From pigment, to shine, to slime…. Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy
Kapoor’s magnificent solo show at the Royal Academy is a delight – rooms filled with huge, tactile objects, shimmering surfaces, giant constructions, and slippery, wet gunk; a visual and physical feast, playing with shape, form, space and colour – where to begin?
Colour is Power
In ‘Pigments works’ clusters of objects heavily dusted in primary coloured pigment are arranged in little communities on the floor and occasionally on the walls, sticking out at right angles. They’re the earliest works in the show, going back to the start of the eighties. Each group has a poetic name like As if to Celebrate I discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers and comprises objects with their own singular shape – ranging from spiked clubs that look like flora in a Sonic the Hedgehog computer game, to lotus flower buds and to the pointed crescents on the top of Islamic minarets. The strange shapes, pure colour and unreflective surfaces make for something soothing – both on the eye and on the mind. For me it’s the pigment that really works – quietly and stealthily generating a richness of colour. Intense and satisfying, the reds, blues and yellows really buzz. Strangely, it makes me think of a portrait by Lucian Freud, Girl with Roses, which is part of the British Council’s Collection. To enhance the green stripes of the sitter’s jumper, Freud painted small, black dots on the green, making it leap off the canvas. In a similar juxtaposition of colour and shade, the shadow of each grain of pigment intensifies the colour.
In the adjacent room is the magnificent Yellow (1999), for which a false wall has been erected to contain a huge, buttercup-yellow cavity framed in the same yellow. The undulating levels create an optical illusion – both on ‘outy’ and an ‘inny’ belly button depending on how you look it. The intensity of the yellow pigment is both meditative – indeed there was a visitor practising yoga in front of Yellow – and energising. Shiny emulsion paint just wouldn’t cut the mustard.
In his recent series of Non-objects – a chamber of mirrors akin to those at the kids’ corner of McDonalds but more sophisticated – Kapoor eschews colour for reflective surfaces. Adults and children alike – we were all happily absorbed in manipulating our reflections in the convex, concave and cylindrical mirrors; space somersaults and disappears into itself in these giant objects. Despite the fun and even vertigo the mirrors engender, I find that they offer me nothing new to reflect upon – more surface than substance.
Similarly reflective forms greet the viewer in the RA’s courtyard, but this time in the shape of spheres or bubbles, jumbled on top of each other to create a wonky, towering mass – a feat of physics and imagination.
Antiquity to modernity and beyond
The epic piece Slug (2009) is something from the deep sea or nightmares; a shiny, red vulva-like mouth blossoms out of a writhing worm of resin. Numbers are etched into the different blocks of resin, exposing the piecing together of this monster and diminishing its mythical status, and also, possibly, referencing Joseph Beuys’ use of resin. The leap between the artificially shiny mouth and the dull, marble-like tentacle surveys the materials of sculpture from antiquity to the present today. The work brings to mind the sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, in which the Greek subjects battle against serpents sent by Apollo. In contrast, Kapoor maintains an ambivalent relationship between the forces in Slug; are they in battle – one consuming the other, or are they in a more umbilical-like symbiosis – one growing out of the other? The sculpture is both masterly in craftsmanship and rich in meaning.
Kapoor’s works cry out to be touched and climbed into – however, the gallery attendants and cordons make it clear that this is definitely a look but don’t touch show. It would be fun to climb into Hive, a sculpture that is something like Carsten Höller’s Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern meets Jim Henson’s movie Labyrinth. I hear that a guest at an event held at the RA innocently wandered in to the exhibition and down the tunnel of Hive’s mouth. He was seen again, but not without a ticking off I’m told. The clever thing with the sculpture is that from one viewpoint it looks like a big cave and from another a flat object which couldn’t possibly house a chamber, although it certainly does. I marvel at the planning that must have gone into creating this visual and physical conundrum, and the sheer boldness – it was built in a shipyard and pretty much fills the gallery.
Kapoor plays around with transmutation in the cryptically named Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008-09). The exhibition notes explain that the different piles of cement that feature in this exhibit have been fashioned by a cement excreting machine – which explains why lots of it looks like coils of poo. Others look deceptively like heaped-up, deep pile bathmats considering they’re concrete. On an individual level they are ugly objects, but together they become something like an intriguing culture that has outgrown a Petri dish.
Making a mess
Svayambha (2007) is a towering slab of sticky, red wax that moves at a snail’s pace along tracks running between five galleries, leaving sticky, bloody residue as its bulk shifts through the connecting marble archways again and again. The sheer amount of waxy matter is impressive, and it’s something that would be great to prod and poke, leaving handprints and smears on its smooth sides. However, it’s hands-off. It seems that Kapoor is again more interested in making an installation that overshadows rather than fully involves the viewer. The bulk of Svayambha somehow takes over – literally by blocking the way to two galleries, and by being an unpredictable mound of matter vulnerably seeping and bleeding.
Making even more of a gooey mess, Shooting into the Corner (2008-09) fires a waxy red cannonball into the wall of a neighbouring gallery, smashing traditional concepts of the gallery space as it does so. The tension mounts in the small crowd as the gallery attendant slowly loads the cannonball with the cold purpose of an executioner and pumps up the pressure. It releases in the blink of an eye and finishes in a satisfying mess on the wall, along with many other splats and stains from hundreds of other wax bullets that have been fired throughout the duration of the show. It’s violent and aggressive, and sees Kapoor doing something completely different with colour and form – mixing it up in a horrible, growing, bloody mess.
The show demonstrates that Kapoor is master manipulator of both material and the viewer’s physiological state. From installation to installation, I lurch from contemplation to shock, from wanting touch, prod and poke to being repelled. The works both envelope me in colour, shape and form, and create an at arms length tactile experience. Despite not being able to touch the works, the textures none the less mark themselves on my mind, in a near perfect metaphor for touch.
Helen Holtom
Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy, 26 September – 11 December 2009
Farewell Dans, hello kitty
Today I said farewell to my dear old friend Dans, who is heading to Australia with her one true love. We supped at Viet Pho on Greek Street in Soho, which is where I spied this cute kitty. You can just about see Dans through the green bamboo leaves on the otherside of the window. Come back soon!
Chord, Conrad Shawcross
London is a network of routes – some visible like the roads and cycle and bus lanes, others beneath the surface; all carrying passengers to destinations. It’s estimated that the London Underground transports more than two million people a day.
Imagine if every single person traversing the capital left a trail of light – something like the trail of a sparkler or the lines of headlights in a photograph taken at a slow shutter speed. The city above and below ground would be alight. Condrad Shawcross’s new installation in the depths of the Kingsway tram system at Holborn makes physical this line of journeying
Chord is made up of two giant looms that are connected by 162 spools of rainbow coloured thread. As the spools rotate and the machines move away from each other on a 100 metre track, a giant piece of suspended rope is woven. It takes four weeks to complete the short journey; the movement propelling the sculpture is barely perceptible.
There is something very human about Chord – like two figures bidding farewell. The coloured rope intimates those invisible trails that we weave as we journey. The gentleness of Shawcross’s mechanical creatures and their shared umbilical chord seems to be generative if not purposefull. However, at the end of each of the four weeks cycles that span the show, the rope, I’ve been told, has been cut up and sold.
Chord is also a response to the cavernous space and functionality of the now defunct tramway, which closed in 1952. It recreates the mechanical to-ing and fro-ing of the bygone double-decker trams, only at a fraction of the speed. Surely it has its roots in the age of industry age, yet it also has an organic quality with its flower-like nexus of spools and twining threads, hinting at the invisible patterns and formulae that govern both the natural and manmade world.
The space itself is something of an exhibit with an intriguing mix of past and present. Street paraphernalia – belonging to Camden Council – is stored in the old underground tunnels. Truncated lampposts and discarded spiked spheres that decorate Holborn streets at Christmas – rather like a miniature B of the Bang, Thomas Heatherwick ill-fated piece of public art – lurk in the shadows. Old tube maps from the fifties – without the Victoria and Circle lines – peel off dusty walls and the intricate threaded shadows cast by Chord bring to mind Ariadne and her reckless tapestry; all add to the sense of melancholy and ghostliness.
Watching Shawcross’s gentle giant, silently going about its motorised business, is very soothing. The spools slowly turn and the looms move away from each other imperceptibly, yet despite the near invisibility of movement something is being created. It’s hypnotic and I found myself adapting to Chord’s time, standing watching without really be able to see progress but nonetheless feeling a sense of satisfaction.
I resurfaced into the evening rush hour of Holborn and drifted into the crowds heading purposefully home.
I have a secret. Beneath our feet Chord is slowly doing its thing into the night, and there is something in its unassuming industriousness that prevents me from moving with the same urgency as those around me. Chord has succeeded in removing me – at least for a time – from the pace of the city. It feels good.
