Anish Kapoor – Perception and Deception

Anish Kapoor has become over the past three decades, one of the most influential and significant artists of this century, gaining renowned international acclaim in the art world. Strictly a sculptor, his interest and exploration of space, colour, perception and creation has had extreme influence not only in contemporary sculpture, but also in the merging of the art world and the public domain.

I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist. Having something to say implies that one is struggling with meaning. The role of the artist is in fact we don’t know what to say, and it’s that not knowing that leads to the work.  Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy of Arts programme

Kapoor’s work garnered such rave reviews from my brother that I could not help but let my mother persuade me to join the public transport commune and see for my self.

Upon arriving at the Royal Academy and joining the cue, which stretched from the reception desk to the grand courtyard gates, we were met with Kapoor’s giant construction of silver balls: Tall Tree and Eye. The sculpture a mathematically complex structure, appears random and irrelevant as it grows towards the heavens. Each ball reflects a multitude of surfaces until it appears that it’s not solid but rather a malleable liquid reflecting each of the towers bubbles simultaneously. The construction realises the idea of a contraction of space, as heaven meets earth through an elongated spherical pinnacle. Charming yet abstract, it’s the first taste of Kapoor’s exhibition.

Moving into the actual gallery you’re met immediately, by a contrasting image built up of steel called the Hive. It supposedly shows the contrasting image of an internal space/cave and an object in space. To my uneducated eye it simply appeared as an enlarged birthing canal, and as the first piece of work to actually see it was shocking, almost slightly disturbing. The grand scale it was on begged the question, how did it fit in the gallery, yet nothing particularly struck me, just a lot of brown and a small slit of black.

Moving through an archway, one’s confronted by a cramped tightly packed room filled with piles ad piles of writhing cement. A feeling of claustrophobia overwhelms you as you edge carefully and disdainful through the pyres. Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke Beauty Evoked, was Kapoor’s next creation, which aimed to create ‘art without the hand’ a goal that set ‘art beyond expression’. The cement sculptures were generated from specifically developed technology, which resulted in a subversion of the natural means of production by human hands. The atmosphere was uncomfortable bordering on repulsive, perhaps due to the unnatural means of creation. Some resembled the atomic fallout of Hiroshima, others piles of worms devouring tombstones, turds piled upon one another, none pleasant or uplifting.  Perhaps Kapoor was expressing man’s darker, less wholesome side. Was Kapoor questioning whether what man creates will become such a good imitation of the natural, we will no longer be able to distinguish the blueprint from the muse? Perhaps from this repulsive creation Kapoor is questioning whether beauty is achievable, or is perfection embodied in our imperfection, our quirks our misconceptions.

This idea of perfection and beauty is heightened by The Slug. A grand swirling creation of marble, with a red mouth evidently displaying sexual connotations. A reflection of man’s desires resulting in repulsion? Or simply a very large sculpture?

Kapoor’s work, though ingeniously created and seamlessly formed to appear without a maker, is a spectacle to observe but one that makes you question art as a form of aesthetic beauty. His moving wall of red wax with tracks covered in the viscous materia,l is like imminent death approaching you. It forms the idea that we continue forward on our bloody road of life on the backs of those who died. Viewing it makes one feel like the children of a genocide are rising up, moving towards you, an unavoidable tragedy. The block of wax passes through the arches of the Royal Academy, specifically done to show passion formed from grandeur? Bloody violence in a masquerade of wealth?  Is Kapoor’s Svayambh, Sanskrit for Self-generated, a metaphor of man’s cycle for the inevitable search of grandeur through violence?

The exhibition is interesting. It causes you to see yourself from a new perspective and question that perspective. It subtly exchanges views on creation, as in When I Am Pregnant depicts, are we formed or do we appear, like a stomach emerging through a wall. Is our creation at the hands of a creator, or the hands of ourselves, by our design, our manipulation? And once we are created where do we go?

Yellow questions whether what we perceive is reality or imagination, a misunderstanding between the eye and the mind as one is overcome by a sea of colour, plain curving colour that takes a form outside of formation, hovering between apparition and a surface. Can colour, pigment be a state of being, be a form as well as a visual stimulus?

Anish Kapoor’s work is a disturbing exhibition but one worth seeing to question your questions. Whether Kapoor’s work speaks to you or not, the Royal Academy of Arts has done well to host this sculptural talent to the public domain. Kapoor’s work unlike some modern art truly does have something to say. The question is whether it’s interpretable.