By Kiša Lala
Marsyas, 2002 © Anish Kapoor
Over the past decade, Anish Kapoor’s projects have been growing gargantuan in scale, challenging the viewer to engage with the work on an architectural level. Kapoor has collaborated with Future Systems on the Neapolitan Subway, and has an ongoing relationship with the structural engineer, Cecil Balmond, who has worked with him in the past on Marsyas, a sculpture built for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. In January I visited the private estate of a collector in New Zealand where the excavation of a mountain was underway to conform to the scale of the artist’s monumental vision—a tubular red skin that would bridge both sides of the mountain. As an evolution of Marsyas, the sculpture played with the idea of void and absence, that whose essence is shaped by the object around it. The dualities of light and dark, inside and outside, are a motif in the artist’s work. Skin, which separates our internal and external worlds and is a part of both, is in play in the story of Marsyas who, as a musician, dared to challenge the god Apollo to a contest, and was flayed alive for his arrogance when he lost. Looking at the work, the sculpture’s taut red membrane appears to act as the conduit for pain and pleasure, a measure of our sensitivity to the world, the blood-rich darkness within us, made inside out.
Temenos © Anish Kapoor
When I visited his studio in London later in March, the artist had been conceptualizing another project with Balmond, Temenos, which is a 110m long tube of steel wire, much like a nylon stocking stretched between two rings. At a cost of £2.7 million, it is the first of five works planned as the Tees Valley Giants, an arts project to be completed over the next decade in Middlesbrough, UK, and one of the largest in the world. Temenos is the Greek word for a space apart, a sanctuary of the gods.
Mr. Kapoor’s studio is a world unto itself, spanning three consecutive buildings in Camberwell, and teeming with assistants busy on various stages of creation from construction to finish. In the first hall I watched assistants machine-cut plastics and Styrofoam, which are later scaled and cast into metal. In the second, Kapoor was experimenting with cement being excreted by a mechanical mixer into intestinal strips that formed dung-like mounds on the floor. At the end of the room, on tables, were maquettes and a tiny scale model of the gallery in the Royal Academy of Arts, which would house his Shooting into the Corner exhibition (now on view in London). Looking down into the Lilliputian model of the gallery then, I could see more waxy, red gunk being spewed and splattered with violence against the room’s opposite wall. Finally, the last warehouse was a hall of mirrors, where finished, jewel-like metallic shields hung austerely, warping or shearing the sound of my voice and the scale of my body as I passed them by.
The Farm, New Zealand © Anish Kapoor
Protrusions and cavities reflect a visceral obsession with Kapoor, and raw, vulvic gashes on the walls of the studio, needed no metaphors. But more and more, his work has transcended as he says, into the “apocalyptic.” “Marsyas wouldn’t be what it is if it were a third of the scale,” he says. “The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture.”
That is not to say he confuses art with architecture, which the artist believes harbours separate objectives. Kapoor says that one of his favourite architects is Louis Kahn, “My inspiration as an artist, from as early as I can remember, has been symbolic architecture. Perhaps some of the most deeply, philosophically coherent objects of all time are buildings – not objects, not sculptures. It is something to do with the symbolic. To do with the fact that when a form is isolated from its need to function, it can take the role of something that is metaphysical.”
Anish Kapoor’s Memory is currently on exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, October 21, 2009–March 28, 2010.
