ANISH KAPOOR: Objects are, I believe, illusory.
They are never what they at first appear to be.
We look at them mostly with love,
hate, desire, revulsion or whatever else it is.
The viewer's involved.
There's always a conversation.
And one of the things I think I've tumbled into in my process
is that kind of uncertainty of what the object is.
Um, is the space of this object in there or is it out here?
It's-- it feels like it's out here somewhere.
Why not see the camera?
Maybe you can't do otherwise here.
Even there, you see, the camera's in it.
Polished objects have been around in art for a very long time.
But they were all convex.
I've been working with concavity.
And what it has is a focus.
It magnifies and turns everything upside-down.
And at that point there is a sense of vertigo.
And it's that sense of turning the object inside-out that I'm
really taken with.
We think of geometry as knowable.
The interesting thing about geometry,
however, is that when it's taken to the Nth degree of knowing,
it becomes unknowable.
Here's another one.
Um, which does a similar thing in a different way.
This is a rectangle with one curved edge.
It's a straight line here and it's a straight line there.
But all the surface in between is curved.
So it's doing all the things I want of an object which is to
become concave.
Lewis Carroll proposes a world into which you fall.
You know, the rabbit hole or whatever it is.
And that sense of falling is obviously a big part of
concavity.
As artists, we conduct our educations in public.
You can never know whether it's going to be a success in terms
of what the work is after.
One just has to risk it.
I've watched people walk into a space and go in and go...
like that.
Um... Great, that's what I'm after.
That sense of, "How can it be?"
Since "Cloud Gate" was finished I'm told 200 million people have
seen it, which is remarkable.
And 200 million people apparently means 500 million
selfies [laughs] which I love.
When I first made it, I felt that it was too popular,
too...easy.
And in sitting with it I realized that it does something
rather interesting.
When you're with it, it's enormous.
But you don't have to step too far away from it and it's not.
It has this sort of shifting scale.
The size of a thing is the size of a thing;
big, small, whatever it is.
A scale of a thing, however, is a strange combination of
meaning, size and emotionality.
It manages to say, "The measure of my body is such in relation
to the object that it does something to my spirit."
Does that lead then to ask oneself about how big one is,
how small one is, how significant one is or all the
variations?
Like all good little Indian boys, I was pretty sure that the
only thing to do was to be an engineer of some kind or
something like that.
But, you know, once I made the decision to be an artist when I
was 17, I knew that it was what I had to do.
I came here to go to art school.
Because London is marvelously cosmopolitan,
I stayed.
Come out and I'll try to explain what we're doing
next-door.
Or what we're thinking about.
I'm in the middle of making a number of forms.
They're all fairly organic and they all have interiors.
And we are wondering about how we can make the process...
simpler.
I'll start something, whether it's drawing on the wall or
drawing on a piece of paper or whatever it is.
I don't pre-mediate them.
I let it emerge.
And I try and follow the implications of it.
But then, of course, someone has to make them.
So, uh, this was made by Hilary, who's working
down there.
And it takes a particular kind of thinking to do accurately.
She and I have, over the years, understood slowly how do you,
um, do the drawing accurately enough so that the object
actually fits together properly and so on?
I grew up in a place called Dehradun in the north of India.
Um, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
So, there was always, at the top end of town,
um, the mountains.
They were this kind of constant mysterious presence.
It's something that's been in my work from the very, very
early pigment works I made, you know, 40 years ago to these void
mountains.
The proposition here at least is that there's a place or space
through it, beyond it.
It's never just physical.
That there's always something else.
I've worked a lot with dark blues.
This very, very black black which I'm working with at the
moment. And red as blackness.
Red as darkness.
Red as interior.
I think of color as an immersive quality.
That, you know, it's a bit like going into the shower.
You go in the shower, you get wet.
Once you've been in front of a red thing,
you get red.
It's completely with you, around you.
Essentially it's a reflection on an interior.
You know, I'm defined by this.
But actually, close my eyes, I'm not this.
I'm something else completely.
I'm vast.
And it has, I believe, to do with red.
Objects represent these psychic propositions.
"Symphony for a Beloved Son" is conveyor belts that have great
lumps of wax on them that slowly go to the top and fall,
making, I hope, an enormous mess.
What I'm after, of course, is that sense of presence,
decay, process-- all the things that are proposed both by
mechanical procedure and by sculpture itself.
Here is a work which is about 20 tons of wax with this big block
that slowly turns.
Nothing much happens.
It's called "My Red Homeland."
Because my homeland is red, both internally and-- [laughs]
and externally.
You know, one doesn't do psychoanalysis,
uh, for fun.
I mean, I did it for 30-odd years.
And I was, you know, in it because I needed to be.
What I love about it as a process is that it proposes that
the inner world is every bit as, if not much more, significant
than the so-called word of reality.
And the job then is to work with it.
And it's exactly what happens in the studio.
One comes back again and again.
"What is this bloody obsession with red?
Why do I have to do this again and again?"
You know, I can't help it.
It's just there.
Being an artist is a long career.
There's a lot to do and truly opening oneself to oneself is
the hardest work you can possibly do.