The key attraction to this exhibition is without doubt ‘Shooting into the Corner’ where an air compressed cannon fires shells of red wax, weighing twenty pounds, from one room into another through a small doorway and by the end of the week will have accumulated 30 tons of wax (which no doubt will end up at Tate Modern at some point).
This is grown up Performance Art, with an attendant, dressed in black, loading the cannon in a carefully choreographed ritual and firing it with a loud bang that makes the whole crowd scream.
What does this symbolise we are all thinking? Well the group of Lesbians next to me (what is the collective noun I wonder) concluded that is it was quite clearly an anti-war statement and the wax, the evisceration of the world’s guts pouring forth as Global conflicts wage on. However, I was able to put them straight (having heard an interview with Anish Kapoor on Radio Four) It was quite simply Anish ‘shooting his wad’ so to speak (the cannons of old had a wad of material behind the shell). However my explanation went down like a knackered lift. Well no else in the room could have missed the Freudian symbolism for Christ’s sake
The debate continues into the next room where a 40 ton train shape block of red wax, paint & ‘Vaseline’ moves on tracks through five galleries squeezing silently through the tightest of doorways leaving a residue of crimson slime splattering the walls and floors on it’s 30 minute journey. But with Freud in mind again I make my excuses before I get hit on the head with something. I depart into the rainy night for a pint of Sam Smith’s at one of Soho’s traditional pubs in Broadwick Street-The John Snow (mercifully too small to be become another faceless Wetherspoons) and located on the very site of the public water pump that John Snow historically disabled in the 1800’s by removing the handle and thus proving that Cholera was waterborne, saving London from an epidemic after the cases subsided….now isn’t that a pub worth preserving?
© Words - Dave Cairns/ ZANI
