1 December | Anish Kapoor

I saw the best art exhibit today! Anish Kapoor, the artist who has done several high-profile installations including the big shiny bean in Chicago’s Millenium Park, has an exhibit on at the Royal Academy here. Kapoor’s pieces were just so much fun—I was smiling the whole time.

I had been seeing ads all over London for this exhibit, and the ad looks like this:

Which, to me, looks a lot like a horror movie—blood and guts splattered onto a wall. But it is actually a melty wax pellet that is shot out of a cannon at 50 miles per hour every twenty minutes. The exhibit constantly changes as the wax oozes down the wall and more is shot out and added to the piece. The Cannon Master (as I would call myself if my job were to shoot wax out of a cannon in a British Museum) is a drama student who had to audition for the role, and takes his job very seriously—the whole room is packed with people, and the tension mounts as he loads the cannon, and then seems to meditate for a full minute, every muscle in his body tensed, before pulling the lever to fire. It’s spectacular.

That was just one of several rooms of the exhibit. (We weren’t allowed to take photos, so I have shamelessly pilfered the rest of these from the internet.) 

This yellow “sculpture”—a term I am using loosely, as Kapoor plays with the lines between sculpture and painting (he is friends with Homi Bhabha, hence the interest in in-between-ness)—is a big concave space that really messes with my sense of vision—it isn’t clear at first if it is actually a curve in the wall, or an optical illusion on a flat surface. He continues these visual tricks in a room full of mirrored sculptures that reminded me of a funhouse at a carnival, but done much better.

The catalog entry for this sculpture describes how it “takes the form of a train but one without windows, seats or passengers. It is impenetrable, a forty-ton block of red wax, paint and Vaseline, moving across the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy. It squeezes through the archways, leaving lumps of colour, thick and uncomfortable. The smell penetrates the space as we watch this awkward kinetic sculpture slowly pass by.” Yes, it really moves, very slowly, on a track back and forth through five galleries.

This was just great. Called "Slug." It reminds me of the movie Tremors, also “Little Shop of Horrors,” also something from Beetlejuice (the sand worms!), also a surrealistic tuba. I think it’s kind of sexy. It might have been my favorite. No, my second favorite. My favorite may have been this:

Floating bubbles!