exhibition hopping, dinner at mahim and a burning jeep

i like these days when we hop into the car and drive all the way to town to drift from gallery to gallery, looking at new work, bitching about most and admiring very little. the openings of art shows are getting more and more glamorous, wine glasses tinkle and the starters are very fancy.

yesterday, aditya, saurabh, ranjit, sonal, kaushik, mohua and me started off at dodiyas new bhupen khakkar exhibition in the beautiful new chemould space. for an exhibition that was meant to be full of in-jokes and personal memories; it was curiously very distant. the cleanliness of the frame through which khakkars odd sexual ironies were seen made the exhibition curiously boring. but not as boring as the laxman shreshta exhibition at pundole.

generally, i am not one for abstract landscape meditations, but do remember being awed by a mark rothko in the national gallery in the usa. the shreshta the paintings were messy black and white dabs of colour, that were so much about nothing that even as landscapes they did not draw you in. i thought that even for what they were trying to do, they weren’t much to look at and did what they were trying to do badly.

the fanciness and the glitterati of the art world was all assembled in a heap at bodhi where the starters are always divine. it felt like a fashion show. artists drifted in like swans, each with their own groups and smoothly floated over the floor talking to the ones they knew and looking over their shoulders for the more important person across the room. subodh gupta after covering himself up with globs of vaseline and sitting naked on a chair for a self portrait had come up with this huge exquisitely made exhibit of so-called everyday objects forming ufos and moving cityscapes. the idea being of course that this migrant from bihar and his relationship with the glitz of the city- been there done that. at some point i began to wonder about this relationship. doesn’t at some point the one liner wear thin? how does the sheen of the stainless steel relate to the everyday lotas and tiffins he uses? and, to be honest, isn’t it all just a little too pat.

i drove to dinner rafter that to neeras place- an architects assembly, where i met architects from across the city, country and world. the view was fabulous and the bitching even better.

on the way back, at lic, when i turned in, at the garbage dump a jeep was burning in full glory. somebody was trying to remove traces of a murder, i think.