A Pale Lightening Flash: TV Santhosh's “A Room To Pray”

Two soldiers sit facing each other in the back of a truck, guns gleaming weirdly green against the apocalyptic half-light that bathes the scene in a burnt, neon-orange haze. In TV Santhosh's untitled 2008 painting, they seem poised on the brink of dissolution into a strategic anonymity, a trooper's anonymity—that mysterious passage from man to cadre—their moustaches mirror each other, their booted feet cross, their automatic rifles reflect each other perfectly, their berets, their uniforms. But the moment has been stilled there by a sorcerous pulse of visual energy, an inversion like the shadow of a color, or a thermal scan. It is a photographic negative nearly lost in a fire: striped here and there with hot slashes and tiny sunspots, radiant and rimmed in black. As with all three of the paintings in “A Room to Pray,” in its center a crudely cut X leaks an intense orange light that threatens to burst through the photographic realism of the news image, which stands illuminated like stained glass about to give way beneath the force of an atomic sun.

August 6th, Pittsburgh International Airport. It is the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima today; I know this only because I've been thinking about it recently. There's nothing obvious in the news. People are apparently unaware or unconcerned about the anniversary, as though the passage of time has conspired with modernity's always incomplete aspiration for gridded emptiness, infinitely capable of tagging, indexing and archiving what transpires under its invisible rule. Here in the airport, security measures are constantly mutating, subject to tightening and modification—passing through a checkpoint I glance at the man watching a screen with a security scan of my carry-on bag, taken with some kind of radioactive imaging technology that penetrates my bag, encodes its contents in lurid digital colors, searches it for explosives. It looks, I think to myself, kind of like a TV Santhosh painting. That's how effectively Santhosh has engaged with the terrored imaginary and the anxious optics of our high-security age.

Jonathan Schell has observed that before there was ever a physical atomic weapon, before the first bomb was ever tested or even embarked upon, there was what he called a “bomb in the mind,” a virtual bomb that represented an irrevocable alteration in the imagination of the world. The atomic weapon was known to be thought possible; and that idea alone, that anxious sense of the possible, that ticking virtual bomb in the imagination of the world was powerful enough to set in motion the very processes that could make the first bomb physical, real, testable in the deserts of New Mexico. TV Santhosh's recent paintings show us the world after those bombs went off.

All I can remember was a pale lightening flash for two or three seconds. Then, I collapsed. I don't know much time passed before I came to. It was awful, awful. The smoke was coming in from somewhere above the debris. Sandy dust was flying around.


A survivor tells us what it looked like. It was, first of all, a bomb of the eyes, a sudden visual shock, overexposing film and bodies and eyes in a blinding inversion, as though by some horrific flashbulb, in an instant capturing and destroying the world, freezing it forever in some random, mundane moment. The explosion collapses physical and visual force into a synaesthetic nullity, a white-light violence, searing radiation shadows onto sidewalks and walls cast by the bodies of strollers and park bench-sitters. They have been stilled there suddenly, instantly carried from life to death, from contingency into monument, burnt that way like heliograms etched by man's own Frankenstein exploding sun.

In Santhosh's paintings we see the artist work a similar change, taking quotidian scenes—news photographs, snapshots—and pausing them for reconsideration in an eerie estranging light. Santhosh pushes at the edges of the visual “new normal,” painting the world as though through a security scanner: Muslim boys at prayerful study, anonymous soldiers sitting in a truck, waiting to be shipped off somewhere. Santhosh charges these mundane—although often anxious—moments from day-to-day life with a dangerous, slippery energy, painting them in thermal oranges and chemical greens, clouding them with hot constellations of searing gaps, scratches and tears.

I couldn't find my shadow. I looked up. I saw the cloud, the mushroom cloud growing in the sky. It was very bright. It had so much heat inside. It caught the light and it showed every color of the rainbow. Reflecting on the past, it is strange, but I could say that it was beautiful.

On the 16th of July in 1945, after the first nuclear test, Robert Oppenheimer—who had studied Sanskrit at Berkeley, and who kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on the bookshelf closest to his desk—recalled that “a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty: I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer's memory recites the ancient verse over this modern ritual, tries to make it sacred it with Sanskrit. TV Santhosh, in the installation piece that gives this show its name, draws on a different sort of text. A long LED screen, mounted on a dais surrounded by walls of human bones—neatly stacked and porcelain white, like a sanitized skull-tower for an age of surgical strikes and death from above—scrolls through the testimony of Yoshitaka Kawamoto, who was thirteen and sitting in his classroom when the city of Hiroshima fell into an atomic firestorm in August of the same year.

It is hard to tell, his skull was cracked open, his flesh was dangling out from his head. He had only one eye left, and it was looking right at me. First, he was mumbling something but I couldn't understand him. He started to bite off his finger nail. I took his finger out from his mouth...

The choice of a text is just as much an inversion as the flipped colors of the painting: Oppenheimer's solemn mythologizing removes the violence of the atomic blast to a celestial plane of gods and abstraction; Santhosh's invocation of the survivor's account reverses that ghastly, sacralizing sublimation, returning our attention to the messily corporeal, physical and grotesque consequences of a technology that is all too human. Yoshitaka's gruesome words repeat themselves inexorably across the floor, in out-of-sync reiterations, horrifically looping a robotic message sent out to an unseen audience at a perverse press conference. This isn't the first time that the artist has juxtaposed these apparently disparate, chilling elements—electronic crimson capital letters, white plasticized bones, digital clocks, sterile furniture—with the weird warmth of his orange and green oils. In 2008's “Countdown” in New Delhi, the artist drew on the same set of visual and mediatic resources to depict a world at the cusp of unpredictable and terrifying transformation, guarded over by a pack of metallic dogs, Cerberus timekeepers mounted with red, digital clocks circling through empty, meaningless time. What secret is being disclosed in these works? After the fireball, this is what is left—a digital archive, sand turned into glass, fleshy bodies turned into neat piles of ceramicized bones on display, the passage of time stripped of meaning.

Even the traumatic memories of the survivor have fractured and self-replicated, metastasized and come apart, lost their intonations, their quick intakes of breath and involuntary tremblings, blasted into all-caps LED: irradiated, pointillist remainders of a moment of bleaching violence. One could argue that Oppenheimer and his cohorts gave us this room to pray in, but the prayer he tried to give us to go along with it was all wrong: the bomb wasn't death, the destroyer of worlds. In the words of the poet Randall Jarrell, “it was not dying, everybody died.”


They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.
It was not dying --no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?



A young combatant, his eyes shadowed by the brim of a baseball cap, moves through an indecipherable, backlit landscape of vaporous greens and orange laser-beam burn marks and gashes. We can't tell if he is a militant or a soldier from this angle, whether he is uniformed or wearing a t-shirt. His gun is slung behind his head, leaving him defenceless, with the X of a gunsight's crosshairs centered over his heart. He seems ready for anything; anything except this.

[This essay has just been published with others by Shaheen Merali, Brigitte Ulmer and Santosh S. in a catalogue for Santhosh's current show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.]