Untitled, 2007, resin, 450x450x475.2cm. Commissioned 2006 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation in recognition of the contribution to the Gallery by Dong Gall AM, Collection of Queensland Art Gallery. Photo Ray Fultion, Courtesy Queensgland Art Gallery; Yellow, 1999, fiberglass and pigment, 600x600x300cm, installed at Kunsthalle Helsinki, 2001. Photo Jussi Tianinen, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness (1)
by Homi K. Bhabha

Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available.
W.R. Bion, Cogitations (2)

The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness.
Jacques Lacan, Ethics (3)

Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive?  I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression, it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.
Anish Kapoor (4)

Colud Gate, 2004 stainless steel, 10.06x20.12x12.8m, permanent installation at Millennium Park, Chicago, Photo Patrick Pyszka. Courtesy of the City of Chicago and Gladstone Gallery

The True Sign of Emptiness

It may be the most valuable insight into Anish Kapoor’s work to suggest that the presence of an object can render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage. This quality of an excessive, engendering emptiness is everywhere visible in his work. It is a process that he associates with the contrary, yet correlated, forces of withdrawal and disclosure, ‘drawing in towards a depth that marks and makes a new surface, that keeps open the whole issue of the surface, the surface tension.’  Consider, for instance, the figure of Adam. A cavity set so deeply in a stone that its pigmented pitch defies the depth of the rock, and floats weightless to the surface. Suddenly the stone has shifted its mass leaving only its shadow, making more ground than it stands on. Or, walk around the silent swelling of When I am Pregnant. Trace the shape as it grows obliquely out of the wall and then suddenly when you stand in front of it, face to face, it is there no longer; only a luminous aureole remains to return you to the memory of fullness, as the wall turns transparent, from white to light. The monumental and noumenal address of Kapoor’s work should not obscure these uncanny experiences which suggest that his vast tolerance of empty space expands the space available into another ongoing disruption of ‘time.’
Too often we are summoned by critics to stand before Kapoor’s voids, bearing witness to those modernist virtues of verticality that Rosalind Krauss justly describes as the process by which ‘apparent disorder…  [is] necessarily reabsorbed in the very fact of being bounded.’  But the expansion of available space?the making of emptiness?never fails to register a lateral movement, a transitional tremor, that disorders the boundedness of the void. The void slips sideways from the grasp of frame and figure; its visual apprehension as contained absence, made whole and present in the eye of the viewer, is attenuated. The enigma of the void is now discernible in the intimation of a movement that obliterates perceptual space and supplements it with a disruptive, disjunctive time through which the spectator must pass?‘reverse, affirm, negate.’ It is this transitional temporality, effected by the expansion of emptiness, that Kapoor seeks to inscribe into the very passage of time and movement that makes the exhibition the phenomenological experience that it is. The Double Mirror works provide a motif of the material techniques and the metaphorical possibilities of ‘making emptiness,’ which is the subject of this essay. Listen to the artist:
… The curious thing about double mirrors, concave mirrors, when you put them together, is that they don't give you an infinite repeatability… . What interests me is that from certain angles and positions there's no image at all in either mirror. I’m very interested in the way they that they seem to reverse, affirm and then negate… . To place the viewer with these blinding mirrors in this narrow passage…  this transitional space…  somehow at an oblique angle to the mirrors’ ‘visuality’ or the viewer’s  visibility is to be caught in the contest of mirrors. They cancel each other out in one moment and yet demanding that they be looked at from a strange, oblique perspective…  . Where time and space are seemingly absent, at a standstill… , in that narrow passage, paradoxically there is a restlessness, an unease… . As I said before, a transitional movement-reverse, affirm, negate. 
The tactile experience of transition is caught in the virtual space in between the double mirrors. The perspectival distance between subject and object, or the mimetic balance between the mirror and its reflection, are replaced by a movement of erasure and inversion-‘reverse, affirm, negate.’ It is as if the possibility of pictoriality or image-making, associated with visual pleasure, has been unsettled to reveal emptiness, darkness, blankness, the blind spot. However the purpose of Kapoor’s work is not to represent the mediation of light and darkness, or negative and positive space, in a dialectical relationship in which emptiness will travel through the darkening mirror to assume the plenitude of presence. Kapoor stays with the state of transitionality, allowing it the time and space to develop its own affects-anxiety, unease, restlessness-so that viewing becomes part of the process of making the work itself. The spectator's relation to the object involves a process of questioning the underlying conditions through which the work becomes a visual experience in the first place: how can the conceptual void be made visible? how can the perceptual void be spoken?
These questions remain true to Kapoor’s purpose. Not true in the mimetic sense of reflecting the 'real' or revealing the perfection of aesthetic form. True, however, in the way of the homo faber whose eyes stay true to the process of fabrication?straightening, levelling, smoothing, sharpening?in order to move beyond the measure of the ‘maker’ or the material, so that ‘a man’s products may be more’ ?and not only more lasting?‘than he is himself.’   Kapoor’s sense of making the void more empty is the process by which the artist's reach exceeds cloying grasp of ‘personality,’ refusing to allow the source of the work-its originality or identity-to rest in the shallow signature of style.
Style, at first, celebrates the uniqueness of ‘quality,’ the singular challenge of the author or artist; but once established as a ‘name’ or a signature, value becomes ever more consensual and commodified. To treat the void as style is to read its emptiness as no more than a plea for the pictorial; what Clement Greenberg has defined as ‘the look of the void’  : ‘The geometrical and modular simplicity may announce and signify the furthest-out, but the fact that the signals are understood for what they want to mean betrays them artistically…  : wraiths of the picture rectangle and the Cubist grid haunt their works, asking to be filled out ? and filled out they are, with light-and-dark drawing.’  In turning away from the look of the void, we suggest, instead, that the truly made void is fabricated from the ‘sign of emptiness.’ To speak of the ‘sign’ of a work is not to substitute theory for practice, nor to consign the visual experience of art to the language of writing. The ‘sign of emptiness’ can neither be fixed as form, nor preserved as an image or an idea. It is ‘true’ to the making and the materiality of the object but after its own fashion. It emerges, in Greenberg’s terms, when the ‘signals’ of figuration or technique are prevented from articulating what they want to mean; when the void’s plea to have its vacancy filled is resisted; when the signature of style can no longer name or claim to control the aesthetic logic of the work. Kapoor’s voids, standing before us as sculpted objects?blue powders turning into the colour of far, fetching distance?are distinct from his creation of emptiness.
If you think that you have seen ‘emptiness’ as that hole at the heart of the material’s mass, surrounded by a planished facade, then think again. To see the void as a contained negative space indented in the material is only to apprehend its physicality. To figure the depth of the void as providing a perspectival absence within the frame or the genre is to linger too long with the pedagogy of manufacture or the technology of taste. The practice of ‘true making’ occurs only when the material and the non-material tangentially touch. The truly made thing pushes us decisively beyond the illustrational, the ‘look of the void’; the sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space. Kapoor says:
I believe very deeply that works of art, or let’s say things in the world, not just works of art, can be truly made. If they are truly made, in the sense of possessing themselves, then they are beautiful. If they are not truly made, the eye is a very quick and very good instrument… . The idea of the truly made does not only have to do with truth. It has to do with the meeting of material and non-material… . [A] thing exists in the world because it has mythological, psychological and philosophical coherence. That is when a thing is truly made… .
The reason I seem to return to the same material possibilities is, I think, because the polished surface is in fact not different from the pigment. In the end it has to do with issues that lie below the material, with the fact that materials are there to make something else possible; that is what interests me. The things that are available, or the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material… . The material changes… . The method of manufacture is not the point. The question is whether or not an object is well and truly made.
To get to the heart of Kapoor’s thinking and making we must register the difference between physicality of void space, and truly made emptiness. Let us use Heidegger’s beautiful parable of the jug for these purposes.  What does the potter make when he shapes the jug? Of what material is the jug made? The potter forms the sides and bottom of the jug in clay to provide the means for it to stand, to be vertical; to make the jug a holding vessel, however, he has to shape the void. ‘From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel… . The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.’ If I might coin a term suited to emptiness, then I would say that in the ‘be-holding’ of the jug, there is no simply discernible outside (clay) nor a penetrative inside (void), no easily distinguishable negative and positive spaces. These apparent binary oppositions bear a liminal relation to each other. They are held together with the sheer, glancing force with which the surface of a sheet of air intersects the line of the sea’s horizon, the elements spliced, stapled together in a slanted slash of a white sail that stands the pressures of wind and water, just precariously out of balance ? a tense textile, holding the void, withstanding the vessel. In that impalpable moment or movement in which material and non-material touch in the jug there is the exertion of an oblique relation of force: the clay is rooted by gravity to stand, while the void, enlightened by emptiness, becomes empowered to ‘hold’ air or water. They come together, in this uncanny relationship, by virtue of the difference that holds them apart; a contest between surfaces, elements, materials or meanings that conjures up one, or the other, through a ‘third’ dimension. This is the dimension of doubling and displacement: the jug is ‘double’ in the sense that it is no longer a unitary object but at once a relation through clay (material) to void (non-material). And once we restructure the unity of the jug in this way, then the standing (material) and the holding (non-material) are related through an ‘otherness,’ an alterity, an unabsolvable difference. The truly made work find its balance in the fragility of vacillation. It is the recognition of this ambivalent movement of force, this ‘doubleness’ or ‘otherness’ of the literal and the metaphoric, the empty and the void, their side-by-side proximity, that inhabits Kapoor’s work. Such an articulation through displacement allows us to decipher emptiness as a ‘sign,’ ‘where we have really an exteriority of the inward’ , rather than to pander to the look of the void as it signals its need to be fulfilled.

Sky Mirror, 2006 stainless steel, 10.67m (diameter), installed ar Rockfeller Center, New York, 2006 organized by the Public Art Fund, hosted by Tishman Speyer. Photo Seong Kwon Photography, Courtesy the Public Art Fund All images copyright of Anish Kapoor

Ghostly Gestures

I once saw the sign of emptiness rise from the dark void. It was a day of rain and dust as AK and I drove into the stoneyard. You said, ‘I want you to see something,’ pointing to a shrouded dark stone, its light blinded by dust (Ghost, Kilkenny limestone). As we approach the rough-hewn stone, its irregular mass effortlessly, unconsciously awaits our audience. Svyambhuv, the Sanskrit word for the ‘self-born’ aesthetic (as distinct from rupa, the man-made form imposed through human artifice ), has been a long preoccupation of yours and, from one angle, Ghost resembles one of those ‘irregularly shaped protuberances.’  But then, suddenly, the facade belongs to rupa. I am always struck by the formality of the openings you cut into your stone pieces. Doorways, elongated windows, thresholds, finely finished portals, lintels with razor-like edges, that contrast with the raw halo of encrustation and crenellation, the chemical activity of the ages, around them. The torqued, ambivalent movement of the stone is unmistakable: svyambhuv:rupa, and then, in a flash, rupa:svyambhuv-self-made/man-made and then, in an iterative instant, back again, man-made/self-made. Front and back not opposed to each other, but partially turned towards, partly away, from themselves, catching side-long glimpses. A strange diagonal gaze. The whole stone is caught in a act of torsion: turning away from an earlier state, emerging from another time, half-glancing away from us, only partly there, obliquely revealed, a mise-en-scene in transition.
Your formal portals and frames are interruptions, interventions in an ongoing history of the material, not a primal past, but the obliquity of the present, just beyond reach, but not-as-yet the future either. In transition, between the material and the non-material…  as you put it.
Stand there, you say, just slightly to one side…
I move, at an angle to the stone. I am again puzzled by another aspect of the entrance to the work that has now become obliquely apparent. There is something uncanny about its scale. It is an almost-human opening but not quite made in the image of man, nor in the dimensions of the divine or the measure of the domestic. The entrance does not embrace you; but neither does it evade you: it places you, across from the stone itself, in a corresponding state of transition, or transitivity, of the truly made - not fully human/not wholly natural, the passage between stone and a poetic existence. Ours, now, is that state of ‘bewildered calm,’ as our looking is taken over by an affect of tension and anxiety that Heidegger associates with the impending disclosure of emptiness, as the wholeness of the stone shrinks back or turns back and forth, ambivalently, between its double and displaced lives, svyambhuv:rupa. As the one turns to face the other, it encounters a blind spot, the necessary void: ‘it discloses these beings in their full but concealed strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the nothing.’
And then suddenly - with respect to the void - in the emptiness that holds the rock, I see the ghost. It doesn’t rise; nor does it descend. It does not allow the eye to seek the satisfactions of origin ? does it come from within? from without? from where? Nor does the ghost lend itself to the fixed dimensions of distance and nearness - does it live inside? outside? before? behind? As in Heidegger’s jug or Brancusi’s Endless Column, ‘sky and earth dwell’ in the making of Ghost.  The light of emptiness that emanates from Ghost, like the void in the clay or the wind in the sail, falls obliquely, across these material dimensions and divisions: it moves the depth of the stone to the surface, taking the weight off its verticality and holding it, for a moment, in the fine transparency of a film-like column. But then as the dark clouds scud by, the column of light is partially broken, shadow pouring into its emptiness with such a dark presence that it illuminates the deep mirror of the stone. It is, once more, the movement of the material in and through the non-material, the ghost in and out of the stone, that gives the work its character: like Hamlet’s father, Ghost walks the night, wafting us to a more ‘removed ground.’

(1) “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness.” In Anish Kapoor, London: Hayward Gallery ; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.  Published on the occasion of an exhibition of “Anish Kapoor,” Hayward Gallery, London, April 30 to June 14, 1998. ⓒ Homi K. Bhabha
(2) I borrow this epigraph from Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Faber and Faber, London, 1994, p. 75.
(3) Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII ? The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1986, p. 140.
(4) From conversations between Anish Kapoor and Homi K. Bhabha, 1998 (hereafter, Conversations).
(5) Conversations.
(6) Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless - A User’s Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1997, p. 26.
(7) Conversations.
(8) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p. 210.
(9) John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism With a Vengeance, 1957-1969, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986, p. 251.
(10) Ibid, p. 254.
(11) Sherry Gache, ‘Interview - Anish Kapoor,’ Sculpture, February 1996, p. 22.
(12) David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger ? Basic Writings, Harper, San Francisco and New York, 1993.
(13) Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1986, p.
(14) I owe this distinction to Philip B. Wagoner, ‘Self-born’ and ‘Man-made’: Architecture, Aesthetics, and Power at Vijayanagara, MS (a paper presented at the South Asian Regional Studies Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, 5 November 1997).
(15) Ibid, p. 8.
(16) Krell, op. cit., p. 105.
(17) Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Perennial Library, New York, 1975, p. 172.