Anish Kapoor in Berlin

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Frances Follin is as impressed as the Berliners by a substantial show by a major British artist

Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau is built on a site straddling the line of the now-demolished Berlin Wall, a little of which remains further along the street. Mounting the main staircase, one is flanked by two large mirrors, one marked ‘ost’ (east) and the other ‘west’ (west), a reminder that one is occupying what would have been an impossible space between 13 August 1961 and 9 November 1989, the period for which the wall separated the two Germanies.

In a large central atrium, a large red disk is held aloft on triangular, scaffolding-like supports. Around it on the floor are what look like half-melted, half-broken gobbets of the reddish wax that visitors to London’s Royal Academy (RA) in 2009 will recall from the massive work Svayambh and others shown at Kapoor’s exhibition there.

This feature – or ‘sun’ – is surrounded by several large conveyor belts angled upwards on stands. Some emerge from the walls, one from a pit in the floor. Periodically, a gobbet of wax is loaded on to one of these belts by unseen hands or mechanisms and travels slowly upwards. Falling over the end of the belt, it noisily joins its predecessors on the increasingly messy floor below. This is Kapoor’s Symphony for a Beloved  Sun (2013). The slow movement of each wax gobbet creates a sense of suspense. Spectators become hushed as a gobbet approached the top of its belt. Once it has fallen there is a sudden burst of conversation, laughter and general noise as it seems that the moment everyone awaited as happened and passed by. Then people disperse – it will be a long wait for the next one.

We are all very familiar with the sense of suspense engendered by thrillers and crime series, films and books – but how easily we are all manipulated into feeling suspense here, without a plot or any engaging ‘characters’ to trigger our emotions. This is visual art that acts directly on the emotions, like music. (‘All art aspires to the condition of music’, as the critic Walter Pater (1839–94) said)

Shooting into the Corner (2008–9) was shown at the RA in 2009.  A cannon periodically – and only occasionally – fires lumps of wax at the opposite corner of a room. This is even messier and noisier than the Beloved Sun next door. The cannon inevitably adds a militaristic note and the wax spattered on the walls opposite evokes blood. Large cans of wax stand to one side, awaiting their fate.

The body is also evoked, rather differently, by The Death of Leviathan (2011–13). This consists of what appears to be an interconnected sequence of massive PVC bags of a dull brown colour that occupy three rooms. Standing in the central room, I could see to my right through a doorway a less inflated portion, becoming much more inflated in front of me – the bag here is well over my head. To my left, through another doorway, the end of the sequence is largely deflated. It is hard to escape a sexual metaphor here. Again the importance of time is manifest, the inevitable sequence of events, of gradual tumescence and detumescence. In English, ‘tumid’ means both ‘swollen’ and ‘pompous’, and in the vast size of this sculpture there is a suggestion of pomposity getting its inevitable comeuppance (or rather, its coming down). However grand you may be, it seems to say, that third room always awaits.

Organ (2012) is a real tease. On a white wall, above head height (even for a tall spectator) is a small black disk. Is it painted on? Is it a hole? Walking round to the other side of the wall, one finds what looks like an electricity generator – a diesel motor of some sort. A pipe leads up from it and ends at the wall – it seems to be of the same cross-section as the ‘hole’ seen on the other side and aligned with it. So is the black disk the end of this pipe? The generator is not operating – what would happen if it started up? Would smoke emerge from the ‘hole’? As with so many news stories, you could make your own mind up if you had just a bit more information – but that is what you cannot have.

Descent into Limbo (2013) is another tease. Into the perfect wood-strip floor a hole has apparently been cut – or has a circle of some perfectly black material been placed there? A barrier prevents close inspection. Little bits of screwed up paper litter the floor around it. Have these been thrown by spectators trying to test whether the hole is actually a hole, or are they part of the exhibit, meant to make you think that someone has been testing? While I am there, nobody throws anything. A label on a nearby wall says only that the piece is made of fibreglass and pigment. One longs for more information…

If Symphony for a Beloved Sun tackles the nature of suspense, Organ and Descent into Limbo confront us with the tantalizing nature of our own curiosity, and the intractability of the world in the face of our demand to know.

With space for 70 exhibits, this show gives a very comprehensive account of Kapoor’s oeuvre. There are evocations of an apparently none-too-healthy bodily interior in 1st Body (the physical body or the body politic?) and distorted views of the spectator’s own body in the mirrored surfaces of Non-Object (Oval Twist) (2013), Non-Object (Door) (2008) and Non-Object (Square Twist) (2013). Can you believe that any reflection is accurate after seeing these? In Hexagon Mirror (2007) the concave surface is composed of a honeycomb of hexagons in which the spectator’s reflection is reduced to such an extent that it is hard to detect it  at all – as if, in the human hive, we are all so small as to be almost lost.

Use of the now-familiar reddish wax abound. In Bell the eponymous object sits on a turntable; it has apparently been cut from a block by revolving through a curved ‘blade’ – a thin layer of wax is still being shaved from its surface as it turns. It is indeed being shaped by events – or at least by one continuous and apparently never-ending ‘event’.

This exhibition is a massive event in itself. A host of thought-provoking and intriguing sculptures each constitute an experience for the spectator – indeed, one cannot merely spectate in a passive sense, one is forced to take part. Indeed, Berliners were keen to do so. There was a constant hum of excitement as adults and children alike explored the show. When we left, there was a long queue to get in.