Enchanted by space

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Born in Indian Mumbai, he moved to Britain at the age of 18, and has been residing and working in London for the past 40 years.

Apart from the numerous solo exhibits the artist has created grandiose installations for the Turbine Hall of the gallery Tate Modern in London within the series “Unilever” and Grand-Palais in Paris within the program of the “Monument 2011” project. His sculptures for public space, including the mirror Cloud Gates in the Millennium Park in Chicago and 10-meter high Sky Mirror installed in Rockefeller Center in New York City (2006), as well as London’s Kensington Park (2010) has immediately acquired cult popularity. Besides, in 2010 in English city of Middleborough the sculpture Temenos, the first one in the series of gigantic works planned to be installed in the valley of the river Tees, was unveiled. The colossal abstract sculpture Marsyas inspired a well known composer Arvo Paert to create the play Lamentate (2003) for piano with orchestra. The ceremony of unveiling the tower “Orbit” designed by Kapoor will take place in May 2012 in London, during the Olympic Games. The tower has become for the British capital as symbolical as the Eifel Tower for Paris.

Kapoor studied in the Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Arts and Design. He won international recognition after representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where he was awarded with the Premio Duemila Prize. The following year the artist won the Turner Prize, the most authoritative art award in Great Britain, and in 2011 Kapoor was awarded with the Premium Imperiale in sculpture, a prize awarded annually by the Japan’s Art Association.

The PinchukArtCenter is presenting Kapoor’s works made of metal and concrete, models and drawings of his architecture and monumental works, as well as his installation, A Shoot into the Corner, a cannon shooting at the wall with shells of red wax. It is possible to assert already now that this exposition is one of the most successful in all the history of Pinchuk’s art center.

In all of his works Kapoor plays with space in one or another way: he turns it into a trap, or an attraction, he tames it, uses it for provocations and jokes. His works are delusively simple: in a same way, hieroglyphs meaning a concrete word or a whole religious or metaphysical category can look simple. In Kapoor’s work the hieroglyph of emptiness is emptiness itself, however the metaphysics is embodied here in the metaphors of elusiveness and optical glimmering: all these dark-azure hollows, which seem to swallow any means of measuring, parabolic mirrors, in which the scales go wild, and sounds live their own lives, massive balls with similarly changeable color, unexpectedly lightly suspended on the walls, are altogether the best imaginative embodiment of metaphysics as a reality beyond physics that exists and non-exists at the same time.

Not only does Anish Kapoor create certain shapes, he also marks the absence and presence as such. From certain angles it is impossible to understand whether the object does exist – a half-sphere which seems to break through the wall, or just a hardly vivid shade on the wall. The white parallelepiped seems geometrically understandable only from certain distance: at close it seems that its facets are concave and deformed, but it is impossible to define to which extent. Twelve monumental heaps “Between shit and architecture” (2011) created owing to half-automatic technological process – a sarcastic gesture in the same direction. Rectangular shapes seemingly spun from concrete sausages, resemble to some extent the sacral molding in the frontons of Hindu and Catholic churches, but the internal hollow with its sharp gray stalactites is totally unattractive: the lack of sacral and low things is the most important here.

In the same way the strange combination of fun and violence is a distinguishable feature of Shoot into the Corner (2008-09): pneumatic cannon pierces the interior with shells of red wax; the process of charging is presented by a massive man in gray uniform, who charges the cannon, waits, a high and tense sound is heard in the depth of the construction, then the shooter pulls the trigger: this is a separate performance with a feeling of danger; the pile of red wax near the wall resemble a pile of torn human flesh; the splashes on the walls and ceiling in the same way evoke an association with slaughter. At the same time, no less strong is the comic flavor.

Kapoor is enchanted with the space, and he passes on this enchantment to the audience: actually, this rational wizardry is worth of going to his exhibit.

Your works include a powerful mechanistic component: to create them, you need to be knowledgeable in physics and technology. Do you provide the technical aspect of the installation or involve engineers?

“I want to explain what is going on at this exhibit. On the second floor, for example, there is an installation ‘Between shit and architecture’ made of concrete produced by a machine, programmed by a computer. The machine did it on its own, like it was programmed. This is one of stories of the practice I have been involved in for many years: objects create themselves, without any interference of the artist.”

Why the motif of emptiness is so vivid in your work?

“Emptiness means darkness, deepening, hollows, and absence. This is an attempt to make an object which does not exist in fact. And here I face the problem of making a non-existing object. When you have a problem in your life, you begin to look for an answer, and I think that art is namely the search of the answers. Thus you can divide the items on this floor into two kinds of objects: emptiness and mirror objects.”

How did you come up to mirror surfaces which are your calling card in the world?

“For almost 10 years I have created hollow and dark spaces. They all were painted in dark-blue, those were works about darkness. In the 1990s I came up with an idea that you could do the same thing with mirrors, so I took up negative mirror objects. They not just broaden the space when reflecting, they also create spaces full of reflections. On the whole, all of these objects are about the space, this is a free dialogue of existence and non-existence.”

Shoot into the Corner is by far the most popular installation of yours.

“You could have seen in this exhibit how important the colors are for me. Many of my works are based on this idea: the color and the space. When they enter a dialogue, they mix with each other. Thus the cannon to certain extent embodies the idea of projecting color onto space. Here one can recall the old cliche of contemporary painting, when the artist throws paint on the canvas, to make a splash, thus an image emerges. To certain extent this is history of art: from Goya with his execution of revolutionaries to Jackson Pollock [an abstractionist who poured the paint on the canvas. –Author]. And here the cannon is not just shooting at the corner, which is a fundamental element of architecture, but also this resembles the psychosexual dialogue with the cannon and the corner. There are many layers. And of course this is a performative work. Many of the exhibited works here are performative.”

When does the performance, an action, take place in mirror works?

“When you look at them.”

The cannon is shooting with dark-red wax. This color is present in many of your works. What does it mean for you?

“For a long time I have tried to receive the color of darkness. Red is closer to darkness, because our body is the same inside. It is much darker and more dangerous than black and blue.”

Why the wax?

“It has the capacities I was looking for. This is actually a mixture of wax and paint, thus the result a texture resembling flesh and blood. In the end of the exhibit there will be an absolutely different image, as nearly all of the surface will be covered with wax. After it ends, everything will be gathered and used anew.”

What do you want to achieve from the space?

“Space is the central principle of sculpture. The fact that we are living in different spaces is an undisputable fact. Our body moves, drifting in all kinds of spaces. And this is very important. Besides, we have a feeling of inner space. I have been studying for years the interaction between this inner, very physical body space and the space of the places where we are living our life. Not to take too much time, I will repeat what I have already said: to make new art, you need to create a new space. The traditional space of the picture is the surface of the canvas and what is behind it. My works with concave surfaces are somewhat quite opposite. The space of these works is here, beside you. You can almost physically feel it as you approach, you can get into these objects, trying to get focused. I think this is a new space, a space before the works, which gets activated in a different way.”

Your most famous architectural project is London’s tower Orbit. What impression did Tatlin’s Tower created by great Kyiv-born futurist artist produce on you?

“The whole history of construction also indicated that they used to be symmetrical structures, because in this way they were supporting each other, and it was well-grounded from the point of engineering. I wanted to make an asymmetric tower, which of course has references to Tatlin’s Tower, because the asymmetry is irreversibly doing this. But I think this is a more complicated question: the time and place are not proper to give an answer to it.”

There is an opinion: when you stare at an abyss for long, the abyss begins to stare at you. Why you are so much focused on emptiness which is an abyss?

“This is the nature of human reality. We all have a sense of abyss and darkness, what we call our inner space, it is typical of us to feel certain delight from where everything starts and ends. The work of an artist is to peep into the dark space. It is very interesting that in post-Freudianism time, after psychoanalysis have emerged, the abstract art is calling upon us to peep into such things, and psychology also reveals the topic of self-deepening.”

Your works bring delight and entertainment. On the other hand, radical artist refuse from entertainment, because entertainment is part of consumption, and such artists don’t want their art to be consumed. Does not it worry you that your work only entertain and don’t make the audience to ponder?

“We have already spoken about emptiness, darkness, and danger. In spite of the fact that an object has certain aesthetic capacities, I suggest that it can be dangerous. This is a quite opposite thing to what you have said. We are living in the world of many different objects, and only few of them are really safe. However, I think they pose psychological danger, caused by the game we are involved in via the object. Anyway, beauty is not associated merely with consumption. I understand the implication of your question, but it is wider than it seems. In the world of terrible destruction, poverty and wars, we need to have more beauty, and I think we are creating it together.”

This is your first exhibit in Eastern Europe. Do you have any special message to Ukrainians?

“I don’t care about messages. I think an artist’s task is to define his place in the world and discover himself. For me it is a great honor to be here, and hopefully your audience will not simply look at the works, but feels them too.”