'There's something immanent in the work but the circle is only completed by the viewer'

Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.


JT The moment you mention Barnett Newman I immediately think of his series 'The Stations of the Cross', which after all that is very strong subject matter. So how does this distinction between content and subject matter work out in the case of a series like that?



AK The important thing there is to look at the work. On the face of it you are absolutely right. The moment that you are, as we all had the opportunity recently to do, in front of those works, they seemingly have nothing to do with the Stations of the Cross. They are a series of black and white canvases with "zips": - these areas without colour, without painting; nothing to do with the Stations of the Cross other than that he has very carefully made the title part of the content. It's as if the words then act as another form in the process of looking. So therefore one has to ask oneself the question about where this content arises. Is it about whether the content is resident in the viewer, or whether it is resident in the work? Now that's a subtle yet very clear manipulation of the act of looking.



JT If it wasn't in the work though, you can't always invest what you take to it can you? There has to be something immanent in the work.



AK Precisely. There's something immanent in the work but the circle is only completed by the viewer. Now that's a very different position from a work with a subject matter, where the work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint.



JT It tells a story, you recognise that story, you tell it back!



AK But here is an incomplete circle which says "come and be involved. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story!": I believe that that's a complete kind of re-invention of the idea of art.

Anish Kapoor

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'making your unknown known is the important thing'

the echo box of the cosmos

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a private sketchbook

A thing that helped me a great deal over this period was the decision to start working in a series of private sketchbooks. I needed somewhere to experiment that I knew only I had access to. Somewhere to make images that didn't always have the unconscious intention of being a step on the way to somewhere, or a breakthrough, or the thing I was waiting for. Somewhere to just play with the things that interested me.

And then one morning, very quietly, while I was looking the other way, the dancers came through.

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make the paintings you want to look at

'My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist'

Brian Eno

'The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use - do the work you want to see done.

Austin Kleon

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'Examine where you fall short'. Or not.

 'So, copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What's in there that makes you different? That's what you should amplify and transform into your own work.'

Austin Kleon

Actually that wouldn't work for me. If I started looking for 'what made me different' I would go up into my head again and lose whatever comes through working.

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'Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We learn by copying'

'Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.

We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism... copying is about reverse-engineering. It's like taking apart a car to see how it works.... We learnt to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practising scales.... Remember: Even the Beatles started out as a cover band

First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.

The songwriter Nick Lowe says, 'You start out by rewriting your hero's catalogue. And you don't just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them.... If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from many, it's research.

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds.

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.'

Austin Kleon 

I had no idea that this was how it worked. I knew I had to 'do something' with what I felt when I looked at these images, but I no idea how to start, or why. I knew I didn't want to just copy them, but I couldn't think how else to start.

So I started.

I was totally frustrated. What am I doing, just copying these images?

After a while, I started to notice something. As I was drawing I was asking myself, how do these bits of stone manage to feel so alive? The answer was the tribhanga; a principle of Indian aesthetics which is the three planes that make up a figure with its weight on one leg, the hip jutting out.

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'the earth was born...' and the mirror appears....

'The mirror becomes a widely used metaphor for expressing the Sankhya philosophy of dualism, and the nature of cognition...'

 Naman Ahuja, The Body in Indian Art and Thought, 2014, p68

Guardian review of this exhibition, William Dalrymple

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