Phuc and I had arranged to meet in Chinatown for dim sum prior to visiting the exhibition. As we alighted at Leicester Square station and turned left into Chinatown, the familiar Chinese food smell whacked us straight in the face. The pavement was blackened with grease from all the restaurants and food stores. The remnants of last week’s Moon Festival celebrations still remained; red lanterns still hung across Gerrard and Lisle Street, speciality food stands were still attempting to flog off the rest of the foods. To Nuria’s delight, the Dragon Beard sweet stand was still there.
I don’t remember the last time I ate in Chinatown, so before meeting Phuc and his friends Anja and Robert, I had consulted my sister as to which restaurant had the best dim sum. It was good to know that most eateries had still retained their excellence and she had named the Jade Garden being one of them. This was reassuring as I know the restaurant pretty well.
The meal was excellent. As always, we ordered too much food. Luckily we had Maxine on board and considering she’s only 8 years old, managed to devour a good portion.
After the meal, we rambled back down Gerrard St to get some dragon beard and went into a handicraft shop. I’ve often wondered why oriental non-food stores all smell the same. It’s a pungent smell of faint incense mixed with the smell of dust, grease and, weirdly, Asian hair! Yes, hair! Some Asians exude this smell which is pretty much indescribable. If I had to say what it is, I’d say it’s the smell of MSG with a hint of body odour. Repulsive it is not, but it’s not at all pleasant.
We bought a box fortune cookies and I tried on some traditional cheongsam.
On we went down Piccadilly to Green Park. Phuc took us down Dover Street Market, a bohemian arty four storey shop which housed much of Come des Garcons (CDG) clothing with a few bits of accessories, house hold stuff and few branded names. Phuc came to London with a suitcase of black clothes. CDG's autumn/winter 2009 collection is entirely black. Phuc is a conceptual artist and everything he does, or in this case, wears, tides in with a particular concept he has in mind. He combined Garcons’s theme and his London visit: black. Not sure whether Phuc knows, but CDG, rarely design clothes in any other colour but black.
As we whizzed through the store, I was amazed by the high price tags on the clothes. 60 quid for a cotton shopping bag with the CDG printed logo. Flimsy cotton shirts ranged from £250 to £300. Silk knitted grandma like knickers started at £250. Jackets and coats from £1700 upwards.
“Jesus Christ” I said. “Fair enough that the designs are unique, but the qualities of the fabrics were poorer than that of Mango! The finishes are complete shites. It’s what you’d expect of design undergraduates collection not that of an established brand”.
I picked out a to die for Nina Ricci leather jacket, £ 3900!
“Yes, but it’s worth it, feel the quality of the leather and look at the workmanship” I said. Phuc agreed.
I spotted a pair snake skinned high heeled Italian shoes. Wow! The shoes were works of art. On the top floor, there were pairs of shaw- green inlay dainty 1940s shoes and squared toed black metallic coloured high heels. Price tagged……well, lets just say, unimaginable! It was time to exit. This was not therapeutic shopping!
Anja was getting tired and made it very clear that never in a million years would she go into an art exhibition. So we said our farewells. I liked Anja and Robert a lot. They had an air humility and an aura about them which draws you to them. I hope to see them again in the near future.
The queue to the ticket office at the academy extended back to the end of the courtyard. We waited patiently in the queue as Maxine artistically took tens of photos of the gigantic sculpture and the masonry work in the square.
The academy was teeming with people. At the entrance of the exhibition we were met by was an overwhelming rusted metal tubular piece, which I’m sure if we had the time or space to admire would give greater appreciation. Denied of privacy and connection due the vast flow of people, I named this piece Arse Hole.
The first sala contained various cemented sculptures Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked which Phuc aptly named Shit! I absolutely agreed with him. It was cement that had been squeezed through different sized tubes to create differing textures which interwove each other. Yet, walking around the wooden pallets on which these works were mounted, one felt an awe of weariness and familiarity. Phuc beautifully described them as the shapes one makes as a child playing with wet sand on a beach.
We moved onto the second sala which contain the highlight of Kapoor’s exhibition; a giant wax installation titled Svayambh. Maxine and Nuria had been looking forward to seeing this piece which they described as a gigantic moving lipstick. The only problem was that the piece was moving so slow that one could not see any movement. It was like watching paint dry. This was Kapoor’s main attraction, so as you can imagine the sala was almost impenetrable due to the mass of people. What a shame.
Phuc commented how pathetic people are at art exhibitions. They tend to intellectualise and verbalise art when they ought to just to feel. Each piece evokes different emotions in everyone. What we see is different from the other. What we interpret is different. That’s the whole point, pretentious arse holes! In my experience, art exhibitions are best attended in the company of children on Wednesday afternoons. Children's uncontaminated minds and high imagination are so much more receptive to abstraction. Anyhow, art should be fun and not taken so seriously.
Many artists have really nothing to say about themselves or their works. Kapoor has said that “having something to say implies that one is struggling with meaning”. He’s absolutely right! I pondered on this statement and came to the conclusion that art is a perfect paradigm of love. If you can precisely give reasons why you love someone, what it really means is that you are rationising your emotions. You are searching for reasons to love that person. I related my conclusion to what Allison once told me. She fell in love with her greatest, her only love, purely because of the way in which he threw the tea-towel over his shoulder whilst he was cooking!
The piece that impacted us most was Yellow, a huge concave-convex piece mounted on the massive wall. Kapoor attempted to recreate the pleasurable sense of awe that we feel when confronted by vast and threatening natural phenomena such as mountains or glaciers. He suggested that Yellow, drew the same sensation by immersing ourselves within a space in which our entire field of vision is occupied by singular experience of colour. Wow, we were truly awed! Maxine liked this piece best as it was the colour yellow and it reminded her of the sun. Beautiful piece, you really have to see it to experience the awe!
I realised upon exiting the exhibition that the gigantic Slug in sala 3 was quickly skipped by us and many exhibition goers. Personally, this was my favourite piece. I had so wanted to touch the blood red lacquer part but was aware of the two guards standing nearby. Reading the pamphlet later, I learnt that this piece deliberately sets up tension between desire and repulsion. Kapoor certainly evoked a strong desire within me to touch the vulva!
Anish Kapoor exhibition is a must for anyone who appreciates simplicity, sensuality and nature. It was just a shame that our experience was diluted by the masses. Though, all in all, it was another almost perfect day and I’m left to question what it means to love. Hmm!
1 comment:
Jordi.....estas tomando nota?
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