Kapoor

What do I really think about Anish Kapoor? /  by Justin Harrison

I’m torn, I’m not sure I like Anish Kapoor’s work anymore, which is kinda tricky as I was looking at him for my research paper. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, but there you have it, after looking for a while I’ve become less enthusiastic about it.

I do like the language of the materials. The imperfect dialogue, I can’t translate it all, but who can? The text of steel or the dialect of paint. It murmers in deep tones, a quiet melodic muttering.

Yet I feel disatisfied, like I’ve eaten but still feel hungry. I want to access more but feel arrested at times. I know how much Homi Bhabha enjoys his work, which makes me stop, pulls me up. But when I hear him talk it seems like a lot of the creativity and intellectual rigour is Bhabha’s rather than what Kapoor has invested in the work.

Some of his recent paintings feel tedious and a little in the territory of art therapy. I find I don’t want to interpret them, I feel repelled rather than a desire to enquire. Content and context matter. Materials matter. The above work I do like however I’m finding that there is more that I don’t.

The work of translation and interpretation is often the burden of the audience, yet how much? This is another rabbit hole of Roland Barthes and others.

 

Minor Literature in a Major Culture Language - Deleuze /  by Justin Harrison

Minor Literature in a Major Culture Language

Cathedral Machine

Cathedral of Capitalism

Vectors of resistance

Deterritorialisation - Deleuze

Naustalgia

Does no the digital world lend itself to control and observation

Art might be absurd but is the status quo any less?

If Kafka's work is a rhizome, then its expression does not crystalize into a unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth. The work resembles crabgrass, a bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections. Reading can participate in these connections; a reader makes connections as he reads. He need not interpret and say what the text means; he can discover where passages in the text lead, with what they can be connected. The result is not an interpretation but a map,a tool with which to find a way. The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."I The reader becomes a nomad; to borrow a phrase from Lyotard, reading becomes "a nomadic of intensities."7 As such it does not threaten minor perspectives; instead it entertains them, and minor literature works to produce a reading which will constitute its own affirmation.

Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

In Kafka: pour une litterature mineure, Deleuze and Guattari enter Kafka's work by considering his mode of expression. What they discover is that expression in Kafka evades the linguistic models that might interpret it-in particular Hjelmslev's distinction between the form of the content and the form of the expression.' Kafka works toward an "unformed expressive material" which, on the one hand, leads to "less and less formalized contents" and, on the other hand, turns the most resistant formalizations into unformed contents as well. Kafka works toward a deterritorialization which cannot be reterritorialized by an interpreter: what he expresses are "states of desire independent of all interpretation," and he expresses these states not in a universal way but as a Jew in Prague, as the writer of a minor literature who finds that if expression provides an escape, it does so in connection with a specific cultural context

Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

So Deleuze speaks of territoiralisation and interpretation, Bhabha also speaks at length on interpretation and then Derrida writes to a Japanese friend. In regards to language and it's codification - interpretation is a significant machine who's output is...dubious. How then do we approach the minor literature of art making? Interpreting Art?

Kapoor repeatedly presents us with an ambiguity of locating the self in space and time. The void is cast before us in multiple iterations, refusing to abate.

The liminal and void are the same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

The liminal and the void are the same, not the same. They share qualities essences sensibilities and lacking. Yet the void by its nature must be empty. The liminal is thick and soupy,. In both locations references become null, maps Undraw themselves and time frays.

In both codes and coordinates unravel, like nets cast upon the world to create order. To locate the self.

But to exit the void leaves what?

To exit the liminal leaves the old behind and ushers forth the new, change, transformation.

There are a number of references which need to be kept apart and should not be used interchangeably. The liminal, the void, the in-between. The non place. The Third Space. The middle.

Specifically the liminal has a vectorality of the passage.

The liminal is full.

The void empty

Maybe in Kapoors work the void correctly identifies what is generated by imperialism, a consuming absence. Where as UvR’s work identifies the marginal liminal experience - not so removed. Not empty but ambiguous.

With my artwork things are the same not the same. I use an objects history to locate a vector, but replace it in time establishing another vector. In the materiality I am using its history. It’s Hauntology. With the fence panels I have in my work I am engaging in the history of a friend who’s now passed.  It’s  purpose haunts. A fence a boundary a margin. The materials history , purpose and materiality become part of the minor literature.

On the floor /  by Justin Harrison

I’m sat in the library, although I might as well be sat on the floor. It feels a more comfortable place. I’m dizzy. In researching for my paper I’ve journeyed a lot with Ursula von Rydingsvard and her making from marginality. This is all in concern to the liminal and transformation. Derrida haunts me all the time with notions of difference and Hauntology, the phenomena or not of spectres. And now I’ve taken a sharp left and have started looking at Homi Bhabha. He speaks of the ‘Third space’ and ties it to creativity and making in concern to Anish Kapoor.

Kapoor repeatedly presents us with an ambiguity of locating the self in space and time. The void is cast before us in multiple iterations, refusing to abate. But I haven’t studied Kapoor so much and some days I find him pompous. Yet I do see the significance of his work.

So now I have books surrounding me on Kapoor, Bhabha, Derrida oh and Deleuze I’ve been avoiding him but it was unavoidable. I keep on finding connections with "‘Terrain’ and ‘Territory’ ‘Translation’ - the connections make me wonder if everyone is all speaking about the same thing, or are they nuance or completely different and deserve the nomenclature, and dense books assigned to them?

I feel like I’m on to something but I can’t quiet pull it all in. This formlessness that is the generative. The Difference that permits us to create, be, not be. Make some sort of meaning.

It’s 14:55 I need to write more - write an intelligible draft. But then there’s my work too. I see more threads between my making and preoccupations. I’d draw a map yet I fear it will be of no use the moment I finish it.

Deleuze says;


The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."
Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

There is a thread at least, of time and space and thought. That in the fluidity there is movement, a freedom to create. In creativity there is the power to imagineer and realise the new. Ownership is hard in the liminal.