrary to the commotion of the streets of the city that "sits atop their heads. In this respect the paintings are double portraits, depictions of street urchins but also portraits of the claustrophobic and chaotic city, its countless narratives tumbling Medusa-like from each child's head".("Jitish Kallat", Haunch of Venison website, accessed May 2012). Kallat's love for elevating the subaltern additionally comes through the bold palette and the use of a sunburst pattern in the background-a device that echoes the glorification of figures seen in propaganda posters of the 20th century.

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