Digging for Meaning

ABCD 2 is dance movie with mediocre dance. And that tells you a lot about the film makers and what they think of their audience. Made by celebrated choreographers with cult following, it is really disheartening to see them do a half-ass job at what they preach.The dances are not path-breaking or  original or even evocative. Most of the dancers do not give their 100% to the performance. You can see the lack of practice and energy in dances. The editor and cameraman do as much, if not more, movements as the dancers. Many Indian dance shows have better choreographed dances than this movie has. This is interesting because, the makers of this film are judges in at-least a few of those shows. Why suck? "Because everybody deserves a second chance." ad infinitum..  But this is the second movie in the franchisee. One expects that they would learn story telling by now at least? or does 100cr business is a reason enough for bad film making and lazy dance choreography? (for a movie ...

Art is what a very rich white man says art is. A blank canvas. A urinal. A gaze. All of these are works of art. Because someone had the balls to bluff and a rich white man thereafter decided to agree. What if the rich white man does not agree? Then the thought remains a failed though - an attempt, a shot at the game of chance.

A recent attempt by me at an animated short film. This one started on a whim. i created an image, then another and kept on going wherever the whim of the moment took me. Hence 'a trip'. I intend to continue this project as long as i can. I will keep on adding continuation in the trip as times goes by. lets see what i end up with. hopefully, it will be entertaining enough.

My laptop is crowded with many unfinished projects. By some miraculous grace of god some are beginning slowly to take some form of completion.This one is a little litany about life in cubicles. No, its no where close to the genius/ insightful/ funny of Dilbert. I didn't intend it to be that any ways. It was more an outlet to what i felt fleetingly at times in my previous job. A little snapshot of the thoughts that crowd around in a moment of frustration. But this frustration had hope, it contemplated the many possibilities. its the frustration of the young. :-)   To be continued.. hopefully soon enough. (the first two pages happened in a weekend a year back. The next two pages were done today. :P I shall persevere. i must. :) ) 

Have you ever shouted out in a valley and laughed out in incredibly playful happiness? The marvel that is echo. (umberto, go sit down in that corner :P) Isn't it beautiful? to hear yourself. louder. bigger. from unknown corners. delayed, almost leisurely. Whatever age you may be, the moment you do it, you turn 6 year old faster than the speed of sound. You may try to hide yourself, but don't you for that moment become that annoying little kid who gives you creases on your forehead in annoyance and ripples of laughter in your heart? But this echo is temporary. after the 10th echo, you will start getting tired. (it actually involves physical efforts you know? yeah. really. the very concept of any real physical effort outside of a gym will soon become extinct, i know. hmmm.. whatever ) There is no more novelty to it as well. The echo is going to come out exactly the way it has been coming all this while. There is no more mystery left to it. But, there is another magical e...

As a kid I always loved cartoons. I would watch them all day and I would buy those disney/painting books to copy draw those characters. Every single cartoon character that I found interesting would promptly get reproduced on one of my drawing books. exactly. I was messy with water colors and like. so I would stick to pencil and sketch pens for these. I would not bother about the colors, but the form was something I could exactly replicate. with pen you can exactly draw what you want. but with brush it requires discipline, something that nothing i have tried my hands at has been able to bestow upon me.  So it was a little weird for me when I first started attempting to use water colors.  With paintings, the colors take primacy (especially in landscape or imagined drawings) over how the image is to be created rather than the boundaries as would be the case (or i thought) with pencil drawings. That is a huge learning i had much later, until which i had given up on painting. I...

I was reading Art India’s review about chintan upadyay’s oeuvre, where it says that his conception of an artist is ‘Warholian’. Wtf is warholian. Warhol was a great artist. He had a certain distinct vision, a distinct style. But when Chintan Upadyay can be ‘warhol like’ why should he be a ‘warholian’? Well, my trouble is not with chintan or Warhol but with this tendency by writers, reporters to turn everything ‘ian’ to give undue depth to an argument, especially when people’s styles don’t remain styles but apparently a discipline due to the suffix ‘ian’. So we get warholian, lovecraftian, well why not pawarian? I have certain distinct traits, well none expressed to the world with any beauty or originality but in my world I am quite pawarian and this pawarian-ness is quite important to me. So to sum up my request, stop turning famous people’s traits into disciplines.

The first time I read about Semiconductor was at a blog , and it showcased their excellent art piece called brilliant noise . I was totally sucked into their gaze. It was amazing what they were doing with scientific data and observations and using sound innovatively to create one masterpiece after another. I wish to see their installation in person sometime in future. Then came the magnetic movie. I don't have far too many grey cells and had to struggle to see if what was being projected was real or cgi. Amazing nevertheless. and then i kept going through their work. especially their work 'out of the light' . I was enamored with the idea's simplicity and its sheer beauty. In Ladakh, once I had taken a video of shadows and lights falling through leaves and how a cloud passing over us changed the shadow-light interaction, and this work reminded me of it.  They seem to have a penchant for sound corresponding to the light's intensity on screen and time lapse magic. ...

mark rothko, Sharmila irom, baudelaire, mclluhan, beethoven, milan kudhera, rob dougan, Fransisco Danconio, Muse, Bjork, Raza, Duchemp, Banksy, Doris Lessing... creators. some forgotten. some lost in the fog of memory. some fictional. all alive. their breath, their thoughts, their actions, their stories shape our lives. Like falling from clouds, leaving indistinct erasable marks on them. we are. its people like these who piece us together, breath in us the life that strides confident on grounds concrete made of the fertile compost of once dead forefathers. thank you for letting me walk. i owe my life to you.

I usually seek creativity in form, innovation at structural/conceptual level. So, though i appreciate content, its usually the medium that attracts me more. Thats perhaps the reason these days I am heavily into digging for good installations. I have mentioned my love for work of Olafur eliasson earlier. But then we come across works which are simple and yet so profoundly creative. Yesterday, I saw Anuradha Thakur's exhibit at Jehangir Art Gallery. The first bias set in due to her choice of theme. She has depicted adivasis and their cultures through her work, something which I am keenly interested in appreciating. What really attracts you to her work is her choice of colours. The colors are so natural to indian sensibilities and yet its as if its a new discovery. I haven't seen use of these colors and combination thereof in recent art works. to get an idea of these colors, take out crayons from your sons/daughters/nephew's color boxes and start mixing. Apart from division of...

i am a big fan of Ólafur Elíasson and his creations. absolutely brilliant stuff. even working as an account executive in tribal ddb, i try to push installation ideas like these for campaigns when i can. (well i am fresh off the campus, u c). i have always been interested in the choice of mediums used by artists to respond to cultural shifts. digital technologies have certainly changed the way we live and also the way in which we reflect, we communicate, we perceive. no wonder then that some brilliant work is happening world over that explores the implications of digital intervention in our lives. one such excellent project i came across was called ' fashion victims '. the reason i loved this project is because i have always advocated communication of efforts that goes into consumption. i have discussed this here and here and here .. in fashion victims, the mobile communication has been given a tangible face. the electromagnetic radiation converted as patterns on clothes. ch...

I feel cheated when subjected to literary works or cinema. The good art, good cinema is characterised by a focussed thought, a focussed reasoning that while being genius and revolutionary, is at the same time blinding and constraining. I see people bound up by the beauty of these constructed worlds, never to admit the world around as their own. Well, that’s not my reason o f complain though, I don’t read too much, only as much as my curiosity and hunger wishes, nor do I allow myself to fall away in quotidian stupor by keeping my curiosity and hunger for wisdom sharp on the granite of my senses. I try and absorb and diffuse the wisdom garnered from the art through me around me, trying to comprehend the world through it, trying to see the beauty that lay hidden beneath. I only have 2 eyes; maybe the author’s/artist’s eyes would lend me some new vision... My reason of complain is that that art, resplendent with the genius in it, binds me to its reasoning, to its ideals (at least for a ...