encounter
Of matter, mind and myth-generating stuffs
ANISH KAPOOR talks to MUSTAFA ZAMAN on his earlier quest for wholeness and the recent penchant for fragments
Mustafa Zaman: Let's begin this interview with the issue of communication, as it has been referred to as a means to generate meaning in the sphere of the arts. Do you consider art to be a form of communication or do you feel that it is primarily about non-communication? Because, there is this sense of anxiety that rests between text and readers, between art and audience…
Anish Kapoor: Of course there is anxiety; this is something Homi and I have been talking about for hours. But, you know, communication, if you like, is not a direct process, it is not as if one – as I feel myself all the time – has some direct message to convey or portray. However, I believe that works of art always speak in a deeper way if the space that they occupy is something that is half-recognized, half-remembered, forgotten, by the viewer, and there comes to be a play between certain memory and the object. It is through the mediation of things inexplicit that art speaks and makes things all the more interesting for the viewers.
As far as my own reading is concerned, I remember an early work of yours – The Three Witches, in a British art magazine. And the three pieces that make up the whole with their blackened, emptied-out spaces, which are references to female genitalia, reminded me of Maa Kaali – who is about absence. She is also about devouring of time – and time is one of the most important frames of reference for an artist to work through.
It is not so direct a reference, but I understand the drift of what you are saying. Of course there is a kind of overt sexuality to that particular work and many others which are not often interpreted along that line…
Sexuality or absence of sexuality perhaps is the mainstay…
The particular work that you have mentioned – they are about a deep, dark space. If you like to stick to our psyche – especially a Bengali psyche – we have a particular reading of one that you have just given, referring to Maa Kaali.
She is one of the most popular and living deity…
I understand; and as far as the work is concerned, yours is one kind of reading. But it isn't what I would have to go by. Similar to the question of the gentlemen who were asking earlier about whether one of my works was about death, whether it refers to those notorious trains of deportation used by the Nazis and horror of holocaust and so on and so forth. I would like to stress the fact that they were not created with all these in mind.
Of course, I'm open to these readings, because I think they widen the context of the work. I'm not trying to say that it needs to be narrowed down; however, I set out to make work that illustrates a particular idea; I was fascinated by the way these three pieces of stone – placed in a particular way in relation to each other – could have void pockets in them that have certain kinds of mystery and they speak to each other – form a dialogue with more than one intentions. This togetherness and the dialogue are important, as if they are literally in conversation. The title 'Three Witches' refers to the three witches in Macbeth – the embodiment of dark voids, absent figures of the night. So, in a way, they relate to the attributes of Kaali. So, we know that it sort of fits together in some way – all those interpretations.
Can we conclude that in your work we are able to see the West being brought into alignment with the East. I mean your references are leading us to the Modernist idea of 'ideal form' and also to things that are unknown – like darkish objects you make with dust colour, which sort of renders the act of contemplation anxious and the object chimerical. They don't look like what they actually are.
One of the languages of our time is, if you like, sort of Modernist, post-minimal reduction of form. I'm interested in it, and I'm also interested in it because it is full of possibility of memory, and…
It has a past – an entire baggage of history behind it…
Abstract art is very good at this point between meaning and no-meaning. This is where things have significance and in another place it is completely banal – just a thing. I'm interested in that jump between meaning and no-meaning. So, in a way, that sort of answers your question, I think.
As far as banality is concerned, you stand far from it. I mean you works look very, very grand. They look delicious – somebody coined this particular word to explain the quality that your earlier works had. As for your recent development, your domain is now replete with scatological references. So, between the delicious and the scatological, where do you think you are most comfortable – and as they stand apart, how do you now look at this shift. If you could throw some light on the turning point…
What I can say about that, I was always been interested in quite exotic materials; materials that are quite loud – pigment – you know, very, very bright stuff; mirror, oily-waxy stuff, etc. For some reasons, I keep going back to these exotic materials. Now, from the delicious to scatological – as a younger artist I always felt the need to make certain wholeness – to try and make things in its entirety – dealing, if you like, in the process of making whole of an aesthetic world. Now, I thought perhaps I have grown older and may be more confident aesthetically. At present, I feel that the opposite is possible; and it is possible to think of the world in its fragments and fractured state. I suspect my recent works deal with that in a personalized way.
If we are to touch on the issue of Indian-ness, it is about wholeness, about oneness, where the internal and the external merge – and you started out with that and now you have turned away from that – was there a turning point?
I don't think I have turned from one thing to another, I don't think there is a turning point. All I can see is that I'm able to deal with things that I perhaps was not so comfortable with before. May be, now, I have grown-up a little.
About your future project, is there anything you are working on right now?
I'm doing this project for the Olympics in London; and then in Paris I'm doing another new project at the La Grand Ballet – which is very beautiful – a very, very big space in central Paris. These projects try to draw on some of the ideas of objects that reverse themselves to different place.
You referred to Havel's telescope during the conversation; do you think your work has any connection to the outer space – if not physically, perhaps conceptually? Do you think they try to achieve a cosmic dimension as we have often seen that your work tends to move away from the body? But it also comes back to it in a certain way...
Sculpture is all about body. Sculptures are about how the body responds to a given object, environment and whatever. So that's important. And I have always been deeply interested in science and its speculations about the nature of matter. I would be having declared somewhere that I'm interested in non-object – this understood extension of the body. As bodies aren't our bodies – our bodies are imaginary – the space of the body isn't just what we see it as – the physical architecture. There is whole other dimension to that…
That's where the word mythology comes in. You were referring to that during the conversation…
No! I was not talking about that at all. I was talking about a very straightforward, earthly kind of mythology. Like the mythology of an Apple computer is that it is beautifully designed, it does this and that and costs me that much money and it is available to this and that consumer…
Seen from the materialistic point of view…
Precisely…. The mythology of a Picasso is that it is worth millions of dollars, it has sexuality, and it has certain value and aesthetics attached to it. That's what I was talking about. I'm talking about the way that an artist deposits – if you like – a certain mythological substance in the object – the poetic quantity – and then when you look at the work that is what you look at – you don't look at the object. That is the mythology I was referring to.
Perhaps that is why though your work look ethereal, they also are grounded in the physicality of their existence as you are thinking in terms of the material and the essence is the result…
Yes.
Thanks for your time…