Anish Kapoor
"Anish Kapoor" by Christina Bagatavicius, Spring 2010, pp. 89-99
Expectations were high for Anish Kapoor’s latest exhibition, which marked the first time a living artist has been given free rein in the Royal Academy. Featuring around 30 works, the show is as much a crowd- pleasing spectacle as it is a milestone in the artist’s practice. The exhibition tempts visitors in with Tall Tree and the Eye (2009), a steel sculpture made of 75 oversized reflective baubles that stands in the outdoor courtyard. This cluster of rounded surfaces generates a myriad of vistas that come to life as the work’s surroundings continually shift and change.
The introductory gallery showcases Kapoor’s pigment sculptures, which garnered much attention in the 1980s. These geometric forms appear fragile, like powder mirages that might blow away at any moment. Nearby are two playful wall pieces that explore the chasm between perception and reality. While the saturated colour of Yellow (1999) is overpowering, When I Am Pregnant (1992) is discreet and cleverly hidden by the gallery architecture. This sequence of works celebrates Kapoor’s aesthetic sensibility as we have come to know it: transcendental, illusory, pure and elegant.
What follows is a departure into the unexpected. Kapoor’s latest piece, Shooting into the Corner (2008–09), embraces the theatricality of excess. This performance, which could be viewed live on the Royal Academy’s website during the show, is staged as a two-room installation. In the larger room, audiences congregate around a massive cannon that sits next to a stack of red wax shells. Every 20 minutes a gallery attendant loads the cannon and fires a deafening shot into the adjacent room. A wad of wax catapults towards the smaller room and the bloodthirsty crowd is rewarded with a heavy thud as it splatters into an amorphous pile. The experience of witnessing the desecration of an art institution for art’s sake is immensely satisfying.
While some critics have remarked on the work’s Freudian, sexual connotations, others see it as a play on Jackson Pollock’s Action painting. The destructive impulse underlying this performance also brings to mind the work of Paul McCarthy. Another monumental piece, Svayambh (2007),whose title is Sanskrit for “born of itself,” is an apt companion to Shooting into the Corner. This work consists of a 40-ton crimson block of wax that almost imperceptibly inches its way back and forth along a track on the gallery floor. As the grotesque mass squeezes through doorways, it flays itself, leaving a thick trace of residue smeared on the walls. Some visitors are so mesmerized that they can barely suppress the desire to touch.
Nearby sits a cement-based work with the poetic name Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008–09). Its scatological concrete mounds are imperfect and broken, their wholeness of form unravelling into worm-like shapes. The rest of Kapoor’s exhibition is equally engaging—from the spellbinding, house-of-mirrors Non-Object series through to Slug, which brings the sexual explicitness of Georgia O’Keeffe to a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors. Kapoor’s brilliance lies in his ability to activate the spectator’s imagination while pushing his work into raw and unrestrained territory.
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