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Anish Kapoor’s Dance With Illusion

Dr. Gerry Coulter

I. Introduction

“If Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art, then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by Beuys in some way – that all the objects in the world are symbolic… it’s the artist’s duty to find poetic meaning in things. …There has been a long tradition in sculpture that said that materials have to be what they appear to be – this thing of truth to materials. I couldn’t deal with that. Even as a student I didn’t know what that means. It seems to me that art’s all about illusion and the unreal. ‘Truth to materials’ runs counter to everything I want to do” (Kapoor in Higgins, 2008).

“Sculpture isn’t simply an object in space” (Kapoor in Ward, 2008).

“A work of art is a singularity, and all these singularities can create holes, interstices, voids… (Baudrillard, 2002:21).

Scale (from the very small to the very large), colour (especially vivid reds), and form (mysterious passageways), are vital to Anish Kapoor’s dance with illusion. His gigantic works challenge and overwhelm us as bodily presences and his smaller delicate works draw us into their mysterious points of disappearance. Many of his stronger works of the past quarter century disappear out of the space they occupy pointing us toward a place we cannot (physically) follow. If these disappearances have a destination it is as a gesture towards the infinite, the unknowable, the eternal which we can ever only grasp in thought for an instant.

If you approach Kapoor’s work seeking clarity and a specific direction it is likely you will leave irritated as did the following reviewer:

“And yet I’m not quite sure what it all adds up to. I can’t deny that there is a sense of wonder in walking around the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy. But what I struggle to find is some lasting argument, some defining narrative that makes me alter how I see the world. The works are full of allusions, but have very few reference points. One can feel the exhibition, but what do you take away?” (author’s name not indicated, Wordpress.com, 2009).

For Kapoor: “…the challenge of the work is that it needs to confound expectations. It also has to do with the sense that an object is only of real significance when it has an immaterial counterpoint, so it’s the materiality and beyond” (Kapoor in Ward, 2008). If his works frustrate it is precisely in pointing us toward somewhere we would rather be than trapped, as we are, in our culture of the present. Kapoor, like everyone else, knows that the world we live in is broken, and he, like the rest of us, does not know how to fix it. What he does with his art is to represent our desire for elsewhere – the elsewhere’s about which we dream and have no idea how to achieve. Yet at the same time it is a hopeful art perhaps because it points to no specific destination. It is not meant to alter how we view the world but to encourage contemplation of our existential condition in the cosmos. Kapoor’s is not a world-centric art.

Kapoor’s art is a joyful, inventive, and highly imaginative one but this has not stopped uninspired critics from failing to grasp its seriousness. Referring to Shooting into the corner one well-established reviewer said: “The silliest work in the Anish Kapoor exhibition [Royal Academy in London 2009] is a kind of shooting range. It’s silly because it’s an unhappy mixture of solemn and fun” (Lubbock, 2009).

Shooting into the corner (2008-09) was a kinetic work that propelled (at 80 kph) 9 kg cylinders of red wax (loaded by a human assistant) against a gallery wall. Upon completion the weight of the wax shot was 20 tons. No one saw the work in its entirety and most experienced it for a few minutes or perhaps an hour. It was heard throughout the building for the entirety of a visit and as such it existed as a work of kinetic art in process before and after we saw it. Even if we were to arrive as the work fired its final shot we would have experienced only a fragment of its existence (when does an artwork begin and end?). This is but a glimpse of our relationship with eternity and Kapoor’s work forces us to experience the frustration of our own experience of temporality and our rootedness in space and time. Yet we long for fluidity and we create communications technologies to give us the illusion of being multiple places in multiple times. Kapoor reminds us of our singularity and the slowness that characterizes human movement through space and time. Among Kapoor’s concerns is the act of traversing. Shooting in the Corner was, among other things, a work concerned with the space which was traversed by the wax between the cannon and the wall. Most of Kapoor’s work points to spaces “in between”. Space has qualities of substance in his work.

Lubbock (above) seems to prefer having his hand held by the artist during an exhibition but Kapoor is not the kind to attempt to complete the work for the viewer – if he were he would likely be preachy and tiresome. Kapoor makes us strive to complete his art whether it is in pigment, stone, mirrored steel, wax, or a vaporous fog. We often have to work hard to deserve his art and it can be very frustrating especially to those who want to be pointed in a specific interpretive direction. Kapoor engages us very much on an intellectual level.

II. Pigment

Most of us became familiar with Kapoor by way of his pigment pieces (1000 Names) from the end of the 1970s. In these works two of his key themes were already present – a desire to expand the scale of the work (the red stair-like piece climbing the wall [image 5]) and for work that concerns interstices, voids, and disappearance (the rounded yellow object in the foreground which is open at the top). They also signal a sculptor who likes to perform his works: “I would almost ritually lay-on the pigment; they are very much performed… I made them all in three years” (in Higgins, 2008). Kapoor’s work with pigments was extremely innovative and he garnered much praise for the striking colour. We need to remember however that the objects which comprise the 1000 Names series are as much about form as colour. When we experience the pigment works in person perhaps the most striking them about them is their ephemerality, their fragility and how close they come to perfection which is denied by the tiny signs of decay already setting in. When they on view together with Shooting into the corner it is not difficult to understand it as another (later) pigment work in very different form.

III. STONE

Kapoor’s work with stone began his movement towards the large scale. This architectural quality is not “pretentious” (Lubbock, 2009) but rather is concerned with what the artist wishes to convey. Part of what he consistently communicates, with works that we cannot take in all at once because of their scale and dark passages, is another way of reflecting upon the fact that we can never see everything at once. Kapoor’s art works against one of the sad thematics of our time – the quest for simplicity. As it is with eternity, so it is with Kapoor larger works, all we have are incomplete (brief) glimpses.

Stone also conjures in humans a sense of geologic speed and the slowness of time’s passage. A rock experiences time with a mastery that humans can only envy. Kapoor comes close to an understanding of “the wisdom of the rocks” (De Landa, 2000). His works in stone succeed in leading us to contemplate change over the vastness of time and how in our time, when we perceive so much change, there is not really much which has changed at all. Humans are almost incapable of experiencing changes in the cosmos although scientists can theorize them, and a few artists, like Kapoor, can provide works that allow us to contemplate the brief glimpse of it all our entire lives are.

Against those who eschew the scale of his larger pieces Kapoor notes that many of his these works would not be what they are, or accomplish what they do, (especially in terms of arousing certain feelings and emotions) if they were significantly smaller. He said: “The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool of sculpture” (in Higgins, 2008). He also told Ward: “scale… is an integral tool when dealing with space” (Kapoor in Ward, 2008).

The space occupied by Adam is timeless in multiple directions. The stone is as old as the earth itself but the black void suggests a futuristic (science-fiction) aspect. It is as though Adam is about to speak or allow us a glimpse from another time/space which we are ultimately denied. Is the black area a screen about to flicker and reveal a message of distant origin? Adam gestures to from some other place/time as the large figures on Easter Island signal to us from elsewhere.

To feel the distance of a gap which cannot possibly be traversed is a frequently occurring aspect of Kapoor’s sculpture of which Oblivion is a good example. It is important at this point to note the importance of text to Kapoor’s work (there are few “untitled” works).

It is difficult to use names from our world to point successfully to eternity, especially when they are assigned to heavy solid objects. Kapoor demonstrates great skill here in drawing on the concepts such as oblivion (a synonym of which is nothingness), while attaching it to something as ancient and slow moving as stone. We may as well attempt to hurtle ourselves into oblivion – but we cannot do that either – all we can do is point towards its existence. Rocks emerge as superior life forms in these sculptures.

IV. Slits / Holes

For me Kapoor’s most intriguing works take leave of the space they occupy – disappearing through slits and narrow passageways – where we cannot follow. We do not know if they lead to a better place or a worse one, they simply point to an elsewhere. An important dimension of Kapoor’s art is mystery and one of his principle mediums is the unknown. We are restless to be elsewhere and Kapoor points to a way out to other spaces, places, and times but denies us passage. This aspect of Kapoor’s work opens a dramatic void and ruptures in the museum – a central place of ‘culture’ as we perceive it today.

Kapoor points us toward oblivion, which is deep and timeless running we know not where. By pointing to it he opens up an immaterial part of the material object. The experience of the immaterial is part of the experience of the material objects he creates. Yet Kapoor’s performance of sculpture is not about the Nothing. It is about the many interstices which punctuate existence. Rather than an effort to take us some where specific – they call out to us to think of elsewhere and the terrible gap which separates us from our longing to be anywhere but here. There is no specific destination or unified view in his work which remains enigmatic and vague. The totalitarian impulse to unify is absent in Kapoor dance with ambiguity.

Modernism challenged us and while its sculpture ‘confronted’ us rarely did it deeply destabilize. Kapoor, in a Beuysean way, moves us, his works trouble many because they subvert – they do not exist entirely in our space (the holes) put pull us and project us elsewhere. Sometimes they (Tarantula, 2000; Marsyas, 2002) tower over us like mysterious visitors from a future world yet to come. As we never see the whole of existence there is no point from which we can see all of his larger works either – this they share with his smaller holes and tiny passageways. We always have a partial view of everything. It is not easy to consistently make objects which heighten our aware of this aspect of existence and the ability to do precisely this has elevated Kapoor’s art to a place of great interest on a global stage.

Kapoor’s objects occupy and point us to space(s) and time(s) beyond the work and this often leads people to feel an increased level of discomfort. His art is deeply manipulative but rather than the usual manipulations by objects in our culture, all of which are wrapped in lies (that we know to be lies), Kapoor wraps his objects in mystery, timelessness, and space. They echo our longing to be elsewhere in a more hopeful manner than do the mundane objects of consumer society which merely leave us feeling encumbered.

Homi Bhabha says that Kapoor consistently removes the ground from under the viewer’s feet: “A sudden disappearance of surface in a deep dark hole literally cuts the ground from under our feet; the body loses its direction and density; the eye hovers horizonless, homeless” (1998). Perhaps this is Bhabha’s description of how he would like the work to feel (to be like his own writing in some way) but for me it does no such thing. Despite Bhabha’s attempt to be poetic we need to recognize that Kapoor’s “holes”, while they disappear, do not in any way cut the ground from under our feet – indeed, the inability of escape into the holes of his work leaves me feeling firmly rooted to the ground. Our bodes do not lose direction or density, rather, the density and direction of our bodies is reaffirmed against the mobility of Kapoor’s object. It is not our bodies Kapoor is after – but our minds. Bhabha seems preoccupied by two of the dominant myths of our time – mobility and speed. But in our time, as we experience web portals which seat us firmly at work stations, Kapoor’s art points to more eternal openings which we can imagine but cannot physically traverse. We are very much left behind by Kapoor’s work and made deeply aware that our place is ‘here’ despite our longing to escape into the holes Kapoor has made in our culture and in the space where his work is viewed. It is not “moving ground” nor is it vertigo I feel in the presence of Kapoor’s holes and voids – but the opposite of these – solidity, rootedness, as the work leaves me behind. Bhabha calls this feeling an emptiness and here he is right – it is an emptiness experienced as longing in the face of something pointing elsewhere – to places I cannot go – across gaps I cannot traverse. Kapoor makes us feel the disappointment that our culture of happiness attempts to distract us from thinking about.

Kapoor points to fragments of a larger ‘truth’ is entwined in and through time and space – a truth we can only know locally along our own restricted horizon. I have the sense he knows that the artist always remains peripheral to this truth which can only be suggested as being (mostly) elsewhere, only minimally present and viewed/ sensed through the interstices an artist can create in the current culture. This is why so many of his works can only be seen in part (holes in floors and walls).

Marsyas and many of Kapoor’s works are very dark – they are part of a very large and important part of human history – the inhuman. There is nothing about these works that attempt to signal that progress is inevitable. Red and blue are the colours of darkness, of blood and fear and foreboding. Colour is an important element in the mental dislocations Kapoor’s art thrives upon.

V. Mirrors

Mirror pieces, concave, or mainly convex as in Cloud Gate – conceive of space much differently than the traditional art of painting. Instead of a receding space the “image” emerges outward at the viewer and makes our presence part of the work (usually distorting it). In an important way Kapoor’s holes of disappearance also have this effect on the viewer by drawing our attention into them. Cloud Gate tackles the difficulty of creating a successful public work of art today in a time when we do not share a symbolic language. Cloud gate is inviting and playful while quietly seducing us to approach it. It is a useful reminder that what we see and what we know depends upon our perspective and that hundreds of individuals viewing it at any one moment will not share the same image reflected in its form. Cloud Gate is a subversive work against uniformity and manufactured consensus.

Kapoor’s mirrored surfaces do not simply function as reflectors the way mirrors usually do but rather project images from elsewhere onto us while projecting images of the viewer elsewhere. Art which simply mirrors culture is not art – Kapoor’s art does not attempt to mirror the real but to use illusion to cope with the real and think past it – but again to no specific place. The frustrated desire to be elsewhere, to see all of the work at once, represent the frustrations of human existence facing oblivion and the eternal. Kapoor’s work does not offer us false notions of security but rather makes us confront multiplicity and complexity – the kinds we desire and the kinds we do not.

Any mirrored surface accentuates the personal for a human viewer. This is an art well placed alongside of poststructuralist thought which, if it has taught us anything, is that we will never know who we are (Baudrillard [1990] 1993:165).

Kapoor’s mirrors draw us in, project us out, twist and distort both us and our perspective. There is neither pessimism nor optimism in these works (as in most of his oeuvre), and I think this provides much of it with a vital melancholy concerning the present and the unknown which lies ahead of us.

VI. Wax works

For Kapoor form is related to space and his larger wax works problematize the relation of art and the artist to the gallery space. In Past Present and Future<< and Svayambh we see the very walls of the gallery shaping the work. Form is subject to performance in these works. In Past Present and Future a mechanical arm made to represent a white gallery wall smoothes the block of wax into shape. In Svayambh (a Sanskrit word for “self generated” as opposed to “human made”) a block of wax passes through a series of gallery doors (which are slightly narrower) and in so doing the gallery itself is changed as the gallery’s door frames change the shape of the block. I do not take the finished block to be the actual work as much as I take the wax smeared along the gallery walls to be the core of the work. Here the artist sets up a material procedure, one steeped in the essential molding and shaping processes of sculpture, and the outcome is slightly different every time. What these works say to me is that the artist acknowledges the importance of the gallery/museum to what art is while reminding us that what the institution takes in also changes it. These works also emphasize the struggle the sculptor always experiences within specified spaces. While doing so Kapoor seems very aware that the role of the sculptor is always to press sculpture to be more than it has been – even if the artist is uncertain about the direction to take. I wonder if any of Kapoor’s works are actually “completed” as much as frozen at a highly evolved state of their process? This is why I believe Kapoor is less interested in conveying a particular message than he is in making enigmatic, somewhat unintelligible, and poetic works.

These large wax works include the viewer in the making of the final sculpture in a manner which is not normally the case (when works are made elsewhere and we only see the finished work in the museum). What Kapoor achieves here is an emphasis on process which is a central concept in contemporary art over the past fifty years (see Coulter, 2008). Svayambh took 90 minutes on each pass through five galleries during its installation at the Royal Academy in London. As with Shooting Into The Corner the viewer typically experiences only a fragment of the work and once again we see Kapoor giving us only a glimpse of something much larger. It is for me one more vehicle he uses to represent a fragmentary glimpse of the eternal.

VII. Conclusion

If you do not mind being frustrated while facing some of the deepest questions humanity faces, then you will like the work of Anish Kapoor. If however you prefer an artist to provide easy answers to difficult issues, then he may well frustrate you and leave you cold.

If one of Kapoor’s works might be allowed to stand in for the others I think it may be Underground (2005). This work places us in the frustrated and immobile position of the large stone which cannot pass through the opening between the walls. This work represents our own relation to the eternal. Rather than his works which place us looking into a hole leading out of the work to elsewhere, In this work we stand in the hole looking back at the stone which represents our very immobility to pass through to elsewhere. The work stresses immobility and frustration – the kind of frustration every artist feels as they understand something better might exist but we are unable to attain it. Ascension does the same thing using different media while echoing religious mythologies concerning extra-corporeal levels of experience.

Anish Kapoor challenges contemporary art while deepening and extending ways of expressing and making which have dominated thinking in the arts for half a century (see Smith, 2008). His enigmatic works do not provide solutions but they do raise a fundamental existential problem concerning our desire versus our rootedness. While doing so Kapoor lays down an enormous challenge to sculpture to press ideas and philosophy poetically into its work with objects – to the point of pushing the object into the non-object. His work well illustrates the importance of the symbolic in sculpture at the present moment.

Time and space are media for Kapoor and his works appear in our space in our time only to point to other spaces and times – passageways through which we cannot pass. Bhabha is correct when he says: “Kapoor stays with the state of transitionality, allowing it the time and space to develop its own effects – anxiety, unease, restlessness – so that viewing becomes a part of the making of the work itself”. However, Bhabha oversimplifies when he turns to Heidegger’s parable of the jug to explain Kapoor’s blending of materiality and immateriality. For me the jug, or any object, provides too complete an image to describe what Kapoor is seeking. Kapoor’s materiality is but a fragment of matter – the large stone in Adam (1989) and a single stitch of the immateriality of infinity. In short, no object we know or have known can represent that which Kapoor gestures toward. Kapoor says: “A thing exists in the world because it has mythological, psychological and philosophical coherence… materials are there to make something else possible” (Bhabha, 1998). What we have in even a large work by Kapoor, if we are to use Heidegger’s jug, is a fragment of a jug, enveloped by the empty space (not of the jug) but of eternity. The termination (rather than the end) of process for Kapoor is the beginning of a difficult mental process for the viewer / interpreter of his work.

We are presented so often in his work with passageways which point to places we cannot go – our relationship to the void is that we are its prisoner and art may at best gesture to something/ time/ place else.

Kapoor has enjoyed incredible success and popularity in recent years (he is the only living artist to have been given a show at London’s Royal Academy and he has recently been chosen to make a huge sculpture which will sit at the centre of London’s Olympic Park for the 2012 Olympic Games. His is an art for frustrating and dissatisfied times – an art for a culture which yearning for a way out of itself. It is a body of work of infinite depth that agitates more than it soothes. It is less part of the dominant culture of its time than it is a vehicle for making openings in that culture – hence the vital role of ideas and philosophy in his work. Ours is a culture of self promotion rather than self examination as such is only minimally a culture of ideas. Kapoor is certain to be influential with a coming generation of sculptors who will rise challenge him. Given the tragic and anxiety filled nature of contemporary globalizing society and its fragmentations Kapoor has laid down an important challenge to the next generation.

Anish Kapoor’s art is a dance with illusion, the unknown, and the unattainable. It concerns our very real obsession with the unreal and with the existential desire for elsewhere. His works are the impressive residue of processing materials in such a way as to provoke a thousand meanings. It is distressing to think about just how terrible he would be if he were a political artist with a single message.

References

Jean Baudrillard ([1990a] 1993). The Transparency of Evil. New York: Verso.

Jean Baudrillard with Jean Nouvel (2002). The Singular Objects of Architecture. University of Minnesota Press.

Homi Bhabha. (1998). “Anish Kapoor – Making emptiness” in Anish Kapoor. London: Hayward Gallery; Berkeley: University of California Press; reprinted in Art in Asia, September 2009:

http://www.artinasia.kr/content/view/63/31/

Gerry Coulter 92008). “Robert Rauschenberg and the Joy of Making”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, (July 2008): http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol-5_2/v5-2-rauschenberg2.html

Lucie Charkin (2009). “Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts”. FAD website (September 24): http://www.fadwebsite.com/2009/09/24/anish-kapoor-at-the-royal-academy-of-arts-review

Manuel De Landa (2000). A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. New York: Zone Books.

Richard Dorment (2009). “Anish Kapoor at the royal Academy, review”. Telegraph.co.uk (September 21): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/richarddorment/6215818/Anish-Kapoor

Kurt Forster (2003). “A Word in the Giant’s Ear”. Parkett, Number 69.

Charlotte Higgins (2008). “A Life in Art: Anish Kapoor”. The Guardian. (November 8): http://www.theguardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/08/anish-kapoor-interview

Tom Lubbock (2009). “Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy, London”. The Independent (September 24): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/anish-kapoor-royal-academy

Heidi Reitmaier (2007). “Anish Kapoor in conversation”. London: Tate Magazine (July).

Roberta Smith (2008). “Art Review: Anish Kapoor – Sculptor as Magician”. Newyorktimes.com (May 30): http://www.newyorktimes.com/2008/05/30/arts/design/30kapo.html

Ossian Ward (2008). “Anish Kapoor and Richard Serra Interview”. London: Timeout.com (October 13): http://www.timeout/london/art/features/5938/Anish_Kapoor_and_Richard_Serra-interview

Wordpress.com (2009). “Review: Anish Kapoor – Royal Academy, Autumn 2009” http://artreview.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/anish-kapoor.