Anish Kapoor

I haven't blogged for a while so a have a few things to catch up on. Last Sunday myself and Sophie took a trip into central to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art. The que was huge, this exhibition has been on since September and is still drawing huge crowds which tells you how popular he is. Outside in the courtyard was a beautiful steel sculpture called Tall Tree and The Eye which consists of lots of globes of mirrored steel. They reflect everything around them in every direction which is quite a strange experience. It seems as though the globes are floating freely and unattached to each other and i was intrigued at how something so simple could throw up so many different interpretations. This was just the beginning of a truly amazing exhibition. Each sculpture gave me so many ideas and i took a lot of different meanings. It really inspired me to create performance work. The most memorable pieces were Svayambh and Shooting into the Corner. Svayambh was a huge block of red wax that moved incredibly slowly through 5 rooms. It was difficult to tell if it was even moving at some points and it takes an hour and a half for the block to reach the end and back. As the block moves through the rooms it squeezes throught the doorways and is then moulded into their shape. It was really interesting to watch this process even though it took a long time, i didnt find myself getting bored at all.
Shooting into the Corner is the most famous work of the exhibition. Sophie is working on a performance inspired by it for her creative collaboration performance. A canon fires a block of red wax into a blank white corner every 20 minutes.
The anticipation of waiting for the canon to go off was probably more powerful and affecting than when it actually did go off. A man sits with his back to the audience and every 2o minutes he walks to the canon, takes a cylinder of wax from the shelves and places it in the canon. He turns on the gas and then waits. This is probably the most tense that i have been. I knew it was about to go off so i was bracing myself for the bang. When it did go off the wax missed the wall so it did feel like a bit of an anti climax, however when we left we both found ourselves feeling really emotional. I honestly never thought that a piece of art could affect me so much. The canon is a symbol of destruction but their is something quite theraputic in watching something so clean like the white wall get destroyed or messed up. I think that we have all been in a situation where we have wanted to throw something and we find a sense of release from that. This piece really captured that feeling and it was definitely worth the long wait. I would recommend this exhibition to everyone, you will definitely come out having been moved in some way.