I got me some art-learnin'

Hi all. How was your weekend (bank holiday weekend, for the Irish and New Zealanders)? Mine was glorious. Firstly, I did no work at all. In fact, I did the opposite of work, much of it the company of colleagues who were similarly determined to not even think about work.

Friday - to the pub, of course. But Saturday saw me on a train to London to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I turned up early to see the Wild Thing exhibition - Epstein, Gill and Gaudier-Brzeska, which was fabulous and still shocking in many ways. They reintroduced 'direct carving' (i.e. chisel on block rather than making clay and plaster casts for technicians to reproduce. They revisioned sculpture and heavily influenced each other. If you want to see lots of Epstein, go to Walsall Art Gallery - their collection is based on Epstein's own work plus that collected by he and his wife. Here's a photograph of Epstein's Rock Drill, which was so advanced that it was totally rejected by the critical establishment. He took it apart, did a bronze cast of the head and torso and chucked the rest away - the version in the exhibition is a 1970s reproduction. I've gone on about Eric Gill far too much, so won't dwell on his manichaean genius any further here.

When my comrades turned up, we trooped into the Anish Kapoor exhibition. His interests are in space, form and the body - one room contained pallets of extruded concrete, reminiscent of turds, maggots or intestines. Another contained a long, writing intestinal tube which ended in a shiny red vulval aperture, while Svayambh consists of a 30-ton red wax carriage endlessly moving through 5 galleries, squeezing through each ornate doorway and leaving wax splattered over the walls and edges - it's hard not to think of childbirth. Elsewhere, a cannon fired red wax onto the wall every twenty minutes (no, me neither).

Kapoor plays with perceptions too - the perfect white pregnancy bump (or malignancy bump) on the wall which can only be seen from one oblique angle, the fairground mirrors, the deep receding yellow hollow: spatial perception is warped throughout, as is the nature of art and the role of the gallery. The sculpture outside (The Tree and the Eye) is also interesting - at first it just seems a little flashy, but then I realised that it's doing two things: warping your perception of the severe classically-designed buildings surrounding it, and turning you into the art: to look at it or take pictures of it is to publicly proclaim your narcissism - there's no way to view this art without gazing at yourself, so that every picture is a self-portrait (should it be The Tree and the I?).

Here are a couple from the exhibition and some more of the day here. The bad ones are of Ezra Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska, and Kapoor's Svayambh - rubbish quality because photography isn't technically welcomed, so I used my camera phone. The others are of my fellow cultural refugees.

This  is Gaudier-Brzeska's Ezra Pound, the poet.

Kapoor's Savayambh, pushing through the door.

Kapoor's The Tree and the Eye.

The Wolverhampton University Culture Vultures.

The Wax Cannon.