FIFA 29th Edition: Anich Kapoor - Spiritual Sculpture

The Year of Anish Kapoor

(UK, USA, Netherlands / 2009 / 55 min. / Director Matthew Spingford)

The Year of Anish Kapoor was designated to be the closing film of the 29th edition of FIFA – International Festival of Films on Art, held in Montreal every year in March. Kapoor, a world renown sculptor, dazzles public with color, monumental sculptural designs, and the play on inverting and containing space. The film deserves the focused attention of the public since it brings into the forefront a very accomplished sculptor with a one-of-the-kind spatial and sculptural aesthetics, and it also raises a number of pertinent questions.

The concept ‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality ‘ is heard throughout the film. Anish Kapoor says of his work, “Just as you can’t set out to make something beautiful, you can’t set out to make something spiritual. What you can do is recognise that it may be there. It normally has something to do with not having too much to say. There seems to be space for the viewer, and is sometimes something we identify as being spiritual. And it is all about space.”

This perception of spirituality being all about space is very specific to Kapoor. A number of questions could be asked in regard to the statements made in the film by him and others about spiritual aspect of Kapoor’s work:

-Is space spiritual?

-Is enticing you to enter into an artistically created, modified, and even distorted space a spiritual act?

-Are the feelings spectator experience vis-a-vis such artificial artistic spaces of a spiritual nature?

-Does artificial activity of shooting paint in to a corner in a gallery and thus visually reconstructing the space and the perception of it, represent a spiritual activity and a spiritual experience?

-Is a sculptural object placed in the middle of a countryside, in the middle of nature, that reflects, or distorts, or enhances nature a spiritual statement?

-Is the distortion of real space as perceived either on the surface of a sculpted object or in the inner cavities of it an act of creation of an illusive spiritual space?

-Could the abstractly represented dismembered body of a Saint, and the spectators walking between the separate body parts, be equated to an experience of a Christian pilgrimage?

-Would the act of creation itself, of creating a unique artistic object, give an artist a consciousness that he is involved in a spiritual act?

- Is our modern society so spiritually starved that it would seeks to find spiritual experiences and sensations through artistic statements of contemporary artists and through inanimate aesthetic objects they create?

The photo at the top, at the very beginning of this article is that of “Cloud Gate” (2004-2006), Chicago. Kapoor sais about it, “Distorts, people see themselves in, see the city, plays with your mind like a woman, simple and beautiful outside, complex and perhaps discovery inside.” Discovery of what? Of the sculpture’s souls or perhaps simply of the sculpture’s aesthetics?

Below are several examples of sculptures presented and discussed in the film.

Above, Kapour’s sculpture “C Curb” (2009) near Brighton is set in the middle of a field. It reflects, distorts and inverses the natural space in its mirror surface. It is a very remarkable sculpture with a playful theme, and liked by public. But does it offer a spiritual experience or only an aesthetic one?

The sculpture above is called “Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc” and was presented at Brighton Festival in 2009. It is bright read. Kapoor states, “One is literarily walking in her, through her, through her body. The implication is that the viewer is involved – something fundamental to sculpture. One body, one person responds to another, the memories of various parts of the body… It is as if this body is laid out in almost religious way. A kind of pilgrimage, as if somebody is to go to Santiago de Compostela.” Why red? Kapoor explains, “it makes it kind of black the way blue does not. It’s the black you see when you close your eyes. It’s something you know intuitively. And that sort of knowing… is the real subject of the work.”

So what is true spiritual knowing? Is is not supposed to be of Light rather than of blackness?

Kapoor’s above sculpture “Svayambh” (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, 2007) is a structure made of red wax that passes through museum’s doors, where wax is subtracted and then added again . Kapoor comments about it “Self generated, leaving a trail, violent, collecting stuff, dropping stuff… Spiritual… What is a physical experience and metaphysical experience? … Terminology of spiritual… Spiritual powerful effect on you … dimension away from rational… You are forced to feel something.”

Site-specific Work at the Farm, Kaipara Bay, New Zealand 2009, is build into landscape, restructuring, enhancing, and “beautifying” the natural landscape. Kapoor comments about it, “Somewhere deep in my heart is a Wagnerian will to the grand.” Is it possible that it is this type of will that could be mistaken for spirituality?

I will conclude this article with a question I asked already earlier: Is our modern society so spiritually starved that it would seeks to find spiritual experiences and sensations through artistic statements of contemporary artists and through inanimate aesthetic objects they create?

FIFA 29th Edition: Emily Carr – Spiritual Painting

Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers and the Spirits of the Forest

(Canada / 2010 / 90 min. / Director - Michael Ostroff / Screenplay - Michael Ostroff / Cinematography - Leigh Uttley)








The film presents an eloquent portrait of the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945). It focuses on her creative journey, on the reasons for her artistic drive, as well as her choice of themes, style, and colours. It is generously interlaced with the quotations from Carr’s own writings. What comes to the forefront is her search for something that would satisfy her fully and not being able to find it.

She searches for it in the nature, in the Canada’s vast British Columbia forests. Right at the beginning of the film she is quoted asking herself this question, “What do these forests make you feel? What is it you are straggling for? What is the vital thing that woods posses that you want? Why do you go back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there, being unable to find it? It’s in there, yet so far away. You cannot reach it. Oh, you old fool, do not try to force these great forests, woe them.’

Thought Carr had rejected the organized religion at an early age, she never rejected her spiritual needs, “No church, no philosophy, you have to travel the road for yourself, you must find for yourself.”

She embraces loneliness, not finding consolation in the human crowds.

“What most attracts me in those wild, deep, solitary places – nobody goes there. The loneliness and quiet are unbroken. The loneliness repels them, the dug smells, the awful solemnity of the aged old tree makes you feel perfectly infinitesimal. They stay outside and talk about it. It’s bad for them but good for those who enter because holiness and quite are unbroken. I see clearer what I am away from humans in the woods.”

The film makes it obvious that Carr is searching for her own spirituality through the act of painting. It is as if by trying to capture on a canvas the spirit of the woods and wilderness, and the spirits that animate the Indian totem poles and carvings, she tried to reclaim her own spirituality and her connection to the ‘holiness’, a word used repeatedly throughout the film when quoting her writings.

Native Americans believed that the spirit of a person got caught in a picture, and this is why they refused to be photographed. Was it the same principle by which Carr was trying to capture the spirit of the nature, of the woods, and of the totem poles and imprint them onto her paintings, trying to repossess them for herself in an attempt to reconnect to her own spirituality? Is this why she is using the brush strokes, colours and shapes in such a novel way for her times so they would portray that all illusive spirit she is searching for?

Her art was too avangard for her times. It was not accepted and she stopped painting for 15 years. This changed when the National Gallery approached her to exhibit her art and when she discovered the Group of Seven and began a long lasting correspondence with Lawren Harris.

“Oh God, What have I seen! Something had spoken to the very soul of me! Wonderful! Mighty! Not of this world! Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created? If I knew where to find the God, a God to pray to, I would pray. God Bless the Group of Seven.” She also wrote about Lawren Harris’ paintings, “There is holiness about them, something you cannot describe but just feel.”

After seeing Emily Carr’s works, Lawren Harris tells her that she is one of them. Encouraged, Carr begins to paint, but this time, advised by Harris to depart from the native motives and to find herself instead ( He wrote to her, “Put aside Indian motives, strike out for yourself. ” ) she focuses more on painting the nature and the woods.

In another letter, Harris also tells her, “We are only content when all our sails are full with the winds of heaven. I hope all your winds are up and full of the winds of heaven.” This statement makes it obvious that both Harris and Carr perceived their creative impulse as that of being of heaven, as being spiritually inspired.

Carr once again embarked on a vigorous search of the spiritual through her painting. Yet there comes a startling realization: “the great forest, full of unseen things, and great silence…..and when I look at my paintings, there is nothing in it.... Oh, I am frightened when I look over at my paintings. There is nothing to it, just paint, dead and forlorn. I want my things to rock and sway with the fluids of life. But there they sit, weak and still.” And once again he asks herself in desperation: “What is it you are struggling for? It’s there … but I cannot catch hold of it.” Then she states, “I do not believe in the supernatural beings. Still, who understands the mystery of the forest?”

When in the middle of the night, all alone in the woods, she steps into a flowing water she exclaims, “I stand alone on my own perfect good feet in the stream at night, Life, Life, Life.” With this realization she begins to attempt to catch the light and the movement of the forest, her brush strokes becoming more free, fluid, and flowing.

“Everything is waiting and still. Colours you have not noticed come out.”

“I am looking for something so light, so tender, as mysterious as a tear.”

“Slowly things begin to move and slip into their places, groups and lines tie themselves together. Colours come out … Everything is alive, air is alive, sun is alive, silence is full of sound.”

At the end of the film a quotation is read, “I never before realized the relation between one’s pictures and oneself. Maybe the Indians were right and that something of you can get trapped forever in the picture as long as it lasts.”

Did Carr succeed in discovering her own spirituality or did she simply leave us something of herself permanently trapped in her paintings? Or maybe they are simply the spirits of the woods and of the Indian sacred objects as seen through her eyes that got caught in the paintings?

Can one’s spirituality be found by means of the creative act of painting? Can light and life be created through artistic means, through a person’s will for them to be expressed on canvas?

There are two short videos with excerpts form the film Wind of Heaven posted on YouTube:

EMILY CARR: WINDS OF HEAVEN

FIFA 29th Edition: Antwerp Central Station - Spiritual Architecture

Antwerp Central Station 

A 90 min. film directed by Peter Krüger, starring Johan Leysen (the narrator), shot by Rimvydas Leipus (2010).

The film goes beyond presenting the history of why and how the station was build at the end of the 19th century by King Leopold II of Belgium, and beyond discussing its main architectural features. Right from the start the focal statement is pronounced “It was clearly the intention to be overwhelmed by the feeling of holiness in a cathedral devoted to world trade and traffic.”

The station, dubbed by the Belgians the ‘Railway Cathedral’, is truly an architectural marvel caught in stunning shots by the cameramen. What is shown is the real as well as a specifically focused perspective, the play of light, the architectural details, the movement of passengers through space and time, as well as the intimate mood of the narrator, the presenter of this architectural gem to the viewer.

The magnificence of the station’s exterior architecture is even surpassed by the interior design and décor. There is a lot of marble: decorative columns, balustrades, balconies, galleries, regal stairways, and the floor, laid out in a squared pattern composed of 3 different kinds of Belgian marble. This train station is indeed “a place of beauty and glory” as stated by the narrator.

The camera zooms on to and lingers over the architectural details that one finds in Christian cathedrals. The imposing Dome which lets in the light is not unlike that of the St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome. And then there is a choir standing on the marble stairway singing about Devine creation: “Let there be light, and there was light.”

The narrator chooses to compare the train station’s dome to that of the Pantheon. He comments that the dome’s supporting walls are not decorated as in the Pantheon (not with Roman Gods) but rather with the sculpted symbols of trade and commerce. He notes that “in the place where in the Pantheon an emperor’s image would be located, is placed a clock…These are the Gods of the 19th century looking down at the visitors.”

The film forces one to ask a question, if the power of trade and commerce is so strong that it runs our modern life from the late 19th century to the present, why did the architects of this building resorted to incorporate the traditional elements that were part of the spiritual worship into a seemingly mundane public building of a train station?

The train station's main building was designed in the 19th century by the Bruges architect L. Delacenserie. What was his vision in conceiving it in such a monumental way? Did he consider that the commerce and trade would be becoming the Gods of the future centuries, the new objects of “worship”, requiring therefore the new type of a cathedral? Is this why he incorporated elements from the traditional places of worship into it, to signify the continuation of time and space through which a society moves forward?

What is also spiritualized in this building, through architecture, the interior reliefs, and the exterior roof sculptures, is the regal power of the state. The stone Belgian lion on the roof, the replica of the royal crown above the archway, and the live lion let roam freely at night in the empty station’s hall, called by the narrator “the income hall”, state that not only the past but also the present Belgian power is alive, well and strong.

Beside the Christian monotheistic and early Roman pantheistic elements of spirituality encompassed in the architecture of the station, the narrator also discovers that this monument also includes metaphysical concepts such as those of non-existence of time, the blending of time and space, and space being dissipated by areal lines and emptiness. The linear platforms covered by an immense expanse of iron and glass of the vaulted ceiling create a strange type of a perspective causing one to question what is real and what is not regarding time and space.

The station recently underwent extensive reconstruction. A new open concept was added: two new lower levels of platforms for high speed trains, passing underneath the city. This brought the light down into the underground, allowing it to be lit from above, in addition to lighting panels. The narrator comments, “By adding lighting panels one never has the feeling of descending in the underworld.” So the building’s architecture denies the existence of the underworld as well as of time and space, the same as these concepts are denied by the metaphysics.

The hall has now become a social place where people meet, have coffee, and participate in cultural events: choir singing, tango dancing, etc. The new Gods of the present century are usurping the train station’s space, and they are the Gods of culture and art.

This short video on YouTube is a series of images from the film:

ANTWERP-CENTRAL / MIDDENSTATIE by PETER KRÜGER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swUsnrjQSvM

The photo at the very beginning of this article is from blog.petaflop.de