1000 names at Fabrica for Brighton Festival.

In a very direct way I have come to know two sculptures by Anish Kapoor very well in the past month. First I assisted with the installation of both of the sculptures at Fabrica (about which I shall say more later) and since then I have been manning the gallery at night and weekends, being unable to leave for periods of up to 21 hours at a stretch. This has meant that I have spent an extraordinary amount of time alone with the sculptures (60 hours over the Easter period alone).

Hours spent alone with the sculptures in the last 12 days = 163

Spending that amount of time with a piece of work tends to make one consider it in many different ways. That much time alone at night tends to make you see the world quite differently too. The experience has, for me, raised many questions, although surprisingly most of these questions aren’t about the work so much as the world the work exists in – which, I imagine, is one of Anish’s objectives.

Prior to this experience I knew about as much as the next person about Anish Kapoor’s work, although, being a professional sculptor. I am very familiar with its contexts and associations. As for the Anish Kapoor the person, I have a vague recollection of him being around in the faculty of art & design at Wolverhampton polytechnic while I was doing my degree, I thought he was a postgrad student, but his biography says he taught there in 1979. I do remember seeing what must have been the first of the thousand names sculptures amongst other students work.

So I find myself in the strange position, of being very intimately acquainted with the physical sculptures, and yet being unaware of the body of academic or art-critical commentary surrounding the rather high profile work of a man I used to share a college canteen with.

The reason that I mention this is that it is becoming clear to me that there is a bit of a contradiction between 1 the man and his sculpture and 2 Anish Kapoor and his cultural icons.

For instance – the pigment sculptures as they sit on the plinth in front of you speak of extraordinary dustiness, lush colour and almost exotic forms, they are sensual, tactile, delightful - many people think that they are shaped heaps of pure pigment, some have likened them to the icing on ‘iced gem’ biscuits or meringues.

But the received wisdom is that the ‘1000 names’ sculpture refers to the 1000 names of Shiva and that the pigment used refers to the piles of pigment that Indian street traders display, sex is there too referenced by the lingam shrine like shapes.

Taken together the ‘fact’ of the sculptures sits quite happily with the ‘narrative of references’ that seem to accompany any work, a bit like the way sleeve notes enhance a collection of music. Until that is, one considers that Anish Kapoor doesn’t provide any sleevenotes.

In fact he positively discourages ‘interpretation panels’ and the support material so beloved by most curatorial organisations, perhaps because if something appears in authoritative print next to the work it in some way lessens the immediacy of the work itself. He avoids information that encourages us to look away into some other discipline for ready made answers.

 nish Kapoor trusts us each individually to interpret his work. The man wants us to experience the stuff he has made, just as it is, as sculpture.  Ordinarily such an approach should seem rather humble and lacking in sophistry, but a national cultural Icon doesn’t get away with being humble so easily, especially when thousands of allied trades, with vested imterest, have all supplied their own sleevenotes to fill the void that he left for our own perception.

I keep encountering particular attitudes of reverence towards this cultural celebrity and his work from many people, and it has occurred to me that there is a ghost here of the worst excesses of modernism in our collective psyche. It insists good work should be intellectually difficult and complex to approach unless you have the keys. Of course such a scheme usually insists too that the creator inhabits a more rarefied plane, where being obstructive and confusing is evidence of their genius.

So it occurs that leaving us to deal with the sculpture using our own faculties and curiosity is most likely to be read as the exclusivity of a prima donna, CBE, celebrity and guest artistic director of the second largest festival in Britain, rather than someone who is too busy and too wise to orchestrate disciplines beyond his expertise, that are not concerned with sculpture at all. 

Seems that we each get the art that we are ready for – this is only sculpture, and it does what sculpture does fantasticly well. The prestige is about something else entirely.

Time to look at the sculpture again, its no more tricky than looking at a flower or a rock without sleevenotes.