Kapoor, a Manufactured Emptiness

One

There is one circle on the wall.

It is red.

Very red.
Redder than any red seen so far.

Tamayo's red had soil mixed into it.
Munch's red flowed.

This red is not mixed with anything.

It is pure.

Come close and the surface is powder.

It was not painted but scattered.
Pigment powder sits on it as it is.

Touch it and it would come off.

The middle of the circle is strange.

It is darker.

It seems deep.

But there is no telling whether it is shadow or hole.

Step one pace to the side.

Seen from the side it is the same.
If it were shadow it would change with the angle.

It does not change.

It is a hole.

The wall was cut into and the inside was made dark.

It was made so that the depth cannot be judged.

In another room there is a black circle on the floor.

It looks like a carpet.
It looks flat.

In fact it is a hole cut into the floor.

A hole made to look flat.

People often mistake such work for shadow.

It is built so that they cannot help mistaking it.

This chapter begins here.

This emptiness is exact.

Two

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in India.

In Mumbai.

His father was Indian and his mother was from a Jewish family that had come from Iraq.

In 1973 he went to London.

He was about twenty.

He studied art there and stayed there.

He still works in London.

In the early period he worked with pigment powder.

He made small forms and scattered colored powder over them.
He scattered it on the floor as well.

Red, yellow, blue.

Very intense color.

India has a long custom of using colored powder.

It is used in rites, pressed to the forehead, scattered.

His color is not unrelated to that.

After that he went to emptiness.

He cut holes in stone.
He cut into walls and cut into floors.

He made the inside very dark and erased the depth.

He used mirrors as well.

Concave mirrors, convex mirrors.

There are enormous mirror pieces set in city squares.

People look at themselves in front of them.

For a period he stood at the center of a discussion over a very black material.

It was a substance that ate almost all light.
He held the exclusive right to use it in the field of art.

Other artists raised an objection.

The question was whether one person can hold a color exclusively.

That argument is not yet settled.

This book does not rule on it.

It only sets it down.

In his work color and emptiness are made, and what is made can be owned.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

His emptiness is designed.

Look back at the three before him.

Bada Shanren's void was paper.
A place that comes into being when the brush is not set down.

Williams's void was ground.
A place that comes into being when the same thing runs wide.

Turner's void was air.
A place that comes into being when moisture dissolves form.

All three voids came out of conditions.

They were already in that land before the painter did anything.

Kapoor's emptiness is not so.

It was calculated.

The angle is measured, the depth is set, the reflectance is matched.

It has to be exactly that dark for the depth to disappear.
A little brighter and it looks like a hole; a little darker and it looks like a stain.

He finds and fits the narrow place between.

This is close to engineering.

And it is no land's emptiness.

It is not London's emptiness and not Mumbai's.

Set it anywhere and it is the same.

This is the counter-evidence of this part.

A void can be made without fūdo.

Two things follow.

First, material and form come apart.

His pigment touches what is Indian.

And he does not live in India.

The material comes from one land and the form from elsewhere.

This separation is his position.

It resembles Gauguin, whom we will see later, and is not the same.

Gauguin goes to another people's land and paints that land.

Kapoor takes the material of his own land and lives in another's.

The direction is reversed.

Second, emptiness becomes a matter of perception.

The void of fūdo says where.

This void is paper.
This void is mist.
This void is wind.

Kapoor's emptiness says nothing of that kind.

It asks what we are looking at.

Shadow or hole.
Plane or depth.

It shows that the eye can be wrong.

The question is not place. It is perception.

So his work lies outside the frame of this book.

Better not to pull what is outside inside.

Only one thing can be said.

Rootlessness too becomes a condition.

In the last part we saw Chusa.

Form came out of a place where fūdo was cut off.

Kapoor's case is of another kind.

He stands across two lands and belongs wholly to neither.

That is his condition.

And out of that condition came an emptiness belonging nowhere.

It is not that there is no condition. The condition is of that kind.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

This encounter is different in character from the earlier ones.

What is alike is hard to find.

One man made sculpture and the other painted.
One is precise and the other drew by hand.

So look at the difference first.

A manufactured emptiness and a void left behind.

Kapoor's emptiness is perfect.

There is no gap.
The calculation holds.

Byun Shi-Ji's void is rough.

The places the brush passed remain and the color is uneven.

Before a perfect emptiness, what does a person see.

He sees himself.

If it is a mirror he sees his face; if it is a hole he learns his eye was wrong.

Either way it returns to himself.

Before a rough void, what does a person see.

He sees wind.

It does not return to him.
He looks over there.

One turns inward and the other sends outward.

There is a second difference.

Kapoor's work can be set anywhere.

It can be set in London, in Chicago, in Seoul.

The place is not inside the work.

So it is read anywhere.

Byun Shi-Ji's surface carries Jeju with it.

Hung in Seoul it is Jeju; hung in Tokyo it is Jeju.

The place is inside the work.

So knowing that place lets it be read further.

Here one may recall Munch from Part One.

The Scream was no land's story, so it was read in every land.

The same structure.

Art without place goes wide and art with place goes deep.

Which is better, going wide or going deep, need not be asked.

Both have to exist.

There is a third difference.

Kapoor's emptiness does not let a person inside.

One can look in.
One cannot enter.

Enter and it is no longer emptiness.

In Byun Shi-Ji's void a person is already inside.

An old man stands within it.

There is a person in the place where the wind blows.

A surface with no person in the empty place and a surface with a person in it.

This is the largest difference in this part.

With no person in the void, the void is the master.
With a person in the void, the person is the master.

Kapoor's emptiness is the work itself.

Byun Shi-Ji's void is a place for the old man to stand in.

The purpose differs.

Five

The middle of the red circle is dark.

There is no telling how deep it goes.

Look in and there is nothing.
Only that there is nothing is exactly there.

On the surface of a distant island there is an empty field.

Look in and there is wind.
And an old man is standing.

It is not that there is nothing.

The two emptinesses are different things.

A made emptiness and a left void.

What is the empty place the place of.

Four answers came out of this part.

The place of what is gone.
The place where the same thing repeated.
The place of what was erased.
The place that was made.

The third gate closes this way.

The empty place also has kinds.