These are the notes that accompanied it.

I.

Baudrillard, in ‘The System of Objects’ writes: “The antique object’s role is merely to signify – it is structural, it refuses structure, it is the extreme case of disavowal of the primary functions – yet it is not functional nor purely decorative, for it has a very specific function within the system, namely the signifying of TIME. .. Not real time, but the signs and indices of time.”

“.. No matter how fine it is, an antique is always eccentric; no matter how authentic it is, there is always something false about it”.

II.

The work here is composed of images that do not belong to a coherent place; the places here are composed of images that do not belong to a coherent moment. These are sound-image compositions in which ‘place’ is read in a few ways:

As erasures of narrative, but never letting go of its structures

As force fields in which the layers of place accrue but never locate

As repositories of histories that are not necessarily summoned

III.

Many years ago I watched a film in which a woman goes into a video mausoleum – a vault of images, of people who no longer lived, but existed only in their images in video noise. She goes there to see her dead brother, and plays his image repeatedly. This scene made me think of the ability of the electronic image to stand in for presence, and then the limits of that presence. A friend called my work an “archive without presences”. I had never thought of archives without presences.

Somewhere the image of the video mausoleum has stayed with me.

IV.

The word trilogy here, wishes to be read as it appears in the poem: On becoming a trilogy for future music, by Rainer Maria Rilke. [And music in turn: as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air .. ]

(http://www.project88.in/#)

I went to a meeting organized by an arts initiative and studio  -  a group people who work with the arts, organize international exchanges, artists, educators, mainly from the Portsmouth area.

The meeting was a discussion of a phase of regeneration in Somerstown, a part of Portsmouth that was earmarked for regeneration 10 years ago.  Somerstown is the densest part of Portsmouth and has low figures with regard to housing, education and health services. In other words, there are high levels of deprivation. Residents and stakeholders came together with a vision of Somerstown.

“Vision: the aim of the Somerstown and North Southsea regeneration plan is the creation of a sustainable urban community. It will improve quality of life, foster local pride and act as a springboard for social and economic regeneration. This will be achieved by creating a safe, active and attractive environment with a new community heart.

Somerstown and North Southsea Regeneration Project Board and Regeneration Participation Group (RPG)” [From the website]

According to Jane who lives there and runs an artists’ space called ‘Space’, the residents are now cynical. They do not believe they will see this happen. They are afraid they will lose facilities and are being misinformed. None of this is a surprise . I was listening to this quite interestedly not so much because this is something that not is happening in most cities, but because I was trying to understand the word ‘regeneration’ as well, and the other word that is used in conjunction with it – ‘community’ here. Oliver, from the arts initiative organising this, had mentioned earlier that there haven’t been many opportunities to respond to ‘regeneration’ and that ‘community’ slips through ones fingers as soon as one tries to grasp it.  I was interested also because most of the people at the table were connected in some way to art, and I was curious to know how they would interpret a moment like this, and what they would consider an ‘intervention’ into it to be. Jane has obviously engaged with it for a while, because she seemed to know it well – she was cynical though. She kept saying how people were tired of it. And then she talked about the ‘mashup’ : Art plus community plus local histories plus multimedia. And funding and spaces and galleries. Everyone seemed to know this. Clearly it hadn’t really happened, or when it had, didn’t manage to restore pride and facilitate change.

It was interesting talking about a place I was in, but hadn’t seen apart from the walk from the station. The walk from the station was through snow and it was hard to tell roads, and pavements in some places. Everyone had written three words about Somerstown – some of them were: thoroughfare, squashed, divided, separate, boxed in, fenced off ..

The studio from start to finish. Ended with an open studio from March 26th – 28th, 2010.

I saw this quote on a BBC show called ‘Dear Diary’  last night – on famous diarists in the UK and  people whose diaries are records of their times and valuable as an index of history and so on. (The quote was by Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, diarist, author and politician (1898-1958), who wrote extensively as a Member of Parliament, as did many after him.) The show talked about Samuel Pepys, whose detailed diaries, (from 1660 – 1669) have been invaluable ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London; it talked about The Mass Observation diaries – diaries of people recording their everyday lives in Britain from 1937  – because 3 friends were interested in ‘An Anthropology of Ourselves’ and hundreds and hundreds of people wrote about their lives for years; it talked about the diary of Sir Robert Scott who led a British expedition to the South Pole and never returned and his diary was found under his hand nine months after his body was discovered.

Somewhere else I read about the things that diary writing do not include.

” a good diary is not necessarily literature; for of its nature it must be free of most of the disciplines and tests of a work of art. Vision, imagination, passion, fancy, invention, scholarship, detachment and the steely constraints of form and design – none of these have a vital place in diary writing. ” [Quoted in Robert Fothergill's 'Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries']

I decided I wouldn’t journal a couple of years ago. And when I read this list I think the reason is that journaling can’t be detached. Ofcourse one makes decisions to write in any which way – but there is something about diary writing that has to not decide. So when I write:

A few things happened on the way to Kings Grove:

On the 436 the other night -  the bendy bus from Paddington all the way to the top of my street – two men got into an argument where one of them said : I will fuck you up man, don’t talk to me! You don’t know me and I’m not having a good day.

I stared out the window, got off the bus where I had to, and walked really fast back to the house.

The young guy who works at the corner store said to me : Lekin yahaan life nahin hai. Mai soch raha hun ki mai Manchester shift ho jaoon ..

The store from 2 weeks and a new jacket ago, is being renovated and there’s no trace of it. I walked past it three times yesterday and it was like it had never existed.

I looked around me at Madame Jojo’s in a moment of perfect sync because I had never met the people I was with before, and the DJ said – you can breakdance to anything. She looked like Angela Davis.

There’s nothing worse than opportunistic people who are flaky.

Looking at all the art in ‘The Empire Strikes Back – Indian Art Today’ made me think of how looking at art requires an attention span of 20 seconds in such big, important art venues. How meaningless time is to big art. Exposition is everything.

I think I need different material and different textures. I think I should never diary again.

It sounds too much like how I would say it. And it feels discreet. I don’t want a discreet soul, even if I have one..

Should diaries only be read as chronicles? I was going through a booklet from the Mass Observation Archives and a few people’s diaries have been published and there was a kind of summary of what was in them. What is clear is that it is a subjective reading of a person’s life – and chronicles of what the reader would choose to find interesting.  And at the end of 12 such summaries, was a list of references to events, places, things, organizations.. So that if one were to look at war time accounts of peoples everyday lives – one would be likely to find..

Air-raid shelters: 5342, 5246 Amateur dramatics: 5246

Animals: cats: 5323 dogs: 5323, 5342 goats: 5434 poultry: 5434

Family businesses: garage: 5323 Gardening: 5342 Hampshire: TB sanatorium: 5269 Hoarding: 5 342

Mother’s help: 5434

Music: 5399,5246 Nanny: 5246

(I’m not sure I’m supposed to be putting this out – the numbers stand for the diarist, and the list is much much longer.)

The details in my grandfather’s diary of the most banal, the most repetitive and the most mundane – make me think of how he would write his diary twice a day, standing at his dresser. He used to be a policeman and I believe he dictated stories of his days in service for my cousin to write down when she insisted. He never wrote about them. He never mentions them except in passing reference to a place or a person. His diaries are crammed with details – of illnesses, of phone calls, of car repairs and plumbing, travel plans, documents, noise pollution and deaths in the extended family. He writes in bullet points almost. He doesn’t dwell. Once in a while he expresses a point of view.

‘Manish Sen and his wife came and gave me a magnifying sheet. Very good of them though it does not help to see better.’

He has a line he ends each entry with. In one of the dairies I have now, It says “the same”.

I am trying to find ways to read diaries.

Meanwhile, here’s where my studio is!

Ghevra, Delhi, Resettlement Colony since 2006

London Building SItes

I saw an exhibition yesterday, called ‘London Building Sites’ – by Frank Auerbach, one of London’s most important post-war artists, who was fascinated by the reconstruction of London after World War II. Frank Auerbach was born in 1931 and has a studio in Camden where he works. The fourteen paintings in this this exhibition, were from 1952 – 1962. Also exhibited, were pages from his sketchbook, of the sketches he made of the sites that were being rebuilt. There were also smaller ‘studies’ – versions of the painting he would finally arrive at. His paintings were thick, layered, textured surfaces, where detail and the form of the built structures were almost obliterated. Sometimes they were an inch deep – reworked for months, and conveying the drama of the epic task of rebuilding London.

There were unexpected hints at forms in some – a rope, a worker, the scaffolding that melted into the canvas, a luminous excavation. The abstraction lay in the texture, the mapping and transcending at the same time, of space and architectural form. The thickness of the paintings, the layers into which detail disappeared, and the hues and tones that he used, gave a sense of unity  - of experiencing past, present and future cycles of devastation and renewal – in each work.