{"id":4280,"date":"2021-10-01T15:52:04","date_gmt":"2021-10-01T12:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metacpc.org\/?p=4280"},"modified":"2021-10-01T15:52:23","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T12:52:23","slug":"anish-kapoor-intv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metacpc.org\/en\/anish-kapoor-intv\/","title":{"rendered":"Anish Kapoor on vaginas, recovering from breakdown and his violent new work: \u2018Freud would have a field day\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anish Kapoor’s interview to Jonathan Jones<\/span><\/strong><\/a> <\/span><\/strong><\/a>\/ The Guardian<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thu 30 Sep 2021<\/em>. Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He\u2019s scared to talk about it \u2013 but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world\u2019s blackest black. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A<\/strong>t 67, Anish Kapoor<\/a>, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas \u2013 the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture \u2013 the artist is exposing his innards. That\u2019s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world\u2019s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he\u2019s about to unveil that may disconcert. \u201cThey\u2019re very, very violent,\u201d he confesses. \u201cAnd I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what\u2019s in me. I can\u2019t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don\u2019t know how to. But I recognise that it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The works, about to go on display at Modern Art<\/a> Oxford, are beautifully painted yet brutal: full of images of bloodletting, decapitation and disembowelling. Kapoor seems to have taught himself to paint the human figure in order to desecrate it. At his London studio, there are stacks of these blood-soaked canvases depicting huge wounded bits of bodies and purple organs spattered on the walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYikes,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m not doing it intellectually. I just wanted to make a many-breasted quasi-female figure and see what happened. Could I unwrap her pristine exterior and look at her problematic interior, full of blood and guts and breasts and bits and pieces, and all that? Fuck knows. Freud would have a field day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Seeing
Seeing red \u2026 Kapoor\u2019s The world trembles when I retrieve from my ancient past what I need to live in the depths of myself. Photograph: \u00a9Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved DACS, 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Kapoor isn\u2019t exactly an inhibited conversationalist. We meet twice, at his gallery, then his studio. On the weekend in between, he gives a speech to\u00a0Index on Censorship<\/a>\u00a0in which he warns against \u201cself-censorship\u201d. And the flow of images and ideas in our discussion is certainly a masterclass in how to not censor yourself. Throwing out provocations and theories, he tries to explain what he\u2019s up to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m doing what I\u2019ve always done, which is to look to some primal ritual act. If one takes that to its logical conclusion, the primal ritual act has to be murder or sacrifice. In Freud\u2019s Moses and Monotheism<\/a> he talks initially about Moses having not been a Jew but an Egyptian \u2013 which I quite like \u2013 but from there on, it\u2019s all about the idea that Moses was murdered. Moses was sacrificed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read a book called Blood Relations that said the first culture was made by women \u2013 and it came from menstruation<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In case anyone misses the point, the paintings are accompanied by sculptures of enigmatic doorways and stepped buildings like Aztec pyramids, over big metal trays flowing with great painterly globs of red matter. Human sacrifice has played a part in many cultures. For Kapoor, it is a part of what religion is: \u201cIts purpose has to be to ask ridiculous questions like, \u2018Where do I go after I die?\u2019 Or, \u2018Where was I before I was born?\u2019 Public display of the victim, public sacrifice, somehow helps us, even though it\u2019s completely counterintuitive. We think the energy of civilisation is in a different direction. But apparently not so.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are unusual ideas and impulses to put on public display. At the gallery of his London dealer, we stop in front of a triptych of three big canvases that depict what at first look like florid, sensual blooms. Then you notice a headless neck bursting with blood, and the flowers turn out to be exposed anatomies. What\u2019s going on? \u201cThe Diana of Ephesus who has 10,000 breasts \u2026 she\u2019s there. So I think what was in my mind was the sacrifice of Diana, the opening up, the revealing, of what\u2019s inside her body. You\u2019ll see that the only remaining bit, in a way, is her vagina. All the rest is opened up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Leaning
Leaning in \u2026 Kapoor with one of the exhibits for his show at Modern Art Oxford. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The vagina has become quite a theme for Kapoor. There was a row in France over his Versailles sculpture, Dirty Corner<\/a>, which was nicknamed \u2018\u201cthe queen\u2019s vagina\u201d. So what\u2019s with the vaginas? Kapoor answers, unexpectedly, in terms of Marxist anthropology. \u201cThere\u2019s an anthropologist I\u2019m really interested in who\u2019s weird,\u201d he says. \u201cA man called Chris Knight who wrote a book called Blood Relations<\/a>, in which he speculates that the first culture was made by women and that it came from menstruation. That women who lived together, especially in small groups, menstruated together, and that they used red ochre to cover their bodies so as to hide their menstruations. He speculates that the first acts of culture were to do with this act of solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earliest artistic material known is indeed red ochre, which was used at Blombos Cave<\/a> in South Africa up to 80,000 years ago. It makes a strong red pigment \u2013 hand prints and animal images in red ochre survive in cave art. Kapoor can\u2019t get enough of it either. \u201cI have an obsession with red. My favourite colour of all, the one I use by the ton, is Alizirin crimson. It\u2019s a very dark bloody Bordeaux wine red. What\u2019s interesting about red is that it links to black so unbelievably easily. Red makes great darkness. And of course one might say red is fully a colour of the interior.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Kapoor\u2019s paintings are not so far from his sculpture after all. Since the 1980s, he has used colour to release the cosmic and the inward \u2013 from early works, in which he scattered raw pigment on small objects, to Descent into Limbo, a 2.5m deep hole painted with a black so dark the drop seems infinite (and into which one gallerygoer fell<\/a>). \u201cColour is deeply illusionistic,\u201d he says. \u201cDeep space is something I\u2019m constantly in conversation with \u2013 the way colour affects deep space, in ways that are indescribable with words.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The drop seems infinite \u2026 Descent Into Limbo, made with \u2018the universe\u2019s blackest black\u2019. Photograph: ART on FILE\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In his studio, among the bloody canvases, is a black lozenge on a white background, encased in a glass tank. He asks me what I think it is. One thing I am sure of \u2013 it\u2019s flat. Then he gets me to look from the side. It\u2019s not flat at all: it bulges out into space, a solid diamond form. The optical illusion is mind-blowing. \u201cSo this is one of these new works made in the blackest material in the universe,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s in a case because the material is highly toxic and it\u2019s incredibly fragile, especially to saliva, so you can\u2019t talk in front of it. It\u2019s a nano material. And what happens is the light enters and basically it\u2019s trapped and doesn\u2019t escape.\u201dAdvertisement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It traps 98.8 % of light \u2013 \u201cblacker than a black hole\u201d. When Kapoor got exclusive artistic rights to this material a few years ago, there was a bit of a hoo-ha<\/a>. You can even buy a \u201cblackest black\u201d acrylic paint, created by self-styled rival Stuart Semple, with the warning that by ordering it, \u201cyou confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After my breakdown, my mother went to India, got some earth and put it under my bed \u2013 so I could dream myself well<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The entire row is daft, for Kapoor\u2019s actual black nano material is dangerous, difficult to use and has taken years to develop into artworks. He shows me 19 more of these freaky spatial illusions in an upper room of his studio. Next year they will be unveiled at the Venice Accademia show. They take a lifetime\u2019s colour research to a sublime extreme. Is it a cliche to ask if this fascination with colour was influenced by his childhood in India? \u201cI think some of my relationship to colour has to be cultural. This propensity for red has to have something of that. I think of Picasso and his relation to his Spanish roots. They were with him always \u2013 the dark mythological forces playing away\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, when I push him to explain how his gory canvases reflect his own psyche, as opposed to anthropological ideas, he comes out with a moving story about India, displacement and the healing power of ritual. \u201cI grew up in India,\u201d he says. \u201cI was there until I was 17, 18. My mother was Jewish, so my brother and I then went to Israel. And I had the most awful, terrible nervous breakdown. I could hardly walk. I had an aunt who lived in Israel and my mother came to visit me. And my aunt, who had a kind of shamanistic predilection, said to my mother, \u2018You must go back to India and you must bring some earth and you must put it under Anish\u2019s bed.\u2019 Sorry Jonathan, this sometimes makes me want to cry. But anyway, I\u2019ll tell you it. And so my mother, bless her, went to India and got some earth and put it under my bed, and my aunt said further, \u2018He will be able to dream himself well from this matter.\u2019 Wow! You know it took me years to recognise the power of this thing. It gives me goosebumps. Sorry, but it does give me goosebumps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kapoor is an artist who takes you to the edge. He can make you contemplate the biggest questions. His new paintings are not so much a departure as a key to everything he has ever done, ransacking religion and myth to ask why human beings have always been driven to ponder the mystery of being. \u201cI\u2019ve been in Buddhist practice for a long, long time,\u201d he says. \u201cZen practice. It matters to me. I do really believe that we are religious beings. Where do I come from? Who am I? What am I? Where do I go? Those are questions that puzzle us all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n