ANISH KAPOOR: THE ARTIST IN THE ECHO CHAMBER OF HISTORY
ANISH KAPOOR:
THE ARTIST IN THE ECHO CHAMBER OF HISTORY
WRITING BY
NORMAN ROSENTHAL
‘I will
drench the land with your flowing blood all the way to the mountains.’ (Ezekiel,
32. 6) Form, not color, is generally thought to be the prime aspect of
sculpture. When color is applied as in ancient times to great monuments or,
more recently, in contemporary sculpture in the case of, say, painted steel, it
is still shape and three-dimensionality that give sculpture its essential
identity. For Anish Kapoor, however, color is a fundamental element – essential
to the aesthetic perception of the form. Kapoor’s earliest works, for example
the fragile piles of red, yellow, and blue pigment known as ‘1000 Names’ (1979—1980) – miniaturized
sacred mounds – speak in their essence of the mystical meaning of color. In
this there is some thing of Wassily Kandinsky who, in his famous tract
concerning the spiritual in art from 1912, proclaimed that color “is a
power which directly influences the soul.” [1] But Kandinsky of course was a
painter, not a sculptor.
Kapoor has
made spectacular public works for open air and museum spaces, sensitive to the
site and often on an immense scale. ‘Shooting into the Corner’ (2008–2009),
‘Leviathan’ (2011), and ‘Svayambh’ (2007), the title of which
is Sanskrit for ‘born by itself’ and which consists of a train carriage covered
in blood-red wax moving on tracks through the gallery, are among his most impressive
and shocking sculptures of recent years. In these three works, the turning of
all nature to red is a project of endless possibility, from the savage and the
tortured, to the sublime and the triumphant. Thought of together, they evoke
the powerful poem by Charles Baudelaire, “Le Fontaine du Sang” (1868), from
‘’Les Fleurs du Mal: It seems to me at times my blood flows out in
waves / Like a fountain that gushes in rhythmical sobs. / I hear it clearly,
escaping with long murmurs, / But I feel my body / in vain to find the
wound. Across the city, as in a tournament field, / It courses, making
islands of the paving stones, / Satisfying the thirst of every creature /
And turning the colour of all nature to red.’’ [2]
Kapoor
conveys the inherent symbolic power of color as essence, material, and
readymade. Over the years he has imagined and realized an economy of means in
countless ways, always with an under standing of the necessity to achieve form
that expresses the material’s essence. This says much about his ability to
communicate using, in a fundamentally abstract language, these three elements:
color, form, and material. With these means he achieves a wide range of
sometimes self-evident, but also personal, hidden, and secret meanings. It is
the purpose of this essay to offer clues and connections to a body of work
built up over a period of more than three decades, an endlessly inventive
‘theater of sculpture’ of which this exhibition, Kapoor in Berlin, is a
highly significant stage. Kapoor’s art encompasses the aesthetics of shock and
surprise, but equally that of the sublime and the quiet. It also exemplifies
specific dualities: the pure and the messy; the smooth and the rough; the
void and the dense; the tranquil and the noisy; the implicitly sexual and
the chaste. Often these dualities are present within a single work. Moving
through a large exhibition such as this we find the artist inventing
spectacular pieces onto which we are forced to project and reflect, drawing on
our experience and imagination to interpret the essential forms and colors.
Over the years Kapoor’s evolving work has explored the distinct and inherent
qualities of color – initially the primaries, blue, yellow, red; more recently
he has become happy to explore more complex colors within which to saturate the
viewer. At the same time he has allowed red to occupy a central position in his
oeuvre – as the many works in this exhibition testify, notably the works in
wax. It is a deep, visceral, powerfully associative red color. Kapoor’s wax is
not colored red but is redness embodied. It is also always tending to form – it
never assumes a form that is fixed.
In ‘Symphony
for a Beloved Sun’ (2013), the great environment that dominates
Kapoor’s atrium at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, red wax piles up, as if suggesting
disaster, yet the sun could perhaps be snatching back victory from defeat. Its
title evokes the haunting final line of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in
which Mrs Alving’s dying syphilitic son Oswald asks, “Mother, give me the sun.”
In this piece Kapoor is, inevitably, challenging the memory of Joseph Beuys
from the legendary exhibition ‘Zeitgeist of 1982’. This was only
the second exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau to take place after its
restoration, following near destruction during World War II – and one which the
author of this essay had the privilege of being a co-curator. Beuys was asked
to occupy the museum’s central atrium.
He chose to
bring with him the entire contents of his Düsseldorf studio – from the work
benches to chairs as well as his individual sculptural tools. Each of these
tools he wrapped in clay to form what he termed the ‘Lehmlinge’. In a part of
the atrium Beuys constructed a six-meter-high Berlin clay mountain, around
which gathered the studio furniture and tools.
Into all
these he had transmuted animalistic spirits. For those willing to enter the
poetics and historical background of the environment it be - came a magical,
even immortal image. Like Beuys, in ‘Symphony for a Beloved Sun’ Kapoor
is attempting to make both a theatrical and sculptural environment of near and
distant resonances, acknowledging the building’s art and historical memories,
and more widely those of Berlin. This new environment of Kapoor’s, with its
rising bands conveying red wax that drops off gradually to build piles on the
floor, resonates with those modernist theatrical productions that took place in
the city in the 1920s and early 1930s. Such stage sets are symbolic of the
cultural and political history of their period – including the good, bad, and
terrifying – yet also suggest a triumph of the sun over the industrialized
bloody mass murders that have emanated, not only out of Berlin, but throughout
the world of the last hundred years and more. Red is the color of blood, the
color of triumph, of love, of the rising sun and its setting. The sun was among
the greatest deities of ancient Egypt – think of the rebel pharaoh, Akhenaten.
Apollo is the all-powerful sun god of Ancient Greece – the god of light, color,
and truth, and the embodiment of art and culture in general.
Sometimes
color is presented as the essence of the form, sometimes it is embedded in a
more pictorial but still essential fashion. Kapoor’s mirrors act like
paintings; their substance and their reflected imagery are one and the same
thing. The silver mirrored piece ‘Vertigo’ (2006),
when situated in an English landscape, becomes as it were, the equivalent of an
English landscape painting by Constable or Turner. We might regard his strategy
as aspiring to hold fast rock or cloud formations in which human faces or
animal forms can be perceived. They could also recall Hermann Rorschach and his
inkblots, which, in psycho logical tests, provide any number of different
responses, consciously or unconsciously expressed. However, where the Rorschach
test has in tended medical application, the perceptual response to a Kapoor sculpture,
regardless of the distance from the artist’s hand, is purely aesthetic.
Kapoor’s work occupies spaces within and without physical and mental space, a
stream of culturally infused visual shocks.
Mirrors as
objects in themselves have accrued an extraordinary cultural history: from
Narcissus onwards, they have functioned as poetic and metaphorical devices,
holding up a mimetic appearance of reality, “Just as it is, unmisted by love or
dislike.”[4] Mirrors, too, when formed as convexes or concaves, or fractured in
endless ways, can arouse astonishing, even miraculous effects that baffle our
initial sense of logic. These senses Kapoor loves to explore for sublime and
sometimes even comic ends. In German literature, the ‘Narrenspiegel’ and the equally famous
character Till Eulenspiegel are long recognized examples of the inherently
comic ‘illusion’ of existence as evidenced by the mystery of the mirror.
All cultures
have seen the essence, even the keys, of creation itself reflected back in the
mirror. In the Newtonian scientific age that has ruled our sense of logic, in
which everything is inherently explicable, explanations nonetheless do not take
away from a sense of surprise when con - front ing re flection effects in
mirrors.
Parabolic
surfaces gather energy and are capable of receiving light and sound in ways
that can be ghostly or energetically expansive, depending on the size and
complexity of each structure. The fascination of the mirror is that it indeed
functions as an echo of the universe. This sense of magic that has resulted
from Kapoor’s play with mirrors achieves a high moment in the spectacular ‘Cloud
Gate’ in Chicago. In such
a cityscape, the reflections might make us recall Vermeer’s painted view of
Delft [ill. 5&6]. Further - more it has become a symbol of the city as much
as the Brandenburg Gate, surmounted by the figure of Victory facing East and
with its own long and complex history, has become the symbol of Berlin.
The complex
engineered beauty of ‘Cloud Gate’, however, through its wondrous parabolic
shape, is that it faces all directions and at the same time none. It creates
the impression of a city as a warped, fluid space – as though each man and
woman becomes a reflection of their own interior landscape – as well as being
suggestive of the male and female sex. Great paintings in the Western tradition
are so often to be perceived as mirrors – the Arnolfini portrait couple,
Velasquez’s ‘Las Meninas’, and Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ are all about the ambiguity of
mirrors and the interplay between the imaginary and the real. It is Kapoor’s
particular achievement, in an ongoing series of investigations, to examine
aesthetically the ambiguities of the mirror itself. The mirror, too, can
reflect the sublime, as already suggested. When constructed by Kapoor,
refracting tens of thousands of tiny fragments, all mathematically engineered
into a single concave plane, the viewer fragments as if becoming, for the
glancing moment, a cubist figure shattered almost beyond recognition. In other
cases reversals or inversions take place that seem to defy all logic and common
sense. Confronting again one of his geometrically fragmented monumental
mirrors, the carved 20 ceilings and tiles of the Alhambra come to mind, the intricate
reflected patterns of which could only be created through advanced mathematical
science.
Between the
tenth and the fifteenth centuries, during which time the Alhambra was built,
this knowledge was available to Arab scholars alone – scholars who were able to
project an extraordinary illusion of infinity, suggestive of the autonomous
hand of God, who not only controls but ultimately allows a sense of order, and
wonder, into the world. The aesthetic power of pattern and ornament, translated
into contemporary techniques and insights, plays an equally vital role in the
art of Kapoor.
Ernst
Gombrich in ‘A Sense of Order’ quotes
‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ by
Victorian art critic John Ruskin:’there is not a cluster of weeds growing in
any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably
superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones [i.e. the
sculptural building itself]: and that all our interest in the carved work, our
sense of its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass
beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate ...
results from our consciousness of it being the work of poor, clumsy, toilsome
man.’ [5] Ruskin was
writing in the nineteenth
century, at a moment when the possibilities of the machine to duplicate and make more efficient the work of
man were all too apparent. What he was unable to envisage, however, was the aesthetic
consequences of an artistic practice that does not merely imitate nature – imitation of nature is
something that artists have, in fact, strived for since the beginning of time. Kapoor’s
genius is in devising strategies, inventing machines, or otherwise setting in motion the
conditions of fictive creation that appear to do what nature does, to create the effect not only of
replication but also of its processes, in order to achieve an equivalent of what Ruskin
looked for in his tuft of grass, in a vast rock formation, in a shell, or in a spectacular cave of
stalactites. Each of Kapoor’s works, in a highly calibrated way, appeals to our powers of
abstract and figurative perception. Of course, at one level all art aspires to this, as the
significance of form strives to balance with meaning, and even the great masters of Abstract
Expressionism – Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and so on – were particularly conscious of this
imperative of art. Kapoor – deeply sensitive to cultural history, psychology, and the drive to
metaphor – has a mastery of abstraction based on knowledge and instinct for the
possibilities that lie dormant within the materials
he uses.
In ‘Shooting
into the Corner’ a cannon
fires heavy pellets of red wax into the far corner of a room, making out of the
scattered wax a blood-like stained environment. It is a kind of
threedimensional equivalent of action painting: the work’s final out - come is
unpredictable and the space becomes a noisy battlefield like the drip paintings
of Jackson Pollock, but also in fact like a world of modern violence and
warfare. Materiality and indeed science (Wissenschaft) lie at the heart
of Kapoor’s creative processes. They are part of the wonderment that his art
occasions for those who engage with it – including the artist himself. For
materials, as they submit themselves to the laws of physics in the context of
sculpture, do strange and surprising things; materials behave evermore
paradoxically as they submit to new technologies and new artistic insights. He
plays with a wide repertory of materials: alabaster, earth, steel and other
metals, concrete, wax, and plastics of many different kinds. Young Goethe wrote
in 1776 of a now little-known eighteenth century French Rococo sculptor,
Etienne Maurice Falconet – an artist who could hardly be further away from the
spirit of Kapoor’s world, but who represented for Goethe the transformative
magic of the artist: ‘‘this transparency in the marble which produces the
harmony itself, does it not inspire in the artist
that soft and subtle gradation which he then applies to his own works? Will not
plaster, on the other
hand, deprive him of a source of those harmonies which so enhance painting and sculpture? … No more does
the sculptor look for harmony in his material; rather he puts it there, if he can see it in
nature, and he can see it just as well in plaster as in marble … Why is
nature always beautiful, and beautiful everywhere? And meaningful everywhere?
And eloquent! And with marble and plaster, why do they need such a special
light? Isn’t it because nature is in continual movement, continually created
afresh, and marble, the most lively material, is always dead matter? It can
only be saved from its life lessness by the magic wand of lighting’’.[6]
Falconet, who
originally made models for the Sevres porcelain manufactory, was later
summoned by
Catharine the Great to St. Petersburg to design the statue of Peter the Great,
famous thanks to Pushkin’s poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’. Falconet’s sculpture
became, like Cloud Gate and like the Brandenburg Gate,
the great symbol of a city. ‘A century – and that city young, Gem of the Northern world,
amazing, From gloomy wood and swamp upsprung, Had
risen, in pride and splendour blazing’.[7]
Can momentous
historical events and memories be translated into the category of art without
banality? Once again we can take a clue from Baudelaire, who understood that
art, as well as making any critique or comment, is the glory of expressing what
one dreams, [8] the only way to find a moral equivalent to the realities of
human history, whether through painting or sculpture. Kapoor makes possible a
phenomenal fusion of both, as though they were almost one thing, achieving a
synthesis that balances analysis on one hand and imagination on the other. As
Baudelaire puts it: “Imagination is the queen of truth, and the possible is one of the provinces of
truth. It has a positive relationship with the infinite.”[9]
Kapoor’s hand
is visible in traditional techniques, such as carving and casting, but he also
harnesses technology to make giant sculptures that appear to come about
miraculously, as though by themselves. These can look like ancient cities
uncovered by archaeologists, but now these cement sculptures resemble body
parts of huge, Cyclopean figures come down to us from mythic times. Kapoor,
with out his hand directly involved, yet with his imagination fully in control,
contrives to allow the cement to flow like natural lava, or like meat through a
mincer, producing ever more fantastical shapes. One might describe these
objects as being produced by the hand of God – quite literally the deus ex machina. Some might argue that
a distanced, and alienated, machine is incapable of making an artwork, and that
only the human hand can fashion one, even allowing for accidents of the
‘unfinished’, as perfected by Michelangelo in sculpture and Cezanne in
painting.
But Kapoor’s
concept of the controlled ‘unfinished’ produced by his machine is something new
again, relating to the idea of the autogeneration of the artwork that goes
right back to his early pigment works. In spite of the imperative of discovery
and surprise the Western art world demands, art nonetheless has to act as a
repository of memory, like the Mnemosyne of Greek mythology, who gave birth to
all the nine muses, themselves repositories of memories – historical, cultural,
and scientific. Gombrich, in his biography of Aby Warburg, that famous
constructor of visual cultural memory, quotes his hero, who defines the idea of
‘distance’ or ‘detachment’ as a condition of civilization in art and in
thought: “The conscious creation of distance between the self 26 and the external
world may be called the fundamental act of
civilization.
Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can
achieve a lasting social function.”[10] The lasting social function resides
primarily in mental processes, the nuanced ambiguities and ambivalences that
art, relying on our memories, achieves while pushing the game forward. In all
that is produced in Kapoor’s studio, in all the sculpture that before our eyes
appears to generate itself, new possibilities are constantly opening up. The
paradoxically wondrous thing in the case of Anish Kapoor is that each work,
even as it resembles the processes and results of nature and science or as it
automatically self creates, is stylistically identifiable as coming from this
artist alone. ‘Red life burns through my veins, the brown earth
shifts under my feet, with glowing love I hug the trees and the marble
images, which spring to life in my embrace’. [11]
[1] Wassily
Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, Hilla Rebay (ed.), The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1946, p. 43.
[2] Charles
Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, William Aggeler (trans.),
American Library Guild, Fresno, 1954.
[3] Friedrich
Hölderlin, “The Song of a German,” in: Friedrich Holderlin. Poems and
Fragments, Michael Hamburger (trans.), Anvil Poetry Press, London, 2004, pp.
160– 161 / Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke. 6 Bände, Band 2,
Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1953, pp. 3–4.
[4] Sylvia
Plath, “Mirror” (1961), in: Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, Ted Hughes
(ed.), Harper & Row, New York, Cambridge/MA etc., 1981, p. 173.
[5] John
Ruskin, cited in: E. H. Gombrich, A Sense of Order, Phaidon, London, 1979,
p. 39.
[6] Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, “Commentary on Falconet [Aus Goethes Brieftasche, 1776],”
in: John Gage (ed.), Goethe on Art, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, p. 17.
[7] Alexander
Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” in: Waclaw Lednicki, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1955, p. 140.
[8] Charles
Baudelaire, From the Salon of 1859, Phaidon, London, 1955, p. 231.
9] Ibid., p.
233.
[10] Aby
Warburg, cited in: E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography,
The Warburg Institute, 1970, p. 288.
All the
information writing by Norman Rosenthal and Horst Bredekamp for Anish
Kapoor’s exhibition which had taken by Martin Gropius Bau’s Press Office. You
may visit Anish Kapoor’s Exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau to click below link.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/09/anish-kapoor-at-martin-gropius-bau-in.html
SVAYAMBH 2012
Installation View From Royal Academy of Arts 2012
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
TALL TREE AND THE EYE AT ROYAL ACADEMY 2012
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
TALL TREE AND THE EYE AT ROYAL ACADEMY 2012
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
MY RED HOMELAND 2003
Wax, Steel, Motor, Oil Based Paint
Courtesy the Artist Museum
of Contemporary Art Australia
© Anish Kapoor
MY RED HOMELAND 2003
Wax, Steel, Motor, Oil Based Paint
Courtesy the Artist Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
© Anish Kapoor
MY RED HOMELAND 2003
Wax, Steel, Motor, Oil Based Paint
Courtesy the Artist Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
© Anish Kapoor
MEMORY 2008
Cor – Ten Steel
Dimensions: 4.48×8.97×14.5
m
Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Foundation
Courtesy the Artist Museum
of Contemporary Art Australia
© Anish Kapoor
MARSYAS 2002
View From Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
MARSYAS 2002
View From Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
CLOUD GATE 2004
View From Millenium Park Chicago
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
CLOUD GATE 2004
View From Millenium Park Chicago
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
SYMPHONY FOR A BELOWED SUN 2013
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
SYMPHONY FOR A BELOWED SUN 2013
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
SHOOTING INTO THE CORNER 2008-2009
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
UNTITLED 2010
Wax, Oil Based Paint and Steel
Dimensions: 135.5 x 135.5 x 222.5 cm
Installation view: Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, 2010
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
a) Non-Object (Oval Twist), 2013
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 250 x 128 x 150 cm
Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
b) Non-Object (Door), 2008
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 281.3 x 118.1 x 118.1 cm
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
c) Non-Object (Square Twist), 2013
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 250 X 144 X 100 cm
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Installation view: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
LEVIATHAN AT GRAND PALAIS 2011
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
THE DEATH OF
LEVIATHAN: FORM AS A POLITICAL ISSUE
THE
WILLFULNESS OF THE FORM
WRITING BY
HORST BREDEKAMP
The Death of
Leviathan stands at the
end of a series of works in which art theory and the theory of the state were
interlocked in a peculiar way. But for Anish Kapoor, what counts first is form.
Taking up the ambition of Minimal Art and Concept Art, the furthest thing from
his mind is an art that offers itself to the viewer. He follows the line
tracing back to Wilhelm Worringer’s 1907 dissertation Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), which
propounded a counter-position to the philosophical and psychological doctrine
of empathy. [1] A work whose eye
is on its audience from the beginning cannot reach this audience in its inner
most, while an art that initially follows its own logic is able to unfold a
fascinating interplay with the recipient.
This doctrine
opposes all theories that tie visual art to a representing function in the
sense of imitating nature, feelings, or the political realm. Kapoor has
developed this counter-principle in his works through their Euclidean geometry,
surrealistic coloration, unexpected tearing open of spaces, and aseptic,
immaculate mirrors. To be able to be present, the works must first withdraw
into their own spheres of absoluteness. This inner constancy, which expresses
itself in rejecting any narration, fixed halting point, or proportional
reference, conveys the prelude to a deeper relationship. Kapoor’s pyramids and
spirals, and especially the huge concave mirrors embedded in stone steles that
produce an upside-down mirror image, [2] embody a principle through which works
that initially aesthetically withdraw make a stronger impression than those
which ingratiate themselves, dripping with insinuated
meaning, into
the viewer’s horizon of willing expectations.
This is not
the conciliatory form of the sublime formulated by Kant, but Edmund Burke’s
more painful variant of unbridgeability that induces people, faced with
unboundedness, to find guiding principles in themselves. This also led Barnett
Newman to follow Burke instead of Kant. [3] This is about the intensified
addressing that can arise after distance is taken. Because all great
spaciousness bears the danger of an inner sterility, grand dimensions, which
may seem to suggest themselves for this interplay, are initially unsuitable.
Kapoor has
taken on the challenge of precisely this problem in his large-format works,
notably in ‘Memory’ 2008, and in ‘Leviathan’ 2011. In ‘Memory’, exhibited in
the Deutsches Guggenheim, Berlin, the boundary between sculpture and
architecture is crossed; but the unboundedness is bound by the fact that the
surface shows a patina of rust, which, comparable to a fine pigment, surrounds
the object like the paint of a painting.
The rough
variegation of this surface lends the huge, traversable form an organic
character that takes away the steely quality of its hull [ill. 2].
Added to this
is that the unsurveyability of the whole relies on the processual remembering
of the participant who moves through the ensemble; this is why Kapoor calls Memory a “mind sculpture.”[4] The vast
dimensions of this architectural sculpture initially seem to both repel and
subsume the viewer; its organic appearance gives it a pulsation that makes it a
seemingly living organ; and the forced act of memory leads to the freedom of a
mental sculpture put together from memory again and again, a sculpture whose
inner dynamic contradicts its rigid alien quality.
This
principle corresponds to a currently widespread approach that questions the
hypertrophy of the modern subjective
individual. Here it is a question of confronting something that, although it is
a human artifact, refuses function. Striving to understand the implicit person as part of an environment
confronting him[5] is on a level similar to attempting to recognize an intrinsic value
in objects, which should lead
metaphorically to a parliament of
objects [6] or to seeing
in the willful quality of artifacts the effect of a pictorial act. Kapoor’s works are embodiments of what
can be called an intrinsic
pictorial act.[7]
Resin, Air
Space, 1998, gave this principle an early programmatic turn: suspended within
the space of the minimalistically clear stereometry of a transparent block is a
Something that does not entirely tally with the defined hardness of its
boundaries.
It would be
banal to speak here of the soul of an object, but the inner life of this form
testifies at least to the idea of a latency of what is inorganically formed
that does not entirely tally with viewers’ expectations.
Kapoor
formulated this paradigmatically in his work ‘When I am Pregnant’, made in the early 1990s, in which
a bulge presses out of the veraicon of the white surface of the
wall . Something similar played out with the Leviathan of the Grand Palais in 2011.
The
monumental character of this sculpture-architecture was boundless, like that of Memory, but here, too, the artist knew
how to create the quality of a living organism. A huge, pictorially active
art-animal that, in the latency of its lurking appearance and the
metamorphosing play of light in its ambience, also overcame the emptiness that
can accompany monumentality.[8]
THE
RELATIONSHIP TO POLITICAL ICONOLOGY
It is
possible that a wordless presence would have left the work more freedom than
titling it Leviathan permits. On the other hand,
precisely this suggestive title opens up the broad field of political iconology
and the specific way Kapoor has dealt with it.
With Thomas
Hobbes’ Leviathan, Kapoor refers
explicitly to the work that founded the modern theory of the state. Hobbes, in
turn, referred to the two monsters in the Bible that demonstrate God’s sublime
power to the rebelling Job: Leviathan and Behemoth. These two creatures, before
which “terror dances,”[9] appear as the monsters of the sea and land. [10] In
his frontispiece, Hobbes has converted Leviathan into the form of a humanoid
giant rising out of the sea.[11]
But Kapoor
retracts this transformation. He confronts the image of the state developed by
Hobbes with the counter-model of a semi-organic being that displays no human
traits.
He sought to
avoid the humanoid machine as which Hobbes interpreted his Leviathan as a metaphor of the state.
[12] Kapoor’s Leviathan thus belongs to the realm of
the counterimages that present alternatives to Hobbes’ state-animal that, with
relentless violence, suppresses people’s bloodlust to create a repressive
peace. [13] Nor has Kapoor conformed to William Blake’s famous version of the
two monsters from the Book of Job. In Blake’s image, Behemoth appears in the
upper half of the globe of the world like a kind of monstrous hippopotamus,
while below it Leviathanroils as a dragon in the sea. [14]
Kapoor’s Leviathan, by contrast, with its
softly contoured huge form, is more in keeping with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which, in accordance with a
long tradition, imagined Leviathan as a whale. [15] In his introduction,
Melville quoted Hobbes’ Leviathan:
“By art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State – (in
Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”[16] Because Melville cites
Hobbes literally, the impression could arise that his whaling novel was to be
grasped as a parable of the struggle against the Hobbesian state, and this
interpretation had a powerful and in part dreadful effect.
In March
1969, a militantly anti-capitalistic oppositional group appeared in the United
States; with its magazine Leviathan,
it sought to accompany the struggle against the state, regarded as a whale. In
November 1969, it published an editorial titled “from the belly of the whale”
that tied Melville’s novel to the Old Testament story of Jonah. The people,
swallowed by the state as whale, should slash open the state from the inside:
“We began life as Jonah, as a part of a movement trapped inside the belly of
the great whale that devours us all. We’re still not sure exactly what that
whale looks like, exactly how to get out: but what we do know is that we’re not
going to be passengers anymore. We’re going to learn how to rip that whale’s
gut apart.”[17] On one of the covers of the magazine Leviathan, the state-whale appears as
a caricature of a sea monster equipped with three torsos and heads [ill.
7].[18] The right-hand
head has a
trunk and embodies capital, while the monster on the left, armed with pistols,
represents the police. Both protect the bespectacled figure in the middle that
is filling a test tube while looking ahead and setting the course. The
Leviathan appears as a monstrous triad of the organic interplay between
capital, police power, and research.
A trail may
lead from this identification of the Leviathan as a whale that must be
combatted to the German terrorist group, the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion = Red Army Faction), which also
assumed that Melville’s Moby Dick alluded to the state. Almost all the
members of the RAF took cover names out of the novel.[19]
Melville’s
reversion of Hobbes’ humanoid Leviathan back to the sea-monster form in which
it appeared in the Old Testament also impacted the political milieu that did
not promote but criticized or even castigated the destruction of the state
animal. Thus, in his 1938 settling of scores with the criticism of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Carl Schmitt said that
liberalism had “slain and eviscerated” the modern state. [20] The cover of the
1982 reprint of Schmitt’s book took up Melville’s identification of the state
with the whale, against Hobbes’ imagery: Hendrick Goltzius’ engraving Beached Whale, in which men are
beginning to eviscerate a dead whale, is the cover illustration.[21]
Following the
criteria of political iconography, Kapoor’s transformation of Hobbes’ humanoid
pictorial metaphor for the state into a huge, artificial organism stands in the
same tradition. This is the starting point for the problematic mentioned at the
beginning. To start with, a comparison between the three-headed monster of the Leviathan of March 1969 and Kapoor’s Leviathan from 2011, with its three bulges
like an abstract implementation of this fantasy, may urge itself upon us [ill.
9]. But here Kapoor was interested in a problem of form and not in giving
visual expression to three bodies of state terror, as the caricature wanted to.
Iconographically, all that remains is the common reference to Melville’s
transformation of the state giant into a sea monster.
Despite its
distance from Hobbes’ image of the state, Kapoor’s Leviathan is closer to the concept of the
Leviathan than to Hobbes’ critics. He shows the Leviathan in its sub lime
vastness as a doublecreature: alien and uncanny, and yet attractive and
alluring in its organic presence.
This is where
the artphilosophical and the statetheoretical components touch each other. The
Leviathan appears as a huge amorphous sculpture that subsumes the viewer and
yet drives him to an extreme activity of empathy and reflection. In this, it is
an example of pictorial activity coming toward one from alienness and also of
the problematic and achievement of the state: always in danger of consuming
one, it is nonetheless a lively and life-enabling counterpart.
THE DEATH OF
LEVIATHAN
The Death of
Leviathan leaves this
dialectic behind. The huge animal lying on the ground corresponds with the idea
that the state has lost its justification for existence since the 1990s
because, in the face of the dissolution of the Iron Curtain between the blocs
and the fact that just one form of economics enables global networking and
connection, people could now associate freely. They dictate the laws to the
state, and not the reverse: this was the doctrine considered valid until 2008,
when the horrendous consequences of the receding of the state became
obvious.[22]
The Death of
Leviathan could symbolize
this process, and with that its message would be much more open politically
than all of Kapoor’s earlier works. In this sense, ‘The Death of Leviathan’ makes the prediction that the future
of society free of the state, whether hoped for or lamented, has already begun.
That the condition of a failed state in no way means a liberated anarchy, but
rather terror and the abuse of power, becomes clear in the face of the pitiable
horror of this dying sculpture. Accordingly, a more fitting title than ‘The
Death of Leviathan’ might be ‘Behemoth’, the second
monster from the Book of Job, with which Hobbes identified the unending civil
war that would accompany the collapse of the state.[23] The sculpture assumes
the prophetic role of Cassandra: it explains the currently unfolding,
desperately conflictual efforts to bring under state control the processes of
global finance and
the economy,
as well as the ongoing latent and open civil wars as a snapshot of a grand iose
failure. From the perspective of political iconology, ‘The Death of Leviathan’ offers no wayout, but confronts
the recipient with the message that he should prepare for a situation of
intractability.
And with
that, the form comes back to itself. It is the indefatigable work on the
material that becomes clearer in the moment of failure than ever before. No
reconciliation lies in this, but the return of the principle of arguing from
distance and of regarding art as a counterpart that makes its own demands,
which are uncontrollable but precisely for that reason can be judged and
evaluated. Via the form, art encompasses all areas of life, together with the
political realm.
[1] Wilhelm
Worringer, Abstraction and
Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, 1967.
[2] On this
motif, cf. especially: Anish Kapoor, Turning
the World Upside Down, exhib. cat., Kensington Gardens, London, Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010.
[3] Barnett
Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” in: Tiger’s
Eye 6, 15 December 1948, p. 52–
53; cf. Max Imdahl, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III,” in: Christine
Pries (ed.), Das Erhabene.
Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn, VCH, Weinheim, 1989, pp. 233–252, here:
p. 235.
[4] On this,
cf. the unpublished study: Anna Katharina Groth, Anish Kapoors Auftragsarbeit Memory
(2008): Ein Objekt zwischen Skulptur, Bild und Bauwerk, Magisterarbeit,
Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2010.
[5] Wolfram
Hogrebe, Der implizite Mensch,
Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2013.
[6] Bruno
Latour, Das Parlament der Dinge. Für eine politische Ökologie, Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2010.
[7] Horst
Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts.
Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010.
[8] Monumenta 2011: Anish Kapoor/
Leviathan / Grand Palais, exhib. cat., Réunion des Musées Nationaux Grand
Palais, Paris, 2011, No. 112.
[9] Job
41:22, in: New Revised Standard
Version Bible, 1989.
[10] Job
40:15–41:26.
[11] Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, London, 1651:
frontispiece. Cf. Horst Bredekamp, Thomas
Hobbes. Visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan:
Urbild des modernen Staates. Werkillustrationen und Portraits, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1999. Cf. idem,
“Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in: Patricia
Springborg
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Hobbes’s Leviathan,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 2007, pp. 29–60.
[12]
“Introduction” in: Richard Tuck (ed.), Thomas
Hobbes: Leviathan, Cambridge Uni - versity Press, Cambridge, 1991 [1651], p. 9.
[13] Horst
Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes. Der
Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder 1651-2001,
Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2012 (4 ed.), pp. 132–139. Cf. Dario Gamboni,
“Composing the Body Politic. Composite Images and Political Representation,
1651-2004,” in: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, exhib. cat., ZKM |
Karlsruhe, MIT, Cambridge/MA, 2005, pp. 162–195.
[14] Bo
Lindberg, “William Blake’s Illus tra - tions to the Book of Job,” in: Acta Academiae Abonensis, No. 15 D,
1973, p. 299.
[15] On this
tradition: Noel Malcolm, “The Name and Nature of Leviathan: Political Symbolism
and Biblical Exegesis,” in: Intellectual
History Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2007, pp. 21–39, here: p. 28.
[16] Thomas
Hobbes, cited in : Herman Melville, Moby-Dick,
or: The Whale, Constable
and
Company,
London, Bombay and Sydney, 1922, p. XV.
[17] Leviathan, Vol. 1, No. 6, November
1969, p. 3.
[18] The
imprint gives no indication of the artist, who signed simply with “mack” (Leviathan,
Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1969).
[19] Stefan
Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof- Komplex,
Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1986, pp. 274–277. Cf. idem, “Wer die RAF verstehen
will, muß ‘Moby Dick’ lesen. Vor dem Deutschen Herbst: Ein Gespräch mit Stefan
Aust, dem Autor des Klassikers ‘Der Baader Meinhof Komplex’,” in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22
August 2007, No. 194, p. 31.
[20] Carl
Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der
Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols,
Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg, 1938, p. 124.
[21] Günter
Maschke (ed.), Carl Schmitt, Der
Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines
politischen Symbols, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1982.
[22] Martin
van Creveld, Aufstieg und
Untergang des Staates, Gerling Akademie Verlag, Munich, 1999; Reinhard
Wolfgang, Geschichte der
Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen
bis zur Gegenwart, C. H. Beck, Munich, 1999. An excellent overview is offered
by Mario G. Losano, “Der nationale Staat zwischen Regionalisierung und
Globalisierung,” in: Jörg Huber (ed.), Darstellung:
Korrespondenz, Voldemeer, Zurich, 2000, pp. 187–213. [23] Horst
Bredekamp,
“Behemoth als Partner und Feind des Leviathan. Zur politischen Ikonologie eines
Monstrums,” in: Leviathan, Vol.
37, 2009, pp.
429–475 (also as offprint: TranState
Working Papers, No. 98, Bremen: Sfb 597 “Staatlichkeit im Wandel,” 2009.
Reprinted in:
Philip Manow, Friedbert W. Rüb, and Dagmar Somin (eds.), Die Bilder des Leviathan. Eine
Deutungsgeschichte, Nomos, Baden-Baden
LEVIATHAN AT GRAND PALAIS 2011
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
.jpg)
UNTITLED ( RED DISH ) 2011
Resin & Fiberglass
Dimensions: 135 cm Diameter
Resin & Fiberglass
Dimensions: 135 cm Diameter
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
FLOATING DAWN 2011
20 Acrylic Cubes in 2 Lines of 10
Dimensions: 35 x 28 x 28 cm Each
20 Acrylic Cubes in 2 Lines of 10
Dimensions: 35 x 28 x 28 cm Each
Exhibition view “Anish Kapoor & James Lee Byars”, Kamel
Mennour
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
FLOATING DAWN 2011
20 Acrylic Cubes in 2 Lines of 10
Dimensions: 35 x 28 x 28 cm Each
20 Acrylic Cubes in 2 Lines of 10
Dimensions: 35 x 28 x 28 cm Each
Exhibition view “Anish Kapoor & James Lee Byars”, Kamel Mennour
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
DETAIL 2010
Cement
Variable Dimensions.
Variable Dimensions.
Exhibition view at the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins of the
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux - Arts, Paris, 2011
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
COSMOBIOLOGY 2013
Resin
Dimensions: 126 x 128 x 500 cm
Resin
Dimensions: 126 x 128 x 500 cm
Exhibition View “Anish Kapoor & James Lee Byars”,
Galerie Kamel Mennour
Photo: Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Photo: Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris
THE ARCELOR MITTAL ORBIT 2012 FOR LONDON OLYMPICS
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
THE ARCELOR MITTAL ORBIT 2012 FOR LONDON OLYMPICS
Courtesy the Artist © Anish Kapoor
WIDOW 2004
PVC-poliestere, acciaio
Dimensions: 4610 x 14630 x 4610 cm
©Fondazione MAXXI © Anish Kapoor
PVC-poliestere, acciaio
Dimensions: 4610 x 14630 x 4610 cm
©Fondazione MAXXI © Anish Kapoor
CAVE 2012
Corten
Corten
Dimensions: 551
x 800 x 805 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
© Anish Kapoor
THE EARTH 2012
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
© Anish Kapoor
.jpg)
INTERSECTION 2012
Corten
Dimensions: 515
x 812,5 x 514,4 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
© Anish Kapoor
INTERSECTION 2012
Corten
Dimensions: 515 x 812,5 x 514,4 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Continua
© Anish Kapoor
WHEN I AM PREGNANT 1992
Fibreglass, Wood and Paint
Dimensions: 180.5×180.5×43cm
© Anish Kapoor
SLUG 2012 - 2013
Paint and Fiber Glass
Dimensions: 415 x 600 x 465 cm
Paint and Fiber Glass
Dimensions: 415 x 600 x 465 cm
© Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and De Pont Museum
Courtesy the Artist and De Pont Museum
.jpg)
VERTIGO 2012
© Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and De Pont Museum
DIRTY CORNER 2010
Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano
© Anish Kapoor
ANISH KAPOOR
12 March 1954
Born in Mumbai, India. Kapoor spends his childhood in Mumbai
and his youth
at the well-known boarding school The Doon School in
Dehradun.
1970–1973 At
the age of 16, he moves to Israel to live on a kibbutz. After
six months he
quits his studies of electrical engineering and decides to become an artist. He
soon attains international renown with his sculptures made of pigments.
1973 Travels
to the UK to study at the Hornsey College of Art in London and then
at the Chelsea College of Art and Design.
1979 Teaches
at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the U.K. That same year, he
travels to India, where he is enchanted by the vibrant powdered pigments he
sees everywhere, from temples to market stands. He soon begins to create
sculptures coated with colour-saturated pigments.
1982 Becomes
Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery in
Liverpool and later exhibits at the Lisson Gallery in London. He is
part of the movement that would later become famous as New British Sculpture.
1990 Represents
Britain in the Biennale in Venice, and in 1992 in documenta IX in Kassel.
1991 Awarded
the Turner Prize.
1996 Creates
an altar of black Irish limestone for the Frauenkirche in Dresden; the altar is
located in the lowest point of the church, at the apex of the cruciform barrel
vault.
2002 The
installation Marsyas is displayed in Tate Modern’s türbine
hall in London.
2003 The
Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibits My Red Homeland, a 20-tonne sculpture of red
vaseline and wax Press kit: Kapoor in Berlin page 6
2004 Anish
Kapoor creates the installation Cloud Gate at the Millennium Park
in Chicago, a monumental 110-tonne polished stainless steel sculpture.
2008
Conceptualizes the steel sculpture Memory for the Deutsche
Guggenheim, Berlin.
2009 Presents
the installation Shooting into the Corner at the Museum für
Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna. That same year, the Royal Academy in London
devotes an extensive solo exhibition to Kapoor.
2011 His work
Leviathan is exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris as part of the
annual Monumenta. Works by Kapoor are on display simultaneously at two
exhibition venues in Milan: the Rotonda di Via Besana and the Fabbrica del
Vapore. In October, Kapoor is awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo.
2012 On the
occasion of the London Olympics, Kapoor creates the
Arcelor
Mittal Orbit, a tower 115 metres high.
Anish Kapoor
is a member of the Royal Academy and a Commander of the British
Empire (CBE).
