Anish Kapoor, Up Down Shadow, 2005. Wood, wax, and oil based paint. 172 x 172 x 101.5 cm. Photo: Dave Morgan. © Anish Kapoor/ VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
Constructions from a conversation with Anish Kapoor. By Peter Lyle
A few weeks before the opening of Anish Kapoor’s new show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the artist and the work were still in the Anglo-Indian artist’s complex of London studios.
Kapoor, in dapper navy blazer and blue shirt, looked as crisply- finished as his most famous pieces from the past. The art of the near future, on the other hand, was in various stages of completion, being variously made, dried, painted, polished, reconsidered. The polished mathematical perfection of a work like “Cloud Gate” in Chicago (now claimed to be the world’s most popular artwork) seemed an infinity away. Kapoor picked his way past boxes for industrial paintguns, mysterious packing containers, and a white plastic bucket on which was written “SKY MIRROR BOLTS”, and addressed the waiting media.
For a show of this scale, he began, “generally, one would be a bit more sane”. More than half the works for the show would be new, he said, which meant that they wouldn’t all have been tested and finished to the usual extent, which was a risk for someone like Kapoor, whose works all depend on a quality of either “perfection or roughness. This is important. But that’s why this isn’t a retrospective. Why do we do this? Not to prove how great we are, but in order to open a whole area of possible new exploration with the work.
“I’ve no great message to give the world or any such thing – that’s ridiculous. All we can do is point to possibility…”
Then he took us on a studio tour of the recurring concerns and mixed media that are currently on show. Kapoor started with an example of the “rough” stuff: curling clay shapes that look like larvae, stone serpents, and perhaps dog mess too: a kind of “proto-form”, Kapoor said that he’d begun conceiving with a computer package, but ended up designing by hand. They were “slashy, messy things” that on one level looked like “lumps of shit, but also refer to Rodin more than I would have thought.”
After the media of addition, that of subtraction: shapes from polystyrene and fibreglass eroded with resin into shapes and shades that resemble dissected bodies or uncannily evoked crystalline caverns.
Next, the mirror stage. Kapoor wears his erudition very lightly indeed, but he does drop Jacques Lacan’s name as he enters his mirror studio – the fairground exhibit of your dreams – and talks about the French psychoanalyst and his influential theory of identity as something fabricated by the gaze of our mother and the image of ourselves in the mirror – a hall of illusions. In Kapoor’s studio, it’s not a theory but a reality as, everywhere you look, your perceptions are confronted by phenomena your mind can’t process. A mirror that seems as unreal and yet embodied as an Escher painting; mirrors that turn your world upside-down, but keep your face upright; a mirror with positive and negative halves and a bend in the middle that brings to mind Dali’s molten geometry. It doesn’t reflect a mirror image, but shows you yourself as others see you.
Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 1990. Fibreglass and pigment. Dimensions variable. Photo: J. Fernndes and S. Drake. © Anish Kapoor/ VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
Kapoor had hidden the work now on show in the Atrium, a revised reshowing of “leviathan”, which was first seen at the Grand Palais in Paris. But it’s hardly a triumphant return: the beast is now dead, without any body, only a shell, he explained: “The Dead Leviathan.” Kapoor also approvingly mentioned an essay by Horst Bredekamp in the new show’s catalogue, which related the work to the seminal 17th century tract on statehood by Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan” and the crises of statehood in the world today.
Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, which conceived of the state as a kind of giant body, is one of the most cherished texts of enlightenment thought. Kapoor’s practice could be seen as a kind of challenge of the enlightenment and the Platonic thought that preceded it. So, tour over, when Sleek sat down with Kapoor on a plastic chair by a nearly-complete synthetic cavern, we did want to check one thing. He may have no message, but then again – hasn’t he spent most of his 59 years sculpting things that connect directly to our perceptions to challenge the ways the Western tradition attempts to understand and organise the world?
“Correct, I’m very interested in that. And of course it isn’t an intellectual exercise; it can’t be. It has to come out of the process. Even in this process, it’s very important: the work is made first, then things emerge which may have tangential connections with other things in the world. On that basis, one might even measure the quality of a work by how far it extends into other worlds.”
Kapoor has never been satisfied with the conceptual world he inherited; that’s why he set out to explore a perceptual one in a language of his own. Instead he senses a greater hunger everywhere for less dogmatic ways of looking at things.
“It seems to me that our institutional projects, whether they’re done by government or institutions of social justice etc, they’re all looking now in ways they haven’t been for a long time, simply because all the old orthodoxies seem to keep landing up on troubled places. So the idea that artists do stupid things to such an extent that they have to be taken seriously, I think it’s a kind of vital and tangible truth. not a new one – but it’s very important. Because it says the apparently stupid and irrelevant might point to something or other, in that Freudian way – it’s as though the subconscious returns with answers that are not where you would expect them to be.”
Anish Kapoor curated by Norman Rosenthal is at Martin-Groupis Bau until November 24 2013. www.berlinerfestspiele.de
Taken from Sleek #38 “The One and the Many”.