Brighton Festival: Part 1
Words by Elizabeth Simner / Photo by Elizabeth Simner
The Brighton Festival, which opened on Saturday, is being guest directed by Turner prize winning sculptor of international repute, Anish Kapoor. Kapoor has commissioned four of his own pieces for the festival, most of which use external and unusual venues within the city, such as the Old Municipal Market, a space never before used as an art venue.
In a talk last week, Phillip Morgan, producer of the festival, attempted to explain Kapoor’s aims, a difficult task as the sculptor is known for his dislike of any specified meaning. ‘Kapoor has spoken of the quality of light in the city’ Morgan said. ‘We approached him through a mutual friend, to our surprise and excitement he accepted the challenge. Working with Anish Kapoor presented a certain challenge, but the challenge is part of the reason why he accepted the offer.’
Morgan enthused about the commitment made by the CBE holder, stating that Kapoor had been offered ‘no financial payment at all’ and adding that Kapoor has donated ‘the time of his studio staff at no cost.’
The four works to be part of the festival include ‘C Curve’, a concave metal structure that is insured for 1.8 million pounds and installed at the Chattri on the South Downs. The Chattri (meaning umbrella in Hindu, Punjabi and Urdu) is a memorial for the Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in the Dome theatre’s temporary hospital during the First World War and were cremated on the Downs. The Chattri has obvious connections for Kapoor, who said that as he walked there the crows flew away and that in India you saw the crows as you walked towards the graves. ‘He immediately wanted to put a piece there’ said Morgan. The highly polished steel structure, accessible only on foot via a twenty minute walk, reflects the surrounding countryside and changes with the weather. The location is remote when compared with the bustle of Kapoor’s Pavilion Gardens piece, and attracts devoted art hunters and surprised ramblers alike. The inner curve of the structure is polished and placed at different angles to refract the reflections in strange and fascinating ways. Although on close inspection you can in fact detect a dividing line between the mirrors, the cynical realist has no place here. Children run up and pose in front of their distorted reflections, and play with the light emitted from the metal curve. Even the lambs of the area can’t keep away, as they keep trying to jump up onto the plinth. We speak to the outdoor producer of the festival as she sprays water on the piece and informs us that maintaining it’s cleanliness among the countryside detritus is quite a task. A worthwhile labour of love, as the effect at sunset is breathtaking.
Another original piece for the festival is the ‘Dismemberment of Jeanne D’arc’ in the old Municipal market. A chilly old warehouse, the building still has the ticket offices of the workmen, steady drip of unkempt plumbing and quiet cooing of many pigeons from the rusty ceiling girders. The work here consists of two huge piles of what looks like red dust and mud, as Kapoor has heaped the material around the poles in the centre of the space to form two pyramids. Morgan said of Kapoor: ‘The challenge of working with him is that he is not structured within his work, giving a chance to respond to the space and see its reward.’
This is certainly true of the market piece. There are two vast cylindrical lumps of clay at least twelve foot long apiece, moulded into crags and boulders, lit red by the lighting here. On first glance they are abstract shapes and forms and nothing more- keep looking, and faces appear from the shadows, in groups and on their own. The third piece is a deep hole, red again, the texture of which appear to have been mined into the very ground- it is at least six foot deep and we are advised to stand back. As Morgan explained ‘health and safety thought that if we built a big hole people would immediately try to throw themselves into it.’ All together, the red lighting, the unusual venue, and the scale of the sculptures, and Kapoor has created a powerful scene.
Perhaps to defend Kapoor’s perceived lack of contact time within the festival preparations, Morgan spoke of the ‘pressure on his time,’ explaining that, as an international artist he: ‘flew to New Zealand for just eighteen hours. It is a huge compliment to Brighton that he agreed to take time out to do the work here’
Another piece to open for the Festival at the weekend is the Sky Mirror in the Pavilion Gardens, which is insured for 1.2 million. Although not the only version of the idea- there are six small sky mirrors and two or three large ones at various world venues. Like C Curve, Sky Mirror has the potential to focus the sun’s rays, and Kapoor told a story of a Sky Mirror being polished in Los Angeles, returning after a cup of tea to find that it had melted something.
Morgan spoke of the festival giving people a chance to see the spectrum of Kapoor’s work, and its flexibility. Opposing intellectual explanation, Kapoor has spoken of the search for meaning in his art, saying definition lies in ‘the piece containing its own meaning- meaning is contained in the interaction of the piece.’ In relation to Sky Mirror, then, this is ‘the space between the viewer and the mirror, rather than what it is being transformed into.’
Another piece for the festival will be Imagined Monochrome, an experience using all of the senses and aiming to produce an imagined colour. Kapoor explained where this idea came from, saying that he ‘went into a massage and had an incredibly intense experience of colour’, and that his friends had experienced the same, although he admits ‘probably just because I’d said that I’d had that experience!’ This sparked an interest for Kapoor in exploring, as Morgan explains ‘to what extent we can suggest to people what they will see in a particular environment and situation.’
Kapoor has a major exhibition coming up in the Grand Palais in Paris, and, said Morgan, he ‘would like to credit Brighton first in the development of that- for the shift in the way he regards his work.’
Alongside Kapoor’s proclamation of Brighton as ‘a place of wonderful contradictions and juxtapositions, energy and beauty,’ Morgan states that the Festival promises to be ‘an extraordinary occasion,’ and something that’s ‘never been done in this way, using a whole city.’
The Festival will run from 2-24 May
Posted Tue, May 05, 2009