Anish Kapoor in "London" - Season 10 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.