Blackness of Red: Anish Kapoor and the Sublimation of the Flesh by Giuseppe Civitarese

Be – and know at the same time the condition of not-being, the eternal reason for your inner vibration, so that you accomplish it fully this one time.
R. M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus



There are countless times when Anish Kapoor confronts the viewer with squares, rectangles, rhombuses, ellipses, circles. What these geometric figures evoke are the primordial forms of bodily experience. At the birth of the child, the first germs of symbolisation are generated in a purely sensory (aesthetic) and intersubjective dimension. Punctiform pressure on the skin identifies a point; if it persists, gradually it centrifugally spreads to a larger area, producing infinite concentric circles; if the same pressure moves in a constant direction, it draws a line. It doesn’t take long to realise that point, line, and surface, and all their reciprocal combinations, are only schematic representations of sensibility, and therefore already in some way abstract or simplified.

The first glimmer of subjectivity coincides with the sensation of a calming quality that is created at the point where the mouth comes into contact with the breast or two cheeks touch.[2] The same is true of sight. An ideal line connects my pupil to the dot of an object[3] as it comes towards me or recedes away from me. In the same way, I place myself as an individual at the centre of the circle defined by all the perspectives that radiate from the place I occupy. To the perception of external forms is added the emotional and then also intellectual intuition of the landscapes of the inner world.

To these elementary geometric shapes, Kapoor associates monochromatic colours: predominantly red and black. Colours lend themselves more readily than shapes to represent not only proto-sensations but also proto-emotions (in this example, the pleasant quality of contact between two epidermises). In short, he studies the elementary forms of sensibility, the mystery of sentient flesh. Like a scientist passionately investigating nature, but using the tools of an artist, his aim is to identify what differentiates the inorganic from the organic but also what they have in common. If, like things, flesh is made of matter, the key issue is its perishability, the red that turns to black.

For Kapoor, as for us all, the paradox that never ceases to shock is that the disturbing blackness of finitude, represented by mere matter (‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’[4]), is immanent to ‘red’, that is, to life. It represents not only its limit but also its inextinguishable prerequisite, its true origin. We have thus moved on to a different meaning of the relationship between black and red, this time one that is openly symbolic. In the works of Kapoor these two colours engage in an endless conversation whose ultimate meaning for us is to make visible what he himself has called powerful darkness (blackness)[5] or, in the words of Rilke, the not-being that inhabits red.

Leaving aside the question of how he arrived at these expressive choices, the impression Kapoor gives is of constantly swinging back and forth from red to black and from black to red. In other words, from the visible red of blood to the black of the atoms that form matter, and then back again. The four terms I just mentioned can be intertwined in a chiasmus: colour (c) → inanimate matter (m) → living matter (m’) → colour (c’). More precisely, Kapoor can be said to move incessantly within the circuit carved out by this ingenious rhetorical figure.

There is a key idea that guides him in his artistic quest. Somehow, he explains, the art object must be dangerous (‘Really make it dangerous’). Only in this way will we understand the travails of material and psychic birth and come to realize, with Freud,[6] that that which is negative in life — namely the transience of all things — constitutes the essence of beauty.

Apart from colour and geometric shapes, another element that Kapoor uses to introduce this element of danger — otherwise, if you don’t risk anything, why bother going to exhibitions and museums? — is his predilection for works that overwhelm the viewer, works that are even gigantic, such as Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013), Death of the Leviathan (2011–2013), Ascension (2003) or Howl (2020). To anticipate: Kapoor embraces one of the principles of the romantic aesthetics of the sublime: the will to stage the disproportion between the finiteness of human beings and the infinity of nature. If, conversely, the works are not actually immense, we can sometimes deduce their vastness from the counterpoint with human figurines inserted expressly into the composition, much in the way that architects do when they make models of the buildings they design.

When, on the other hand, they rest on the ground, we are easily led to imagine that they represent only the small, visible portion of something much larger and hidden at some deeper level.

However, when these enigmatic objects are kept in glass cases, they have the appearance of fossil specimens stolen by space explorers and brought to earth from distant planets. With their reduced proportions and without parameters that inform us about the scale of the mysterious element from which they come and of which they represent only a minimal fraction, they nevertheless continue to evoke immense volumes and infinite distances.

It is not only their size that gives the impression of enormity and thus suggests vital risk. Like splinters of solidified lava, they contain within themselves a fire that could at any moment flare up again with unprecedented force. Not infrequently, we witness the spectacle of the energy compressed in matter that erupts again with violence. The volcanic crater of the object slowly begins to emit black smoke, until there is an explosion of gas and lapilli.

However, with his technique of creating oversized sculptures and installations, Anish Kapoor also summons up a world, no less dangerous for us, of simple and infinitely small elements (Democritean atoms, gluons, neutrinos, muons...) that are, as it were, ready to come into contact with and to merge into new and more complex forms. For this reason, he can nonchalantly call them ‘idiotically silly’, ‘ridiculously simple’, or, ‘someway beyond rational’.

In his minimalist obsession, which accordingly disregards the concrete measurements of the work of art, Kapoor adopts the Husserlian motto ‘to return to the things themselves’, the golden principle of any phenomenology. The tactic is to look at things as if he were looking at them for the first time[7]; the strategy is to awaken his and our amazement at their presence.

We come to suppose that the ‘flesh of the world’ is made from such proto-forms. With this expression, Merleau-Ponty[8] points to an original whole from which ‘visibility’ gradually emerges — but which is not to be understood as if it immediately involved an already human sensibility. Rather, it is to be imagined as a field of physical forces that interact with each other since they are equipped with variable points of application, intensities and directions; and also as a field of bodies that can come into contact, collide, shatter, and re-group. This is how in local areas of the real the folds of being[9] are constituted, the first forms of reflection of matter on itself, without ever severing the roots that connect them to the common ground. In the undifferentiated ‘real’ there develops a general capacity for self-affection in an initially anonymous form. After the final transmutation into language, this capacity will also become the basis for the sensitivity now claimed by a fully human subject — a subject that knows she exists.

From an evolutionary and phylogenetic perspective, all this will also become sensitive flesh in the common meaning of the term (capable of seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, etc.). That’s why, besides the expression ‘flesh of the world’, used to indicate this process of ascent to the spirit, it is also useful to recall another expression coined by Merleau-Ponty — ‘sublimation of the flesh’. Ambiguous enough to bring together the reference to sexuality contained in the Freudian concept of sublimation and the ‘sexuality’ of matter implied in the concept of the flesh of the world, in my opinion the concept of the sublimation of the flesh lends itself beautifully to reference the way in which Kapoor constantly interweaves these two domains of being — the material side and the spiritual side.

In the world of art we find many examples where these two aspects are perfectly fused. Think of the transformation we admire in Bernini’s marvellous Apollo and Daphne (1622–25). The myth tells us that the figure of Daphne embodies the inverse phenomenon to the sublimation of the flesh. The direction of the race, however, might also suggest that it is matter that turns into living substance. It is as if the girl is emerging from a purely natural world that she is leaving behind.

Calling matter ‘flesh’, when it is not yet so, has then the sense of revealing a general principle that has always been at work in nature: between things and living beings there are no voids but only different and constantly varying degrees of continuity. As physics has taught us, in the Universe there are no isolated particles but only continuous substances similar to fluids, known as quantum fields.

The image of fluids is perfectly apt for works such as Destierro (2017), in which pigments are merely piled up and completely shapeless. We see, however, that albeit in a crude way, the container that holds them already carries out a kind of filtering and selection — effectively, a sort of ‘epidermal contact’, similar to the one we saw earlier, but between merely material objects. Sometimes displayed within the same frame, the piles of pigments, some of which are scattered all around like dust but which are mostly gathered into well-ordered and defined shapes White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers, 1982), indicating the start of agglutination, silently converse with the quiet and firm compactness of perfectly cohesive and defined sculptures. Their conversation is silent, but no less meaningful for that.

In an Untitled work of 1975, various objects lying on the floor around the plaster silhouette of a human body are connected by lines drawn by steel rays. On the other hand, in Eternal Bonds (1977) other objects, sticks that expand at the top into bulb-heads, thus forming hyperstylised human figures, cast their shadows on two white walls at an angle, foreshadowing the existence of a shadow world alongside the world of light.

Thus, the dialectical opposition between black and red (inanimate matter and living substance) in some way or other recurs at various levels.

First, at the level of mere matter, before the appearance of living substance.

Then, at the level of what comes before the birth and after the death of the psychophysical substance of each individual. The structure that is hidden beneath the apparently sacred perfection of triangles, rectangles and circumferences is — we deduce — the same as that of mere matter. Alongside works that seem to belong to the ideal realm of geometry, and therefore call to mind the rational pole of the subject, others exhibit a rough, irregular, spongy, granular skin, and suggest instead a more immediately sensory pole. I am thinking of Archaeology and Biology, (2007), of 1000 Names (1979-1980), and of the bits of red wax that fall to the floor after having been transported upwards by special ribbons in Symphony for the Beloved Sun.

What we realize, in short, is that Kapoor’s artistic production constantly radiates a force that tugs us backwards in time and simultaneously projects us into the future. On its most superficial, that is to say, simply cognitive level of meaning, this force corresponds to engaging in a debate on the mystery of origin, or rather, of our origins. If, however, it is true, as Merleau-Ponty[11] writes, that ‘every sensation is a birth and a death’, then the deeper meaning, on an affective and corporeal level, tends rather to transport us into the very heart of the event and, by interweaving the two essential dimensions of time, forces us to live the intensity of the now.

In his tireless research on colours, but also on shapes (which often have to be really imposing), like a painter who is not satisfied with drawing and painting on canvas, or like a sculptor who is not satisfied with extracting new figures from marble using the usual tools, but who feels an invincible urge to forge ever more versatile tools, undoubtedly what Kapoor aims at to achieve is intensity.

Black must be the blackest there is, and so must red, indigo blue, yellow or white (‘I think what I’m trying to find is so white that it’s whiter than white’12). The concentrated energy of colour, reflecting a process of densification and simultaneously of simplification of matter, reveals and coincides with a principle of the genesis of any material object or living being, or indeed of any ideal object.

In this way, colour does not remain just colour. Rather, it is transformed into a force that attracts, envelops and sucks in the gaze and body of the spectator. Pressing from the outside with sensations and from the inside with emotions, it shapes her so that she defines herself more and more as a completed subject and as a ‘work of art’[13]— and has a reciprocal effect on the artist through the conversation he holds with the public through his works. One could say the same thing for painting and art in general, although with Kapoor, as with Yves Klein and Mark Rothko,[14] to name the first names that come to mind, colour becomes an explicit protagonist.


Black as a de-hallucination

In a short but scintillating 1957 essay, Donald W. Winnicott describes a patient admitted to a psychiatric hospital who used to paint pictures and then cover them over in black. Another patient, a young schizophrenic, for a period of time did nothing but fill sheets of paper with black. Evidently, he assumed that underneath there was a figure to be erased (and sometimes, indeed there was). Either way, the idea that someone might be spying on their ghosts, evidently projected in the hallucination of figures hidden by black, or even of lines actually drawn but then erased, terrified them.

According to Winnicott, covering the paper with black seemed to be the way these patients dehallucinated; in other words, in his interpretation they erased the intolerable image unconsciously projected onto the paper (in reality, therefore, not from the paper but from the mind) or concretely transposed it into a drawing that was immediately expunged.

We would be wrong, however, to think of absolute erasure. The black continued to stand for the horrific emotion triggered by the hallucination. The underlying drawing could no longer be seen, and in most cases it had never actually been there; nevertheless, the black that covered it retained an essential quality. Albeit to a minimal extent, the individual was still able to stay in touch with his emotions and try to give them a personal meaning.

Covering the paper in black retained a symbolic link[15] with the non-representable and the non-visible. The gesture always sprang from an impulse to re-establish an activity of imagination and thought. At a molecular level, there subsisted the process of abstraction that underlies the very ability to think, to use signs, and to speak — by getting rid of stimuli that risks shattering the psyche.16

To our eyes, the game is paradoxical. In itself, the tear or cut is both the most extreme defence left to the individual in the face of horror and also — were it not so limited, as it is for the blind spot in the retina — the void of total lack of sense. Let us think of the slashes in the paintings of Lucio Fontana or the holes Alberto Burri burnt into the canvas, for example, Grande Rosso P. N. 18 (1964). We realise that if they continue to be significant, it is because they dialogue with the context of the canvas and the system of material and ideal frames that surrounds and contains it. In doing so, they tell us about the very process of sense-making.

Ultimately, the pathology of the blackness of Winnicott’s patients (‘pathology’ because in their case it involves such an exaggerated simplification of reality that they end up losing it) functions as a lens that helps us see clearly what is the nature of (presumed) normality. Behind the naturalness of the vision of things provided by our perception is hidden a constant process of dehallucination. In black we can see symbolised any mnestic trace that remains from the work of erasing (more or less effectively) the excess of sensoriality that the subject would otherwise not know how to contain. The raw emotional and sensory experience is filtered by the body at an immediately perceptual level; for this reason we can say that already in itself the trace is a kind of sensitive idea, embodied concept or proto-symbol.

In other words, there is no red without black. This is basically where the vicissitudes and struggles with the ghosts of the inner world can, as it were, be seen up against the light in Kapoor’s constructions. This is what the blackness of red does. It shakes our naive vision of things, and we realize the imaginary structure of reality. The conflict which physiologically defines our ability to represent, which Freud [17] describes by referring to the game played by his grandson — throwing away a toy and then retrieving it with a thread — and which Winnicott observes in his most severe patients, concerns everyone. In its dual function of both summoning up and at the same time exorcising the lack of meaning, black represents nothing less than the ‘work of the negative’ that underpins our ability to think.

Black stands for the absence of the object. One might think of it as absolute evil, but this is not always the case. Black is also the necessary pre-condition of the good represented by thought and self-awareness — provided, however, that it can be tolerated. The subject tolerates the negative-as-event if it is part of a happy rhythm of presence-absence. There is no original or proto-thought that is anything other than the embodied memory of a harmonious succession of experiences of frustration followed by experiences of gratification. We can clearly see the difference between the negative and the work of the negative. The former can only be a constitutive moment of the latter but only under certain conditions.

The power of language (and of thought) is formed from the same paradoxical fabric. In the sign the system of language keeps alive something that is not there; and instead, when it is concretely there, it makes it partially disappear in the abstraction necessary to represent it as an object. No immediate (full, total) contact is now possible but can only ever be mediated. It follows from all this that any intellectual or artistic representation of the negative that only captured the traumatic impact on the subject and not at the same time that which institutes it would be partial. What is disturbing is not violence but the violence necessary to exist. We understand why aesthetic experience is in essence ‘traumatophilic’.

Kapoor seduces us to explore the abysses of space-time, in a historical and current sense; for our part, this implies that we consent to ‘seeing’ our most horrible fears, the blackness that envelops the birth of all things and of ourselves. It is as if he were telling us: you will experience hallucinatory visions, but I promise you that my magic arts will enable this to happen while you still preserve your consciousness intact. The price to pay is that you are willing to be astonished, that you endure staying in a state of hallucinosis and that you do not retreat in fear when faced with ‘a world of dazzling beauty, power and threat’.[18] The benefit for you is that you will become what you are, but more so. The fact is that accepting the necessity of the negative causes us pain, but seeing it transfigured in art has a potentially redemptive value.


Black as limen

Black is therefore a limen, a threshold from which to look out over the abyss of non-sense. Art inhabits this thin narrow borderline. Its aim is to put us in contact with the ‘void and formless infinite’,[19] but without us falling into it, and thus to make us freer.

Each time, Anish Kapoor sets up a field of experience in which the viewer can be exposed to the malice of blackness while maintaining a safe distance; thus, both without being overwhelmed by the sensory and emotional experience, and without feeling compelled to amputate it completely, which would inhibit her psychic and emotional development. What preserves her from falling (out of nothingness) are the form, the context, since they have the same calming function as the skin-to-skin contact in the primary mother-child relationship I mentioned at the beginning.

What I am describing is the constitution of space and time.[20] It is immediately clear that there can be no spatiality that does not persist in time and no temporality that does not unfold in space. What Kapoor (and in general, all art that engages and moves us) offers visitors is nothing less than the possibility of establishing within themselves more authentic forms of space-time, that is, of being. At the same time, he makes them experience the shock which may be either of the violent dismantling or destruction of these categories of experience. It is, however, a ‘pleasant’ shock. As Benjamin[21] explains, shock is pleasant if there is a frame that transforms it into a lived experience. The frame is in a broad sense culture, language, sociality as an inherently intersubjective source of meaning and significance — in a more specific sense, it is form.

At all events, with either his gigantic or very small works, Kapoor evokes the process of abstraction that is at the basis of thought, both of the mind and of the body, that is, the depositing in the body and mind of simplified or, to be precise, abstract forms of experience: the Kapoor black, blacker than black circle in its container, as well as the internal object of the mind, that is, the model of infinite experiences of relationality with the object.

The visitor who moves through the museum space that houses these objects is, so to speak, transported back to the original stage when a new being faces the world. ‘Semiotic chora’, a spatiality made up of sensations that are always becoming, is the apt expression Julia Kristeva[22] coined to refer to it. Embracing the possibility of rebirth structured by the space of art is equivalent to testing oneself against the transparency of language, which forms the basis of self-awareness, but also against the relative indecipherability of intercorporeal dealings with others and with the living environment.

This is quite evident in Kapoor’s sculpture Untitled (1992), which calls to mind the door that seems to be almost on the point of turning to liquid in Magritte’s painting Unexpected Answer (1933). A block of sandstone in the form of a parallelepiped with irregular lines rises vertically from the ground, resting on its base. Inside it encloses a frame of the same shape but this time with perfect lines, as if to signify that by introjective identification a process of abstraction takes place in the passage from outside to inside. Finally, the same geometric form is repeated for a third time in the black surface of what seems to be a door of darkness — where by ‘darkness’ we can mean both the opacity of the body and of the affections, and the whole sphere of what we are not given to know. If we think of the primary relationship from which the first forms of human subjectivity originate, it also stands for the inscrutable nature of the object and in general, throughout life, of that which is other from oneself.

Similarly to this sculpture, Kapoor’s creations have the extraordinary intensity and immediacy of living presences. We contemplate them in the same way in which we scan the faces of loved ones when we wish to divine their secret intentions. It is the kind of contemplation that, to paraphrase Freud, always takes place in the cone of shadow cast by the object. This same darkness guarantees their brilliance. These objects exert a hypnotic pull on us that we cannot elude (nor would we want to) and that have the effect of increasing our vitality.

More than any other object, the aesthetic object captures the terrible imminence of the object,[23] at least until the subject is able to distance herself from it. What the aesthetic object and the object in the sense of a person to whom one is linked by an emotional bond (a tie of dependence) have in common is their ambiguity, and consequently the uncertainty they arouse in the subject. It is no accident that in a lecture Kapoor once confessed that in the presence of a new creation every time he asks himself the question: ‘What is this thing I have made here?’.

This question makes clear the sense of responsibility felt by the subject in the face of the object and the immediate impulse, dictated by guilt, to repair any possible damage that has caused in the unconscious fantasy. A certain amount of uncertainty also characterises the very act of artistic creation. The artist does not really control the creation of the work — no more, as Tolstoy describes it, than a general controls the way a battle evolves. Similarly, the painter’s gesture of executing a brushstroke expresses the impulse to move felt by the whole body; and certainly it is not the remnant-free translation of some abstract vision of the mind into an action that is in itself already perfectly conceived.

That Kapoor is pursued by the ghost of birth is not just an interpretative inference but a stated fact. When I am Pregnant (1992) is the semi-spherical extroversion of a circumscribed area of a wall, in total continuity with the surrounding plane, which is blindingly white. A dark force, obviously intended to remain invisible to the viewer, presses in on the other side of the wall. What kind of pregnancy is it? Is it Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Parturition or Ridley Scott’s Alien?

The extroversion is also an eyeball, an eye that looks at the person who is looking at it. In various works, for example Clip (2016), the vulva, especially where the dark line separating the vaginal lips is thinner, recalls the rim fissure of an eyelid (just as, in general, the black ‘hole’ suggests the virtuality of a pupil), but like the vertical, slit-like fissure of cats and reptiles, whose functional significance, as we know, is to sharpen sensitivity to a wider spectrum of light.

In Mother as a Mountain (1985), where it is self-evident that doors, holes, frames, cracks and cuts stand primarily, but obviously not exclusively, for the female sexual organs, here coloured in a dazzlingly intense red, it is perhaps the drawings on the studio wall that forms the backdrop to the exhibition that are more intriguing. Because of the play of combinations and dovetails between the various elements, but also because of the line that is at times marked and confident, but on other occasions tenuous almost to the point of disappearing, I like to think of these drawings as a conceptual and abstract transposition of a Leonardo Da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi (c.1482), to be found in the Uffizi, where even there are fully painted figures next to others only sketched, a work whose incompleteness lends it an expressive power that it would otherwise perhaps not possess.

The imaginative effort that inspired Kapoor to draw those shapes on the wall makes us wonder whether it does not originate in the need for reassurance about the secret intentions of the object felt by each individual. For the child, the question is to guess what is in the mother’s mind and what is inside her, what are the alchemical transformations that make for the mystery of conception and birth[24] — but also of the conception and birth of every new thought. To the extent that the unconscious aspiration is to satisfy this need fully, it is always bound to be frustrated.

Mentioning Leonardo’s masterpiece here is not a trivial association, since the explicit theme is nativity itself. As the painting is unfinished, it is populated with gloomy and monstrous figures. The two ghostly horses’ heads at the extreme left of a line that cuts horizontally through the painting seem to echo the creepy horses’ heads in two famous paintings by Fuseli.[25] In essence, there is no birth that is not accompanied by the shadow of a teratology (in both the physical and moral sense). This is clearly to be seen, for example, in Diana Blackened Reddened (2021), where the blood is no longer that of childbirth or menstruation but, so to speak, the blood that ‘rises’ to the head (see also Red Within Her, 2020).

In contemplating Kapoor’s inventions, we realise that something has happened and that something both strange and familiar may be about to happen. We don’t know what. We do, however, experience a sense of pleasant anticipation and are more aware of the passage of time. The presence of these objects is vibrant. Reduced to their essence, they manage to emerge in this form because they absorb the force of the very resistances that antagonise them. There is an inner depth to them, which we feel all the more intensely the more they evoke absence — in other words, the more they implicitly carry within themselves the threat of the dissolution of form.

This could be the meaning of the aesthetic experience in general: namely, to transport us to the scene of this dangerous and in some ways desperate dance with the object and to bring about the intellectual and affective experience of ‘right distance’. Because of its peculiar meta-theoretical capacity and because it so clearly allegorises the attractions and dangers of psychic birth, the aesthetics of the sublime, both classical and contemporary, depicts this dance in an extremely meaningful way. For this reason, one can consider the sublime itself a universal category of the spirit, and the aesthetics of the sublime the interpretive key to any aesthetic experience. Inscribed against the light of aesthetic experience, there is always the blackness of mourning. Therefore, there is no real difference between the sublime and ‘simple’ beauty. In contemporary art, Anish Kapoor is certainly one of its most extraordinary exponents.


Red

What we said about black is not so different from what can be said about red. And Kapoor acknowledges this when he says that red ‘has a very powerful blackness’ and that from a certain point of view it is just a variant of it. To distinguish between the two colours, and continuing along the path I have been following from the outset, I suggest imagining that they allude to enormously different dimensional scales of being. The most obvious association with red is blood. With his use of red, Kapoor continues his exploration of the human body — or rather, of the matter of which we are made — but now at a level that is almost anatomical and no longer molecular or even atomic. He moves, so to speak, from the ‘flesh’ of matter to the flesh of the body.

In Symphony for a Beloved Sun, drops of blood fall to the ground from the top of conveyor belts and gather in shapeless piles. The allusion seems to be to the blood dripping from Goliath’s severed head in the painting by Caravaggio housed in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. How can we not think that beloved (\bi-ˈləvd) sounds almost like blood (\ˈbləd)? So yes, a sun (and also a son: the phonetics of sun and son are identical:ˈsən), but soiled by the blood of a broken bond of love.

In the catalogue to the memorable 2013 exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, Norman Rosenthal rightly references ‘The Fountain of Blood', a poem that forms part of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. In this poem, and generally in his Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire uses the rarefied style of the sublime, in terms of rhythm, tone and images, but he does so regarding subjects that are not elevated. Rosenthal clearly references this poem as part of an interpretation that chimes in with the one I am trying to outline here. Among its main themes are the lack of recognition of love symbolised by the ‘bed of needles’, which is the source of the invisible wound from which the blood flows; and, more remarkable in our context, the fact that this very blood, the transfiguration of the poet’s feeling of ‘terror’, tinges the whole world.

The haemorrhaging is therefore not physical, because it is a question of emotions. It is like an internal haemorrhagic shock, writes the psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion — who shares with Kapoor a strong bond with India and a certain intimate feeling of being uprooted from the places of his childhood: ‘the dilation of capillaries throughout the body so increases the space in which blood can circulate that the patient may bleed to death in his own tissues’.[26] He rounds off the analogy: ‘Mental space is so vast in comparison to any realization of three-dimensional space that the patient feels he has lost his ability to feel emotion because he feels the emotion itself flow and be lost in the immensity’.

But then, somewhat ironically, the scene in Shooting into the Corner (2008–09) may well appear to us as the violent gushing of blood from a wound and at the same time, because of the stains on the wall, may make us think of Dexter, but also of the blood that accompanies deflowering and menstruation.


Birth and non-birth [27]

Many other titles of Anish Kapoor’s works suggest the theme of the body and birth (Wound, My Body Your Body, When I am Pregnant, Organ, Memory, Negative Box Shadow, Her Blood, Hexagon Mirror, Non-Object, Vertigo, C-Curve, Sky Mirror, Red, Blood Mirror, Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc, 1st Body), but almost more significant are the many that bear the title Untitled. It is as if their function is to allude to a dramatic oscillation between something that can be given a name and something that is nameless, and that is therefore frightening (‘nameless dread’[28]). More than in other pieces, in the Untitled works there are cracks, holes, windows, passages, conduits, openings, and most of the time there is an impenetrable and deep black.

In Leviathan (2011), the large-scale work created for his exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2011, for example, the artist’s intention to go on a journey inside the body, which in this case is the body of a monster (!), is openly declared. The dark red hue makes us feel as if we are being transported inside the blood flowing under the skin and in the bowels. Many faint at the sight of blood, it takes a certain gutsiness to watch this fluid emanation from one’s body. But, again, as is the case every time with Kapoor, apprehending the invisible is a matter of having the courage to enter into the game of going beyond the visible.

In some of his more recent works, Kapoor reinterprets the same theme through the classical image of decapitation, the true negative version of the many paintings that stage psychic birth in the form of ‘sacred conversations’ between mother and child.[29] Of course, he is dialoguing with the Masters (there are obvious echoes of Bacon, Rembrandt, Soutine, and so forth), but also with contemporaries, such as, for example, with Damien Hirst and his Demon With Bowl (2014).

The surprising aspect of these paintings lies not so much in the explicit subject matter but in the affinity between the dark red or black hole of the cut at the level of the neck and the many magical circles of black in other works. In both cases, there is not only a cut but an opening into which one could sink. A peculiarity of these tragic figures is that they are continuous with the ground, as if they had roots that penetrate into it. In this way they remind us of the Deleuzian image of the subject as a ‘fold’ in matter. Indeed, the contrast between red and black could not be rendered more dramatically.

Two impressive works surpass even the horror of beheadings. The Unremembered (2020), and The Innocents (2020) recall the torture described by Kafka in his masterpiece In the Penal Colony We have no trouble imagining the ultimate consequences that in the story the action of the torture machine known as the Harrow produces on the body of the condemned. The body ends up being mangled and reduced to an incoherent jumbled mass of flesh and blood. In the same way, we see every day in clinical practice, the self can end up butchered by the inscription on the body of a ruthless feeling of guilt.


La chose génitale[30]

Anish Kapoor accords much space to the representation of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, Freud’s famous ‘dark continent’,[31] and to female genitalia. Numerous works, some of them explicitly, refer to L’Origine du monde, Courbet’s scandalous painting of 1866, owned for a time by Jacques Lacan, and which has elicited several scandalous contemporary reinterpretations. I’m thinking of Replace Me (2011) by Rosemarie Trockel, a black-and-white digital print of Courbet’s painting, where an enormous spider covers the pudenda; or, from the same year, the provocative unauthorised performance by Deborah De Robertis at the Musée d’Orsay.

In some drawings in Kapoor’s 1979 Sketchbook one can clearly see the shift from the representation of the female organ in geometric form (an inverted triangle, a D rotated 90° clockwise and resting on the ‘belly’, a ‘tunnel’), where the contours of the body are still outlined, to pages where all the space is blacked out but in the centre one can still see the sign of the genitalia, now in white.
In other drawings, these same forms are tinged with blood red; and lastly, in yet others (1000 Names, 1979–1989) they become three-dimensional; by now the body has become the very ground on which they rest.

At times humankind’s experience of dismay before the immensity of nature, which has its matrix in the infant’s relationship of material and spiritual dependence on the object and its elusive infinity, an aspect that in the romantic sublime is metamorphosed into a fascinating and terrible landscape, is instead rendered with the expedient of placing a visitor who approaches the threshold of a house/labyrinth. There is a clear allusion here to the female genitalia as a Place No Place (1982), as well as an echo of Kubin’s 1902 drawing entitled Death Jump (or Death Leap) in which a little man dives into the vagina of a giantess — an inventive idea that also calls to mind a 1989 gouache on paper by Kapoor.

A drawing that we imagine as preparatory to Descent into Limbo (1992) depicts an enormous cube with a tiny door and a black circle in the centre of the floor. The image, however, is much more ambiguous than the installation. Completely identical to Necker’s cube , this cube is an optical illusion that allows the viewer to experience the essential instability of perception. The ‘hole’ could be inside or outside the house, depending on which side of the figure the viewer sees as closest to him or her. It is therefore both an entrance into and an exit door from existence. Limbo, another liminal space, in that it welcomes those who have committed nothing more than the sin of being born, is many times to be equated with life itself. The very concept of ‘limbo’ links birth and death and delimits a state of existence in which the subject is deprived of a lay version of the beatific vision of an authentic and full life.

The fact is that we could say about all of Kapoor’s works that they aspire to represent the world ‘downwards’: the void, the limbo. It is the material and notional area in which the dust of the pigment detaches itself from the figure and spreads around, waiting to reconnect to the portion that is not seen — but in the same way that our subjectivity spreads around, only illusorily defined by the boundaries of our empirical self. The alienating effect, in his case, is heightened by the fact that his spectator, whether present on the scene or only assumed to be present, finds herself faced with real bizarre objects and not recognisable landscapes of nature. If anything, to come back once again to the sublime, they are reminiscent not so much of the realistic views we get from Caspar David Friedrich but of his more fantastic depictions — for example, Sea of Ice (1823-1824).

Just as ice brings to mind André Green’s concept of the ‘dead mother’, that is, of a non-responsive and non-transformative object, so too for Kapoor ultimately the human body, and in particular the sexual organs, is always landscape, and landscape always stands for the original dwelling place — for Freud, the place to which every human being yearns to return. But, as Dante’s phantasmagorical construction teaches, liminality is also ethical. As a caption to a drawing that again features a vagina in the foreground, Kapoor quotes St Augustine — We are born between faeces and urine.

The question immediately becomes how not to be trapped in limbo, how not to become ‘waste’ or immediately abject products, how not to be evacuated (‘The building is shitting this thing’), but rather contained (thought, dreamed, loved) by the object.


Tauromachy

Other artistic expressions enable us to experience highly immersive situations, such as when we are absorbed by reading a novel or when we ‘enter’ into a film. However, specific to the three-dimensional nature of sculpture (or installation) is that it requires multisensory participation in which motility is not sacrificed. Rather, visitors are asked to contemplate the object before them by walking around its perimeter. It is up to them to discover the perspective that flashes an image in the mind or elicits a physical sensation. This gently exploratory movement around the object is a kind of dance. Through the work, visitors and artists create new figures in the never-ending dance of existence. The sense for both of them is to internalise each time new forms that are felicitous, that is to say, not separated, and thus to expand their own capacity to feel and act.

We can therefore understand why Kapoor shows a certain lack of interest in what is openly symbolic and narrative, and instead declares himself to be attracted by the abstract essentiality of proto-forms. Proto-forms rather introduce a rite, an experience that is in some broad sense religious or sacred. It is less a matter of ‘seeing’ and more a matter of achieving a kinesthetic and carnal intimacy with the work. Such an experience of the sacred, in itself, is not directly to be seen in terms of semiotic expression and words. Kapoor, always his own best critic, expresses it wonderfully: ‘Come on, come over here. I can engage you deeply and my space infiltrates yours’.

Taking inspiration from a sort of quantum table (that is no longer Mendelevian) of the primordial elements of being, these modern (yet at the same time very ancient) Pathosformeln, rather than ‘representing’ that which is negative, absence, the non-visible, bring it to life. Where the overtly symbolic is directed more at the intellect than the body, ritual calls into question the body more than the intellect.

What intrigues Kapoor more than the thing is the no-thing, or rather, the field of negativity from which the thing can come into being and exist in a relationship of competitive solidarity with the no-thing. Again, thinking means tolerating the temporary absence of drive gratification — the word stands for the thing, it is not the thing. Thinking (speaking) is always a game of hide-and-seek with absence, and at the same time it is like engaging in a bullfight. The human subject can never be a pure presence: if she is deprived of language she has no world; if she has acquired language, she can see a world but only filtered (simplified) through certain ideal structures. Of course, absence can be painful — but after all this pain is the source of all creativity.

In this respect, Kapoor shows extraordinary coherence. His is a magnificent and painful inquiry into the objectness and otherness of the object. As with everyone, the drive comes from the unfulfillable desire for the absolute and concrete presence of the object. The direction he takes in order to carry out his investigation (it goes without saying that, like an analysis, it is essentially interminable) is to always revisit some basic elements, but each time from new and surprising perspectives.

To repeat: in the background, there is always the same question about the origin of all things. Is this origin in the ‘empty’ space that contains the aesthetic object or is it the object itself? The relationship almost seems to be reversed. Not the exhibition space at the service of the object, but the exhibition of the object that activates a true contrapuntal choreography whose most intimate truth consists in a coming to co-being. No longer separate things or individuals, but relationships.

Take for example My Body Your Body (1993), — not because it is different from similar works, such as Yellow (1999), but because we benefit from the guidance of a title that is less unsaturated but not unambiguous; a title in which the relationship between the two terms can be read not only in a disjunctive key but also in a dialectic key, as a co-implication. None of the bodies is in any way identified, either in their general forms or in any detail. Only a uniformly indigo-blue surface, but with a density of colour at the centre that seamlessly shades into a darker blue and finally into black. The clash that is thus generated between the centre and the periphery, as well as between the ellipse and the square, effectively represents the tensions of matter or the flesh of the world, as we have called it in line with Merleau-Ponty’s suggestions.

From this same matter emerges what we call the being-there (Dasein), that is, the subject situated in a world. However, there are no concepts, except those necessary to see ourselves while we observe, in other words, so as to continue to exist as subjects, even if we forget ourselves in the act of contemplating an aesthetic object; or the few concepts necessary to recognise colours and shapes, but only essential colours and shapes. What I mean is that the dimension of experience belongs more to the order of being than of knowing.

What Kapoor aims to provoke is an emotional response rather than an intellectual response, so as to make us think with our body more than with our mind; or better still, to give body back to the mind or to reinstate the spirit in the body in the act of asking us — as the Sphinx asks of Oedipus — to reflect on the enigma of birth. So, the dark ellipse at the centre — which is a two-dimensionality that tends towards three-dimensionality — or the spherical introflexion that is already unfolded in the three dimensions of space, both tell us about the myth of the libidinal forces that generate life and that thus oppose the death drive.

As I admired My Body Your Body in a catalogue, before seeing it ‘in the flesh’, in my mind’s eye I reconstructed the work as playing out in two dimensions. On seeing a second reproduction, however, not without a certain wonder I immediately realised, as is evident for Yellow, that instead it was in three dimensions. I could almost say that I had been ‘hallucinating’. My ‘misunderstanding’ made me live directly the dizzying experience of ambiguity that Anish Kapoor intentionally aims to achieve by enhancing the intensity of the colours and the voluminosity of the works.

If I mention this personal anecdote, it is because it ‘tangibly’ represents the simultaneous extension of ‘external’ spatiality (available for the perception and movement of the body) and internal spatiality (available for the perception of psychic qualities and the inner movement of emotions) in the manner of every happy aesthetic experience. Literally hijacked by a wave that has something sweetly constrictive about it, as in the passive state of a dream, the images of these objects announce themselves with the same unprecedented vividness as hallucinations. But, as always, hallucinations are but the more precise perceptions of what in our deepest intimacy matters most to us.

Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia & Palazzo Manfrin 2022

Materialising the unthought known: Reflections on the work of Anish Kapoor by Christopher Bollas

Blood and Light. In conversation with Julia Kristeva

Turning the World Upside Down by Darian Leader