By CHRIS DERCON

I.
Kapoor’s work began to change in the mid-80s, when the surface of his structures started to open up and cave-like holes and folds began to emerge.

II.
On Svayambh he says: “The building is shitting this thing.” When talking about Kapoor’s exhibition “Past, Present, Future” in early 2008, Artforum’s Caroline Jones writes: “Kapoor’s willingness to put excrement back into modernist hygiene may be one way of understanding the postcolonial contemporaneity of his work. Most people who write about Kapoor are careful to downplay any essentialist ‘Indian qualities.’”

III.
In the 2007 exhibition at Haus der Kunst these – can I say erotic? – bulges and cavities stand in direct relation to Svayambh. In these works, Kapoor explicitly shows both male and female genital forms. He’s cut a kind of dark red gash, about one and a half meters long, directly into the wall. Your first thought may be a wound, but most visitors – and not just men – associate the form with a vulva. The artist speaks (admittedly only in public) against explicit connotations. He calls the piece Archeology and Biology, and in the adjacent room lays its phallic counterpart: a form-filling marble sculpture with the cryptic title Wounds and Absent Objects. The red mass of Svayambh moved through the rooms of both pieces like a kind of penetration.

IV.
Kapoor’s work – with its many connections to architect-guru Cecil Balmond – is taken very seriously within the international association of starchitects. Rem Koolhaas, who’s also a collaborator, says about Balmond: “Perhaps only because he’s a non- European could … his structures express doubt, arbitrariness, and even mysticism.” Whoever is considering Kapoor and Balmond must also think of Leibniz, the great Baroque universal thinker. Leibniz was completely fascinated with anything having the slightest thing to do with folds. The fold is the material expression of esoteric tension between the visible and the invisible.

V.
One may want to associate Kapoor’s forms with body parts, body shapes, and even gynecological instruments. The curator Julienne Lorz and I associate the red fragments, large amounts of blood, raw flesh, and bodily fluids discharged by threatening machines like Svayambh with “images from after all kinds of conflicts, or should we say, after pains?”

VI.
In March 2008, Kapoor reflected openly and unpretentiously on his new phase in a conversation in Vogue with writer Hanif Kureishi:

Kapoor: During the last four to five years my work has become much more brutal.

Kureishi: What kind of brutality do you mean?

Kapoor: The body has always been seen as the center of my work; there is something ineffable about it. However, over time it became more filled with blood, bowels, something physical.

Kureishi: You’re not completely innocent either. There’s tons of love and sex in your work too, right?

Kapoor: I want to understand how the unconscious influences the world. I just had an exhibition in an astounding museum in Munich. It was the first museum Hitler built. A Jew developed the first plans for it in the early 1930s, but of course he was gone very quickly. Then a Nazi who had a soft spot for the interiors of ships took over. But he died in the middle of construction and his wife finished the project for him.

Kureishi: And what did you show there?

Kapoor: The material is dark red like blood, and thus the whole thing has a very critical undertone. Of course the relation with the history of the building causes you to associate the color red with blood, and hence with death and the Holocaust. That’s too obvious for me. That’s a meaning that doesn’t really touch me. I think invoking a more unconscious, more dangerous meaning is much more interesting.

VII.
In a BBC interview, John Tusa reacted to Kapoor’s architectural models: “I sometimes get the impression that when people look at your work, the one thing they feel they can’t quite mention in their English way is that of course they are womb-like. But vaginal- and womb-like is the easy way out.”

VIII.
The Independent also addresses Kapoor’s new interest: “Anish Kapoor is extremely keen on vaginas. In his new exhibition, they are everywhere. Here a chasm; there a crack; over there an abyss that takes you plunging into a void.”

IX:
Duchamp-specialist Elizabeth Bronpfen notes: “Duchamp’s Feuille de vigne femelle, which was cast twice in plaster, could be seen as a positive mold of the female backside. But at the same time it’s an inverted impression of the female sex.”

X.
Unfortunately nobody is reporting on Kapoor’s most important influences: Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois. Are people ashamed? But why? Are people ashamed, for example, as Artforum says, of an eventual “Indian” interpretation? And can people go back to ancient India in relation to Anish Kapoor’s red, smeary pieces? A more refined, learned relationship with sexuality developed in ancient India as early as the Kama Sutra, which is originally from 300 A.D. And the Kama Sutra survived and even converted the prude Muslim rulers.

XI.
The Tantrics sexualize many common religious rituals. There were evidently blood sacrifices at cremation sites during the earliest Tantric rituals. They demanded the worship and presentation of sexual excrement, as well as animal and human sacrifice. The hard-line Tantric traditions disappeared in the 13th century during the Islamic invasions. However, as William Dalrymple concludes in an article about sex and metaphysics in Indian culture, the sudden break in India’s erotic tradition, and the birth of our common conception of it, didn’t start during the Islamic period, but rather at the beginning of British colonization.

XII.
There’s an image of Jean-Jacques Lequeu that’s often seen in relation to the French Revolution. It’s an image of a nude woman on her back, whose head protrudes out of a narrow tunnel. She holds her arm up lasciviously; a small bird can be seen above her hand. The words “Il est Libre” are written below her body. The work is from the year 1789. It’s about the revolution and what it should liberate. But then you look closer and you don’t know who, what, or how it should be liberated. The woman lies exhausted on the ground, as if she needs to recover from a petite mort. And why does the little bird have tail feathers that look like testicles? Did she set it free? We know from Lequeu biographer Philippe Duboy’s suppositions that Marcel Duchamp could have possibly stolen a few ideas from Lequeu. Even some young architecture firms, like Graft, are entering the delicate terrain of architectural eroticism. That’s the big obsession of Jean-Jacques Lequeu; his “Figures Lascives” are obscene drawings of women masturbating and peeing, and close-ups of the female genitalia over and over again. He’s also pornographic, even when he doesn’t paint naked women. His architectural sketches are infused with a sexualized aesthetic: phallic towers, breast-shaped cupolas, dark entrances, and mysterious caverns. When he paints the female genitalia it often looks like a landscape that hasn’t been worked or cultivated: mountains and hills that arch over the paper and lead to a vagina, which looks like a cave opening or a volcano.

XIII.
The red mass of Svayambh can be seen as a geological and biological body, and, as Kapoor alleges, a geological movement through the room. Remember that Svayambh is a penetration that channels through the room and leaves a monstrous trail of dark red ooze. Like a volcano, red lava flows out of it and then hardens. In the exhibition catalogue Marquis de Sade and the Erotic Fantasies of the Surrealists, published by Kunsthaus Zürich, we read: “The libertine dreams that he is a volcano before he actually becomes one thanks to his sexuality, and the impossible knot between organic movement and phantasm are bound. In Sade, the volcano appears elevated because he encourages and legitimizes unprecedented desire and monstrous misdoing.”

XIV.
In his spring/summer 1996 collection, entitled “The Hunger,” Alexander McQueen introduced the “vulva dress” to the runway. He continued with themes of rape and disgrace, letting blood-splattered models stagger down the runway in ripped lace dresses. In her book Wann ist Mode, Ingrid Loschek argues that the oversized, abstractly painted vulva on the front side of the dress appeared as a kind of sign “against evil.” What’s important is that sexuality and violence – rather than eroticism – are central to McQueen’s ideas. His are similar to the works of Marquis de Sade or Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. The vulva dress also brings up associations with the old Venetian Carnival costumes and the drawings of Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer, and René Magritte. The vulva dress and the baggy dresses by Comme des Garçons are closer to Kapoor than the “Tutti-Fruti-Art” of Jeff Koons. And unlike Jeff Koons’ shiny charms, Anish Kapoor’s pieces have reflections as well as stains.

The stain frequently plays an important role in fashion, photography, and film, especially when there’s a narrative circling

around femininity and disgrace. The stain is clearly a visible symbol or a history that remains hidden to us. For example, the paparazzi are very interested in stains because they allow a look into very private spheres. Amy Winehouse’s blood spattered ballet shoes were used as evidence of her intravenous drug abuse – she was allegedly in a hotel room injecting drugs between her toes. Marketa Uhlivora’s collection of essays, If Looks Could Kill, delivers this idea of “stained clothing, guilty hearts” in a splendid way. But Richard Prince spatters blood even more expressively in the “Nurse Paintings” series. Or is it different bodily fluid? Fantasies about nurses rest in a duality: on the one hand, nurses have been depicted in popular literature and television as active, autonomous, professional woman; on the other hand they can be subordinated, or at least play the role of the inferior/submissive. In the case of Prince’s blood-spattered nurses, he empowers them; they seem able, and even happy, to dominate their suggestiveness imposed upon them. The unblemished Nurse Hat Chair, which Prince recently created for Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris, is a further variation on this kind of suggestiveness. In this case, the “Architecture Parlante” (Speaking Architecture) catches up to Pop Trash as a system of gender representation. Designer furniture is actually similar to architecture in that gender is never neutral – think of the chairs of Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, or Ron Arad, which, in the sense of morphology and consistence, come close to Kapoor’s objects.

XV.
Interestingly enough, Kapoor creates a compilation or an exact transfer of gleaming elegance, while also suggesting brutal, red-smeared vaginal and inner-vaginal cavities and discharges. They simultaneously conciliate and destroy the viewer, both optically and emotionally. Their silhouettes are destroyed by all of the reflecting and glittering objects, which function like mirrors in a fun house.

XVI.
We can talk about Anish Kapoor’s objects, and above all his architecture projects – he calls them “no places” – as “psycho buildings.” A psycho building, according to the recent catalogue of the same name from the Hayward Gallery in London, is not a symptom of a sickness, but rather a welcomed distraction from the rationalization and abstraction of modernistic architectural spaces. A psycho building fathoms and embodies the subconscious in architecture.

XVII.
Interestingly enough, we find echoes of Duchamp’s ampoule in Air de Paris, Klein’s Beds of Pure Air, and Fuller’s Domes in the seductive sex toys designed by Marc Newson and Tom Dixon with the help of new materials and design systems. Their dildos and anal beads are like alternative architectural suggestions to our unsatisfied sexuality. Actually, for a clean, almost perfect form of a truly free, self-determined sexuality in itself. We did think of these sex toys when we visited Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, and contemplated his cute and manageable architecture models. We also found a combination of contemporary designers’ sex toys, a touch of 18th-century pornographic engravings themed “Phenomenal Phallus,” extatic ampoules, and alleviating suppositories (the “elementary particles”) in Kapoor’s worm and penis-formed organic sculptures that are supposed to be embedded in Herzog & de Meuron’s chic Leonard Street 56 Housing Project in Lower Manhattan. And recently the Saudis commissioned Kapoor to execute the same sculpture within the perimeters of the elite King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in the middle of the desert.

XVIII.
A long time before Rem Koolhaas was an architect, he worked with his best friends at the Amsterdam Filmakademie as a script writer on films of a pornographic nature. Later – or so goes the self-made myth – Koolhaas worked on film projects with Hollywood’s porn king Russ Meyer. Koolhaas presented grotesque collages of dirty bedroom scenes in his manifesto Delirious New York. Perhaps he knew of Eisenstein’s film scene in The General Line, where a very macho Rodchenko and his seductive companion, artist Stepanovna, play two Dutch architects who have just arrived in Moscow on a Junkers plane in order to enhance the dynamic relationship of Communism and sex through architecture. Koolhaas’s colleague, Oscar Niemeyer, was inspired by the curvature of sensual women on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, and later used that inspiration for the dramatic curves in his radically sensual architecture. He then coined the term “form follows feminine.”

XIX.
In Sex or Symbol, published by the reputable British Museum about classical Greece and Rome, I found the following explanation of erotic depictions: “The vulva is rarely seen. Its situation makes it invisible in any normal position even to its owner.” This “nothing to see” is founded on a male fetishist experience of the female genitalia merely as an absence, as lacking. Victor Burgin ends his essay “Perverse Space,” from the unparalleled collection Sexuality and Space edited by Beatriz Colomina, with the following: “All men are fetishists to some degree, but few are full-blown clinical fetishists. Most men appreciate the existential fact of feminine sexuality, albeit one which is not to be grasped as simply as their own.

XX.
I will never forget the uncomfortable moment when he told me in the exhibition rooms of the Haus der Kunst: “This wound isn’t too obvious? It shouldn’t be. Let’s do something about it.” And he did.

This article originally appeared in 032c #17 as “Kapoor Pornography?”