A blog’s been a long time coming, though the seeds of one have been germinating in my skull’s soil for quite some time. Discerning what to write about in what has been a very hectic month is as difficult to conclude as an undesired chore.
Yesterday, I paused for a moment, slouched on the sofa, munched on reheated Persian kebab, listened to the residue of an earlier argument, watched snippets of Rudolf Nureyev prancing about to a Khachaturian ballet on the telly and began contemplating a postcard I had earlier propped up against the corner of the television.
Not much really, a great big block of ochre red just passed a waxy arched doorway of the Royal Academy of Arts’ main gallery, currently hosting an exhibition by Anish Kapoor. The picture plays a trick; either the block is smaller than the doorframe, but is otherwise a perfect copy of the arch’s outline, or else the block of wax has already passed through, and then what you’re witnessing is something in the distance, beyond the archway. Of course there are giveaway clues as to which is true.
What struck me, as I sat quietly at home, late on a Friday night, post a pint with Effendi Al-Firangi, a heated discussion about Afghanistan, a reheated Persian kebab churning in my belly, was how in the month that had just passed by, it was watching this slow moving slab of wax that had afforded me my only slowed, conscious, moment of observation; the kind that might warrant the subject matter of my rambling away in this blog.
Ostensibly I had spent a good quarter of an hour watching an almost imperceptibly slow block of wax, a good twelve feet tall, four metres wide, eight metres long, pass along tracks laid out through three galleries. So slow, that it’s movement was describable as stealthy, so agonisingly slow that you wonder why exactly you stood, with an equally gormless group of tourists, pretentious art people and bored housewives, watching a block of wax course slowly by.
Its passage looks so painful through the arches that it reminds you of choking on a too-large morsel, passing painfully through your gullet, whilst the evoking twinge in your arse suggests what’s implied here is constipation. The blood red density of it might just represent the passage of blood, the tracks, the limits of a vein, and the painful push through the archway is rather reminiscent of those obesity awareness campaigns which show the passage of blood through fat clogged arteries.
Whilst one could ‘wax lyrical’ about the piece, entitled ‘Svayambh’ – self-generated in Sanskrit, you are just staring at a slow-moving block of wax. Kapoor argues that the art lies in the process whereby a substance ‘sculpts itself’ and defines itself. I’m not certain this is what is actually occurring – the material is manipulated by a human-authored mechanism, just as the archways are unlikely to allow for the non-sentient block of wax to form itself into the shape of an elephant.
Having said that it was mesmerising. Almost as involving as the installation wherein a cannon fires a giant artillery shell of wax (red again) at the far wall, after being triggered by a very serious looking attendant (very serious, as though charged by God with some celestial task) every quarter of an hour; bang! The predictable noise of the impact and gasping sighs of people in total awe, this one I don’t get, I like it, but don’t get, can’t even begin to interpret it. It’s just a cannon firing wax pellets that, over the exhibitions course have built up into a mound of hardened wax, splattered over the frescoes of the gallery’s neo-classical ceiling. Rather than engage in a debate over interpretation, I can’t help but wonder more about the cleaning bill for an exhibition, a large part of which might just as easily be called institutionalised vandalism, as well as art.
That’s not to say I didn’t fall in love with Kapoor, who, like myself, is half-Iraqi, half-Indian, though he’s Jewish, and I’m Armenian, and this similar familial background is the origin of my interest in the cheeky chap. What’s astounding is that the whole exhibition, indeed the artist’s whole work, relies entirely upon the individual’s perception; you don’t necessarily ‘get it’ because your approach is variable, and each new approach, by the same individual, provides a new perception. You need to have David Bowie’s question: ‘Don you wonder about sound and vision?’ echoing in your head to fully appreciate Kapoor.
Take the sculptures seemingly made of granules of pigment, you awe at the fragility, how has the artist managed to maintain them in those positions when even the sighing breath of an ant would be enough to tumble them down. Look a little closer and you’ll see it’s a facade, a granulated coating giving the impression that what you thought were mounds, are in fact sculptures. A seamless bulge from the wall entitled 'When I Am Pregnant' disappears with distance, or closeness, changes in perfection, dimension, shape and size – all dependant on where you stand. Though completed, the implied pregnancy suggests the sculpture is still in development; its conclusion has yet to be ‘birthed’. The title, equally ambiguous in its resolution might as well be followed by ‘...’.
Though there are only a few pieces you linger. A yellow indentation in the wall would appear deeper than it is its playing on the norms of your mind’s understanding of convex and concave makes an inversion simultaneously a protrusion. Gives you a bit of a headache as well.
Kapoor’s sculpture ‘Slug’ is equally evocative; either an intestine attached to an anus, in which case you’re looking at a digestive tract, yet the colouring and style might equally be an umbilical cord attached to a vagina. The colours and shapes are playful; they’re both natural bodily greys and organic loops mixed with viscerally graphic reds and all-too-perfect shapes.
The series of concrete sculptures, pushed through an icing dispenser, in their asymmetrical randomness, but all produced in the same way, conjure different images. Collapsed layers look like ancient civilisations’ ruins, pseudo-altars, masses of corpses and tapered ends are rather phallic looking. Again, you’re just looking at concrete, as you were just looking at wax, a reflection or powder...
That’s my take on the genius of Kapoor, he devilishly plays with your perception, and the outcome is deliciously infectious and leaves you really wondering as to how you perceive things. What’s complicated might just as easily be reduced and reinterpreted accordingly.
Then again I might just have wasted my time staring at and explaining essentially a glorified candle.
©Ara Iskanderian 5/12/2009
