Anish (Anus) Kapoor at the Royal Academy or a butch Niki de Saint Phalle...perhaps!

I am not sure why I should be perplexed but I am. What is it that made the Royal Academy display the Anish Kapoor works? They are are not important unless one thinks that big makes slight grand.......but then again grand is not important either.  The show it seems is an invite into the inner workings of Kapoor's stomach. 

You  gain entry to it via his vagina shaped anus as you enter the show. That piece I must admit is the most interesting......it appears to have mass on a grand scale (grand again) but actually as you progress around to the side.....................it really is  slight.....relatively speaking.

For the rest of the show......................well what did we have?  A block of wax that traveled through several galleries like a giant suppository shoved up someones ass......and tight enough to make it bleed. 

A gun firing red wax splattering the stuff around the gallery producing the effect of nothing less than a shit splattered toilet bowl..................what was the red for Anish....blood in your crap?

There was a room full of pallets with turds on. Some nice shaped and aesthetically arranged turds but turds all the same. 

Another room had a glossy  red vagina shaped ass hole with it's tube squirming around the floor looking very much like it might knot itself and become a medical condition!

Then there was the room of fun fair mirrors........all about fun fair mirrors with stark names.

...and dear god a big yellow with an indentation!

the whole thing ............................anus if you ask me.

....but please don't.............................hmmmm........................... 

I thought it was only the dutch that liked looking at their shit?

Ah...I forgot.....the shiny ball Christmas Tree in the courtyard is a shiny ball Christmas Tree...

nice....fun!

Thinking about Kapoor....I thought I had seen most of his work and ideas before. Sure 

enough. A quick meander through my books, brain and Google...there it all was;

With thanks to:

http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/niki-de-saint-phalle/

     http://www.abenakiartworks.mb.ca/PhalleWomb.JPG

‘Hon’ (Swedish for ‘she’) at the Stockholm

Modern Art Museum. 1960's

  

Niki de Saint Phalle


US-American Sculptor

born 29 October 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine
died 22 May 2002 in San Diego, California


Biography • Literature & Sources

Biography


In the summer of 2000 Niki de Saint Phalle gave the city of Hanover a magnificent gift: she presented the Sprengel Museum with 300 of her works and re-established at the same time an old connection. For in 1969 she had held one of her first large one-woman shows in Hanover, and in 1974 the city had bought three of her glowingly colorful, voluminous female figures and positioned the Nanas prominently on the bank of the Leine, where they have since become a familiar trademark of Hanover.

Niki de Saint Phalle was a citizen of the world: she was born near Paris, raised in New York, traveled in Europe and later worked in Switzerland, France, Israel, Italy, and finally California.

Her passionately lived life provides the raw material for her works. Driven in part by aggressiveness, in part by the joy of life and love, and infused with humor and an enormous capacity for work, de Saint Phalle has been able to make the wounds of life productive for her art.

After her childhood in an upper middle-class family and a strict Catholic education in an American convent-school, among other schools she attended, Niki eloped at eighteen with a young American, Harry Mathews, and had two children. Following a psychological breakdown she used painting as therapy while still in the mental hospital—her early art was thus the attempt of an autodidact to transform her dreams and terrors into images.

In 1955 she met the Swiss metal sculptor Jean Tinguely—“He was the person I was destined to meet”—and entered into a working and life partnership with him. The idea of the “shooting paintings” evolved: white sculptures and assemblages with enclosed containers of paint which would be shot at, thus releasing aggression and causing the paint to pour over the image. The “shooting paintings” attracted attention and were de Saint Phalle’s first success. She said of them: “In 1961 I shot at Papa, at all men, at important men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the church, the convent, school, my family, my mother….” The campaign of liberation carried out in the “shooting paintings” reached its conclusion with the monumental image King Kong. Now Niki de Saint Phalle could turn to a new topic, women’s roles, which she explored in an unusual way from 1962 on. She created reliefs and assemblages of female figures such as The Red Witch, The Bride, The Pink Birth, and The Monster.

And then there were the Nanas, which made their creator famous. The first figures, still made of wire and fabric, were exhibited in Paris in 1964. In 1966 the first large project followed in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet: a 27-meter-long reclining female figure which could be walked through, entering via the vagina."

...all the guff about using new technology to produce shed loads of crap on wooden pallets in the slight Royal Academy handout is guff. C'mon Anish...lets have something original, smaller and substantial.