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Anish Kapoor's Art Exhibition
It becomes essential to engage with the work and look beyond the hype of Anish Kapoor’s exhibitions at the NGMA and Mehboob Studios to understand the omnipresence of ‘emptiness’.
You wait for long for a spectacle to happen. The anticipation creeps up your spine as a man in a jumpsuit calmly slides a palette of wax in a cannon-like object aiming at a corner of a spatial volume bound to contain and echo a sound. Then it comes with a sudden boom and splat and in an instant; a fraction of a second, a ‘process, painting, installation and sculpture’ happens as a performance of art. Then there is silence. The instantaneous shock of the shooting projectile and the primordial reaction it evokes is replaced by calm; the at times desirable – at times unsettling calm which consumes and contains majority of Anish Kapoor’s artistic endeavours.
An understandable surge of interest envelopes the homecoming of Anish Kapoor, an artist of Indian origin and recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize. With two parallel shows at the NGMA in Delhi and the Mehboob Studios in Mumbai, Anish Kapoor’s work comprising of sculptural objects, non-objects and processes impress through the scale and simple beauty of wax, pigment and mirrored surfaces.
The Counter-Space
In an impressively raw volume of the Mehboob Studios in Mumbai, the nine pieces of art, including ‘Shooting into the Corner’, create an elusive sense of an alternative space; a mythical place which not only binds the nine works of art together but becomes generative of the myth and the idea which developed these forms. The illusion of space created within and outside the flawless mirror surfaces aid the generation of the emptiness. The reaction invoked by Anish’s works of art goes far beyond the mere illusion of void engendering a sense of hollow that inhales and exhales the space around. The uncanny experience of travelling through non-spaces reminds us of a forgotten role of art which is to bring to expression more than to express; to engage and invoke a reaction more than to react.
Anish Kapoor’s preoccupation with the mythical and the metaphysical is reflected in the successful orchestration of visual and sensory apprehension followed by an anticipation of something unusual, something shocking, something present and something absent. One is reminded of the huge chromatic expressions of Mark Rothko which evoked an uneasy sense of emptiness and a seeming extension of time-space but failed to suck the passerby into the void. The sculptures in the Mehboob Studios, on the other hand, evoke anxiety, unease and restlessness through the metaphorical possibilities they present. The virtual space thus created, takes one through a binary of affirmation and negation.
The Non-Objects
Eight objects and a performance define the space within the gallery. The flawless reflective surfaces placed against the crudeness of wax, as pure material expressions, define the dualities which have always served as philosophical narratives behind Anish Kapoor’s art. The metaphorical duality is captured within the objects in the space. The stainless steel ‘S-Curve’ camouflages in the environment and proposes a paradox of solid steel adapting a fluid image. The two ‘Untitled’ concave mirror surfaces are read as a diptych with one reflecting an inverted image of the studio space creating an opposite landscape while the other taking a similar image and fracturing it into multiple planes giving form to the disjunct in time-space. The surface of the ‘Non-Object (Pole)’, a continuation of ‘Turning the World Upside-Down’ reflects its companion pieces creating a united image of divergent forms while the surface of a seemingly cuboidal ‘Non-Object (Door)’ is sucked-in as an act of inhaling giving rise to an uneasy impenetrable space that paradoxically contains you.
The two ‘Non-Objects’; the (Plane) and the (Spire) balance the space between them re-creating the reflected volume to contain the space and the other object within these metaphysical landscapes. While on one hand, the spire – a freeze frame of a vertical pull of a diaphragm produces a kaleidoscope of repeated reflections as you move closer and away from the piece, on the other hand, the parabolic plane creates an unreliable reflection by changing polarities as you move closer and farther from it.
The two works of wax placed at opposite vertices, ‘Shooting into the Corner’ and the wax clad forklift-‘Stack’ balance the fluidity of the counter-space created by the reflecting surfaces by giving stable points of reference to the collection of pieces in the studio. As ‘Stack’ is read to be a transformation of a mechanical object into a mythical object, the ‘Shooting into the Corner’ is read as a myth reincarnated in material reality. The collection of these objects together create an anti-environment of emergence and disappearance, balance and non-balance, calm and unease and the duality of the illusion of space against the creation of emptiness.
Emptiness
The art of Anish Kapoor transcends the modernist perfection of an aesthetic form prioritising the conceptual source of work over style. The various works at the exhibition strive to achieve implied meanings and convey abstract parallels to a presence of the singular line where the material meets the non-material. The act of passing by and passing through Anish Kapoor’s work thus comes across as an experience of discovering signs of emptiness and extensions of time-space till one comes across a frame where the void is discovered and lost. Through the travel, one realises that the ingenuity of execution of these works is an endless endeavouer towards creation of the calm, the sacred and the ritualistic. Then it comes with a sudden boom and splat and again, a fraction of a second pulls back the realisation that anything is possible but nothing has actually happened.
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