Anish Kapoor is certainly making a mess of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Every 20 minutes, a cannon goes off in one gallery and shoots a projectile of red wax into a second space. There’s already a mass of scarlet splatter on the wall and a growing heap of gore-like gobbets on the floor. By the time the show closes, it’s going to be ceiling high.What’s more, this brilliantly colored detritus looks beautiful. The Turner exhibition at Tate Britain may have more art-historical meat, but for sheer blow-your-mind, blast-off- your-footwear spectacle this is the exhibition of the autumn.
The color, and the accumulated refuse aren’t confined to the piece I’ve just described (“Shooting Into the Corner” 2008-2009). The grandest 19th-century galleries in the building, which in the past have displayed the masterpieces of such artists as Poussin, Van Dyck and Reynolds, contain a single work by Kapoor: “Svayambh” from 2007, (the title is a Sanskrit word meaning “self-generated”).
An unusual cross between a sculpture and a train, this consists of a lump of red wax as big as a Pullman coach that slowly — almost imperceptibly — glides down a track from one end of the building to the other. It looks like a ton of mobile raspberry ice cream. As it passes through each marble doorway, this rosy slab is molded by the architecture, and little piles of shavings accumulate on the floor.
There’s more, but not — in the sheer number of works — a lot more. Kapoor is extravagant when it comes to space. A complete retrospective of his career to date would require a very large gallery indeed, say the size of an Olympic stadium.
This isn’t a retrospective, but a small selection of (in several cases) large works dating from the 1980s to the present. Still, it’s enough to give an idea of the ambition and imagination of this unique artist. Kapoor, born in 1954, has an artistic personality as complex as his Indian/Jewish/British cultural identity. Kapoor’s “Yellow” (1999) is a wall-sized field of butter- hued pigment with a circular depression in the center. It’s a bit like an abstract painting, except that it has an addictive, weird quality that geometric abstraction normally lacks; you feel you could look into that golden bowl all day. It’s like staring down a deep well.
The aspect of Kapoor’s art that the minimalism-plus- mysticism formula misses is sex. Although he’s considered to be an abstract artist, Kapoor shows an unmistakable interest in bodies. An interviewer once put it to him that all his work “seems like a fanny in one way or another.” That’s an exaggeration. Only some of it does. But you can’t miss the reference in an untitled new work that snakes around another gallery at the RA. It looks like yards of internal piping ending in a narrow, shiny red opening with lips. The orifice is just capacious enough to swallow up a slim visitor.
Sensuous, mysterious and going off with a loud bang three times an hour, this Kapoor exhibition has qualities guaranteed to attract almost anybody’s attention. It’s an artistic triumph, and an unusual challenge for the RA cleaners when it ends.