A group of sculptures that Kapoor exhibits together at the Royal Academy for the first time (Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked, 2008-09) began as a series with working titles such as Between Shit and Architecture or Electronic Ruins. These are 'printed' works, prodigiously produced through a computerized, automated process, whereby a three-dimensional printer lays coil upon coil of raw concrete, like anonymous excrement or architectural debris, the two bound together in the working title that leads Homi K. Bhabha to interpret the work as a metaphor of urban life.(7) What is unusual about these works in the context of Kapoor's oeuvre is their soft, muffling tissue that evokes handwork and pre-industrial craft, turning on its head the romanticism and organicism of works that used similarly-looking materials to critique hard-edged, impersonal abstraction, and updating the idea of the self-made, technologically-produced object. Kapoor's humble industrial material is poured out of the machine in its raw state, much like Pollock's paint was poured out of the can, producing what seems like a mere record of the event. 'To make art without the hand is a goal that sets art beyond expression,' affirms Kapoor, faithful to a tradition that demands from the artist a work purely of the mind, even though the reasons change with the times. And he positions his electronically-generated sculptures back on their pedestals: plywood palettes, humble waste material themselves too.
Anish Kapoor, Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked, 2008-09, detail, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 26 September - 11 December 2009, photograph by Styliane Philippou