the uses of impossible solutions

superstudio

was at the sparc office in khetwadi today. the office is on the second floor of an old school building, built in stone with lovely kota floors and jack-arch ceilings. it was a meeting to discuss, what else, dharavi. cept, it seems has done some work on it too and was presenting its proposals along with our nascent strategies to a group of various interested groups. the cept proposal drew upon romantic notions of traditional indian cities to develop an idea for the plan. courtyards, gullies, all very picture book india. i was wondering whether this imagination was not far removed from the hyper urbanity of dharavi where every square inch is throbbing with activity, where work and living are so intertwined it is difficult to tell them apart; where all traditional notions of family, identity, scale, form are thrown into compete disarray. all planning standards seem to find no way to explain the madness on the ground. the rigid frameworks of norms cant even begin to account for grasping the situation, forget understanding and proposing solutions for them. is the solution really somewhere in our ‘wondrous’ heritage of jaipur and the pols of ahmedabad. ownership, densities, work patterns; all in dhravai are something else.

if the fulfillment of the life of an individual is the aspiration of all planning policies, then how do we address them when we don’t even begin to see who the individuals are. i don’t know how this is to be addressed. i have heard it said that since the informal systems of living and working are so resilient- they will survive anyway, so maybe we need not address them. the other option is to skirt the issue by allowing things to stay as they are. are these two poles the only solution? one a complete erasure based on an inability to engage with the complex reality on site , replacing what exists with a somewhat more pretty alternative; or the other to refuse to engage and to romanticize the horrific and degrading living conditions on site.

can a proposal instead also be a rhetorical device? a call to arms for an urgent reappraisal of what we consider to be the right standards for a reasonable ‘quality of life’. this would mean the undertaking of a utopian project. where the complexity of the site is the generator of a new typology for living, and not the blind spot in the new master planning efforts. where existing industry and community is celebrated and enabled rather than denied. already, dharavi has perhaps the highest density on the planet earth. no existing imagination can work. only a project that engages with radical reimagination can perhaps be viable. i am reminded of the utopias of archigram, peter cook, superstudio; even the megastructures of the futurists. have we finally reached the stage of hyper urbanity that these projects imagined? can their mega infrastructure and technocratic imagination open out a possibility for everyday life to celebrate in a new unusual way. I am angered when these proposals seem to care little for what exists but propose without compunction ideas that are ridiculous and unviable. but that does not mean that the responsibility for a new imagination for type does not exist. is there another vision? can we draw it?

antonio sant'elia

archigram

paolo soleri

woman marrying banana trees- all is right with the country.

so now amitabh bachchan has been proposed as one of the next options to be the president of india. just when i was getting completely irritated with the way the entire charade over his sons engagement or wedding to aishwayra rai. i cannot believe that any sane literate individual would make his future daughter in law get married to a banana tree, a banyan tree and a stone idol to rid herself of the curse of the manglik. as if we did not have enough of these nonsensical superstitions anyway that now we have the ‘first family’ of indian cinema actively practicing such regressive reactionary rituals.

what is even more annoying is that this probably means that more of these rather archaic practices that have been known to completely destroy individual lives will be reinforced having gained validity through their adoption by influential people.

i wonder how someone like abhishek bachchan is able to reconcile his urbane hipness with this stifling conservatism; or is the liberal pose merely that- a pose; and is he really only a silly papa’s boy, too spineless to step out of his fathers shadow. and now this grossness as president!? no thank you, mr bachchan, we don’t need any more women domesticated.

black friday

strangely, in spite of the subject of the film, more intellectually interesting rather than emotionally draining, ‘black friday’ is a strange animal of a film. the story is not yet history and cannot be told yet with the sepia tinted sentiment that most period films regarding a ‘real’ life incident can afford. i guess that is a relief- for i can only imagine what could have been the result if anurag kashyap had learnt from the steven speilberg school of soaring violin crescendo film making. though he does try to wrench some human drama out of the blast sequences; instead he ends up hovering over decapitated limbs and bodies languishing in blood in slow motion. it may be gruesome but in the way a murder is in a thriller.

and that’s what the film is. a well told story about the people and the events that led to the bomb blasts and the eventual arrests regarding. by being as ‘objective’ as possible, the film is as unjudgemental as possible – except vilifying the usual whipping boy of most conspiracy theories – the isi and the secret service across the border. the story moves with a rapid pace sketching out the incidents that led to the blasts and the arrests. it cut from location to location shifting from one character in the complex tale to another. suddenly it spends considerable time with randomly selected characters looking at small incidents regarding their role in the conspiracy. these asides, although they initially make little sense as far as the narrative is concerned seem to add a dimension that lifts the film above the average story telling.

religious fanatics, gangsters, terrorists and policemen seem to be caught up in a vicious cycle of suspicion, corruption and violence that is postulated as the cause of the riots. like the reason lies outside the intentions of ordinary men. like there is a system that can be blamed- abstract and disconnected from the everyday lives of people. perhaps that is true- how many times have we seen bigotry exist at a theoretical level and disintegrate when we see people deal with others on a day to day level? the difficulty is when these abstract relationships being to distort our perceptions of reality; where the everyday appears as a representation of the conceptual heroes and villains within a theoretical framework. but does that remove the culpability of the men who actually plant the bombs, or break the mosque, or rape the women? resistance or critique of a ‘system’ can happen at the level of practice. we need not follow the herd.

himanshu s encounter

today in the encounter slot himanshu showed his public art projects where he engages with an audience in a far more tangible level, making work that is ephemeral and easy to consume. his work with children and the photos he gives away were charming in their intent. the aesthetic concerns emerge from these concerns for consumption, using everyday language and adamantly ‘ordinary’ modes to communicate. there was an easy accessibility to the work made even more so by his tendency to simplify and make cute. i must admit not being completely convinced by the anti-market stance. after all there is another form of market of this kind of work. the vicious swipes at some artists were pointlessly caricaturish to the point of being mean-spirited. is the posture of being an enfant terrible of indian art also a piece of well orchestrated performance art? andy warhol was quoted multiple times, and pop is classic commodity. madonna does it best. and sure makes a lot of money.

houses - boring and beautiful, broken and battered

venturi's vanna venturi house

ettore sottsass drawing

the pitched roof single storey house set back from a street with a front yard and a back- the model for the american suburban home has somehow become a universal symbol of domesticity all around the world. no matter where you go versions of this seem to be being built with strange variations to account for local tastes. from the outskirts of new delhi to the suburbs of washington- the form is now archetypical of the desires of domesticity- and the claustrophobia of its heteronormative, middle class, two parent, two children, two car and dog nature .children draw in in their scribbles when asked to draw their houses – even though they may live in a seven storied building in goregaon. the family unit and its urge to keep itself safe from any possible challenge makes nature and other people seem like threats to be kept away or tamed. the other factor that makes the typology of these houses so powerful in shaping our imagination must be the nostalgia for a better time somewhere in an imagined past where children played unthreatened in gardens; and where neighbors were all friends whom we knew from childhood. a sweetness in soft focus green and pink, behind which lurk often the unresolved misshapen real desires of people, decapitated and turning into mutant forms the more they are curtailed. i am reminded of innumerable movies from edward scissorhands to american beauty where the rigorous moral codes and physical form of the suburb makes monsters out of men.

rachel whiteread's house

so much art and architectural work tries to address this in a new book i am browsing through – a compendium of work from an exhibition on art and architecture of the last century. There is such a variety in the approaches. there is robert venturi’s play on the icon of the suburban american home- affectionate yet critical in the house he built for his own mother, john hejduks crazy poetic houses, eric fishcls paintings of the interiors of the houses with the sleazy sexuality within, gordon matta clarks methodical dissections of the house revealing new dimensions kept hidden, rachel whiteread cast of an old town house, erwin wurms melting and inverted houses, david oppenheims digging house. the house type is a theme upon which experiments are carried out destabilizing it, destroying it, giving it new meaning, and at the same time curiously reinforcing its mythical nature as a locus for the unfulfilled desires for calm and quiet in a world turning upside down in the throes of constant change.

david oppenheim

erwin wurm

erwin wurm

kausik and mohua

gordon matta clark

eric fischl

toba khedoori's house

veenas birthday at madhus place

drawing space

boulee's cenotaph for newton

been reading and thinking about drawing and its urge to capture and describe reality, especially when it has to also at the same time propose a new one- like so many architectural representational forms. like the plan and the section, orthographic necessities that are forms of making a drawing that will help in the technique of building.

on the other hand there are those drawings that want to bridge the gap between the lived and the represented- to make a drawing as close to reality as it is perceived. as if reality lies in the seen… or then the act of drawing as architecture- the ability think critically though the act of drawing. but as much as drawing attempts to bridge the gap between the represented and the lived- it actually does seem to make it even greater. doesn’t the act of inscribing and tracing forms as perceived or even as measured seem to distance itself from the spaces that it is trying to capture?

the book is fascinating, dense and full of examples and references from texts that i have never heard of, or have in passing. somehow the book seems intent on exploring the relationship as it were between the act of building and living; and the act of representation and imagining. it is a complicated thing leading to some interesting phenomenon- like anamorphosis where space is distorted to appear ordered from a privileged position in architectural space. as soon as the observer moves- or that architecture begins to work in time as well as pure space the illusion is shattered.

or like axonometry that removes all vestiges of the body of the observer to make the architectural object completely self referential- as if that is the only ‘truth’. what happens when the subject of the space begins to disintegrate into a point? and then what happens further when the subject is completely evicted from the space of representation as an anomaly?

in the pure space of the axonometric that we in the profession seem to so favor where does the body find its place? and without the sensual where does architecture find itself in its role to address the everyday lives of people? not merely the practical and prosaic but also the mythical and poetic aspects of life.

perhaps it is also the problem with the very discourse of architecture that aims to create perfection or purity. maybe the schism exists because architecture is seen to be a model of the universe- perfect in every way. the temple and the cemetery can be the only real architectural space then. for a stone god or for the dead. architecture, in these cases – even when built, stays merely a representation of lived space. like a diagram of an ideal. a utopia. but we are not gods and not yet dead. our everyday life comes up against there diagrams all the time.

we muddy the floor with our footprints and hang our desires on the white walls. we destroy predetermined notions of correct living by churning things through our multiple points of view; our memory and desire. and this is how we try to make our lives more rich through the spaces we inhabit and imagine for ourselves. to achieve that we need the dark as much as we need the light. the ground below our feet as much as the heavens above as we hang perpetually in between.

maybe that’s why i seem to love the collapsing perspectives and overlapping fragments in piranesi’s drawings as much as i love the bare horizonless drawings of boulees cenotaph for newton.

piranesi

these imaginations are underpinned by the only real tool in the hands of the architect- the drawing. and when the drawing is enabled by the copy paste reductivism of computer aided design softwares the schism is even more apparent. it is so easy to fall for the seduction of beguiling efficiency of production that we deny architecture its most essential role- to create space for life to thrive , especially in a time where all experience seems to be modulated completely on illusionistic projections. that is not to say, of course, that autocad is evil or to rue the increasing cybernetic nature of everyday life. but it is to, in an old fashioned sort of way, remind myself that technology will always be merely a tool and never a solution.

project of a library from tu delft

geometry

i have been reading architectural representation and the perspective hinge- a book on the development and transformations of the perspective and other orthographic projections over western architectural history. some the work in the book is quite amazing. among them is this work by wenzel jamnitzer – a viennese engraver of the 1500s. carefully constructed and beautifully rendered experiments in geometry and its possibilities in creating complex forms. see more here

love, actually

the first few lines of the film were actually enough to put me off; when hugh grant in his clipped accent as the prime minister of britain talks about love being so much more all pervasive than hate- after all, after the 9/11 blasts weren’t there more phone calls made in love than hatred. and the film has so many more gems of this kind of sickly sweet homilies that it can make you slightly ill. the humor though manages to salvage some of the stories from complete disaster, but even there sometimes it is seeped in such schmaltz it can get nauseating. the other thing that kept me from giving up after the first few minutes of the film was the star cast- most of whom tried their best to rise above the mawkish script to give their characters a semblance of reality- but failed. my already still rumbling stomach took somersaults in protest.

bollywood soap opera nightmare

woke up in the middle of the night with a horrifying dream in which salman khan was asha bhosale and r d burmans long lost illegitimate child.

now why should that be horrifying to me is anybody's guess... must be my colitis rumbling.

kausiks new blog

kaushik has a new blog with some of his work on it. its brilliant.
everyone must see.

go here

encounter - chirodeep . two city studio / homes

chirodeep showed two series of photographs he was taking- one of the 'enterprise' with phone booths in different bombay locations; and the other of a book that he is working on on the annual durga pooja in his home village in rural bengal. i did not quite understand the need to makt the enterprise photographs so people less; and the rural bengal phots for me bordered slightly on the exotic india. but one photo of women discussing jewellery was brilliant. the discussion regarding his process of pre-determining so much before hitting the ground to shoot was a new things for me and the questions were interesting.

after the encounter i headed into south mumbai with mukul and saw two very different city houses meant to be studio cum living spaces. the first was on malabar hill with a split level and spectacular views across the ocean on three sides and the strange modernist skyscrapers of the 60s and 70s on the other side. the other was nalinis labyrinthine new studio space in colaba with its double heights, its loft areas and the little nooks and crannies all over the place. fantastic space. a space for so many strange stories to take place.

salaam - e - ishq

i should really dislike this more than i did, but maybe i was forewarned and went with as miniscule expectations as possible. after all the length was not the only deterrent, the stars were the other – no one really i would want to watch- but for govinda- and he was the reason i bought the ticket. and he did not disappoint. he is such a joy to watch, terrific timing, easy humor and what a dancer! in that one scene, in that one dance. even his east/west love story was the most watchable of the bunch with a blonde american playing his lovelorn love interest.

the other stories were juhi/anil kapoor in their ‘shall we dance’ reprise; the akshaye khanna / ayesha takia runaway groom story; sohail khan/ issha koppikar and the getting laid skit; vidya balan/john abraham in the tear jerker segment with memory loss and hindu muslim love; and the worst of the bunch priyanka chopra as the item girl who wants to be a tragedy queen with salman khan in tow.

the pacing of the film is flat, nothing much happens, everything is predictable and slow and yet i did not hate it as much i expected to. i guess it must be because the characters were really quite nicely drawn (some of them); some warm hearted sentiment and sweetness; and one good song. and then there was ayesha takia as the earnest bubbly bride left waiting, akshaye khanna as her groom, isha and sohail as the comedy item; and of course govinda himself. after ‘guru’ i think i have become more ‘generous’.

pop in the age of digital reproduction

the sequel to the last post is another thought about art- this time about intellectual property rights. my mother was at a workshop being held at the thakur complex on how folk and classical music was being incorporated into hindi film songs and pop songs; and how these songs were by the nature of the market being bound into the rigid framework of copyright.

what that means is that folk and classical performers can no longer sing these pieces without the threat of getting into a long legal wrangle with a record company like t-series. well, naturally- don’t the jobs of these record companies depend on making music a commodity. i do understand the urge by the marketing moguls and accountants to control the free movement of music; but what i can’t understand is the ruckus that some musicians make when their music is freely downloaded.

now i do realize that this makes them lose quite a bit of money and this just might be my excuse to continue downloading music and feel guilt free; but does not the digital reproduction of music make the ‘original’ so much more valuable.

does it not increase greatly the value of music that actually emanates from a real body in real time? in other words, does not the body of the performer in a live concert become so much more valued? echoing benjamin in ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ where he talks about the ‘aura’ of the original being greatly enhanced because of the interminability of numerous copies, does not the fact of the real, unadulterated voice suddenly take on an even more magical quality? did this not happen, for instance, with the mona lisa? why cant it happen with the latest bob dylan record?

art shart

this post is with regards to a few nagging questions regarding art and criticism that have been plaguing me for the past few days after a recent discussion. the debate was with regards to the context in which art is conceived of and created and the notion of the audience it is meant to address. for some people the context seems like the determining factor- the context in which it is created.

like regarding a discussion about baudelaire i had a few months back. to me it was great love poetry; to the other person it could only be felt if it was seen in the context of the paris of the times.

then there was this other little irritating point. the fact that actually the art that needs patronizing in an age where the state is disinvesting from institutions of culture is actually the ‘classical’ and not the ‘popular’. if a need exists to encourage critical cultural production then it is these experimental (and often difficult) works that must be encouraged by buying a ticket, watching and spreading the word.

so sue me for liking tarkovsky.

the context of criticism

this post is with regards to a few nagging questions regarding art and criticism that have been plaguing me for the past few days after a recent discussion. the debate was with regards to the context in which art is conceived of and created and the notion of the audience it is meant to address. for some people the context seems like the determining factor- the context in which it is created.

like regarding a discussion about baudelaire i had a few months back. to me it was great love poetry; to the other person it could only be felt if it was seen in the context of the paris of the times. i could not fathom this need to frame everything within a strict framework of rights and wrongs. i understand the need to contextualize to be able to understand, but to say that it was the only way to appreciate was to me a little unforgiving.

a similar discussion but rather more violent ensued a few days back regarding the notion of ‘high’ vs ‘popular’ art. it was seen to be ‘postmodern obfuscation’ to demand that art be able to transcend simplistic ‘binaries’. (i use the terms of the debate- so please forgive) i was told that there is a space for straightforward storytelling as that’s what is easy for most people to relate to.

in other words i was accused of being a cultural elitist by liking art that might be complex but therefore more difficult to understand. i wonder whether then we are being patronizing to the audience that we say can only understand things in easy sized bites. like little chunks of easy to use political wisdom. not only did this anger me no end, but also there was in built in it a gibe of my predilection towards lets say ‘high’ art. i was told to patronize or rather like work that was made merely because it did get made- in spite of hardships. it seems that to appreciate a work of art one must be able to see it in the place and time (and budget) it was made in. like a 30 crore film and a 30,000 rupee film can be compared only when their budget is kept in mind. art can have no autonomous presence- or speak to one only when one understands the constraints of the creator.

when i asked whether that would mean that of the two films, 30 crore and 30,000- both being equally bad- i would have to like the cheaper one (because it was politically correct to) i was told- ‘yes, merely because it got made’. i am sorry but i have to aim my own tastes a little higher than that. poor people make good art while rich people make bad is a silly argument that harks back to the times that mao’s cultural revolution destroyed ancient buildings and scriptures because they represented bourgeois ideology that needed to be over thrown.

then there was this other little irritating point. the fact that actually the art that needs patronizing in an age where the state is disinvesting from institutions of culture is actually the ‘classical’ and not the ‘popular’. if a need exists to encourage critical cultural production then it is these experimental (and often difficult) works that must be encouraged by buying a ticket, watching and spreading the word.

so sue me for liking tarkovsky.

photo post - alo/ashvin . doctor

alo, ashvin, mukul and me. they were on their way to bangalore from cape town. ashvin says that it was so beautiful that they have decided to move there in five years. some people do have a good time.

and i am ill, did you guys know? and here i am at the doctors, woozy and delirious, while mukul thinks it is a great opportunity for a 'cute' photo.

photo post - highway in the morning / kausha

grand openings

yesterday the world saw the world premier of the thesis for the current fourth year, where the first presentations with vandana were long and poetic; and then the world premier of ramu’s kabir rock and rolling with the students in the av room. the kids were adorable, especially tapan, priya and prachi. then the trip to town in an overcrowded car rupali, ninad, ateya, aparna, kaushik, namrata and me, where we attended the opening of the new chemould with the atul dodiya bhupen khakkar homage. clinking glasses of wine and lots of muah-muah, and food at the deutsche bank. got home at 12 and caught the chills suddenly. was shivering and shuddering like mad. slept uneasily, woke up and decided not to go to college.

i voted

it is the municipal elections and i went to the local municipal school tucked away in the heart of the mango grove in the afternoon heat to get my finger stained and to vote.

city in light

the mornings nowadays are overcast with an unseasonable drizzle playing atmospherics on the drive to school on the highway. the fog settles in around goregaon and jogeshwari near the green of aarey milk colony. it makes the disappearing highway and the silhouettes of high rises appear like a landscape from some post holocaust future. the road melts into white.

that is, until, a few days back when the milky white carried the rays of the sun across the sky in gold and amber, across the highway from the hills to the east to the bluing sky in the west. the sunlight hit the tops of the slum rehabilitation buildings to the right and suddenly the city was different. it rose into a relationship that was made unexpectedly through shifting light. from the ritualized daily trudge to work down the same road, i suddenly saw the city lifted beyond into a new space that made it seem small and insignificant yet heroic.

yesterday aparna and me were talking about nature and living in the city. i don’t know how much difference living in a terrace flat where every single change in the light outside means that a façade of the house has changed, has made to the way i am. there must be some reason for my romanticism regarding the idea of nature and the edge that urbanity imagines in between. what makes the ‘outside’ for the humongous anthills in which we live and what meaning does it have for us?

i remember walking on carter road and watching people on the edge of the sea. while some looked outwards at the moon on the water, others turned to look at the promenade and the people walking by. i remember thinking about the double inversion of that phenomena. while those looking outwards at the ocean were looking inwards; those looking inwards at the promenade were reaching out to others. the line in between is where both of these were allowed to happen. another place that fascinated me is the tops of flyovers in the mornings and evenings. there must be something to being able to perceive a horizon at eye level, even if it is the horizon of vanishing tracks, that makes it a place to romance and hang out.

house

some photographs of sureshs house 3 months after they moved in.