Unlike most of the posts on this site this one has more to do with someone else’s art (In this case Anish Kapoor).
I have a problem with Vantablack (and it’s not the usual one about the fact that Anish Kapoor won’t let anyone else use it).
The defining property of Vantablack is that it’s so black that it absorbs almost all of the light that falls on it. This means that if you were to coat an object with Vantablack you literally wouldn’t be able to see the object (because it isn’t reflecting any light). You literally see a black space. You see nothing. It’s all very philosophically fascinating.
I recently went to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London where there is a room with half a dozen Vantablack themed artworks on display. I gazed at them all in turn and contemplated the void within each of them, with each artwork being fascinating in its own right.
However, once you’ve seen one incomprehensible black void you’ve seen them all.
Staring at things that you can’t see has got its limits when it comes to attention-holding.
Not being able to see Vantablack is the pigment’s strength, but it’s also it’s weakness. Vantablack is so good at doing what it does that it doesn’t give you any chance to work out what it is that it’s doing.
One work in the show at the Hayward featured a Vantablack sphere attached to a Vantablack surface (see the video below). This particular work was fascinating partly because by walking around it you could see what you were looking at from some angles (where the sphere was silhouetted against the gallery wall) while from other angles you literally couldn’t see what you were looking at because the sphere was in front of the Vantablack background and all that could be seen was total blackness.
Others of the Vantablack works in the show however gave no clue as to their construction even when you walked around them and peered into their unfathomable blackness. This was fascinating and mysterious in itself of course, but also more than a little frustrating.
If you want to see art as a metaphor then I think Vantablack art may be a metaphor for the fascinating, mysterious and frustrating way that we as humans attempt to look into the void and try to grasp the nature and meaning of existence, only to see that we can’t make anything out at all.
But once you’ve done that while looking at one piece of work, you don’t particularly want to do exactly the same thing when you move on to the next piece which seems to be telling you exactly the same thing but this time via a black square on the wall rather than a black circle on the ground.
I found myself staring at the just-mentioned Vantablack circle on the floor of the gallery, pictured above. Was it a black circle painted directly onto the gallery floor? It certainly looked a bit like a rug. Or was it a hole reaching down to the centre of the Earth? The exhibit was on the ground floor of the gallery so a hole going down at least into the basement wasn’t inconceivable. With Vantablack a flat surface and a twenty foot deep hole in the ground both look exactly the same because, as I mentioned, you literally can’t see the thing that you’re looking at.
I could imagine some people being tempted to throw an object onto the black circle on the floor just to see what happened.
Thinking around this idea I decided that if I got my hands on some Vantablack (fat chance) I’d probably deliberately place visible objects on the Vantablack surfaces in order to create something more than just a blank black void. For instance with a Vantablack hole in the ground I’d probably place an object on the bottom of the hole. I’d probably place it so that it could only be seen from one direction, meaning that from other directions you couldn’t tell whether the Vantablack hole was in fact a hole or whether it was a flat surface.
I’ve done a few ‘black hole’ artworks of my own over the past decade or so (search ‘black hole’ in the search box).
Below is a photo of an idea that I had some time ago, showing a room with a checkered tiled floor in which some of the black tiles are actually replaced by holes (the photo’s a visualisation, not an actual artwork). In this version in the visualisation I’ve placed objects in some of the holes while others are black voids. I’ve deliberately adjusted the lighting to make the holes obvious for explanatory purposes.
I’m sure that Anish Kapoor must have thought about this sort of thing himself and that he decided not to pursue it, perhaps because it violates a metaphor or because it says something that he doesn’t particularly want to say.
