The Case for Horror: Anish Kapoor in Venice
I never seriously cared for Halloween even though I had grown up devouring horror movies with my dad in his dark den. Some of my fondest memories of our brief time together were of the both of us sitting haloed by the luminescent glow of his large television nearly the size of a door turned on its side. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Chucky, and Saw—we binged them as breezily as if they were romcoms irrespective of the time of day or year. What made most people shield their eyes or turn away in disgust made us inch closer to the screen. I remember many a time casually walking past his tv during the day and seeing Dexter strangling yet another one of his victims in a blood splattered room or serious-looking professionals trying to psychoanalyze the brutal actions of a 1970s serial killer. I would argue that my father and I bonded most during our quietest moments, when we would sit next to each other saying nothing at all, and usually this was when we were bewitched by horrors playing on the screen.
Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022)
When I walked into the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice and saw Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) upon entering, I couldn’t help but feel I had wandered onto the set of a horror movie. The massive mound of red wax drooped to the ground as if an enormously heavy creature lay ensconced in it, stretching it thin and about to rip through. It was like an upside down tsunami barreling towards you, except, like in the movies, time had frozen in the face of oncoming danger and you were left feeling like it was only a matter of minutes before it would come crashing down or burst open with your worst nightmare. It was like a tidal wave of blood, something from The Shining.
Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013)
Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013) loomed upstairs with its steel conveyor belts smeared with bloody-looking wax and melting blocks of it spreading across the floor like a fresh crime scene. Canopied by eighteenth century Venetian frescoes thirty feet high, what was once a ballroom in the seventeen-eighties, and later a convent for nuns in the twentieth century, was now a grim scene no one back then could have even imagined. A large red circle stood tall behind the gruesome mess of a scene, guiltily standing by and overlooking the torrential damage. Feeling as if I were in a malfunctioning meat factory surrounded by offal, I couldn’t help but feel awestruck by it all. It was both heinous and fanciful, like the part of the horror film where you cover your eyes but can’t help but peer through your fingers.
Through the doorway in the adjoining room was a wall of organ-like constructions, smooth, deep red, and sinewy snaking wax contortions. They draped over a dark wall as casually and languorously as dirty clothes waiting to be washed. They were only obliquely suggestive of human body parts like Jean Arp’s biomorphic sculptures or Mire Lee’s carnivorous installations, yet the association is undeniable. As sickening as it looked, I couldn’t help but lean into it, resisting the strong temptation to touch it. Like in a horror movie that suspends your reality, I had almost forgotten where I was and how I was expected to behave, possessed by the terror of it all.
In an interview in Número Magazine, Kapoor explains how his work aims to reach the depths of the universal language of abjection: “Does our inner language allow for a ‘disruptive self’?” asks Kapoor. “We spend our lives negating this part of ourselves, and in turn we educate our children to forget it. We reject the difficult or the abject, we deny that which is not ‘good.’ We don’t want to see it. But I believe this is a terrible mistake… Our poetic self is to be found in the undisciplined and the deranged. Viewers come to an artwork with their own baggage of affects and emotions. They can look at it with love, hate, desire, whatever, and it’s up to the artist to play with that. And part of that is the abject.”
Kapoor’s maximalist work is a celebration of the unconscious mind. With Freud always lurking in the background, Kapoor not only pulls our unconscious selves up from its dark depths to the surface but also demands us to walk around in it amongst the most disturbing and vile thoughts we never even knew we had.
Freud believed that by bringing the shadowed thoughts of the unconscious into awareness, we could help relieve psychological distress. As unsettled as we may feel walking through Kapoor’s installation at the Manfrin, he would argue that this is a productive feeling, encouraging us to take a tour of the ugliest parts of ourselves that we instinctively repress everyday as a defense mechanism. To confront our most aggressive, anxious, conflicting, and frightful selves is to become a more self-aware and emotionally intelligent human.
Freud had a tripartite psychoanalytic theory that he believed determined human behavior and personality: the Id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains aggressive and sexual desires ruled by the pleasure principle; the Super-Ego operates as a moral conscience; and the Ego is the realistic part that acts as the mediator between the Id and Super-Ego. Kapoor’s installation is a psychoanalytic experiment that puts us in conflict with ourselves—while we regularly move through life with the Ego in charge helping us fit into society, how are we supposed to act when this hierarchy is turned on its head and we find ourselves exploring a Venetian palazzo that has been superseded by our Id, the part of the mind we have been conditioned from birth to gag at all costs?
I recently complained to my therapist that I only feel inspired enough to write when I feel sad and depressed, that I don’t feel the same creative spark when I feel happy. Although I do believe that we can find inspiration in anything no matter the feeling, there is something endlessly poetic and inexhaustible about the dark places sadness and fear can take us. Seeing Kapoor’s macabre installation in the flesh helped me return to that disturbed self I love to wrestle with.
