R
E
V N
E
X
T
Portrait of Anish Kapoor. Photo by Ned Carter Miles for ArtAsiaPacific.
Anish Kapoor first exhibited at London’s Lisson gallery in 1982. In the 35 years since then, he has used a wide variety of materials, including pigment, stone, mirrors and wax to extend his artistic enquiry in both private shows and high-profile public commissions.
Now, in Lisson’s 50th year since owner Nicholas Logsdail founded the gallery, Kapoor is exhibiting there for the 16th time with an unusually eclectic selection of works. Among them are painted three-dimensional silicon objects wrapped in gauze, mirror pieces and a collection of “drawings” that more closely resemble traditional paintings. ArtAsiaPacific caught up with Kapoor at the show’s preview to talk about the spaces he creates, the problem of the artist’s hand with which he has struggled throughout his career, and the development of mythology in both art and life.
You’ve spoken about developing languages in your practice—a “pigment” language, a “void” language, a “mirror” language—how would you describe the language here?
It’s confusing. I don’t have a phrase for it yet, but I think what I’m trying to get at is that the object includes its shadow. One of the things the gauze does is include a space within the space of the object. It’s only half-physical.
Would you call the space a heterotopia?
Yes, something like that. I haven’t made enough of them yet and I haven’t fully formed it, but it’s happening there somewhere . . .
ANISH KAPOOR, Shade, 2016, silicone, fiberglass and gauze, 230 × 325 × 225 cm. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London.
Do you believe there’s such a thing as an ideal language?
I don’t believe there’s an ideal language at all. Some of them have been geometric and, if you like, utopic; others have been entropic and acknowledge decay. I don’t see entropy as not being mathematical; it’s just a different kind of geometry, even though it doesn’t appear to be so at a first reading. A normal flow of art history would tell us that artists work in that way or that way. For some reason, I need both sides.
What does it mean to you then to have both entropic and geometric “languages” under the same roof?
In my first studio I wrote on a wall: “There is no hierarchy of form. All form is good.” And I’ve stuck with it. I guess they both acknowledge psychic reality. One is a pursuit for an absolute or a purity, while the other is uncertain, and I’m more interested right now in uncertainty than I am in purity, especially as purity seems vulgar in this political moment.
There’s something very fleshy and visceral about these silicon paintings. They seem to suggest violence, but also a kind of genesis. What is this doing?
Those two words you’ve used, one is beginning and one is the end. All our ideas about the universe seem to suggest a big bang, a blow-up beginning and a blow-up end, and one wonders to what extent those things are mythological, even in physics. One of the real pursuits of art—perhaps more so of abstract art—is consciousness. Science on the whole hasn’t been so good at talking about this. I think it’s legitimate to ponder what is a beginning, what is consciousness. It necessarily implicates things like meaning, that moment when a non-thing becomes a something, and, in the conversation between a viewer and a thing being viewed, where and how meaning arises and recedes. I think that to-and-fro is essential, and has something to do with both consciousness and, weirdly, with beginning and end. It’s not fully logical, but it has something to it.
In your drawings, there seems to be clear cosmological imagery. You’ve got your crescent moons and supernovas and nebulae . . .
Definitely! Definitely! I think it’s definitely there. Some parts of it are conscious of course, but some parts are to do with scale. When you have a sun and moon, you make the space bigger. I’m really interested in that. Enlarging the space isn’t simply making a big space and putting a thing in it. Does the so-called “voiding” of a thing or a space—either by painting it black or all the other things I’ve tried to do over the years—merely paint it black, or does it do what is more poetically poignant to my mind, which is to make more space? Is it possible to make more space than there was when you started out? I think that’s an ambition worth pursuing, and weirdly kind of possible.
You veil these silicon objects with translucent gauze, while also describing them as paintings. Does this gauze function like a picture plane?
I’m glad you put it like that because that’s exactly right. Exactly right. It’s the thing through which you need to look. It mediates the interior. The first ones I made weren’t painted. Curiously, painting it black makes it most transparent—the opposite of what you think it would be. When I first did it I naively thought painting it black would make it darker. I’ve been playing with that: levels of transparency.
You’ve always tried to remove the artist’s hand from your work. Here you have both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, the former of which can’t really escape the “hand” . . .
Correct! Correct!
ANISH KAPOOR, First Site, 2016, gouache on paper, 51 × 67.1 cm. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London.
. . . And when you have both together, as here, it reveals this developmental process, and thus even more of the “hand.” How do you feel about this? Is it something you’re more at peace with here?
I’ve made the decision to put the drawings in. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever put drawings in the same space as objects, and drawings—they’re more like little paintings really—are clearly of the “hand.” I’d love them not to be, but there they are. I hope it’s not fetishized as an idiosyncratic kind of thing. It’s also to do, in this particular group of works, not so much with line but with color. So, as you say, the “hand” is there, there’s no denying it!
You once said artists don’t make objects, but rather mythologies. There’s a certain sense of history around this show, how do you see your own mythology?
First of all—50 years—Nicholas is unbelievable. I have to say big chapeau to him for this way of really working with artists. I’m really proud of him for that. I’ve tried to be associated with Lisson and what it stands for in that respect.
The first time I realized that mythology mattered was when I did the Venice Biennale [in 1990]. I was a young artist. It was one of my first fully international shows and, extraordinarily to me, people were telling me what my work was about. They were telling me the stuff I’d been saying for the last few years. I thought, “Wow, that’s so weird.”
That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing here in our conversation!
Exactly. And it works! Objects represent an evolving mythological process. Who knows where it goes? I’m convinced that’s the reason it takes more than a lifetime for art to have a real effect. With truly great artists like Yves Klein, for example, it’s taken 40 to 50 years for us to see him in a particular way and be able to say that color is mythologized, that blue is a part of his image, his hand. It’s a hell of a process . . .
Anish Kapoor’s latest eponymous exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London, is on view until May 6, 2017.
To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.