AESTHETICIZING
POLITICS VERSUS POLITICIZNG AESTHETICS
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| Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (2006) following the artist’s recent recoating in Vantablack (photo courtesy City of Chicago) via http://hyperallergic.com/287628/anish-kapoor-coats-cloud-gate-in-the-darkest-black-known-to-humanity/ |
To get to the heart of Kapoor's
thinking and making we must register the difference between physicality of void
space, and truly made emptiness. Let us use Heidegger 's
beautiful parable of the jug for these purposes. What does the potter make when
he shapes the jug? Of what material is the jug made? The potter forms the sides
and bottom of the jug in clay to provide the means for it to stand, to be
vertical; to make the jug a holding vessel, however, he has to shape the void.
'From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings
it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel… . The vessel's
thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the
void that it holds.'
Anish Kapoor has been
creating lavish, sensual abstract, sculptural forms for over four decades.
Over the years he has been rated as one of the best contemporary sculptors, and
in a way as the 'master of public art'. Homi Bhaba in his analytical eulogy of Kapoor,
offers us Kapoor as the ‘maker of emptiness’. In this short piece stems from my
discomfort with how Bhaba gets so lost in the philosophy of emptiness that he
becomes completely blind to materiality and its impact on the politics of
visual culture.
The blind spot that Bhaba
and Kapoor share for ‘thingness’ and materiality is not new. This is the blind
spot shared by the genre of makers and thinkers whom we can call neo liberal
conceptual artists. This group that has grown to be rich and powerful, twisted
the radical possibilities of conceptual art. Conceptual art as a practice
emerged at a time when the authority of the art institution and the
preciousness of the unique aesthetic object were being widely challenged and
artists felt the need to interrogate the possibilities of art-as-idea or
art-as-knowledge. It was a breakaway from formalism, bringing in a new
philosophy of materiality. The neo liberal contemporary group has managed to
quote the linguistic, mathematical, and process-oriented dimensions
of conceptual art , yet has gone on to
support and buffer the very hegemonic systems, structures, and processes
conceptual art poised itself against.
The popularity of
conceptual thought in contemporary art practices has created a moment of
oxymoron in art history. At one level, bowing to the pressures from corporate and
museums that are mediated through gallery practices, artist have to large scale
fabrications and have effectively become cultural producers. There is a visual
dominance of the large, the phallic, of the archival, of the vaginal and of the spectacular. Materiality, finish and longevity have become
more and more important for artists who claim their art has got nothing to do with
the ‘thingness’ and exist purely in conceptual terms. It is this oxymoron that results in a
situation where Anish Kapoor patents the blackest colour, claims that it is the
darkest colour, thereby showing a complete lack of conceptual understanding
about darkness. Nor does he explore the politics of the concept metaphor called 'black'. Just like the modernist masters for him it is a 'pure aesthectic' engagement.One can forgive Kapoor for this blind spot, but how does one forgive Bhaba? The coat of Vatablack on the Cloud Gate gives a fantastic sense
of a dark void, visually flattening out its voluptuous form. If anything the ‘thingness’ is the only thing
left visible, yet it is the very thing Bhaba and Kapoor deny.
The collapse of discourse
over skill , materiality as art history was run over by literary studies has
lead to primarily semiotic , interpretations of art works even though it
remains well known that image and objects carry an excess which cannot be
reduced to textual interpretations. Questions of ethics and politics got swept
away by the neo liberal market economy and a middle class distracted by its
manufactured desire. Ethics of course has become unfashionable, but politics
has gone on to become a decorative motif. Most of our contemporary masters make
work in which the politics of making is in opposition to the political content
of the work. Conceptual art becomes an easy
escape door for these artists , by denying the ‘thingness’ they can escape the politics
of its making .
