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Deep into plan d mode (I have converted an unwished for weekend in Milton Keynes to a day trip to Manchester), I met up with FJM at the Caffe Nerd near to Green Park, and more to the point near the Royal Academy of Arts. Whilst this was due to the logistics of the Victoria Line, we moreorless walked past the other Piccadilly Nerd on the way to Wagamama (and I tried not to be sidetracked/distracted by the waiting staff).
Steps were then retraced to see the Anish Kapoor and the Paper Cities exhibitions - after a brief queue - and the unexpected decision to go to Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill which had opened just before. I had already regretted leaving my camera behind - the silver baubles piled up in the court by the RAA and RCS is very photogenic but will have to wait - but I cannot recommend the Kapoor highly enough. I knew him from two works - the ear trumpet thing that must have been one of the earliest in the Unilever series in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and a mirrored dish outside Nottingham Playhouse.
It would be easy to snoot - the canon that fires something at the wall and the large slab of wax that scrapes itself past the walls of three rooms of the Academy are both crowd pleasers, and it's a while since I saw so many smiling faces of viewers and attendents in a gallery. The wax slab is slow, the canon hard to see firing, but there are other joys which i will hide behind a cut.
The first piece is carved or shaped wood - which echoed oddly for FJM, but I failed to pick anything up. More striking - and abject - was a room of sculptures which seemed to be made from extruded clay but were probably cement - at times a literal pile of poo, a round of sausages, an excremental vision, built into round towers and turrets. Beyond that, another room of a snaking, curving tube, marked with letters and symbols and terminating in a pair of bright red lips: a mouth, a sphincter, a vulva, but *something* bodily.
On the other side of the wooden sculpture - having picked our way carefully though the bases of the turd statues - a room of curved mirrors, which stretched and shrank, distorted and focused, which doubled and disappeared, which allowed inversion and reversion in the shame reflection. Very much a sense of estrangement.
Between this and the canon, I forget what else there was, but definitely what I took at first to be a sunflower yellow canvas, which slowly draws you in, and what at first appears to be an optical illusion of depth is revealed as real depth. Look behind the curtain and - well those worried about wax scraped onto the walls of what must be a listed building should be reassured by the knowledge of false walls and false fronts to walls, and the yellow picture is built into a false wall.
The final room had some striking shapes constructed from red sand - a tension between the granular and the sharp. Hooks, teeth, pyramids, hemicircles. And then another coup de théâtre: why is everyone looking at the grey smudge on the wall: it's just dirt. Move to the right, and the picture is resolved - there is a white - mound? breast? - on the wall, invisible when seen face on, protruding in relief. Move back and you can will it to disappear. Meanwhile the flat yellow canvas seems deeper and deeper.
Great art should have an impact on the viewer - I'm not sure if great would be an overstatement here, but this really had an impact - beautiful, estranging, disturbing, sublime. Go see.
More to follow.
Steps were then retraced to see the Anish Kapoor and the Paper Cities exhibitions - after a brief queue - and the unexpected decision to go to Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill which had opened just before. I had already regretted leaving my camera behind - the silver baubles piled up in the court by the RAA and RCS is very photogenic but will have to wait - but I cannot recommend the Kapoor highly enough. I knew him from two works - the ear trumpet thing that must have been one of the earliest in the Unilever series in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and a mirrored dish outside Nottingham Playhouse.
It would be easy to snoot - the canon that fires something at the wall and the large slab of wax that scrapes itself past the walls of three rooms of the Academy are both crowd pleasers, and it's a while since I saw so many smiling faces of viewers and attendents in a gallery. The wax slab is slow, the canon hard to see firing, but there are other joys which i will hide behind a cut.
The first piece is carved or shaped wood - which echoed oddly for FJM, but I failed to pick anything up. More striking - and abject - was a room of sculptures which seemed to be made from extruded clay but were probably cement - at times a literal pile of poo, a round of sausages, an excremental vision, built into round towers and turrets. Beyond that, another room of a snaking, curving tube, marked with letters and symbols and terminating in a pair of bright red lips: a mouth, a sphincter, a vulva, but *something* bodily.
On the other side of the wooden sculpture - having picked our way carefully though the bases of the turd statues - a room of curved mirrors, which stretched and shrank, distorted and focused, which doubled and disappeared, which allowed inversion and reversion in the shame reflection. Very much a sense of estrangement.
Between this and the canon, I forget what else there was, but definitely what I took at first to be a sunflower yellow canvas, which slowly draws you in, and what at first appears to be an optical illusion of depth is revealed as real depth. Look behind the curtain and - well those worried about wax scraped onto the walls of what must be a listed building should be reassured by the knowledge of false walls and false fronts to walls, and the yellow picture is built into a false wall.
The final room had some striking shapes constructed from red sand - a tension between the granular and the sharp. Hooks, teeth, pyramids, hemicircles. And then another coup de théâtre: why is everyone looking at the grey smudge on the wall: it's just dirt. Move to the right, and the picture is resolved - there is a white - mound? breast? - on the wall, invisible when seen face on, protruding in relief. Move back and you can will it to disappear. Meanwhile the flat yellow canvas seems deeper and deeper.
Great art should have an impact on the viewer - I'm not sure if great would be an overstatement here, but this really had an impact - beautiful, estranging, disturbing, sublime. Go see.
More to follow.
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