Andrew Lambirth talks to the sculptor Anish Kapoor on the eve of his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy
I interviewed the sculptor Anish Kapoor (born 1954) while preparations for his major new exhibition at the Royal Academy were nearing conclusion. The galleries were busy with technicians so we talked in the Members’ Room (Kapoor has been an RA since 1999). I last interviewed Kapoor 11 years ago, on the eve of his last big museum show in London, when he had the whole of the Hayward Gallery. Now he has been given the grand rooms which comprise the entire main floor of the Academy. Our talk was inevitably concerned with his new show. Was it a retrospective?
‘There’s a room of pigment pieces from 1979 to about 1983, and there’s a work from the early Nineties and then almost everything else is fairly new if not brand-new. It’s not a retrospective. I feel there’s so much to do. The opportunity to work in rooms like these is rare, so one has to take what advantage one can to move the work forward, rather than retrospecting. They can do that when I’m dead.’
By including the pigment pieces, Kapoor has gone back to the beginning of his career because he sees that strand of his work as pertinent to this exhibition. There are no stone sculptures here as there were at the Hayward. But the big difference between the shows is, as Kapoor admits, that there are works at the RA which are really messy. In particular, he has developed a group of sculptures which use a composite of wax and pigment, rather like oil paint, and which affect the building they are exhibited in. He’s always wanted to make his mark, but now the traces are unavoidable. (What might be called the spoor of Kapoor.) For the moment, his aspirations to the sublime are in abeyance, and he has gone all visceral. ‘That side of the work has always been there,’ he contends. ‘Not quite so obvious, perhaps, to the general viewer, but actually it’s been there right from the start.
‘In the early works I was looking for a certain kind of whole object, something in a curious balance between being physically present and somehow having an absent half. Colour does that. I moved that story along through matt painted surfaces and then the stainless-steel concave works, which have a similar kind of spatial quality to the void works I made from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties. Now it’s as if my adventure with colour has taken another little step, and I’m using this waxy oil-paint stuff. However romantic the choice of material, however exotic, what I really want it to be is blood, flesh, meat. It’s red, and red is the colour of our interiors. And I think that now I’ve perhaps dared to go to the less comfortable, to the emotionally fraught.’
Commentators and critics like to note the new leaning towards tragedy and violence in his work, but Kapoor declines commitment to subject matter. ‘I insist that it’s abstract art, and that it’s about that moment when things hover between being a block of stuff — a casual form — and the moment they almost come to meaning. I don’t really have anything to say, I don’t have any message to give anybody.’ He pauses, considering. ‘The process, the physical object and the access to meaning are all in various states of becoming.’ What he’s really after is ‘profound content’, which is a much more sophisticated notion than mere meaning.
If his work is not about anything definite, it’s not not about anything either. Kapoor maintains that it’s ‘the relationship between the phenomenological and the psychological, or the poetic, that deeply interests me. Somewhere in there is a propensity to meaning. I’m prepared to let that meaning be.’ Of course, the viewer also brings meaning to the work by looking at it and interacting with it.
Colour is very important, and Kapoor’s working relationship with painting is close. He alludes to ‘a two-dimensional/three-dimensional hop that keeps happening all through the work’. He is particularly inspired by Barnett Newman, whom he describes as ‘probably the most complex artist of the 20th century, notwithstanding Duchamp, whom I also love’. Colour is certainly central to the two wax sculptures which dominate this show. The biggest is called ‘Svayambh’, taking its name from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘auto-generated’. It’s a vast block of wax composite (‘about 30 tons of it’) mounted on to a rail and inching its way through the suite of five galleries running the width of Burlington House, oozing and squeezing through archways, depositing coloured matter in its wake. ‘It’s like a big monochrome painting or sculpture that slowly creates itself. The stuff is dark, so there are dark associations with it. It’s not a jolly red.’
The other work, entitled ‘Shooting into the Corner’, is basically a cannon firing wax projectiles. ‘At one level, it’s a kind of performance of the act of making a painting, a cliché of the way to make a mark,’ says Kapoor. I am reminded of Ruskin’s famous phrase about throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face. ‘The implications here are that making a mark is an act of violence, which I never thought of before I made the work, though it’s pretty bloody obvious. Then the corner is symbolic of architecture, civilisation, religion, and it’s also deeply sexual. There are all these layers, and what this work does is to reveal them. And I promise you I didn’t think this up, I found it out by making a piece about space. As artists we afford ourselves the liberty of doing apparently foolish things, and it’s the seriousness with which we do the foolish that allows something to emerge that one would never have imagined to be there.’
Kapoor is very drawn to the cave, the grotto and the cavern, and his designs for a metro station in Naples are currently being built. ‘There’s something Freudian, uncanny about the sewer, the underground, the implications are both psychological and mythological, while, chromatically, colour goes to an amazing dark blackness. Part of my attraction to red is that the darker hues of red make the most incredible black, blacker than black itself, and somehow more troubling. I’m deeply drawn to that.’ Anxiety and disturbance have ruffled the smooth surfaces of Kapoor’s work; no longer is the physical transfigured into spirit, instead it remains determinedly visible, and, for some, rather too reminiscent of bodily waste.
Anish Kapoor exhibition is at the Royal Academy from 26 September to 11 December.
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