Anish Kapoor

I have written about this excellent artist in previous blogs, in particular his show at the ICA in Boston just last year. But last night I had the pleasure of hearing him speak about his work due to the opening of his newest installation at the Guggenheim in New York City entitled, Memory. Born in 1954 in Bombay, Kapoor has spent the majority of his life in London. He has many international solo shows and currently has a show on view at the esteemed Royal Academy of Arts in London. Kapoor began by stating that he is “an artist who believes in the studio. If an artist has too much to say it can get in the way of the work.” The studio for him is a place where meaning is excavated through process. He led the audience on a verbal and visual tour of his work over the years which has led to the current work on view.

Mother as a Mountain, 1985, Image courtesy of the artist's website

In the 1970s he wondered if anyone could make a sculpture out of color–simple pigment. Pigment is physical but it seemed to contradict itself because it is also kind of an illusion. He stumbled on the shaped pigment sculptures he created during this time while playing with form. To him they read as partial objects like icebergs with the notion that there is something else hidden under the floor. Or that the works weren’t made but arrived; they are beyond the hand of the artist.

Void Field, 1990, Image courtesy of the artist's website

After 7 years of pigment pieces he felt he had begun to make “compositions” and he didn’t like that, so he headed in a different direction. He had a desire to deal with absolute color, color as a condition instead of as a tool. By emptying out an object, space did not seem empty but began to fill up with a darkness of mass. These works had 2-d and 3-d qualities to them. They represented mass and no mass. He wanted the viewer to question what it was they were looking at. In a work called Void Field a group of 16 blocks of stone weighing between 4-6 tons each each had a small excavated hole in the top that was painted Prussian blue. For the viewer it was like looking into a well. He feels that we recognize an object not just through its apparent weight and form but through its skin.

The Earth London, 1991, Image courtesy of the artist's website

In another work he made a hole in the floor and people weren’t sure if it was painted on or not. He does not consider it a hole but a “space full of darkness; it is both full and empty.” For Kapoor uncertainty is what it is all about. Art is an heroic adventure that takes us to the sublime. A current project in France that he is working on is a 3/4 km long crack in  the ground outside. He is interested in its symbolic potential. He wants people to ponder whether or not it goes to the center of the earth.

At the Edge of the World, 1998, Image courtesy of the artist's website

In At the Edge of the World Kapoor attempted to make a horizon, to turn the red of earth into a sky. Kapoor believes art can do that; it can fundamentally change things.

He is deeply interested in monochrome because there is no composition when working in one color–red is red, yellow is yellow. One of Kapoor’s heroes is Joseph Beuys, another is Barnett Newman. Beuys felt that pregnancy is a condition of sculpture. You don’t simply look at a work of art. You always come to the work with other knowledge which affects the way you perceive the piece. he made a series of white works during this time that dealt with these issues–what am I looking at? Is something really there?

Iris, 1998, Image courtesy of the artist's website

Next he began to use mirrors in his investigations of spaces. He would fill voids with mirror-like substances. He was intrigued by the idea that throughout art history form has always been a solid and no one worked with concave space.

Turning the World Inside Out, 1995, Image courtesy of the artist's website

He felt a need to “turn the world inside out” focusing on negative space almost as if the object was swallowing itself.

Cloud Gate, 2004, Image courtesy of the artist's website

The most obvious example is Cloud Gate in Chicago. This object collects in images of what is happening around it and as one enters it, it pulls one in in a way that is parallel the surrounding landscape.

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Marsyas, 2002, Image courtesy of the artist's website

In the Turbine Hall installation at the Tate Modern he created Marsyas using stretched red PVC entering a new investigation of pulled and stretched works. The PVC acted as a skin like the flayed flesh of Marsyas in Roman mythology. Similar to Memory, it is impossible to see the piece or perceive it in its entirety. One can only capture bits of what is happening.

He has also used wax in his obsession with color because wax seems to be physical and present as well as having other dimensionalities. The works are all about process and doing something. The work and the medium is slowly churning, moving and there is something dark and dire about what is happening. Kapoor addressed red as a favorite color by explaining that “it has a kind of darkness that we understand at a deeper level.”

Some of his newest works on view in London now exist in a space between purpose and nature. A machine he developed exudes cement in various forms that look like yarn or spaghetti in cone like shapes. devoid of color, these works are completely about process.

Memory, 2008

The work on view at the Guggenheim, Memory, is 24 tons of Cor-Ten steel whose form is never fully visible as it is tightly snug within a space in the museum. Visitors can see the work from three separate viewing areas but must piece the images together in their minds creating what Kapoor suggests is a”mental sculpture.” There is thus a contradiction between the known and the perceived. The viewer is left questioning it because it doesn’t quite make sense how it all comes together. The outside of the work is rough and corroded but the interior is covered with a substance which renders it completely dark. The one room offers a window into the interior of the work–the void. The viewer can still see the rusted steel at the edges, but it blends into complete darkness just beyond the edge of the work. What a brilliant concept! To me the outside shape reminded me of a blimp but with twists and turns. For lack of a better way to say it–it is so freakin’ cool!