I’ve been in Zen practice for many years. I think there is something in that which is profound. It has something to do with other ideas, one of them is the idea of becoming, making a work is not just the making of a thing, it is an act of becoming. It is a speculative place that artists can go to, and many artists have attempted to go there I’m thinking of course of Barnett Newman, but there are many. Where was I before I was born, what is it that makes me me, where do I go after I die? In other words, what is this thing that I call life, what is this recognition of life as an actual phenomenon, where does it come from? How do I know of myself or of anything else? Consciousness in other words. Science does lots of things wonderfully, explains all kinds of phenomena but it has not been able to really address consciousness. Only one who has passed through it will know what it means while there will be no words for it.ĪK He has got to be talking about consciousness! This is one area in which science has been rather poor. Human science is not capable of understanding it, nor the experience of describing it. MD I’m going to read a quote to you, which I think relates to that. Beuys used the term, but it is not just Beuys. Picasso as a shaman, that is absolutely correct. What Jung didn’t see was that Picasso was fighting evil with evil, because it is the only way to fight evil and that this is fundamentally shamanistic journey. What John Richardson says, in his immense foresight and wisdom, is that Jung was not into the art world, didn’t understand where these images came from and couldn’t read them. Carl Gustav Jung wrote about the show and said, this man is definitely schizophrenic, he is schizoid in his weird unimaginable grotesque images, etc. He talks about a retrospective that Picasso had in 1932, in the lead up to the war at the Museum of Fine Arts in Zurich. In John Richardson's brilliant biography of Picasso. It is tautologically ridiculous on one level, I’m not Christ, I don’t intend to be Christ, thank you. To foolishly, idiotically, gather the tools that make it possible to make a shamanistic journey, because it can’t be anything else into the unknown, into what it means to touch the unknown. What I’m trying to say is that is the job of the artist. But even the great hero needs a staff or a stick, he can’t go in empty handed. Christ is descending as the great hero into a space of limbo. In the painting, Christ is holding a stick and he is about to enter the cave, he is about to sub-verse the dark cave which the darkness spreads out from. I think of Mantegna’s Descent into Limbo, my favorite painting of all time. So, how do you find out what you don’t know? I mean, that is an impossible question. It is what I don't know that I am interested in. It is the artist’s job, I believe, to be somehow fearless, adventurous, to go into an unknown space. Do you consider yourself more of an inventor or a discoverer?ĪK What I’ve said very often, is that I don’t care for what I know, and I don’t suppose anybody else cares either. MD A catalogue raisonné of Anish Kapoor could very well work as a physics book for the understanding of a wide variety of various phenomena. Anish Kapoor: In conversation with Marcello Dantas Anish Kapoor In conversation with Marcello Dantas
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