I was in Rome for the first time, but I was thinking mainly about Americans. I landed with three days to go for the US elections, the calculation being that I would have the consolations of great art and superb food to see me through in case my man didn’t win. In any of my ‘normal’ cities, Calcutta, Delhi or London, I would have drowned in the sea of predictions and projections on net and print. But here I could look at the odd, semi-impenetrable headline in Italian, zap through the weird coverage by RAI and other local channels and still be able to concentrate on the Local and Eternal.

The streets of Rome are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere, sang Bob Dylan way back in the early 1970s, you can almost swear that you’re seeing double — and there were times I could have sworn I was. There was the Rome, the main city of my imagination, seen primarily in black and white in the films of the neo-realists and Antonioni and Fellini, then there was the city now, warm in November, with beautiful light, loaded with colour, the peculiar, beautiful yellow of the buildings, the deep yet tropical green of the mushroom pines and date palms, the tramp of tourists mingling with the oddest ambulance sirens I’ve ever heard. I’d imagined many things about Rome, but a town heavily serviced by young men from Sylhet was not on that list. I’d imagined many things but was not expecting to land in the wake of a power outage that would have done Calcutta proud in the good old dark days.

Not much of a surprise then, that I ended up reaching for the familiar in all this uncertainty. So: a show of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings over the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, and a big new show of work by Bill Viola before going to see the Bellini exhibition. The Basquiat show was titled To Scare Away Ghosts. The selection from the very short working life of the New York tyro was fascinating, all the more so because one was seeing it in Rome and not in the sleek halls of some American gallery, and seeing such a large collection after many years. A young graffiti artist of Haitian descent, JMB hit the big time in New York when I was squatting there in 1982. He was a little younger than me but already suddenly and hugely famous at 22: Andy Warhol had discovered him and his witty scrawls and scratches and the guy was immediately given a through-pass to big time, into the world of celebrity artists and collectors. His paintings are made mostly in the period of seven years between 1981 and 1988, when he died at the age of 28. In terms of ‘straight’ painting, no other major black artist has emerged in the mainstream Anglo-American art world since JMB took the lethal drug cocktail that killed him.

I remember seeing some of Basquiat’s work in New York at the time and not liking it very much; looking at it now I’m a bit better disposed towards it, though its undistilled debts to Cy Twombly and Philip Guston, not to mention Andybabu himself, are clear to the eye. The reason I am moved though is an odd one: the paintings and collages take me back to a time that was both depressing and yet tinged deeply with optimism for people like me. This was New York in the early 1980s, an island of freedom surrounded by Dark America at the start of the deadly Reagan era; this was also (though one couldn’t have seen it then), a city at the end of a great period of cultural explosion that had begun in the 1930s with the arrival of exiles from Europe, crazies escaping Hitler who brought with them their subversive vision and energy and transplanted them into the fertile ground of the rich and rotting post-depression Big Apple. Starting from that time, New York gave the world abstract expressionism, pop art, video art, and happenings and performance art, just to mention a few of the bigger suspects. By the time Basquiat was ‘discovered’ and rocketed to the dizzy heights, New York was already losing energy; the charade of money, drugs and glamour had begun to drown out genuinely powerful new ideas. JMB could have been one of the figures that revived the scene but, instead, he fell in with the other young stars, the Francesco Clementes and the David Salles and was dead before he reached 30. Looking now at the bright, hard colours, the deliberately childlike drawing, the slash of words and symbols repeated across scarred canvas and paper and wood, the stuff reveals itself to be the interesting but still under-cooked beginning of an oeuvre. The fact that it fills me with a nostalgia for a time and a place long gone doesn’t save it from the assessment that this is still someone trying to come out of the shadows of earlier biggies.

Bill Viola, on the other hand, has had what one might call a ‘rich and full life’ as an artist. Working with experimental video since the mid-70s, Viola has now reached a very recognizable ‘handwriting’ with high-definition, super-slow-motion videos that, among many influences, takes liberally from Zen Buddhism and Italian Renaissance paintings. Walking into this show, Interior Visions, you realize there is no way of zipping through the maze of rooms and videos, this is work that demands time and patience. Three hours later, as I came out, I understood two contradictory things: first, why an artist friend, when I told him I was going to see this, SMS-ed me from Delhi, Viola-r kaaj ektu nyaka, and why the man is deservedly regarded as a major international artist. Some of the pieces are, indeed, nyaka — precious and coy — their references to Christianity and Buddhism narrowing their impact, but the ones that worked, worked wonderfully, with the stern illogic that is the hallmark of all truly powerful art.

I will describe here the video titled Observance, one of the ‘simplest’ of the 20-odd pieces at the show: on a vertical screen, against a black and neutral background, a crowd of people push past each other in slow motion; one by one the ‘characters’ come face to face with the camera, see something that horrifies and shatters them, and turn away into the oncoming crowd; the whole thing happens in extreme slow motion so that each twitch of a face, each involuntary shiver of a hand or shoulder, each small shove and nudge, is caught and stretched out; the scene could be from news footage, or it could be a small cross-section of a fiction film, but as you watch, it is neither — it is a slow, tragic dance that becomes a movement-portrait of our times and our existentialist situation; the horror is undefined, and it’s actually sited where the you, the viewer, are standing; it could be a terrorist atrocity, it could be a machine-gun massacre in a high school, it could be a suicide or an accident, it could be death, or a dismemberment too gross for a human sensibility to take in, yet it’s something that has an almost fatal attraction, the people pushing towards the camera have to see this thing, this event or its residue, despite knowing that they will not be able to bear it for too long, that it will mark them deeply, possibly permanently; there is a craving for the pain of witnessing and yet, what these people (of different races, clearly American, mostly middle-class, mostly urban) are pulled and repelled by is something that the viewer must fill in.

The day after I saw these two American shows, Barack Obama was elected president. In quiet celebration, I went and paid my respects to the huge conclave of Giovanni Bellini paintings that have been gathered at the Scuderie del Quirinale museum (picture). Jean-Michel Basquiat hadn’t lived to see this day, but a black guy a bit younger than him and me had made it to the very top of mainstream US politics; Bill Viola’s work took in the wrenching events of the last eight American years and ran them through the fine mesh of his sensibility, and it felt almost as if that catharsis had then led to this mass release through the ballot. On November 5, with the results firmly in place, I could at last move away from the Americans and give the Italians their due.