On the sublime in the work of Anish Kapoor by Camile van Winkle

De Pont, Tilburg, April 1995. The first two works in Anish Kapoor's exhibition are located on two parallel walls in adjoining rooms. One consists of a large convex form protruding from the wall – a bulge that is identical to the wall in terms of colour, material and texture. Here the architecture creates the impression of being a living organism; the protrusion, whose presence is initially only betrayed by a soft shadow, turns the wall into a living body that threatens to expand beyond the limits of the containable. The second work confronts the viewer with an aperture, in a manner that lends a sexual connotation to the impression of corporality. It consists of a rectangular surface of aluminium, embedded in the wall, whose centre is an oval-shaped cavity that extends deep into the wall surface. Those who catch themselves making sexual associations before these works will initially be inclined to suppress them, until having had a look at the title of the former work: When I Am Pregnant. Such associations are evidently not at all inconsistent with the intentions of the artist.

Cavernous spaces into which the body is drawn have been used before by Kapoor in an entirely different manner, in two works that have been on view at De Pont since 1992. These installations are situated in two small, adjacent spaces which had a storage function in the former wool-spinning mill. On entering the first room, one finds an entirely white space in which no point of interest whatsoever emerges, except for a round black surface on the floor. By approaching this black circle and eventually looking down at it, one undergoes the sensation that the flat surface is suddenly consumed by a sucking depth. The circle turns out to be the opening to an apparently fathomless cavity in the floor, from which light can scarcely escape; painted with an intensely saturated blue-black pigment, the depth and extent of the cavity are impossible to perceive. The floor on which one is standing seems to be no more than a few centimetres thick. The prospect of disappearing, through this hole, into an unforeseen underworld - to which the title of the work, Descent into Limbo, moreover refers - can result in a panicky feeling, an ambiguous mixture of fear and desire.

In the second small room, the doorway to which is partially screened off, total darkness seems to fill the entire space. One must slowly come closer and allow one's eyes to adapt gradually to the darkness, then suddenly, without the saturation of blackness actually being disrupted, to see not only the outline of the room's floor loom forth, but also that of an enormous, nocturnal blue orb, hovering in the space. Those who see this work for the first time experience a kind of phenomenological shock, induced by the ominous nature of the sight and its discrepancy, in terms of scale and spatial orientation, with one's own body.

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In the many articles and essays that have been written about Anish Kapoor over the past few years, the importance of sensuality and corporality to the possible meanings of his work has indeed been widely acknowledged. Strangely enough, this occurs in a manner which, in turn, largely weakens those aspects: by way of abstractions, they are raised to an immaterial level. The references to Eastern religions and philosophies are numerous; many authors seek to relate formal or structural elements in Kapoor's work to cultic or symbolic imagery.'[1] For artists with (partially) non-Western origins, it still seems to be inevitable that their work is explained in ethnic or semi-ethnic terms. Kapoor himself is not pleased with this. The unwanted cliches with which he is confronted time and again are predictable and surprisingly one-sided.'[2]

Although most authors acknowledge the significance of the void as a key element in Kapoor's work, it is remarkable that their speculations seem to be directed at the very negation of that intimidating emptiness as they fill it with metaphysical ideas and categories. The impact which Kapoor's work has often had on its audience leads one to suspect, however, that the denotative levels of meaning are always accompanied by more immediate effects. The preference of most authors for immaterial references supersedes the physical and sexual associations that can be evoked by the sculptures. The fact that these less 'high-minded' aspects of the work often remain underrated or even undiscussed, while they certainly constitute an important part of the work, is reason to give them special consideration. But the objective here is not to replace one incomplete view with yet another, rather to correct a certain imbalance in existing interpretations of the artist's work.

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In a number of interviews, Kapoor has done his best to clear up a few of the misunderstandings, particularly where the exotic interpretation of his work is concerned. But his statements also point to an ambiguity as to whether some of his references are of a spiritual or corporeal nature. On various occasions he has voiced his intention to evoke a 'sublime' experience. Such an intention could, at first glance, serve to justify the previously mentioned metaphysical interpretations. However, for Anish Kapoor the sublime experience is always linked with primary physical and psychological sensations. In connection with this he says, the void has many presences. Its presence as fear is towards the loss of self. from a non-object to a non-self, the idea of being somehow consumed by the object, or in the non-object, in the body, in the cave, in the womb, etc.
“I have always been drawn to a notion of fear, towards a sensation of vertigo, of falling, of being pulled inwards. This is a notion of the sublime which reverses the picture of union with light. This is an inversion, a sort of turning inside-out. This is a vision of darkness. Fear is a darkness, of which the eye is uncertain, towards which the hand turns in hope of contact, and in which only the imagination has the possibility of escape.”[3]

The sublime, as a designation of a specific emotional sensation, has a long history in Romanticism which goes back to the eighteenth-century philosophers Kant and Burke. Within this tradition, the sublime is presumed to arise from a feeling of insignificance in the face of nature's superior force and the immeasurable dimensions of the universe. The sublime has to do with the unequal relationship between individual human existence and the surrounding world, and with man's inability to have an overall view and command of the forces that prevail in it. The awareness of his own vulnerability and insignificance leads, first of all, to a basic form of fear and dislocation. In the words of Burke: 'Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.'[4]

Secondly, however, when those who experience this do not actually have to fear for their lives, the sublime manifests itself as an aesthetic experience. Whereas the experience of beauty is a harmonious, orderly and pleasurable sensation, the aesthetics of the sublime contain a mixture of wariness and bliss: 'not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, or [a] sort of tranquillity tinged with terror.'[5]

When an artist such as Anish Kapoor voices the intention of evoking a sublime experience with his work, the Romantic interpretation of that idea is not, however, automatically applicable. As is indicated by his statement quoted above, Kapoor aspires to a reversed version of sublimity, a variant that is not directed so much upward, toward a divine light, as downward, at the darkness of a prehistoric or prenatal hollow, in which one is solely dependent on one's own resources. Fundamental, if not existential forms of uncertainty become manifest in this dark space as conditioned feelings of fear: acrophobia, claustrophobia and the fear of darkness. In this Kapoor's ultimate concern lies not with the effects themselves, but with bringing about a heightened sensibility on the part of the viewer, who suddenly becomes aware of losing his safe distance from the object of his observation.

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A genre which, conversely, does turn such effects into its main ingredient - in a sensational, reifying and often crude way - is horror. Horror could be regarded as a phenomenon which, through evoking combinations of rapture and abhorrence, cleverly explores, if not to say exploits, the potential for a contemporary experience of the sublime in Western culture. Although primarily a form of entertainment, horror's blunt effectiveness is partly to be explained by its tapping of collective fears and desires. Several authors have convincingly pointed out the wealth of hidden meanings stored beneath the surface of horror films, and the extent to which the fixed formulas that are continually reworked and refined in the genre have moral implications in the realm of sexuality, role patterns, the power and powerlessness of the individual and so on.[6]

Those who already had intensely visceral associations on becoming acquainted with such works as When I Am Pregnant (1992) and Untitled (1995), or had to think of images of a magical subterranean world when faced with Descent into Limbo (1992), could arrive at the idea that these works are aimed at the same 'dark' aspects of the sublime as those which horror films try to evoke. Still, without due restraint, it would obviously be going much too far to approach the work of Anish Kapoor in terms of horror and the horror film. His work emanates a tranquillity and a purity that lift it above the realm of the mundane. Paradoxically, he seeks to represent a domain of immateriality in and through a substantial material presence and to create an integrated sensation: a union of man with his senses and, via the senses, with an isolated and purified part of his spatial environment. It is this paradox of material immateriality that makes Kapoor's work appeal to the critical imagination. By contrast, the unconstrained (and pictorial) illusionism of horror film is more commonly a vehicle for melodramatic fantasy.

Moreover, Kapoor's work does not conform to the prescribed formulas of a genre - on the contrary, it seems, in fact, to elude the very differentiations between such disciplines as sculpture, painting and architecture. Kapoor seems to search for ways to express a truth that escapes not only the reach of words, but also the conventional scope of any particular traditional discipline.

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The specific contemporary experience of the sublime to which Kapoor aspires in his work therefore contains more nuances and levels than that which may be illustrated through an analogy with the horror genre. In addition, the overall link between horror and sublimity demands further specification. For even though, generally speaking, the sublime is horrifying, not everything horrifying can pass as the sublime. Horror and sublimity are to be regarded as two separate categories of experience, which overlap each other only in part. For a better understanding of Kapoor's work, the nature of this overlap - amounting to a subcategory of the sublime that coincides with a subcategory of the horrifying - would have to be defined and described in more detail. An essay by Sigmund Freud from 1919 suggests how this intermediate area, designated by him as 'the uncanny' (Das Unheimliche), could be approached.

The uncanny, a phenomenon which had already acquired popularity as a notion in eighteenth-century Romanticism, has taken on crucial psychological connotations with the help of Freud. Burke associated the uncanny with the obscure side - the nocturnal face - of the sublime. Hegel referred to it as a preoccupation with unknown forces which hold a terrifying but undecipherable truth.'[7] In certain respects, the uncanny clearly distinguishes itself from sublimity in general. Whereas the sublime can be a quality of vast open spaces, the uncanny is more frequently associated with cramped and dark interiors, whose leading prototypes are the haunted house, the cellar, the coffin and the womb. They are filled with '[the space] of silence, solitude, of internal confinement and suffocation, that mental space where temporality and spatiality collapse. The vertigo of the sublime is placed side by side with the claustrophobia of the uncanny.' [8] The safe partition between the individual and the 'landscape' of sublimity becomes blurred when the experience assumes uncanny features.[9]

While the uncanny has thus been referred to as a subcategory of the sublime since Romanticism, Freud states that it is also a subcategory of the horrifying: a quality of some, but not all, fearsome phenomena. An essential aspect of Freud's interpretation is that das Heimliche and das Unheimliche (literally translated, the homely and the unhomely) are actually very closely related: when the memory or the imagination of that which is Heimlich is suppressed or overcome, it turns into its antithesis: ' ... among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; ... this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.( ..) the uncanny [is] something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.' [10] Freud moreover makes the distinction of two variations. Particular instances of the uncanny are to be linked with primitive, superstitious beliefs of our ancestors that we ourselves supposedly managed to overcome long ago, beliefs such as 'the omnipotence of thoughts, the prompt fulfilment of wishes, secret injurious powers and the return of the dead.(..) we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.'[11] The second variation, which can easily cross over into the other, is said to stem from repressed infantile complexes. The fear of darkness and, following from this, the fear of being buried alive by mistake – which, to some people, Freud says, is 'the most uncanny thing of all' – are described as the 'transformation of a phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness – the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.' [12] Repressed feelings of nostalgia for the initial stage of life in the womb could, according to the Freudian line of reasoning, explain why neurotic men often experience the sight of the female genital organs as something very uncanny. 'In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar.' [13]

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Kapoor's fascination with uncanny phenomena such as blank mirrors, bottomless black holes, invaginated or bulging walls and womb–like cavities could be worked into a Freudian-oriented argument without much difficulty. But in doing so we would be making the same mistake as that for which other interpreters mentioned above have been criticized: with such abstract notions, we would be filling up the void – the hollow space at the centre of the work – and would thereby negate it. Freud's essay on the uncanny is just as much an artefact, a culturally and historically determined product, as Descent into Limbo and When I Am Pregnant.

At first glance Anish Kapoor seems to have an absolute and unconditional faith in the directness of sensory perception. Perhaps this cannot be considered unusual for a visual artist, but it is nonetheless remarkable that someone employs a notion such as 'the sublime' as a timeless, universal given that would be immediately perceptible to the senses, as a phenomenon that would also be operative without the mediation of cultural and semantic contexts, without ideological frameworks that evoke, accompany and give meaning to one's need and experience of it. At first glance, therefore, an irreconcilable gap seems to exist, in terms of ideas as well as work, between Kapoor and, for example, the American artist Mike Kelley, who likewise has dealt extensively with the sublime and has said the following about it: '[The Sublime] broaches those ideas of infinity, or ideas of loss of self, or ideas of nothing - which are all language and syntactic constructs that use the limits of language to set up a situation that actually doesn't exist, but can exist through language, like the whole concept of infinity itself. You can use that to test the boundaries of your own thought, and thus throw yourself into an orgasm, a religious orgasm.' [14]

Unlike Kelley, Kapoor tries to evoke the sublime, or the uncanny, in a transcendent form – a form that goes beyond all particulars linked with time, place and language. He aims to intensify the experience of 'the here and now' by making work that 'does not suggest a past or a future', [15] and with that evidently makes use of an aesthetic that refers less to an Asiatic religious culture than to the metaphysical tradition within modern art. (The name of Barnett Newman is regularly mentioned in connection with Kapoor.) This aesthetic tradition professes to have stepped out of history, though from a sociological point of view, this is scarcely the case. [16] Driven by a profound distrust of language and of anecdotal and narrative representations, it purports to be the bearer of a spirituality that has finally passed the stages of heathen mythology and sacred symbolism.

On the other hand, perhaps one can justifiably speculate that the effect of Kapoor's art, aside from being a consequence of the immediate evocation of uncanny feelings, is at least equally founded on our acquaintance with the Freudian interpretation of such feelings and with the cultural and historical context from which that interpretation has arisen. Perhaps it is no longer even possible for a contemporary viewer to distinguish that indirect meaning from the immediate effect.

The strong impact of Kapoor's sculpture could be taken to support the claim that his artistic enterprise is grounded in certain timeless and universally valid psychological phenomena. However, the opposite conclusion is possible as well: that his work, despite its transcendent aesthetic, partly parallels specific types of imagery which as hidden persuaders, are deeply embedded in contemporary visual culture. Implicitly playing a prominent role in that culture, the uncanny could be regarded not so much as a purely psychological phenomenon but, on the contrary, as something that has merged with its own interpretations - as a phenomenon which, having become imbued in the course of this century with all types of derivative versions of Freudian theory, can now be 'unconsciously' experienced and appreciated by almost anyone.

What makes the uncanny so interesting and yet so controversial as an idea is that it cuts straight across all classifications of serious and popular culture. In applying it to the work of Anish Kapoor, it offers the possibility of going beyond the seeming discrepancy between the denotative level of his work and the irrational associative response, so that room can be made for an integrated account which does not make unfounded use of universal principles.

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