May 01, 2015

ANISH KAPOOR: THE ARTIST IN THE ECHO CHAMBER OF HISTORY




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 Ghostsin 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.

And by your shores I saw the cities bloom, The noble cities, where industry keeps silent in the workplace, Saw knowledge, where your sun Gently enlightens the artist to be earnest. [Und an den Ufern sah ich die Städte blühn, Die Edlen, wo der Fleiß in der Werkstatt schweigt, Die Wissenschaft, wo deine Sonne Milde dem Künstler zum Ernste leuchtet.] [3]




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 EvilWilliam 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










UNTITLED ( RED DISH ) 2011
Resin & Fiberglass
Dimensions: 135 cm Diameter
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © 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
Exhibition view “Anish Kapoor & James Lee Byars”, Kamel Mennour
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
Exhibition view “Anish Kapoor & James Lee Byars”, Kamel Mennour
Photo. Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris






DETAIL 2010
Cement
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







COSMOBIOLOGY 2013
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




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




CAVE 2012
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




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
© Anish Kapoor
Courtesy the Artist and De Pont Museum






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).