PLEASE STOP SAYING 'WOMB'
“Given its egglike shape and breastlike visible end, it also evokes maternal fertility. Rather than an existential void, its inner darkness might signify a kind of pregnancy in the sense that thoughts, feelings and images are gestated by and born out of unconsciousness.
As far as most of us can remember, our lives emerge from the unknown and begin in darkness. You could say that what Mr. Kapoor has produced is a womb with a view.”
That’s a quote pulled from Ken Johnson’s October 22nd, 2009, article in the New York Times regarding Anish Kapoor’s new installation at the Guggenheim. And I want to say a few words about it.
First off, some background on the artist. Kapoor is probably most famous in the U.S. for his installation at Chicago’s Millennium Park. The highbrow title of the sculpture is “Cloud Gate” however most simply refer to it as “The Bean.” Any tourist worth his or her salt has at least one photograph of their distorted reflection in its highly polished silver skin. (I’m included in that group, of course.)
Enigmatic large-scale installations that confound the space they occupy are a particular specialty of Kapoor. He’s said before that as an artist he doesn’t attach any preconcieved interpretations to his work. (“As an artist, I have really nothing to say. Otherwise I would have become a journalist.”) I don’t think that it is unusual for artists to conceive and execute a work with a spontaneity that is distinctly separate from intent, so if someone says to me “I made this just because” I tend to believe them. Which is not to say that there are no meanings attached to the work whatsoever. Large, room-swallowing installations are by their very existence commentaries on the space they occupy — that’s part of the appeal and the purpose.
But it is at this intersection of interpretation and intent, idea and execution, that Johnson’s analysis of Kapoor’s new installation fatally stumbles. The work — a giant dirigible of Cor-Ten steel and rusted rivets — is entitled “Memory” and I think it’s apt. Because of the size of the piece and the constraints of the side gallery it is wedged into, the viewer can only see bits of it at a time, and is forced to assemble the entire work in their head. I’ve written of this process before and I like the effect it produces. So does Johnson. Of the small window that looks into the interior of Kapoor’s installation, he writes: “It could be paint on a wall or a window onto endless night. But you understand that you are looking into the pitch-black interior of the sculpture, and since you can’t see more than a few feet of the inner surface, the space seems limitless.” That’s a nifty effect, one in delightful contrast to the rigid dimensions of the installation’s rusted exterior.
HOWEVER.
Once we step into the art-as-symbol-for-feminine-mystique argument I throw up my hands in complete frustration. I mean, really? We’re still doing this? Greedily eying round, swollen objects or sculptures with cavities, drawing arrows to “nipple” and “womb” and labeling the lines “fertility” and “comfort” as if we’ve discovered something profound? I was really hoping that we’d moved past this kind of thing both in art creation and criticism. I know that Kapoor has created explicitly sensual pieces in the past — a sculpture of a vagina, for instance, which frankly is super tired — but there’s nothing about the rough hewn, riveted “Memory” that signals to me breast or vagina. That Johnson immediately thinks of these things is not an indicator of thoughtful original analysis but of reliance on cheap interpretive tricks. Call a tower a phallus, a dome a breast, and somehow you’ve entered deep philosophical waters. Give me a break. This is where I issue a call, nay, a plea: Stop. Simply stop it. Let’s be radical and decide that not every round or pointed thing is a commentary on femininity or masculinity. Let’s decide that art can be important and provocative without embodying antiquated Freudian psychology.
Sadly, it’s probably not a coincidence that the reviewer in this case is a man. I guarantee you no female art critic would’ve walked around “Memory” and decided it was a metaphor for fertility. I certainly didn’t. Instead I thought of space, fractured narratives, and our slippery grasp on truth — discussions that are far more fascinating to me than the trite “we emerge from the unknown” and yearn-for-the-womb conversation Johnson is trying to start. Kapoor has created something that is at once enigmatic and concrete, solid and yet distressingly empty. That’s enough for me. I don’t need to go dragging this over the old interpretive coals in order to give it greater weight; neither should Johnson. It’s okay to simply accept the work for what it is: a successful and pretty cool experiment in dimension, memory, and perception.
And please please please don’t ever again say “womb with a view,” because frankly I don’t think you want deal with the pissed off, zombie version of E.M. Forster, whose novel of manners and repressed sexuality is at the root of this pun.
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