Anish Kapoor: “I talked too much. Please, forgive me.”
The artist pondered over his work at The New School in a talk on May 3th, presented by Public Art Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
“Descension” can be viewed at Brooklyn Bridge Park until September 10th, 2017.
Kapoor started reading an excerpt of the Communist Manifesto.
“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
He then explained how important blood (he mentioned menstrual solidarity, which I found really thoughtful) and earth are for him, “they are cosmic, they are connected to something else.” He also said that he got tired of thinking about the space between objects and the composition of the pieces above. These objects are made by pigment and they just are.
Anish Kapoor was born in India from a Jewish mother. When he was a kid, he travelled to Israel with his brother and he was feeling really sad. Her mother brought earth from India and put it under his bed. That ritual eased Anish’s pain.
“Rituals are vital, are the thing that we all recognize.” Anish Kapoor.
People waited for 45 minutes to enter the room at the Documenta 9 with the artwork shown above, “a space full of darkness,” as Kapoor described. It came up when Kapoor wandered about the idea of singularity. "Is it possible to make something that goes beyond the object?."
One man was furious to have waited so long to look at a black carpet. He threw his glasses at the void (“might be cheap glasses,” Kapoor said) and they disappeared, the man became so terrified that he hugged the wall.
“Fear and darkness live with each other. ” said Kapoor.
Kapoor works magic. He plays tricks with our minds. He makes us feel real and alive and say: “Wow! This is possible, and this is amazing.”
He told us that his deep interest is darkness and that blue makes better black than black does, also that red does good black too. He repeated twice that he had been in psychoanalysis for 25 years and that mystery is the deepest of all things.
The artist asked the audience: How many mysteries have you encountered in your life? “I’ll be surprised if it’s more than one or two.”
A woman asked him about the process of creating art with other people — the social aspect of it. Kapoor said he was very suspicious of all these people opening art schools with a social discourse. There is too much ego in the way; routine and practice push all that out of the way. “Deep practice is personal,” Kapoor said. You do it alone, and it is complicated. He also reiterated that he always dresses in the same clothes, has the same breakfast and lunch, and goes to the studio every day. His discourse reminded me of Haruki Murakami and his working routine, including running every day. It contrasts with the lives of young Internet celebrities these days and the crowds who follow them. Traveling around the world, changing clothes compulsively, checking their cell phones like reaching for water on a hot summer day.
Kapoor, one of the most famous sculptors of all times, presented himself as a humble craftsman.
His advice for young artists:
“Be there. Do it, do it, do it, do it, it is a constant process. Don’t try. Do. There is no point at just aspiring, you have to get there.”
“I am basically a teenager,” Kapoor said. The piece above is wax that was shot at a wall. There is a psychodrama between the cannon and the corner, "a kind of Duchampian male-female opposition," Kapoor said. The artist sees the corner as architecture, origin, feminine, contrasting with an aggressive phallic shooting. After the shooting, Goya, Pollock, and much else appeared; but all the references came afterwards, they happened after the fact of the work. “I don’t have anything to say as an artist, but I am very interested in the process.” How the meaning and space are changed.
Because of the humongous dimensions of most of his works, Kapoor says, “you can’t try these things out.” There isn’t a model, or rehearsals; the form is going to tell you what is going to be, and how.
The artist is also deeply interested in autogeneration. “There is no hierarchy of form,” he said. “All form is possible.”
“Artists should be unapologetic”, Anish Kapoor.
“Best fun in the world to do this,” said Kapoor about the creation of this piece (a giant PVC inflatable). The inside has three holes, "cathedral like. Is very big," said Kapoor. From the inside you see the neck, you don't see those big round forms until you go in the space between the object and the building. A woman who visited it said she felt as if being inside a womb. In fact, Kapoor is very interested in pregnancy — the notion of something being there and not being there at the same time. “My body, your body, which is the fundamental question,” he said.
“The inside is bigger and has other realities.” Anish Kapoor.
This piece was situated in Versailles, Kapoor’s intention was to disrupt the order of those gardens. In an interviewed the artist suggested that this was the queen on the lawn and it got written up as the queen's vagina and then it was vandalized . Kapoor decided to leave the comments there and was taken to court for displaying anti semitic material. He then covered the signs with gold leaves ("Of course Versailles. Versailles is all about gold," said Kapoor), leaving the graffiti there but covering enough of it, to show that “hate can become something else.”.
"All intention misses the mark, perhaps that’s why politics doesn’t work. Can an artist work without intention?." Anish Kapoor.
Kapoor’s cited Duchamp’s phrase: A work of art can be completed only by the viewer. “I don’t believe in the idea of delivering meaning. A thing comes into meaning. It doesn’t have meaning.”.
Objects aren’t as described, objects aren’t as they say they are. ‘Ascension’ is a column of smoke in a room.
With ‘Anxiety’, he tried to recreate a haunted, spiritual space. He didn't succeed. Apparently, these spaces have a very low sound (18 Hz, known as infrasound) that Kapoor tried to emulate in a room. Rather than being spiritual or haunted it just made one feel incredibly anxious, to the extend that the staff at the Lisson Gallery, were it was shown, had to move out of the office while the work was on display.
“I like the idea that an object can be made of an immaterial thing.” Anish Kapoor.
“The art world is weird,” said Kapoor. “Much of the art world is consumed by the object. What we do is worth much more than money.”
This might be the reason Kapoor has donated the $1 million Genesis Prize to aiding refugees. A good friend from Mexico told me that this is also the amount of money some of Kapoor’s works are priced and that there is this group of rich people in Mexico were each one of the members owns a Kapoor's mirror. We can argue this is the art world consumed by the object, and this is also Anish Kapoor: A spiritual sculptor inside the capitalist art world who refuses to lose his soul in the game.
“As an artist what one does is set up processes and follow where they go. So, that is all I can do, follow.” Concluded Kapoor.
