I don't really remember how, or when, art became an important part of my life - how I realised that it could provide inspiration and solace, or how it came to occupy such a large emotional and intellectual space for me. My earliest memories of deliberately engaging with art are relatively late, from maybe mid university - exploring the permanent collection of the NGV, looking at Archibald finalists and various other showings in the Arts Centre, a Dali exhibition somewhere along Southbank - but I don't have any recollection of why I was doing it...it just kind of crept up.
More than almost anything else in my life, I think, the experience of art demands openness; without that, you might as well not bother at all. That goes for all art, and just as much when you go in expecting to like something as when not, or when you haven't any preconceptions at all, and I felt that very strongly with this exhibition of Anish Kapoor's work; it can only be engaged with properly from a standpoint of openness, but in fact, even more than that, his works seem to actively solicit such openness, to invite it - not least in the way that they play, and rely, on the viewer's perception, so that, in many of the pieces, it feels like the work of art is, in a very real sense, constituted (or more allusively, if somewhat misleadingly, perhaps reified), by the viewer's consciousness, through the act of perception.
So there are the three untitled concave fibreglass structures, each circular and perhaps a couple of feet across, painted deep and metallic fuchsia, plum, ox-blood purple, which initially appear flat but then become depthless as you keep gazing into them, until you're no longer sure what it is that you're looking at; and their red rippled companion piece "Wave Torus Red" (2009), also mounted on a wall, which appears to be in motion as you move away from or towards it. Or "My Body Your Body" (1993), which looks at first like a dark blue abstract painting mounted on the gallery wall, portrait orientation, but reveals itself to in fact be another structure, built into the wall, a deep (someone from the gallery said 2 metres) recess at its centre - a kind of reverse depth; where a Rothko painting, for example, is textural and endlessly deep over a flat surface, Kapoor's works in this vein are structured around negative space in apparently flat dimensionality.
But his work is no mere intellectual or optical game. There's a depth to it - an affect, an emotional content that arises from and inherently expands the phenomenological and conceptual terrain that his art traverses. "My Red Homeland" (2003) is maybe an easy example - a massive installation of deep red wax (again, Rothko comes to mind) around which a large motorised steel blade slowly traces, gradually sculpting the thing itself - but it has a visceral punch that I haven't felt from many other works of art that I can think of. And it's truly engaging, too - reflective surfaces, meditative spaces, strange reversals...it felt like everyone there at the exhibition (and it was pretty busy) was having some kind of experience of the art, and not simply passively looking at each one for a few moments before moving on. In other words, what art should be.
(w/ Jade - also ran into Alice at the exhibition)
More than almost anything else in my life, I think, the experience of art demands openness; without that, you might as well not bother at all. That goes for all art, and just as much when you go in expecting to like something as when not, or when you haven't any preconceptions at all, and I felt that very strongly with this exhibition of Anish Kapoor's work; it can only be engaged with properly from a standpoint of openness, but in fact, even more than that, his works seem to actively solicit such openness, to invite it - not least in the way that they play, and rely, on the viewer's perception, so that, in many of the pieces, it feels like the work of art is, in a very real sense, constituted (or more allusively, if somewhat misleadingly, perhaps reified), by the viewer's consciousness, through the act of perception.
So there are the three untitled concave fibreglass structures, each circular and perhaps a couple of feet across, painted deep and metallic fuchsia, plum, ox-blood purple, which initially appear flat but then become depthless as you keep gazing into them, until you're no longer sure what it is that you're looking at; and their red rippled companion piece "Wave Torus Red" (2009), also mounted on a wall, which appears to be in motion as you move away from or towards it. Or "My Body Your Body" (1993), which looks at first like a dark blue abstract painting mounted on the gallery wall, portrait orientation, but reveals itself to in fact be another structure, built into the wall, a deep (someone from the gallery said 2 metres) recess at its centre - a kind of reverse depth; where a Rothko painting, for example, is textural and endlessly deep over a flat surface, Kapoor's works in this vein are structured around negative space in apparently flat dimensionality.
But his work is no mere intellectual or optical game. There's a depth to it - an affect, an emotional content that arises from and inherently expands the phenomenological and conceptual terrain that his art traverses. "My Red Homeland" (2003) is maybe an easy example - a massive installation of deep red wax (again, Rothko comes to mind) around which a large motorised steel blade slowly traces, gradually sculpting the thing itself - but it has a visceral punch that I haven't felt from many other works of art that I can think of. And it's truly engaging, too - reflective surfaces, meditative spaces, strange reversals...it felt like everyone there at the exhibition (and it was pretty busy) was having some kind of experience of the art, and not simply passively looking at each one for a few moments before moving on. In other words, what art should be.
(w/ Jade - also ran into Alice at the exhibition)
