The cosmic paradox of Anish Kapoor

If there was one word you could use to describe the artist Anish Kapoor, you might confidently plump for “outspoken”. In recent years, he has offered plenty of supporting evidence. He has threatened to sue after United States border agents posed for a group photo in front of Cloud Gate, his famous mirrored “bean” sculpture in Chicago, describing the scene as representative of “fascist America”. He has called on the US to be excluded from the Venice Biennale, alongside Israel and Russia, for its “politics of hate”. He has collaborated with Greenpeace to stage a guerrilla artwork on a North Sea gas platform to highlight the climate emergency, saying it is everyone’s duty to “have at least some kind of political agenda”. He has described India’s Narendra Modi as overseeing a “Hindu Taliban” and a “fascist regime”. He has signed open letters against genocide in Gaza and the introduction of ID cards in Britain. When I went to visit his south London studio with a bunch of other journalists earlier this year, he handed out stickers for a march against the far right organised by the Together Alliance, adding, with a smile, that he hoped to see us all there.

So it might seem strange, at least at first, when you discover Kapoor’s most unwavering credo. “I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have a message to give anyone,” he told Homi K Bhabha back in 1998, almost word-for-word one of the first things he says during our tour of his studio. “There are so many ways that entrenched ego attempts to take over what the artistic message can be,” he tells me later, when I ask him to elaborate. “Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression, it’s not my role to be expressive.”

Of course, Kapoor is not all that unusual for drawing a line between his role as a public figure and his work as an artist. What is more unusual is that it is this display of apparent paradox, this tension between opposing forces, that is the point of the work itself: between the material and immaterial, between the visceral and the sterile, the religious and the secular, even the very notion of what is and is not art. Whether it’s in one of his meaty works made of wax and resin, his gigantic, ominous red public sculptures or his slick optical illusions made up of elaborately arranged concave mirrors or light-absorbing surfaces, the prevailing experience of any Kapoor work is one of uncertainty arising from contradictions: “It’s in that strange in-betweenness, between nothingness and eternal possibility, that the viewer has to discover for themselves.”

Without doubt, this is Kapoor’s year. In June, he returned to the Hayward Gallery for the first time since his career-defining show in 1998. The Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, home to his foundation since 2018, was open to the public this summer for only the second time ever, exhibiting new works alongside sketches and models of some of his best-known. He has an exhibition of paintings in the US, another show in Finland, a book of photography published. Combine all this with his permanent public sculptures across Italy, Japan, the US and the UK, plus numerous works in public collections besides, and there has perhaps never been another time when so many people have had such ready access to so much of Kapoor’s work. But as Kapoor himself might argue, just because something appears big does not make it so: “Barnett Newman used to say that scale is not a matter of size,” he says, “it’s a matter of meaning.” At the age of 72, he has never looked more ascendant, so big. But does the size of his success come with the necessary heft of scale to warrant it?

From here, you work your way upwards, with each subsequent room given over to a distinct area of Kapoor’s practice. Next is a room of works made in Vantablack, the scientific coating that absorbs virtually all light, making even three-dimensional surfaces seem featureless and flat. In the middle of the room is a recreation of Descent into Limbo, a 2.5m-deep hole made infamous back in 2018, when a man in Portugal mistook it for a carpet and fell straight in—at the Hayward, it is now safely hemmed in by wires. Further up is a room with resin works that look like meat in clear plastic bags. On the outdoor rooftops, some mirror sculptures; another room of paintings; more bloodied resin works on metal beds.

This is as good an introduction to Kapoor’s varied output as any, which also means it’s unlikely to win over the sceptical. One of the most common criticisms levelled at his work is that it can be oddly clinical, perhaps an unavoidable consequence of his chosen materials—rubber, steel, silicone—and his technically complex ways of working. But clinical might just be another way of saying it is impersonal; in which case, this is not a mistake but by design. Kapoor is concerned with formal arrangements first and foremost; the last thing he would want people to think about when they look at his work is himself, or indeed anybody. “I’m going to tell you about my little story?” he says. “No. Not enough, not enough.”

And on this point alone Kapoor’s Hayward show is conspicuous among the other major exhibitions that joined it in London this summer. At Tate Modern is a definitive retrospective by (the very much personal) Tracey Emin; at Tate Modern, an examination of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraiture and broader “iconic” status; at the National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition of Marilyn Monroe portraits. All shows, in other words, that trade on the idea that “artist” can be a synonym for “sitter”, shows that are nothing if not about real people and real lives.

“Museums all over the world are obsessed with where an artist comes from,” Kapoor tells me. “I’m sorry, that’s fine. It’s lovely. Okay, perhaps it was well overdue. But it’s not the real point. We still have to come back to those rather difficult, fundamental questions about whether the object of whatever kind holds any poetic value.”

It should be said that Kapoor was not always so eager to eschew identity as he is now—in a BBC radio interview with the art critic William Feaver in 1983, he described his work as “a re-discovery of how to be Indian, something that I’d perhaps forgotten”—but the change is likely a consequence of how much his own identity defies any easy categories or straightforward allegiances. Born in India to a Punjabi Hindu father and an Iraqi-Jewish mother who had fled persecution in Baghdad, Kapoor was educated at the Doon School—often called the “Eton of India”—before spending some time in his teens on a kibbutz in Israel. Dyslexic, he gave up studies in electrical engineering to become an artist, leading him to art school in London. By the early 1990s, having already represented Britain at the Venice Biennale before becoming a citizen, he would for a time be regarded as belonging to a distinctly British school of contemporary sculpture, alongside the likes of Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread.

In any case, one thing that makes Kapoor’s work an interesting challenge is how we are meant to approach it in the absence of such autobiographical handrails. The natural appeal of a human story is how easily it can be parsed; the artist who uses their life as their principal subject creates something that we can see and understand within the mirror of our own lives. When an artist refrains from doing this, as Kapoor does, we are forced into a more interrogative posture. What is this? How am I supposed to look at it? What is it about? What is it meant to mean? 

An easy answer might be that Kapoor is trying to tap into something universal, something that we all share regardless of who we are or where we’re from, but then Kapoor himself bridles at this suggestion: “Universal for whom?” he fires back. Equally, he is resistant to the idea that our response should be exclusively or principally visceral, as might be expected of his blood-and-guts sculptures; there must also be something cerebral and planned. “I like the idea of eliciting reactions that are beyond words, where you tumble into feeling a sensation, something that you don’t quite know how to describe,” he says. “The question there is always, is it incidental or is it carefully worked at? And, of course, it’s a bit of both.”

Even so, across our two conversations it becomes hard to avoid noticing that we return frequently to some big questions about the unknowable nature of consciousness, the draw of the mythical, the existence of a “hidden inner language”—about something that is, if not universal, then at the very least innate and indivisible. “What resources do we have as human beings?” he asks me. “We have our little story, each one of us our little story. But it’s the way that it can come to have mythological, historical recall that is the important thing.” This is what it all comes down to: “Does it just relate to my little story, or can my little story transcend and become something else?” 

But when I ask him how we might judge whether an artist has successfully done this—is a self-portrait doomed to never transcend by dint of its subject matter?—Kapoor becomes more circumspect. “It’s really a matter of quality,” he says. He gives me an example from this year’s Venice Biennale: Higher Power, an artwork by Chris Levine made up of a simple green laser beam shot up into the night sky from San Clemente Island. “Incredible,” Kapoor says. “A clear sky but a night sky, with the stars going up into the beyond, the other atmosphere beyond. And I thought of Moses and that beam of light that draws the Israelites out.” 

Here, revealed almost incidentally, could be a way of making sense of Kapoor’s work and what he really means by “poetic value”, of what line of history he is attempting to recall and contribute to—and how it might have something to do with your predisposition to religious experience.

Standing there before it, looking up—as you must do with virtually every Kapoor sculpture—I am not sure I can say this work transcends. Unlike All of Nothing just downstairs, Ha Makom feels oddly ill at ease in the formal gallery setting. It is not so much in tension with the white walls as neutered by them, a decontextualised object plucked from its natural habitat. I think back to how it haunted me when I first saw it in Kapoor’s studio months earlier: still in pieces, being worked on by assistants in respirator masks and opaque plastic overalls, looking more like they were excavating the exoskeleton of some dead alien lifeform than putting together a work of art. It was a reminder that taking an impersonal approach to Kapoor’s work applies in other ways: that work is often at its most powerful as a thing you encounter without any wall texts or press releases, without any idea of who made it, what it’s called and what purpose it serves, and without any possibility of knowing. Think Stonehenge—only dripped from top to bottom in something red that may or may not be blood.

I soon find that Kapoor himself is much harder to pin down here, too. At the Manfrin, we are firmly in his domain, and all who cross its threshold do so as acolytes and fellow travellers. As we chat in one of the galleries the Korean sculptor Lee Ufan, casual as anything, wanders in to say hello. “We have a lot in common, me and him,” Kapoor says, standing up to grasp Ufan firmly by the hand.

Many of the things on show here are sketches and scale models, some of realised projects, others of a (let’s say) more speculative nature. One concept picture shows a deep, fleshy scar that, if executed, would cut across the entire length of Great Britain, in what I imagine would be a challenging planning application. “It’s a playful attempt at commentary,” Kapoor says.

Another equally ambitious idea, not shown here but that’s been circulating for some years already, is to launch an artwork into outer space that would be visible from Earth. Kapoor is reluctant to tell me much about it beyond the fact it is a serious proposal. “What’s interesting is the idea of an object of whatever kind sitting in cosmic dimensions,” he says. “It’s full of, if you like, fantastical, poetic possibilities. Which I love, which I absolutely love.”

But despite this clear turn towards increasingly quixotic projects, the thing most precious to Kapoor’s own sense of self remains thoroughly conventional. Present both here and at the Hayward—and not to mention the exclusive subject of his US show earlier this year—are his paintings. “This is an important part of my practice,” Kapoor says; back when he used to go into the studio every day, the one thing he would make sure to do is paint. Unlike the sculptures, which require a small team of dedicated assistants working over many months to plan and execute, painting is something over which Kapoor can exert complete and total control. He always paints alone, just him and a statue of the Buddha.

The logical question to ask here, at least to my mind, is whether what comes out of such a cloistered process could be said to be a closer reflection of Kapoor’s own life. Most of the paintings seem aggressive, even explicit: red gashes and scars, volcanic eruptions; the evocation of diseased and decaying skin. Do they stem from anger? Are they symbolic of a time in Kapoor’s life when he was experiencing major changes? What is going through his head as he works on them?

Ultimately, there are no answers, only speculation. Kapoor is not to be drawn into discussions about how anything relates back to him, even as just a casual insight into his process. When I approach one of his assistants to ask if I could put a few questions to them about what it’s like to work in the studio, I’m turned down, in accordance with Kapoor’s wishes; there is no penetrating the fortress beyond what Kapoor wants you to see. 

From what I am able to glean, however, the impression Kapoor gives of why he paints points to something perhaps less intellectual than it is romantic: based on the notion that an artist should be constantly working away at something, in the spirit of his oft-quoted heroes from the era of Abstract Expressionism.

“What does Pollock do?” Kapoor asks. “He gets paint, which I think of as blood and seed, especially in association with him, and he does this thing. He pours it all over the ground again and again, every day, in a kind of mad frenzy. And then what does he do? He takes this thing and puts it on the wall. When you see a good Pollock, it isn’t blood and seed anymore. It’s cosmic. That’s the artist’s role in the end, isn’t it? Fundamental, alchemical transformation.”

There is an event to celebrate the opening of the Manfrin, with canapés handed out in the main room under At the Edge of the World, a giant bell-like sculpture hanging from the ceiling. Standing under it, everything grows quieter as the sound is absorbed upwards. Midway through the evening, a woman comes forward. I miss the start of what she says, but my understanding is she is going to do a performance of some kind. She asks everyone if we could please turn off our phones, although this is not an obligation; she only wants to encourage us to be present.

Without further ado, the woman bursts into song. It turns out she is an opera singer and her voice, already powerful and overwhelming, is only enhanced by the resonance of the bell’s dark interior; she lies down on the floor to better direct her voice into its maw. With this simple addition of sound, the void above us changes: it is no longer passive and inert but alive. It’s beautiful, but for some reason it fills with me dread too, as though any minute now the void is going to come down and consume us all, enraged by its abrupt awakening.

The woman pauses to catch her breath. As if perfectly timed, there comes another noise from someplace else. Somebody’s phone is ringing. The woman laughs, the illusion is broken; the void once again recedes.

Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Anish Kapoor is on display at the Hayward Gallery until 18th October