Beyond the Void

“Marsyas, to me, is the artist who has a vision to match that of the gods”, says Kapoor. “The taking off of skin has several layers of meaning and the form is like being in the body”.

Not a narrative artist? “I have nothing to say as an artist!” Kapoor insists firmly. “Art is useless, pointless, with no intrinsic value. But when it is good, it is magic, a psycho-symbolic world beyond the individual”.

A what? “An unspoken metaphor, a phenomenological experience, as opposed to narrative art”. Oh.

It is also Kapoor’s opinion that, “Beauty can only be recognised when what is beautiful or what is deemed beautiful isn’t overpowered with content. That somehow, in a constructed and reconstructed process, beauty makes itself so it isn’t a static quality”.

Does he mean that figurative is bunk? That true beauty lies in less form and more in non-form, that is then form-freed-from-form?

“I tend to see two kinds of art in India,” says Kapoor judiciously. “Since “contemporary influence” affected all cultures including India in the 19th century, the narrative tradition has dominated modern Indian art since the Tagores – whom I admire enormously, by the way. The other tradition is the unspoken metaphor. I think I am part of the latter tradition”.

Huge concave mirrors, 20 tons of Vaseline churned and smoothened by a moving metal arm, monster tubing, geometric shapes, a white wall that bulges pregnantly are some of the plain but powerful shapes that Kapoor creates, always in the ‘total context’ of the space around them, the reflections they catch as sky mirrors or even a big red dome inside the Hayward Gallery, called ‘The Edge of the World’ (1998) that disorients the hapless viewer, always flinging her into larger contexts, deeper meanings, awesome possibilities about the meaning of things by shape, scale, placement and intensity. Kapoor loves to use the colour red, that comes from India and takes you there. His shapes are not obvious but contain deep holes, womb-like and mysterious, frightening yet alluring, invitations to beyond the void. Extremely sexual, in fact. “I’m not coy about that”, says Kapoor. “The makers of modern form like Brancusi or Mies van der Rohe designed extruding forms. That is no longer possible. I go inside out, down into the dark hole. No rockets”.

But the “meta-context” (hidden meaning) is an important place to be for Kapoor, who cheerfully admits to being more than 12 years in analysis, “To excavate my own mind, after the trauma of coming to Britain in 1973 to study art at Chelsea”. Otherwise, this 1954-born Piscean had a “normal” enough life: Navy father, Iraqi Jew mother, Doon School, cosmopolitan life in Mumbai. German (Catholic) wife Suzanne, eight-year-old daughter Alba (whose name means ‘Dawn’, like Anish), six-year-old son Ishan, home in London’s Notting Hill, studio in Camberwell. “My India show will happen in Mumbai-Delhi in early 2005. I’m very emotional about being in India. It is my homeland!”