Arse For Art’s Sake?

I was quite underwhelmed by the Sky Mirror. Firstly, it’s not very big. There are several of Kapoor’s mirrors, the biggest being 5 metres across. This one is less than half that.

Secondly the beauty of the sky mirror is supposed to be it’s incongruity. Reflecting a blaze of blue sky into an urban scene. A perfect circle of colour and freedom against drab architecture.

Put the mirror into a natural setting and it loses that impact and contrast. Site it near some bushes, next to one of the most startling and surprising buildings in the UK and it’s dwarfed and utterly out-shone by its surroundings: the Pavilion Gardens is not the right place for this sculpture at all.

The installation in the old vegetable market is different. This is on another scale entirely. Two huge red earth works, like alien turds 7 feet high, appear to have burrowed out of the ground leaving a perfectly oval crater. The rubble is piled nearby.

The deep scarlet red implies something like flesh and blood, the size itself and technical execution is inspiring though like much modern art although it looks cool it doesn’t have a lot to say.

The faint suspicion of pretentious twaddle lingers when you learn of the title: The Dismemberment Of Jeanne D’Arc.

Far better was the installation on the ground floor of my building, created by the Youth Offending Team. On the theme of Seven Deadly Sins, it was laid out like an empty flat – with hints of the occupant’s sins and crimes, repentances and regrets: a briefcase of forged money and drugs, TVs showing static and imploring “Why does no-one listen?”, a bathroom cabinet with medicines re-named things like “I Punched Someone Just For Fun”. It was bleak, but strangely hopeful – these were people who felt they were excluded, had moved into crime but were now coming back having identified their own weaknesses and sins.

As a counterpoint, recent news articles of the MPs expenses scandal were pasted in the kitchen. Are MPs as full of remorse and as willing to accept a penance as these young people? And isn’t everyone a sinner on some level anyway?

Of course it had it’s moments of cliché. But these aren’t artists, they’re just disenfranchised young people finding their voices. It was more powerful and thought provoking than anything that Anish Kapoor could create, but sadly not worth the £2 million the mediocre Sky Mirror commands.