Art Without Heart

The display of small models in the Old Wing had been unnerving enough, but the full-sized work, in the beautiful new exhibition hall of the New Wing was, for me, actually frightening. I had to force myself to go in through the glass doors and stay long enough to look at everything. Before this I’d only once seen a piece by Kapoor in real life. It was a bit like staring into a large red French horn. I remember a pleasurable sense of vertigo, wondering how it was possible to puncture the floor to create this illusion of a profound, exquisite void.

Since that time, however, whenever I’ve seen pictures of Kapoor’s work, I’ve only wanted to avert my face. The pieces at the NGMA are small by the standards of the immensely successful sculptor’s recent constructions. In the film shown as a continuous loop in the auditorium, the vast scale of some of his projects is revealed. Many of them combine impossible size with smoothly curved but meaningless shapes: the vast carmine tubes of Marsyas at the Tate Modern, for example, or the ellipsoid tunnel swooping into the earth of The Farm in Auckland, New Zealand. Then there’s the wildly contorted doodle-in-three-dimensions of the ArcelorMittal Orbit being readied for the 2012 London Olympics. Priced at £19.1 million and rising to a height of 115 metres, the pinkish tangle of tube-steel will be “the largest example of public art in the UK when completed,” says Wikipedia.

In the film, we see Kapoor directing teams of workmen to produce the glossy finishes and taut textures of his objects. He uses people to flesh out his vision in the same way that film directors use actors or orchestra conductors use musicians, that is, as tools of his trade. This is a very common feature in today’s world, where art is routinely realised by teams of skilled specialists. Usually, though, the artist succeeds in infusing the final product with his/her indelible personal stamp to such an extent that when we look at the finished artwork, we forget the multiple hands involved in its gestation. That’s what I miss in Kapoor’s work: the intimacy of the artist’s breathing presence. For all its plunging ‘interiority’, its cavities and its sanguinity, it is heartless in its gleaming perfection.

Though I’ve always preferred classic, representational art, I like being challenged and have learnt to enjoy extreme abstractions. I loved, for instance, the meditative quality of German artist Wolfgang Laib’s golden mounds of pollen and his Milkstone, in which a thin layer of milk is poured onto a not-quite-flat slab of white marble. I enjoy the surreal energy of UK’s Damien Hirst with his animal carcasses in formaldehyde; the quirkiness of India’s Raqs Media Collective’s unorthodox clocks in such works as Escapement; the gloriously ephemeral floating leaves, flower pools and ice arches of UK’s Andy Goldsworthy.

Indeed, the distaste I feel for Kapoor’s current work is perhaps not even specific to him but part of a general unease about trends in modern public art. It’s as if artists, and the city corporations that commission such works, feel the need to bludgeon the viewer into reverence by sheer outrageous size rather than by the quality of execution or the ingenuity of the idea. It’s as if art has become a subset of religion. In the past, gigantism was a way of demonstrating faith in a particular deity or philosophy. Great cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris or the 57-foot monolithic figure of Bahubali at Sravanabelagola would be funded by a whole community and be representative of a collective aesthetic. Today’s public funds are poured into structures which function as altars to the cult of raw commerce and the ego of the individual. That’s why the pieces themselves cannot possibly be representative or even beautiful except in an oblique, perhaps even in an accidental way. A monstrous glob of shining metal intimidates viewers by its very mystery, just as the knowledge of its price initially offends, then humbles, and finally erases all resistance.