WEBVTT

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ANISH KAPOOR: Objects are,
I believe, illusory.

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They are never what they
at first appear to be.

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We look at them
mostly with love,

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hate, desire, revulsion
or whatever else it is.

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The viewer's involved.

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There's always a conversation.

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And one of the things I think
I've tumbled into in my process

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is that kind of uncertainty
of what the object is.

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Um, is the space of this object
in there or is it out here?

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It's-- it feels like
it's out here somewhere.

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Why not see the camera?

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Maybe you can't
do otherwise here.

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Even there, you see,
the camera's in it.

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Polished objects have been
around in art for a very long time.

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But they were all convex.

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I've been working
with concavity.

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And what it has is a focus.

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It magnifies and turns
everything upside-down.

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And at that point there
is a sense of vertigo.

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And it's that sense of turning
the object inside-out that I'm

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really taken with.

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We think of
geometry as knowable.

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The interesting
thing about geometry,

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however, is that when it's taken
to the Nth degree of knowing,

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it becomes unknowable.

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Here's another one.

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Um, which does a similar
thing in a different way.

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This is a rectangle
with one curved edge.

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It's a straight line here and
it's a straight line there.

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But all the surface
in between is curved.

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So it's doing all the things I
want of an object which is to

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become concave.

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Lewis Carroll proposes a
world into which you fall.

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You know, the rabbit
hole or whatever it is.

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And that sense of falling
is obviously a big part of

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concavity.

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As artists, we conduct
our educations in public.

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You can never know whether it's
going to be a success in terms

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of what the work is after.

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One just has to risk it.

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I've watched people walk into
a space and go in and go...

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like that.

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Um...
Great, that's what I'm after.

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That sense of, "How can it be?"

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Since "Cloud Gate" was finished
I'm told 200 million people have

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seen it, which is remarkable.

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And 200 million people
apparently means 500 million

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selfies [laughs] which I love.

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When I first made it, I
felt that it was too popular,

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too...easy.

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And in sitting with it I
realized that it does something

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rather interesting.

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When you're with
it, it's enormous.

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But you don't have to step too
far away from it and it's not.

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It has this sort
of shifting scale.

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The size of a thing is
the size of a thing;

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big, small, whatever it is.

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A scale of a thing, however,
is a strange combination of

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meaning, size and emotionality.

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It manages to say, "The measure
of my body is such in relation

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to the object that it does
something to my spirit."

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Does that lead then to ask
oneself about how big one is,

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how small one is, how
significant one is or all the

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variations?

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Like all good little Indian
boys, I was pretty sure that the

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only thing to do was to be
an engineer of some kind or

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something like that.

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But, you know, once I made the
decision to be an artist when I

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was 17, I knew that it
was what I had to do.

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I came here to go to art school.

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Because London is
marvelously cosmopolitan,

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I stayed.

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Come out and I'll try to
explain what we're doing

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next-door.

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Or what we're thinking about.

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I'm in the middle of
making a number of forms.

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They're all fairly organic
and they all have interiors.

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And we are wondering about
how we can make the process...

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simpler.

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I'll start something, whether
it's drawing on the wall or

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drawing on a piece of
paper or whatever it is.

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I don't pre-mediate them.

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I let it emerge.

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And I try and follow
the implications of it.

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But then, of course,
someone has to make them.

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So, uh, this was made
by Hilary, who's working

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down there.

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And it takes a particular kind
of thinking to do accurately.

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She and I have, over the years,
understood slowly how do you,

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um, do the drawing accurately
enough so that the object

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actually fits
together properly and so on?

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I grew up in a place called
Dehradun in the north of India.

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Um, in the
foothills of the Himalayas.

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So, there was always,
at the top end of town,

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um, the mountains.

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They were this kind of
constant mysterious presence.

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It's something that's been in
my work from the very, very

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early pigment works I made, you
know, 40 years ago to these void

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mountains.

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The proposition here at least
is that there's a place or space

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through it, beyond it.

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It's never just physical.

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That there's
always something else.

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I've worked a lot
with dark blues.

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This very, very black black
which I'm working with at the

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moment.
And red as blackness.

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Red as darkness.

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Red as interior.

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I think of color as
an immersive quality.

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That, you know, it's a bit
like going into the shower.

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You go in the
shower, you get wet.

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Once you've been in
front of a red thing,

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you get red.

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It's completely
with you, around you.

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Essentially it's a
reflection on an interior.

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You know, I'm defined by this.

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But actually, close
my eyes, I'm not this.

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I'm something else completely.

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I'm vast.

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And it has, I
believe, to do with red.

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Objects represent these
psychic propositions.

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"Symphony for a Beloved Son" is
conveyor belts that have great

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lumps of wax on them that
slowly go to the top and fall,

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making, I hope,
an enormous mess.

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What I'm after, of course,
is that sense of presence,

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decay, process-- all the things
that are proposed both by

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mechanical procedure
and by sculpture itself.

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Here is a work which is about 20
tons of wax with this big block

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that slowly turns.

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Nothing much happens.

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It's called "My Red Homeland."

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Because my homeland is red,
both internally and-- [laughs]

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and externally.

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You know, one
doesn't do psychoanalysis,

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uh, for fun.

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I mean, I did it
for 30-odd years.

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And I was, you know, in it
because I needed to be.

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What I love about it as a
process is that it proposes that

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the inner world is every bit as,
if not much more, significant

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than the so-called
word of reality.

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And the job then
is to work with it.

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And it's exactly what
happens in the studio.

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One comes back again and again.

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"What is this bloody
obsession with red?

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Why do I have to do
this again and again?"

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You know, I can't help it.

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It's just there.

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Being an artist
is a long career.

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There's a lot to do and truly
opening oneself to oneself is

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the hardest work
you can possibly do.