Reflections on the work of Anish Kapoor by Christopher Bollas.
A continuous trope runs through Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, of dreaming. To read Pessoa’s evocative fragments is to feel that the dream is our true (m)other, nourishing us endlessly with presences, objects and emotions. Even if when we dream we “have no reality, not even [our] own”, gently bemused by the crafting of absurdities, seeing “things of which visibility cannot even conceive”, Pessoa insists that we are faced with the oddness of being human. With our knowledge of these strange depths, do we dare consider how invisible we are to one another, how little we know about, and understand, one another? Even when we talk to one another, “we each hear only a voice inside us”, and our inner thoughts when put into words become “shipwrecks in our understanding”.
Kapoor often dreams his works in geometric shapes. Triangles. Orbs. Huge, undulating tubes. Gourds. Even his rock formations are protean forms, perhaps on their way to some remarkable reshaping that will transform them into something altogether different. I am reminded of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Never have so many distinctly still objects moved in such a way. Perhaps their movement is owed simply to our knowledge that these objects have been shaped. That, in some secret chamber of mind and physical space, a human hand has conducted them in a peculiar Music of the Spheres only to then deposit them, perfectly still, within the formality of a presentation space.
A Kapoor exhibition, gives the viewer the opportunity to inhabit this kind of dream-work, as if permitted to view the secrets of unconscious thought itself. However, just as Kapoor’s physical presence would be misleading—and just as, while we may appear in our own dreams, the intelligence that creates the dream does not—the unconscious from which Kapoor’s work is forged will not, in fact, reveal itself, even if its aesthetic intelligence is fully present. This perhaps explains how these works put us within the unconscious in a more natural, familiar manner than those of the Surrealists, for example, who saw the dreamscape as a psycho-romantic text of meanings blending and weaving through its menagerie of objects. By contrast, the meanings of Kapoor’s juxtapositions are less prescriptive, less narrative, their suggestive intent more open in terms of the viewer’s creative encounter with them. Their quiet placement thus leaves the mind of the wanderer to more authentically realise the enigmatic energy that a dream releases.
The titles Kapoor gives his works may offer us clues to the thinking that has born them, even if they sometimes seem incongruous, such as 1000 Names (1979–80). These mysterious groupings of pigmented forms appear morphed in other works that carry other names, as if stressing that the word and the thing are linked only by a passing affinity. This evanescent quality of these objects thus elides all comparison, even if the creator now and then names them.