the lightest touch

The Lightest Touch

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

  -- David Whyte

     from Everything is Waiting for You 
     ©2003 Many Rivers Press 

My images don't come if there's any kind of heaviness in my intention. Even referring to 'my work' brings a kind of leadenness.

Even talking of my workspace as my 'studio'.

The heavy weight of the history of art, the heavy weight of the European/American aesthetic, the heavy weight of the contemporary commercial art world, the heavy weight of conceptualism...

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darkness and light

'One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body,

Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.

One of my preoccupations is the actual and necessary coexistence of light with darkness. I lived with an overwhelming sense of darkness for a long time. Injustice, suffering, inequality, cruelty, greed. Unconscious of this, I unconsciously sought out something that could counter these things. There was no sense that they were ever going to go away, but, like a slime mould moving away from a threat to its existence, I groped for something else. 

I'm surrounded by sensitive people who are fighting for justice. Angry, furious, inflamed to action. I've done a lot of that, I fought my various causes for decades. Now I fight for joy. The darkness is everywhere, and now one of my jobs is to make light. Not in denial of darkness, but as a tool for managing it.

It's easy to forget joy. Or to feel that joy is not permitted for as long as there's such terrible suffering in the world; perhaps also to feel that the only viable role for art is to bring that suffering to people's attention.

Something that helped me see this differently was a film called  Amandla:


'Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is a 2002 documentary film depicting the struggles of black South Africans against the injustices of Apartheid through the use of music. The film takes its name from the Zulu and Xhosa word amandla, which means power.'

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'But you can't invest it with meaning after you've made it...'

Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.

JT So if there were no commissions at all, what would you do in the morning?



AK Oh that's great, I’d love that. I would come to the studio and do my thing. What one does in the studio in fact is to pose a series of problems to oneself. You can come in and say, yes I have this funny notion that I want to make a blob of gooey mass of certain dimensions, that has a certain effect. And then, having made it, I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world anyway!



JT But you can't invest it with a meaning after you've made it.



AK Oh, those processes are complex. One can find a way to do precisely that. Naming is one of those ways. Context is another. What happens if I put it next to another object? How does that change its reason for being, its effect on the body? One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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'problems of output are problems of input'

Another way that the computer/internet is vital for me is in showing me images and ideas that aren't my own. This has a stimulating, organising effect, and is often a kind of focussing; bringing something that I've forgotten back into consciousness.

This morning, for example, I saw this image by an artist called Morag Muir:

This image brought back an idea I've been working with since my trip to the Hoysala temples and Jain paintings two years ago.... Narrative friezes made up of multiple frames. Framed people. People in boxes. People trying to get out of frames, overstepping the frame boundary. You see this all over the Indian tradition, in both sculpture and in painting.

Austin Kleon again:
'Problems of output are often problems of input. If you’re output isn’t where you want it to be, try working on your input.'

The internet feeds me when I forget where I am. 

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'In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits'

'While I love my computer, I think computers have robbed us of the feeling that we're actually making things.... Just watch someone at their computer. They're so still, so immobile. You don't need a scientific study (of which there are a few) to tell you that sitting in front of a computer is killing you, and killing your work. We need to move, to feel like we're making something with our bodies, not just with our heads.

Work that only comes from the head isn't any good. Watch a great musician play a show. Watch a great leader give a speech. You'll see what I mean.

You need to find a way to bring your body into your work. Our nerves aren't a one-way street - our bodies can tell our brains as much as our brains tell our bodies. You know the phrase 'going through the motions'? That's what's so great about creative work: if we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motions kickstarts our brain into thinking.'

Austin Kleon

When I got a new phone and realised I could make images on it, I did a couple of drawings.

I found it very exciting, and I love what filters can do to my images, I use them all the time.

But somehow I've never really moved to working directly onto a screen. There's something about marks made with my hand that I find more intriguing.

Once the marks are there, the computer can add amazing riches.

Austin Kleon would say that this is a form of editing. For me it's more than that, the computer adds an additional layer of creative possibility. But it's true that the original idea is always created with my hands, onto paper or canvas.

'It wasn't till I started bringing analog tools back into my process that making things became fun again and my work started to improve. For my first book, Newspaper Blackout, I tried to make the process as hands on as possible. Every poem in that book was made with a newspaper article and a permanent marker. The process engaged most of my senses: the feel of newsprint in my hands, the sight of words disappearing under my lines, the faint squeak of the marker tip, the smell of the marker fumes - there was a kind of magic happening. When I was making the poems, it didn't feel like work. It felt like play.

The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it's really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it's not really good for generating ideas...

That's how the book was made - hands first, then computer, then hands, then computer. A kind of analog-to-digital loop.

That's how I try to do all my work now. I have two desks in my office - one is 'analog' and one is 'digital'. The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, index cards and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on that desk. That's where most of my work is born, and all over the desk are physical traces, scraps, and residues from my process... The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, and my drawing tablet. This is where I edit and publish my work.

Try it: If you have the space, set up two workstations, one analog, and one digital. For your analog station, keep out anything electronic. Take $10, go to the school supply aisle of your local store, and pick up some paper, pens, and sticky notes. When you get back to your analog station, pretend it's craft time. Scribble on paper, cut it up, and tape the pieces back together. Stand up while your working. Pin things on the walls and look for patterns. When you start to lose steam, head back to the analog station and start to play'.

Austin Kleon

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'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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