Big is beautiful

Anish Kapoor, at the Royal Academy, is big. Firstly, because it’s the first retrospective the institution has put on for a current, living, artist. And, secondly, until they install a new Tardis-esque wing, the featured work is some of the largest scale stuff the academy will ever be likely to show.

Indeed, the exhibition opens with a massive steel-supported wooden structure, which looks like something out of a Jules Verne novel. It’s a vision of the future from an antiquarian perspective. Yet it’s also something far more ominous. The side facing the entrance is like a massive abyss. The depth tapers off as it progresses further back. It’s a sexual connotation on a big scale. By its very shape, it draws you in as much as it confronts.

It doesn’t matter which direction you, take; spectacle awaits in every room. One minute, you are in the company of a red and white serpentine sculptural scribble (which, again, towers above the spectator), the next minute you watch as a massive block of red wax crawls along a track, moving at an almost imperceptibly slow speed through several of the building’s rooms, and a little later you encounter a scattering of strange, concrete sculptures conceived by Kapoor, but executed by a computer (and displayed in incredibly close proximity, on industrial palettes). There is a room of mirrors. And, most spectacular of all, a canon which fires wax at a wall. It’s certainly ‘look at me’ art.

However, thankfully, it’s spectacle with a point. Kapoor, probably amongst other things, is interested in the interaction of his art with the environment it’s put in. The red block of wax leaves a smeared trail in the gallery, as it forces its way through archways. Bits fall of the tracks, and the block itself, and lay dropped, limp and lifeless around the piece. The wax fired from the canon builds up on the academy’s walls, ceilings and floors. The wax’s colour, akin to human viscera, makes a sharp contrast against the tasteful off-white walls.

It’s this interaction, the incredibly visual nature of this ever-changing exhibition, which has made this show as popular as it has been. It’s modern art for the people, stripped away from intellectualisation and inaccessible explanation. Yet, it’s completely without compromises. It’s outrageous, grandiose and unique yet incredibly evocative visually, emotionally and, probably, intellectually.