Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas: The Failure of ‘Profound’ Allusion An Unpublishable Critique* Adrian Lewis .Anish Kapoor, Marsyas, 2002, steel and PVC, 150m long, exh.Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, Oct.2002-April 2003 Over the autumn and winter of 2002-3, the Tate Modern displayed in its Turbine Hall a 150 foot long structure designed by Anish Kapoor. Kapoor is on record as saying that he 'soon realised that the only way he could challenge the daunting height of the Turbine Hall was, paradoxically, to use its length’ to the maximum.1 We could put it another way and say that the other-directed motivation here was to fill the space with an object bigger than any other sculpture that the Tate had ever shown, an object which would render the space as dramatically spectacular as possible. Two steel rings were at each end of the Turbine Hall, with a third above the hall’s pedestrian bridge, and a single PVC membrane joined the rings in a shape so massive that it was difficult to see it overall. So my first point is that, whereas artists used to deliver personal responses to lived experiences, now they search out and respond to social briefs, employing digital modelling techniques, to create colossal shapes. The artist’s own response to the accusation that they are operating in an other-directed way would presumably be that they are working with their normal means of expression, simply on a grander scale. We might put it slightly differently and say that contemporary artists market themselves by deploying signature devices, such as in Kapoor’s case curved shaping and blood-red colour (a colour used conspicuously in Kapoor’s 2009 Royal Academy retrospective). My second point is that Marsyas is not really sculptural, though it has one elementary component of sculpture, the element of shape. Shape is only one component of sculpture, and that other resources are needed to create a sense of inner life and expression distinguishing a sculpture from any strikingly shaped 3D object. Shape is not really sculpture, but only a tiny aspect of it, and that dealing with a skin stretched regularly and geometrically allows for no changes of axis, no sense of internal structure, no play with an illusion of internal life, no relation to the human figure’s sense of gravity and grounding, for all the marketing talk around the sculpture about human scale being central to the work. It is not surprising that computer-generated/assisted shape-making has both brought modern ‘sculptor’ and architect/designer together and encouraged many artists to believe that such shape-modelling is sculptural in an aesthetic sense, which it isn’t. My third point about Kapoor’s 2002-3 Turbine Hall installation is that it raises the whole issue of contemporary art’s aesthetic communicability in its typical titular allusiveness. The title is Marsyas, a reference to the satyr flayed alive by Apollo in Greek mythology. There is no way that one would associate that title with shapes reminiscent of brass horns or tubular flower-heads such as those of lilies. The theme of Marsyas to the Greeks suggested the humbling of human beings for their hubris. The creation of harmony by Apollo by means of music was threatened by Marsyas’ aspirations, suggesting disruptive and rebellious human behaviour. During the Renaissance, the classical theme was reinterpreted in Christian terms, with Apollo read as Christ and Marsyas as the sinful human being who must be purified.2 It is probably in these terms that the aged Titian conceived his Flaying of Marsyas (1570-76). Writing on Kapoor’s sculpture tends to associate it mainly with this Titian painting as an image of flayed skin, even though skin is nothing like plastic Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Flaying of Marsyas, 1570-76, oil on canvas, 212x207cm, National Museum, Komeritz and there is no human reference point in the imagery. If Titian conceived of his painting as the necessary transformation of the dying sinner,3 it would be difficult to associate that with the sense of vegetal shape in Kapoor’s sculpture. Certainly an action of stretching a ‘skin’ of sorts was involved, but the resultant sweep and its triumphant horn-like scale do not evoke suffering, and anyway such an association if made would not itself meld easily with the other type of visual source in spiritual schemas that has been found for the work by an author in a recent study of Marsyas.4 So we might say that it is not valid for critical commentary to reach for a reference to Titian’s painting as part of Kapoor’s intended meaning. Allusiveness is rampant in ‘contemporary art’ and it reminds us that Wimsatt and Beardsley back in 1946 suggested that allusiveness went to the core of the issue as to whether we can impute artistic meaning to what the artist intended5 (let alone what commentators impute as the artist’s intention). The allusion to Marsyas, to put it more simply, does not work in Kapoor’s case. Or put another way, there is not enough in the structuring of the artwork to justify the claim that allusion operates artistically here. The whole practice of allusion has transmogrified here into intellectual intertextual teasing appended to (for all their curves) essentially mechanical forms. 2020 *The essay’s subtitle finds justification in the non-publishability of the book from which it is extracted, We Need to Talk About Contemporary Art, offered to all the main art publishers in the UK and States in 2020 and now available on academia.edu. The way in which the co-dependency of art market, art museum, and art publishing (as well as the ‘moral ownership’ of artistic copyright) control and eliminate root-and-branch aesthetic criticism of contemporary art should be an issue of considerable concern. lewisadrian1591@gmail.com 1. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series/unilever-series-anish-kapoor-marsyas 2. The specialist literature on the Renaissance Christian reinterpreting of ancient mythology is extensive. A recent study of this particular motif is provided by D.Unger, ‘Allegorizing Choice: The Apollo Flaying Marsyas Myth in a Religious Context’ (Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 36, 1, Leiden, 2.12.2010, online). For an overview of analyses of Titian’s painting, see J.Held, ‘Titian's Flaying of Marsyas: An Analysis of the Analyses’ (Oxford Art Journal, 31, 2, 2008); pp.181–94, 3.. This straightforward Christian reading of the Titian painting is supported by cross-reference to the image of Michelangelo’s self-portrait as flayed figure in The Last Judgment (1534-41, fresco, altar wall of Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome). See also F.Jacobs, ‘(Dis)Assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno’ (Art Bulletin, 84, 3, 2002), pp.426-48. 4.See D. de Salvo and C.Balmond, Anish Kapoor: Marsyas (London, 2003). 5.. W.Wimsatt and M.Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (Sewanee Review, summer 1946), reprinted in S.Kahn and A.Meskin, Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology (Oxford, 2008), pp.547-55. ‘allusiveness…as a critical issue…challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise of intentionalism.’