"Wax Lyrical (Anish
Kapoor, Svayambh installation at Muse des Beaux Artes Nantes)",
Aristotle
knew it as early as the fourth
century BC: art is a form of therapy. Small surprise, then,
that
artists rebel not only within the
confines of their work. More and
more often, they refuse to
nestle
comfortably in the space in
which that work is exhibited.
A
particularly effective collision between
museum interior and art installation
could be witnessed
recently
at the Muse des Beaux Arts
in Nantes. From June to September,
the museums entire
ground
floor was occupied by Svayambh,
a purposely mismatching installation
by British sculptor
Anish
Kapoor. Known for his monumental vocabulary, Kapoor filled
the exhibition space with a
gigantic
block of red wax. The monolith
was transported by a flat-bed
wagon along rails set 150 cm
above
the floor. Interminably traversing
the 45-m-long rails at a snails
pace of 6 mm per second,
the
block slowly wriggled its way
through the courtyards too-narrow
arches over and over again.
As
a result, the piece not only
blemished the stark-white pillars
to its left and right with blood-red
cargo
strips, but also sustained
damage to its surface, as
continuous clashes gradually wore
the
wax
away.
According
to curator
Jean de Loisy, this painful but
inexorable advance can be
read as a magnificent
allegory of the museums
main themes: memory
and history. Svayambh
Sanskrit for shaped by
its
own energy
also illustrates just what
art does: refusing to blend in harmoniously, it resists its
surroundings
and imperturbably sticks
to a demonstration of its own dynamism.
Words
Ellen Rutten
Photos
Ccile Clos