Anish Kapoor exhibit: 'Rarely do we get a show of this magnitude in India'
The invite to the most anticipated art exhibition of the year simply says: "Anish Kapoor, Dilli, Mumbai. You are invited to the Grand Opening."
The artist’s first major showing in the country of his birth opened on November 29 at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai, two days after the curtain raiser at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi.
The words "Dilli, Mumbai," printed in Devanagari script on the invite, is a succinct pronouncement of the overarching inclusiveness of his intentions; it's not just the art-going crowd but the general public that Kapoor is aiming for.
"There’s no reason why the Indian public should be any different from the public elsewhere, they are as sophisticated or unsophisticated as other audiences," says Kapoor, whose retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Art (RA) last year saw record-breaking attendance for an art show.
Contrary to popular belief, Anish Kapoor has been keen to exhibit in India.
Andrea Rose, the director of visual arts, British Council UK and co-curator of the India shows, first came to India with Kapoor 10 years ago.
The lack of large institutional spaces proved to be a stumbling block for major exhibitions. Several scouting trips later, the chosen sites are a film studio in Mumbai and the new exhibition hall at the NGMA in New Delhi for the exhibitions. Aficionados of both cities cannot wait to get in.
Besides being a quintessential Mumbai film studio with a history of Bollywood film making ("Mother India" was shot here) Kapoor saw Mehboob as a space "where things were made, then emanated from for public viewing. Here bringing in the public, is reversing that process."
Kapoor has shown his works in private galleries, museums and famously in public spaces around the world. Last year’s mid-career retrospective at the RA in London was the first ever of a living artist.
To see Kapoor’s works physically in our cities is an experience long overdue for many who have only followed his career through images of works exhibited abroad.
The issue of origin
Perhaps part of the reason Kapoor has not shown in the country of his birth before has to do with his initial reluctance to be slotted into a category.
Of Jewish Punjabi parentage, Kapoor grew up in Bombay then studied electrical engineering in Israel before moving to Britain in 1973 to study art, where he has lived and worked ever since. There Kapoor’s art school teacher reminded him that one day he would have to acknowledge his "being Indian."
In the catalogue to last year's RA show, critical theorist Homi Bhabha described the art scene of 1960s Mumbai -- the years both he and Kapoor grew up here. Not to root Kapoor's work in an Indianness, but, as Bhabha points out, "as artists of a post-colonial background begin to transform the tastes and traditions of the Euro-American metropolitan milieu, they are trailed by an anxiety of attribution. How to define his culture of 'origin'? What is her indigenous 'past'?"
What Kapoor refrains from doing is drawing on an Indian past through exotica.
Ambition with sculptural scale
Kapoor's sculptural forms, if at all coming from a subcontinental subconsciousness, draw inspiration from the metaphysical rather than the clichéd imagery perpetuated by the state post independence.
One can draw one’s own conclusions from the dark spaces, strong colors and gleaming steel columns of spheres that seem to reach to the cosmos as references to voids, marketplaces, contemporary shikaras; but Kapoor’s sculptural works are inherently unique.
If at all, like the god Vishnu, he stirs the causal waters of consciousness by manifestations of form that are objects one is drawn into, peer into infinity, meditate before, listen to, get color mesmerized by, or merely exhilarate in this mammoth occupation of space.
Kapoor’s ambition with scale and occupation of space has been seen in the work "Marsyas," at the Turbine Hall. Red polythene stretched like two horns over the entire space, a ploy he’s used again at the Guggenheim in "Memory," wherein the piece to be seen in its entirety demands the movement of the viewer even while it remains static and monumental.
There’s an element of fun and fairground, as with the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in a public space in Chicago, where reflections of oneself are distorted then at certain points abstracted with sky and earth, drawing in space, fragmenting it, expanding it outwards.
Despite the requirement of immense technology needed in producing sculptures of this technical finesse and scale, there’s an earthiness that remains, a soul connection that Kapoor is able to achieve successfully and not lose in the polished surfaces.
Wax and mirrors, reveberations in a Bollywood studio
Here in Mumbai the opening was aptly Fellini-esque.
Art grandees and hip young creatives from both Mumbai and New Delhi jostled around the artworks. The film studio reverberated every 20 minutes with the sound of a cannon projecting massive bullets of red wax into the corner of a huge wall.
Out on the lawn under lights that made the trees look a sickly green, champagne flowed and heels got stuck in the soft mud while lawnside chatter continued.
Even a live band came on softly at the end.
Kapoor spoke about the works in the Mumbai show as being in two parts: two works in wax as “two bits of expressive works in a room of geometric works” alluding to the contrast with the other steel and mirror pieces. He likes polarities; the two opposite bodies of works here reinforce that.
As you entered the studio’s cavernous space this is what you saw in one sweep: steel works placed under a flat, uniform, shadowless, bright light and in two corners were the works in wax. At first instance you were overwhelmed by the space. Then the walk around the six strewn mirrored works started and space bounced off their curvilinear and distorting surfaces.
Kapoor works with concave mirrors. As in science he structures them precisely.
People stopped, moved forwards, bent sideways and watched others slip away, widen and narrow and observe the space around move with them.
"None of the works are static, but change, they are subject to a constant flux," says Rose.
Near one corner was placed what looked like a hat straight out of Hogwarts. A giant conical sculpture which teaseed observers to come right up and bend over to peer at themselves at the rim -- as they moved away, there was nothing.
On a far wall a large prismatic round disc fragmented the surrounding walls to a quilt-like abstraction.
"Shooting into the Corner" has red wax methodically loaded into a cannon and shot into a corner, the end result after weeks of relentless pounding resembles a scene of carnage. A poetic, rhythmic rendering of the systematic, relentless violence in the world today.
As I watched a perfect pancake hit the corner beyond the ante room doorway at London's Royal Academy, and then drip, blood-like, the young boy next to me looked up, grinned and said, "Perfect shot." We’d been standing on the frontline for 20 minutes to witness the loading of the cannon and shooting; now thousands of viewers in Mumbai will, too.
The experience here is completely different though. No stuccoed walls of classic architectural space limits it and the wax flies high into a white walled corner. While the reach and subsequent column is impressive in scale, the anarchic drama of wax being slammed into a corner in a confined space as it was at the Royal Academy is missing.
Even so, as the sound reverberates dramatically in the studio space, this is surely going to be the crowd puller.
I would have loved to see "Yellow" in Mumbai, the sublime concave disc which seductively draws you into its saturated color. Only as you near do you realize that what seems a solid center is actually a void.
The organic bricked walls of Mehboob Studio's space begged for a disappearing color void and would have bound the show conceptually and materially and been a more rounded experience for a viewer being initiated to Kapoor’s art. Now, one has to travel to Delhi to see the early pigment and void works on show at the NGMA.
The intangible essence of Kapoor
Another crowd puller that will not be seen in India is "Svayambh." This spectacle is a red wax monolith moving on rails through rooms and hallowed arches of the Royal Academy majestically and messily, scraping the door jambs and splattering the walls. "Svayambh" is one of those stellar experiences in life within a gallery, when you know you are witnessing something truly spectacular.
"'Self generated' is what the artist calls his sculpture," writes Norman Rosenthal in the catalogue essay, "even when he is absent, it is constantly changing and reinventing itself."
Watching "Svayambh" move in silence it was no longer a mere object but imbued with life, much like the svayambhu -- objects in Hindu philosophy which are self generated, born from the earth and thence worshipped. In its own way, the excitement Svayambh caused at the RA garnered its own audience of Western believers.
And Western believers are legion as Kapoor has shown his work around the world from the Venice Biennale -- where in 1990 he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize -- to the Tate Modern and The Hayward Gallery in London, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, ICA Boston and the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Public sculptures include "Sky Mirror" at the Rockefeller Center in New York and "Cloud Gate" at the Millenium Park in Chicago. In 1991 Kapoor was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain's most publicized contemporary art award.
Rarely do we get to see a show of this magnitude in India. It’s taken the combined efforts of the the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, The National Gallery of Modern Art, the British Council, the Lisson Gallery in association with Louis Vuitton and the Tata group to bring this show to New Delhi and Mumbai.
We’ve seen the solid form of Kapoor's sculptures in images over the years, emailed from virtually all around the world. Now as many in India have their first experience of the intangible inherent in his art, we realize it's high time Anish Kapoor touched base here.
The Anish Kapoor Mumbai exhibition runs from November 30, 2010, to January 16, 2011. Entry is free although booking is required. Log on to www.anishkapoorindia.com or call +91 (0) 22 40203660/61/62/63.
Mehboob Studios, 100 Hill Rd., Bandra (W); No parking; Open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
