Anish Kapoor

In my last post I found it very interesting that the work of Lee Bontecou was compared to that of Anish Kapoor’s in reference to his use of voids in his works. Although some critics and philosophers would try to compare Kapoor’s uses of the void to the presence of a “time-of-war” influence or some other political, historical or cultural agenda; this is not the intention of Anish Kapoor. In researching his work and what he has to say about its context in comparison to critic’s explanations, the work is often misinterpreted.

My initial interest in the works of Anish Kapoor are his use of materials and the presence of the artists hand, or better yet the resonance of how the sculptures were created. Though the transformative properties of Kappor’s chosen materials are important…his works address themes beyond material concerns and seem to hover between this world and an alternative form of existence. I can relate to Kapoor’s struggle with defining the alternative form of existence that he alludes to in his work. It is very difficult at times to express to the viewer what your material choices have to do with the conceptual presence of the work. I feel in my own work I am constantly looking into my material and thinking about the “alternatative existence”, in my case being some other worldly or alien artifact that some how has a life of its own. In commenting on the unknown Kapoor states:

“The process of being an artist is to recognize that the unknown is a workable reality. I’ve often nothing to say as an artist, and I feel that’s a crucial port of the equation, yet I know certain things keep coming up. Allowing space for there to be nothing to say, for me, is a really important condition. So, I’m shifting the project into a kind of psycho-physical space in which I try to take the witness of an inner life in material. I try to take this process seriously, it’s where the real work happens.”

Jan Garden Castro comments on this same notion in Kapoor’s work and is supported by Kapoor recounting Paul Neagu’s realization that “the purpose of being an artist was somehow not to make more-or-less interesting objects, but that the language of the eye has psychological, physiological, philosophical, even metaphysical implications. That felt to me what I was looking for.” Sandhini Poddar’s essay on Kapoor quotes that his recent work is “mental sculpture” and that Memory’s monumental void is more central than its mass.

Although I am not directly involved with the use of the “void” as a way to deal with inbetween spaces, I feel strongly about Kapoor’s interpretations of this space and learning what it means to work with the unknown. I am also interested in his use of technology as a tool and a means to create objects; specifically Greyman Cries, Shamman Dies, Billowing smoke, Beatuy Evoked, cement installation. Jean De Loisy comments on the creation of this piece in his essay Le vray cul du diable. to emphasize the work’s distance from the hand, Kapoor employs an intermediary to transform his vague geometrical sketch into a computer program attached to a cement-mixer. This in turn is connected to a machine adapted from the food industry that excretes cement paste like a printer…This lends his works a spaciousness and an aura that propel them beyond the status of objects: they become instead the release button of a mental shutter.

Anish Kapoor Bibliography

Cole, Ina. "Modern Sublime." Sculpture June 2007: 23-29. Web.

Cole, Ina. "Transcending the Object." Sculpture Jan.-Feb. 2010: 23-27. Web.

Kapoor, Anish, and Homi K. Bhabha. Anish Kapoor. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009. Print.