Read Kavita Ramdya’s review of Anish Kapoor’s exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art.
The Anish Kapoor exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art is all the rave right now. You can’t escape it: Anish Kapoor’s name decorates Tube turnstyles, double-decker buses, and cabs. Completely turned off the by hype and marketing, I was more than skeptical that the show would live up to the rave reviews; it’s as if art reviewers are foaming at the mouth for Anish Kapoor, stark-raving mad for more. Unbelievably, the show DOES live up to expectations. I loved it as did my husband and friends who accompanied us, an accupuncturist and the owner of a technology company. The Anish Kapoor show is among the best I’ve ever visited, and it’s fair to say I’ve seen my fair share of art.
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October 23, 2009
News India Times
“An Artist with no nationality” by Kavita Ramdya
Tube (London subway) platforms, double-decker buses, and cab doors, not to mention magazines and newspapers as diverse as The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, and Mayfair Times. The Mumbai-born artist the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the elite Royal Academy of Art, one of London’s most well-respected and revered cultural institutions.
Outside the Royal Academy of Art, during all hours of the day and night, there is a glut of people spilling onto the Piccadilly pavement.
They wait on line to buy tickets to the show as well as marvel at the fifteen-metre sculpture “Tall Tree and Eye” in the Annenburg Courtyard: a Babel-inspiring pyramid made up of seventy-six large, polished, stain-less-steel spheres reaching for the sky. In it, viewers see reflections of the museum, the clouds, and themselves.
As his name suggests, Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai before schooling and working in England where he made his career. Expecting to see art inspired by his heritage, I was surprised by the lack of references towards Indian culture, mythology, current events, and imagery. In fact, I later learned from Dr. Adrian Locke, a curator at the RAA, that the artist finds his Indian origin irrelevant and defies art historians, patrons of the arts, and museum directors to categorize his work as “Indian art”. As a writer of South-Asian descent, and one who is highly conscious that my ethnicity, faith and gender shape my concerns and thus my work, my interest was piqued upon hearing that Anish Kapoor rejects the idea of nationalizing his work. Do works of Art have a nationality? Is it possible to reproduce art which doesn’t lend itself to having a national identity?
Upon entering the exhibit, which takes up five galleries, I quickly observed that for Anish Kapoor, “bigger is better”. The scale of his work is surreal.
As I made my way past “Svayambh”, the heart of the show, where a thirty-ton block of licorice-red wax creeps its way across the gallery on a set of tracks, and walked through “Mirrors” where kids contort their faces and jump up and down while their parents sneakily took photos on their iPhones, I felt like I was walking through an “art funhouse”.
Two major differences between the Anish Kapoor exhibit and other shows I’ve attended is the interactive play between the viewer and the art and, as a result, the preponderance of young children running and screaming throughout the galleries… and, of course, the accompanying noise that further confirmed my analogy of attending the show like visiting a carnival funhouse.
Although “Svayambh” is the heart of the show and the towering courtyard sculpture tempts shoppers and pedestrians while greeting museum visitors, “Shooting into the Corner” is the most infamous piece in the show. The title borrows from a dirty, adolescent joke and with good reason. The work is made up of a canon which fires wax pallets through a doorway from one gallery into another.
There is an element of penetration in the work and expressions of masculinity and violence. And, of course, the joke is on the viewer when the semen, I mean, wax hits the wall and then, in an anti-climactic way, slowly creeps downwards into a mess of old wax. On a psychological level, the work spurs notions of sexuality – not coincidentally, the work was first exhibited in Vienna, the home of Freud. From an architectural point of view, the wax is shot into a corner: the corner as the origin of any building. And, finally, from an artistic point of view, the slowly dripping wax is in its own way a constantly-evolving piece of art work, changing and growing like a human inside and outside the womb.
Is there anything in the Royal Academy of Art show that betrays Anish Kapoor’s Indian origin apart from one work’s Sanskrit name? In my opinion, yes—the scale and the colors with which Kapoor creates his works suggest the artist’s country of origin is at the very least a subconscious force in creating his oeuvre. “Tall Tree and Eye” resembles the shape and size of Rajasthan’s ancient Hindu temples, and the vibrant crimsons and yellows in Kapoor’s work are reminiscent of common Indian spices used in cooking like red chilli powder and turmeric as well as the most popular pigments used to paint family and friends on the popular Hindu holiday, Holi, or the Festival of Colors.
Originally skeptical of Anish Kapoor’s rejection of the label “Indian artist”, after viewing the exhibition I am convinced that although Art need not require a nationality, or a specific country culture from which it originates, I stand by the fact that Art cannot be produced in a vacuum; it comes from somewhere, is inspired by something, and is in conversation with other cultural products.
However, Anish Kapoor’s body of work does not come from the culture of nationhood, specifically India’s, but from the Culture of Science. Anish Kapoor’s ambitious attempts at creating perfectly symmetrical geometric shapes, experiments with pigment, play with materials to create textures, and problem solving behind integrating two seemingly-incompatible materials into a single piece, is the most successful demonstration of Art originated from Science I have ever witnessed. Which begs the question, what does this Culture of Science indicate about Anish Kapoor’s own identity as an artist?
Kavita Ramdya is author of “Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement and Marriage in Hindu America” http://www.bollywood-weddings.com/Home.html
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