Svayambh - the irreducibly monumental monument

Svayambh - the irreducibly monumental monument.

Sculptures and installations by Anish Kapoor in Munich's Haus der Kunst

Kapoor's architectural, monumental art, theoretically influenced by contemporary French philosophy and the rejection of authority, nestles pleasing and violently in the architecture of the original fascist representational architecture, that in this exhibition, abandoning all history and politics, proves his outstanding qualities. In the entrance area on the right Kapoor lulls visitors with bright half-balls made of reflective stainless steel ( "Hexagon Mirror," 2007) and room-, black-sociable mussel forms with high polished synthetic resin varnish in a semiarchitectonic interior, which in his mold treasure varies between the Italian furniture design in the late 60s and anthropomorph Gaudism, but all with a side-effect of abstraction, thus leading through smoothness and size to a new style of beautiful decorative sculpture. This could be a retrograde step, but it really is just a phase of the past few years and one aspect of Kapoor's art exhibited in the Haus der Kunst, which shows far more individual qualities of a lot of individual works. As a contrast to the almost icky, reflecting hemispheres not only "Svayambh" but even the small group of medium-size figures, arranged with color pigments does a good job ( "To reflect an intimate part of the Red," 1981). The "Sublime", which Kapoor refers to in the interview with Gilles A. Appoints Tiberghien, is far away, the medium-sized figures look rather like typical manifestations of artificial nature and picturesque natural beauty - shrubs and hills between worlds of mundane landscape gardens and baking sheets.

As a contrast to the almost icky, reflecting hemispheres not only "Svayambh" but even the small group of medium-size figures, arranged with color pigments does a good job ( "To reflect an intimate part of the Red," 1981). The "Sublime", which Kapoor refers to in the interview with Gilles A. Appoints Tiberghien, is far away, the medium-sized figures look rather like typical manifestations of artificial nature and picturesque natural beauty - shrubs and hills between worlds of mundane landscape gardens and baking sheets. The large installations "Svayambh" and "Archaeology and Biology" accordingly do not totally surprise when they give an amophous impression or play around with conversions of formal properties. "Svayambh" is a monumental cubic from Vaseline, color and wax, which is based on a flat track to move through space and two goals. On their ceilings, the material is smeared and distributed, so it says, the cuboid, originally too large, its shaped through this framework. Even centered in the room next to the tracks are found traces of the sticky plastic material demonstrating the organic character of the huge cube.

As for its architectural sculpture "Marsyas" for the Tate Gallery in London 2002, Kapoor sees symbolized in the material especially meat. Therefore he has tried to reduce the originally planned association with the Holocaust transport trains, what is because of the history of the house one aspect the work represents, by the alienation of the model from a rail system to a kind of slideway.

„

"In some respects, I do not know what this work actually represents. But I am sure that is has no subject in the proper sense. In any case, no particular subject. Nevertheless, I am interested in two or three specific points in it. One of them is something redundant, ordinary, constant, a matter to which I return again and again, namely, the idea that the object has no obvious creator. The idea that it has, as I said, almost created himself and has a somewhat mythological origin.

„This is the first point. And then you have to see that it is an object, rich in other stories of other pasts. These pasts are, at least largely, almost magically, an object that has created itself, has something magic."

The wall sculpture "Archeology and Biology", an evidently vaginal, red painted form cut into the wall – insinuating both sexuality and "wounds" in the artist's view - and standing in the tradition of a series of works of wall surfaces, gashed surfaces with integrated cupped forms, following Kapoor paradox bodies of "nothing" or "non-existence", "voids" – thus receives "Svayambh" clearly sexual connotations.

Still apart from the perhaps unfortunate theorization of his inventions – supported by the antiauctorial gesture of asserting the works arise "in itself, as by itself" - supporting the postponement of the historical into the untemporal sexual will not really succeed, particularly because of the material not. The rectangular wax not really recalls meat but much more frozen blood, and the realism of such an bloody block of organic substance imposes the thought of the hypertrophic killing machinery of the Nazis more than anything else..“

From the funny shape of a tulip carnivorous plant, as it could be seen in the almost ironic "Marsyas", "Svayambh" has very little. Kapoor has built "Svayambh" in a quite similar way before in Nantes at the Musée des Beaux Arts. The motion system was the same as now at the Haus der Kunst, it moved through the block door arches and consisted of the wax material in Nantes, too. Even the historical reference in Nantes was deliberately designed and perceived in a comparable way. Nantes was formerly the center of trade with African slaves, of whom thousands were shipped in the port city. The association with blood, thereby also with a higher dissociation and an increased rhetoric of size, is sustained by the works of Kapoor having developed either the blood-red color (Blood Solid, 2000), or the combination of wax and vaseline already in connection with the human. The same material, vaseline and wax, for example, could be understood as an allusion to female (life)-cycles in India (see Raya Baudinet, 2005, Art Press no 308.).

The cumbrous tastelessness of "Svayambh", his real potential, can not be talked away. The renaming of history into a sort of anthropomorphic, sexualized archeology of Syayambh, by the theorization of the work by the artist and his interview partners and by the constellation with a sexually oriented work is rather a typical Bavarian or Bavaria pleasing eccentricity. With the association of "meat", injury and amorphicity, sexuality and the inhuman, still worse, but also possible, female object likeness, fits the Bombay-born Londoner to the Catholic traditions of the Bavarian Art World. At the same time, the visitors of the exhibition can experience that a plant due to its objective interpretation features a direction against the will of its author's claims - which then let the antiauctorial gesture of the artist again become understandable.

Report and Photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter

Find this report at www.kunst-spektrum.de/html/journal.html

Exhibition:

Anish Kapoor. Svayambh

18.10.07 – 20.01.08

Haus der Kunst

Prinzregentenstrasse 1

D - 80538 München

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