Anish Kapoor in México

Eagerly anticipated by the Mexican public, the exhibition titled "Archeology, Biology," is a traveling show, already presented in many countries, which surveys the artistic trajectory of British Indian artist Anish Kapoor. After the long lines formed outside the Museo Tamayo by people waiting to snap a selfie in the exhibition of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, this new show was also expected to generate a similar response by the public to museum products (if it is possible to call them that way) offered by artists that the media and the collective imaginary have elevated to a status similar to that of movie stars and politicians (so much so that any of them can make pronouncements in favor or against solutions, or lack thereof, to regional or global issues).

As result, artists like Kapoor and Kusama become interchangeable figures for something that Brenda Caro describes in Código magazine and that she uses to wonder about the reasons that led a university museum to organize an exhibition of this nature with an advertising campaign that invites the general public to "share" their experience on social media, following a model used in other countries by private museums.

It is important to take into account that both the Museo Tamayo and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) are sponsored, which—notwithstanding the social behavior generated by those types of exhibitions and the expectations that they may generate within the cultural circuit—distances or altogether exempts them from becoming the bastions of a resistance that is inherent to the managing of contemporary art in other smaller public (and private) spaces.

Guided by Kapoor himself, the inaugural walk through the exhibition became a media event. The show was curated by Catherine Lampert and consists of twenty-two works of large dimensions that, without pretending to be a retrospective, offer a panoramic view of Kapoor's creative process, based on four thematic points distributed in four exhibition rooms: Self-generated Forms (the works with pigments that consolidated him as an artist during the late 1960s); Beauty Forms, based on the organic interactions of the concrete installation titled Gu Gu Ma, 2010-2011; Time, which includes the installation titled At the Edge of the World that consists of a dome-shaped object suspended over the viewers; and Unpredictable Forces, works carved on the walls of the exhibition room based of the installation My Red Homeland (2003). Somewhere between formal abstraction and organic patterns, the work by Kapoor is nonetheless emblematic.

Kapoor knows that the pedagogic ideal and organic matter are both monstrous notions. He nourishes his work with them to develop a vision that is open to the horror of nothingness and visceral beauty. The result is magical and disheartening, overwhelming and conciliatory, opened to multiple explanations (in which the personal can be factored in), but it also serves as model for the civic art of the new century, just as promised by science fiction cinema.