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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Review |
Kapoorthala
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| Anish Kapoor, Delhi, Mumbai defies the straitjacket
of nationality, the latitude resulting in works that tease cultural milieus |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUBHASH SHARMA |
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| ‘Shooting into the Corner,’ the highlight of the Mumbai show, features repetitive firing of wax bullets from a cannon.
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| A |
NISH KAPOOR SCRUNCHES HIS EYEBROWS and
flinches at the sound of a supersized wax bullet
that isn’t hurtling his way. It’s nice to know that the
sound of an artwork—‘Shooting into the Corner, 2008-09’—
completed two years ago, can still alarm Anish Kapoor.
Suddenly, I don’t feel entirely silly at having felt out of sorts,
every 20 minutes or thereabouts,
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which is when the red wax bullet is shot from a seriously smooth cannon.
Before its much-anticipated release here at the Mehboob
Studio, Mumbai, the sounds of this resonant work debuted
at London’s Royal Academy of Arts last year. Kapoor’s midcareer
retrospective at the Academy gave him membership
to a club so select, he is thus far peerless. Kapoor is the first
living artist to have exhibited at the redoubtable venue. At
275,000 visitors, the exhibition worked up a footfall befitting
of the blockbuster show it was always angled to be.
My first encounter with a Kapoor artwork was mediated
via a two-dimensional reproduction of the subtly three-dimensional
work ‘When I am Pregnant, 1992.’ The work had
appeared on the jacket of International Galerie, 1998. At the
time I was just about familiar with Kapoor’s name; but I remember
still, the lightly sculptural work undercutting the
pathologies of violence.
And another red one shoots off into the white corner.
Splotch! This time Kapoor doesn’t resort to duck ‘n’ scrunch,
choosing instead to apologise. “Sorry about that,” he smiles.
Discussing an impression she had picked up following
her arrival in Mumbai, Andrea Rose, co-curator, Anish Kapoor,
Delhi, Mumbai, says, “Earlier today, someone spoke of
how they thought the work referenced the November 2008
terrorist attacks on the city.”
With ‘Shooting into the Corner’ the splatter gun effect
touches on metaphors as wide-ranging as violence; extended
sculpture, painting and abstraction; evasion and—allow
me to be puerile here—even that preferred sport of several
men, the one that has them pointing and shooting into
the corners of this great city of ours, as though it is a ginormous
urinal.
Why of all the places the city could’ve doled out did Kapoor
choose—as inspired a choice as it is—Mehboob Studios,
a churning site of quintessential Bollywood? “Studios belong to Bombay; Bollywood belongs to Bombay. I’m really
interested in the idea that art can go wider, can go further
beyond the art world. And why not? We have here, an audience
as sophisticated or unsophisticated as anyplace else,”
Kapoor asserts.
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Kapoor is the only living artist to
have exhibited at London’s Royal Academy |
Although Kapoor doesn’t share an idiom with the excesses
of Bollywood, his spare show at the cavernous studio
space comes together because of the sheer will of the work.
The site, which looks freshly gutted, becomes befitting of
an artist who has, in his nearly four decade long practice,
been the epitome of spare.
On my way to the opening, the rickshaw driver ferrying
me across to the venue inquired if there was big gig on
at Mehboob Studio. I explained as best I could that an artist
called Anish Kapoor was exhibiting his works there.
I had only just mentioned the name, when he caught my
attention via the rear-view mirror and inquired, “Whose
son is he?”
It was a few seconds before I got routed to the road from
which Speedy Gonzales was approaching the matter. Out
here in Bollywood land, if you’re a Kapoor then you oughta be someone’s son.
Born in the Bombay of 1954, this Kapoor is the son of a
Jewish mother and a Punjabi hydrographer father. In 1971,
he moved to Israel where he studied electrical engineering.
Then in 1973 he moved once again, this time to London, by
which time art was most definitely after his heart.
For all intents and purposes—from the invite to the
hoardings—the title of the show reads, Anish Kapoor, Delhi,
Mumbai; the names of the two cities are in Devanagari.
While introducing and discussing the exhibition Kapoor preferred to align with Mumbai. Be that as it may, on the
evening of this encounter Kapoor prefers to not slip into the
straitjacket of nationality, this latitude resulting in works
that tease cultural milieux.
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The freshly gutted
feel of Mehboob Studios is well-suited to the spareness of Kapoor’s
art |
A case in point would be the startling colour of his pigment
series, 1978-83, with powdered pigment covering the
works and the floor around. Sure, the colours are reminiscent
of a certain Indian aesthetic, but look closer: they disguise
the solidity of Euclidean forms. They are solid forms
confused by the surface. The subject is sculpture, albeit via
Indian culture.
From confusion of surface to the tautness of surface. In
the void series—the word itself first appeared in 1989, in a
work titled ‘Void’—the scooped-out centres of first fibreglass
and then metal create illusory vortexes. From afar
they appear like pools of colour, inviting you to dip your
hand in. In 1991, not long after the voids had arrived, Kapoor
won himself the Turner Prize, Britain’s prestigious
annual art award.
Kapoor is an erudite artist, no doubt. Formal wizardry
and philosophical games have long since made a conjoined
appearance in his oeuvre. But he does best when he leaves
out the quasi-philosophical/theoretical jargon. His idea of
the ‘proto-object’—an object that precedes language and
preconditioning—is a case in point. Any such object would
be impossible, as it would in fact fall within the ambit of natural language and not precede it.
In keeping the works open he enables them to elude any
one meaning. The void works, for instance, are conceptually
busy because they are reminiscent of engineering, astronomy,
Buddhist and Japanese philosophies, computer
programming and even accounting.
Alas, the Mumbai leg of the exhibition does not have
representatives from either the void or the pigment series,
though Delhi does. As a result, we don’t get to see the gradual
narrowing of the palette. From the red, blue, yellow and
white of his pigment and void sequences, to just the red—as
found in the ambitious PVC and wax works—which unfailingly
recalls the body.
Explaining his methodology Kapoor says, “Since Delhi
has some of that retrospect quality, it didn’t feel necessary
to repeat the same at Mehboob. All the works here, I think,
have been made in the last five to six years or so. In the wax
and mirrored works I was keen on exhibiting the two polar
opposites of my work.”
Between the two sites one gets a wholesome view of Kapoor’s
oeuvre. The only missing bit is the sampling of a PVC
work. Thus far, the works have entailed the holding up of
unheard of amounts of stretchy PVC in physics-defying
ways with the help of metal braces, rings and other such
things. The PVC chapter climaxed with Marsyas, 2002-03,
the crowd puller at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. At 3,400
square feet, the Turbine Hall is a notoriously difficult space,
but Kapoor took it over end to end.
In addition to the polarity Kapoor speaks of, it is possible
to discern another axis of polarities. Most exhibitions are
built around the space-object paradigm, and Kapoor too has
toed this line. But in the recent past Kapoor has successfully
brought in elements of the time-event paradigm. So now
we’re looking at a space-object-time-event intersection. Out
here in Mumbai with the exception of ‘Shooting into the
Corner,’ all other works are objects anchored in space, in
that they don’t have a periodic performance timetable.
‘Svayambhu(v), 2007’—first exhibited at the Haus der
Kunst, Munich, and then again at the retrospective two
years ago—amplifies the space-object-time-event intersection
a few notches more than ‘Shooting into the Corner.’ In
it, a red wax behemoth takes its time to wind through the
rooms of the given space mucking up the doorframes it encounters.
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One of the many reflective sculptures on display—a
part of the ‘S-Curve’ series |
We live in a mucky city where guns, horns, bombs, tempers
and everything else that can go off, goes off. And, yet,
nothing startles. For the third time the cannon has gone off.
By now I should’ve gotten used to the shot into the corner.
But I catch my reflection do a hiccup in the ‘S-Curve, 2006.’
When I stand up-close to the S-Curve my reflection appears
no different from the one I see of myself in an ordinary
full-length mirror. But I gain girth as I step away. Finally
now that I’ve moved beyond a certain point, my reflection
has flipped over and is doing the sort of headstand I’m
more or less incapable of doing. Showing solidarity with the
S-Curve at Mehboob are ‘Non-Object (Plane), 2010,’ ‘Non-
Object (Door), 2008,’ ‘Non-Object (Pole), 2008’ and ‘Non-
Object (Spire), 2008.’ These shiny, happy pieces—each work
is titled after the form it’s given—which recall funhouse
mirrors, are made from highly polished stainless steel and
are more modest iterations of bigger and shinier works like
‘Cloud Gate (aka ‘The Bean’), 2006,’ and ‘Sky Mirror, 2001.’
The Serpentine Gallery is currently hosting a show, Turning
the World Upside Down, of four such mirror-like Kapoor
pieces at Kensington Gardens in London. To realise what
we have lost out on, one has to imagine the impact these
works have when not just a person but nature preens in
front of them.
You can’t touch but you can certainly make a picture of
yourself peering into Kapoor’s looking glasses. Ah, yes, but
they’re not allowing pictures at the exhibition. And that,
I’m afraid, is plain silly. What are they worried about? All
previous tests have confirmed that stainless steel and wax
do not wither when exposed to the camera or its flash. But
the Aura might wither; aha, so there’s your catch. Of course,
we must solemnly guard the Aura under all circumstances.
Cameras, more importantly cellphone cameras, complete
these works. It’s like an epic clash between two spectaculars.
The works need them. Cameras bring them closure, so
to speak.
Also, it would’ve been nice to have one of the mirrored
works outdoors, which is where their personality best
emerges. I reckon, however, that thought has gone into this
decision; after all, the show has been a near-decade in the
making. So, it would be best not to carp I suppose. There
have been whispers, ahem, about a possible public art commission
in India. Kapoor does confirm them: “Sonia Gandhi
seemed to say something about a work in the Indian public
place in her introductory address.” Yep, that’s right. Mrs
Gandhi inaugurated the Delhi exhibition at the National
Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA). The politics of aesthetics?
Rancière, mon amour!
A fourth wax bullet. A loud-ish thud followed by a quick
plonk, as the bullet heaps onto the unruly pile of red wax
below.
Anish Kapoor, Delhi, Mumbai
-At Mehboob Studio, Mumbai. Daily, from 9 am to 9 pm,
until 16 January.
-At the National Gallery of Modern Art, Jaipur House,
New Delhi. Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 5pm, until 27
February Clsosed on Mondays and National Holidays.
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