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Works and Curations

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Anish Kapoor | Death of the Conceptual


AESTHETICIZING POLITICS VERSUS POLITICIZNG AESTHETICS

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.'
Homi BhabaThe True Sign of Emptiness
http://anishkapoor.com/185/making-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha


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 .