Drawing Nothing (2017)
Is it possible to draw something if you don’t know what it is?
I have been considering my father’s early death and how this has created both a presence and an absence in my life. Initially, as I addressed this, the figure of my father appeared in my work, but, gradually, the work has become less representational of the individual and more concerned with abstract ideas of absence and changes of state between the known and the unknown. The work has become less iconographic as I have searched for ways to portray the duality of presence and absence and the transition across a boundary beyond which we have no knowledge.
It is in this context that I have considered the work, especially the works on paper, of Anish Kapoor. These works, which he himself categorises as drawings are, for the greater part, dense washes of gouache, executed wet in wet on very heavy supports. Many, especially his early works, are organic or biological in nature, but many are dark, amorphorous pools of black paint, or dark fields with faint areas of apparently distant light (Fig 1). The idea of ‘The Void’ is central to his oeuvre. Bhabha, his friend and commentator, asserts, ‘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’ (Bhabha,1998) and it is hard to escape seeing these drawings and his sculptural works as inherently spiritual in nature, even religious. Certainly his work has been associated with contemporary ideas of the Sublime (Morley, 2010).
Fig. 1 http://anishkapoor.com/890/drawings
The idea of The Sublime in aesthetics was first coined in the first century by Longinus but re-arose in the eighteen century in the writings of Burke and Kant (Morley, 2010). Burke associated the Sublime with characteristics such as ‘power, emptiness, vastness, darkness etc.’ whilst Ruskin saw the sublime in nature, opposing the increasingly man-made environment (Morley, 2010). Nineteenth century artists sought to inspire awe through the depiction of wild landscapes, sea, mountains and wide skies, typified by Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog’ (Fig. 2) in which the figure is anonymous, rendered insignificant, by the scale and force of the physical environment. The sublime was portrayed as the wonder of God’s creation as the antithesis of industrialisation; the spiritual versus the material.
Fig. 2
The beginning of the twentieth century saw the pendulum swing against this rather paternalistic view with the rise of Impressionism, Abstraction and, significantly, Abstract Expressionism. ‘Representation was replaced by presentation, presentation by participation’ (Watson, 2014). Now art was about feelings and psychology, but the characteristics of ‘power, emptiness…darkness, etc’ still remained. The Abstract Expressionists and Kapoor clearly have much in common in their resolute abandonment of iconography and exploration of the internal. In his comprehensive survey of the movement, Anfam says that Kapoor has ‘renewed ideas and elements that were central to Abstract Expressionism….with a sustained aesthetic enquiry into the two Abstract Expressionism lynchpins: the uncanny and the sublime’ (Anfam, 2015). These can be seen as two sides of the same coin; ‘whereas the sublime can be a quality of vast, open spaces, the uncanny is more frequently associated with cramped and dark interiors…the cellar, the coffin and the womb’ (Van Winkel, 1995).
Of the Abstract Expressionists, Kapoor’s works have their closest relationship with those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Newman wrote in ‘The Sublime is Now’ in 1948, ‘We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. …..We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, nostalgia, legend, myth, …….’ (Morley, 2010) and, therefore, attempting to free themselves of any dependence on representation or cultural baggage.
Fig. 3 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rothko-red-on-maroon-t01165
Kapoor’s drawings are directly comparable with Rothko’s dark, later works such as the Houston chapel murals and those for the Seagram building (Fig. 3). These later paintings are exhibited in a gallery which is shaped and lit in reference to a religious building. The space seems to expand away from you through the walls. Both artists settled on shades of red and black to convey the depths they sought. Whilst Kapoor’s and Rothko’s paintings have a darkness at their heart, Newman’s zip paintings offer sharp splinters of light within the darkness (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/newman-adam-t01091
None of the three have tried to create an image of a void, they have tried to create the feeling of tumbling into the void, a sense of vertigo, a push and pull between the space the viewer is in and the virtual space the artist has conjured. Kapoor says, ‘Newman discovered that, as you entered the field in the painting, the eye….pulls in and pushes out…back and forth…’ (Bhabha, 1998). To achieve this the artists negate the picture plane. For Rothko, this means layering strokes which differ in colour almost imperceptibly so that the edges to his forms dissolve. Newman paints dense blacks relieved by vivid slivers. Both Rothko and Newman painted on a monumental scale so that the viewer becomes unconscious of the edge of the frame. Kapoor, operating across different media, has more tools to employ.
Using gouache, wet in wet, on heavy paper, allows Kapoor to capture the movement of the paint and create forms with edges which defuse to nothing but which retain a sense of flow. The gouache is usually deep, matte black, and absorbs light, a concept which he has carried through much of his oeuvre. When he has used other media on paper, for instance in his prints, the form dissolves away without any edges at all (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kapoor-no-title-p78188
In his sculptural works, he defies the surface of his pieces in several ways. In ‘1000 Names’ (1979-1985) dense, matte, saturated red pigment is applied to the surface, eliminating reflected light. In works like ‘Adam’ (1989) (Fig. 6) or ‘Building for a Void’ (1992), matte black pigment is used on a depression in a surface to make the interior space recede to the point where is seems infinite to the viewer, apparently opening out into a bigger space than that which contains it. In his pursuit of a pigment which absorbs all light, Kapoor has turned to technology designed for the space industry and now uses Vantablack. This is not a pigment, it is an industrial coating of carbon nanotubes which bounce incident light around so it cannot escape (Surrey Nano Systems, 2017). It is, currently, the most light absorbent material in manufacture.
Fig. 6 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kapoor-adam-t07592
Kapoor also uses reflective surfaces to similar effect. His mirrors twist, invert and distort the space about them. When we look in a mirror, we do not see the surface of the mirror, we see a virtual image of our surrounding space, in a different plane. Kapoor says, ‘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 the materials are there to make something else possible’ (Bhabha, 1998).
Sculptures such as ‘Widow’ (2004) (Fig. 7) and ‘Memory’ (2008) distort the space around the viewer by their scale within their location. It is impossible to see the whole sculpture from any single vantage point and they seem to suck the space out of the gallery into some other dimension. The sculptures are continuous, complex curves, like some mathematically described figure in a text book. Many of Kapoor’s forms are dished, depressed or pierced through to create funnels and are reminiscent of illustrations of the effect of gravity on space/time where a heavy object is placed on a gridded, stretchy sheet. Thus Kapoor creates a link in the imagination to gravity, cosmology, black holes or Reimann and his mathematical description of complex, multidimensional spaces.
Fig. 7 https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/widow/1AEDLkyRzcRRPg
As we have seen, Newman and Rothko aspired to eliminate all iconography from their work, relying on the rectangle and line, but even the simple rectangles in Rothko’s work can suggest apertures, doors or windows; it is not easy to rid an image of cultural overtones or ‘the pandora’s box of spiritual reference’ (Krauss, 1979, p52). Kapoor is not so ruthless. As we have seen, he references physics but also often references biology. His drawing may reference organic subjects and, most obviously blood (Fig. 8). His early work often drew on the uterus, menses, birth and wounds. His huge, red, glutinous wax installations are described by Kristeva as ‘blood ….burgeons like a haemorrhage’ or ‘quivering, living flesh’ (Kristeva, 2015). These works are drawn before the viewers’ eyes, being carved by their surroundings or projected ballistically. At the centre of his enquiry is the idea of conception, of coming into being, a mysterious internal void in which creation can occur, ‘I think I am attempting to dig away at – without wanting to sound too pompous – the great mystery of being’ (Tusa, Undated).
Fig. 8 http://anishkapoor.com/890/drawings
A fundamental difference between Kapoor and the Abstract Expressionists is that the latter placed themselves at the centre of their art, whereas Kapoor seeks to efface himself from it. Rothko said, ‘ I am only interested in expressing basic human emotions’ (Baal-Teshva, 2012, pp50) and, in an Artists’ Statement in 1943, Gottlieb, Rothko and Newman stated, ‘our function is to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way’ (Harrison and Wood, 2014, pp569). In contrast, Kapoor says, ‘I am not in the business of setting out to reveal, that doesn’t interest me’ and ‘Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role…to bring expression…not to be expressive. I’ve got nothing in particular to say’. (Bhabha, 1998). Of the Expressionists, he asserts, ‘We have just come through a whole period of expressionism, of artists depositing themselves in their works. I just don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that artists have anything to say’ (Furlong, 1990).
Not only does he try not to impose an idea on the spectator, but he also tries to remove the haptic from his works. His sculptures are all smooth, mechanical surfaces or produced by some intermediate process, such as extrusion or propulsion.
So, there is a duality to this notion of ‘nothing’ in Kapoor’s work. On one hand he tries not to impose an interpretation on the viewer but to generate absolute ambiguity. His means of doing this is the Void, a conjuring up of a non-physical space in the imagination of the viewer. ‘So many of the works I have made come back to this idea that the space itself is only notionally defined, that there is something beyond it. It is a proposition about space treated as a poetic idea’ (Bennett et. al. 2009 p33).
Considering Kapoor’s work has informed my parallel project by making me think of presence and absence in terms of denying the two dimensional picture plane, and thinking of infinite, unknown possibilities rather than death and loss. I have been inspired to use black gouache, either as a matte darkness projecting space beyond the surface, or to create edges in a state of transition from liquid to solid, light to dark (Fig. 9). This concept of a change of state, envisaged through the treatment of edges, has become central to the project. The medium is allowed to find its own resolution with minimal intervention and abandoning all iconography.
It was only when I researched Kapoor’s drawings that I understood where I was headed with this project, and it was the context of the project that finally helped me to understand his work.
Fig. 9
Illustrations
Fig. 1 ‘Untitled‘ 1999, A Kapoor, Gouache on paper, 56.5×75cm
http://anishkapoor.com/890/drawings
Fig. 2 ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ c1819, C D Friedrich, Oil paint on Canvas, 98.4 cm × 74.8 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg
Fig. 3 ‘Red on Maroon Mural, Section 4’ 1959, M Rothko, Oil paint, acrylic paint and glue tempera on canvas, 2667 x 2388 x 35 mm, Tate.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rothko-red-on-maroon-t01165
Fig. 4 ‘Adam’ 1951-52 , B Newman, Oil paint on Canvas, 2429 x 2029 mm, Tate
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/newman-adam-t01091
Fig. 5 ‘Untitled’ 1998, A Kapoor, Digital print on paper, 479 x 565 mm, Tate
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kapoor-no-title-p78188
Fig. 6 ‘Adam’ 1998-9, A Kapoor, sandstone and pigment, 2390 x 1205 x 1040 mm Tate
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kapoor-adam-t07592
Fig. 7 ‘Widow’ 2004, A Kapoor, MAXXI Foundation
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/widow/1AEDLkyRzcRRPg
Fig. 8 ‘Untitled’ 2010, A Kapoor, Gouache on paper, 50.5×67cm
http://anishkapoor.com/890/drawings
Fig. 9 Artist’s Book, 2017, S Cussons, Gouache on paper and board, 11cm x 11cm
References
Anfam, D. (2015). Abstract Expressionism. 1st ed. London: Thames & Hudson.
Baal-Teshuva, J. and Levis, N. (2012). Mark Rothko, 1903-1970. 1st ed. Koln: Taschen.
Baume, N. (2008) Anish Kapoor in conversation with Nicholas Baume [online] Available at: http://anishkapoor.com/772/in-conversation-with-nicholas-baume [Accessed 30 May 2017]
Bennett, L., Bhabha, H., Loisy, J. and Rosenthal, N. (2009). Anish Kapoor. 1st ed. London: Royal Academy of Arts.
Bhabha, H. (1998). Anish Kapoor Making Emptiness by Homi Bhabha. [online] Anishkapoor.com. Available at: http://anishkapoor.com/185/making-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha [Accessed 30 May 2017]
Furlong, J. (1990) Anish Kapoor: Interview with James Furlong [online] http://anishkapoor.com/441/interview-by-william-furlong [Accessed 30 October 2017]
Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (2014). Art in Theory 1900-2000. 1st ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Krauss, R. (1979). Grids. October, Vol 9, The MIT Press
Kristeva, J. (2015) Anish Kapoor in conversation with Julia Kristeva [online] http://anishkapoor.com/4330/blood-and-light-in-conversation-with-julia-kristeva [Accessed 16 November 2017]
Morley, S. (2010). The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art). 1st ed. London: Whitechapel Gallery.
Tusa, J. (Undated) Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa [online] http://anishkapoor.com/180/in-conversation-with-john-tusa-2 [Accessed 08 November 2017]
Surrey Nano Systems (2017) [Online] Available at : https://www.surreynanosystems.com/about/faqs [Accessed 08 November 2017]
Van Winkel, C. (1995) On the Sublime in the Work of Anish Kapoor. Originally published in Anish Kapoor. exh. cat., Tilburg: Dupont Foundation For Contemporary Art
Watson, G. (2014) A Philosophy of Emptiness, Reaktion Books, Limited, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [15 November 2017]
Bibliography
Adajania, N. (2017). Anish Kapoor The Mind Viewing Itself by Nancy Adajania. [online] Anishkapoor.com. Available at: http://anishkapoor.com/459/the-mind-viewing-itself-by-nancy-adajania [Accessed 30 May 2017].
Bhabha, H. and Tazzi, P. (1998). Anish Kapoor. 1st ed. London: Hayward Gallery.
Evans, M. (2013). Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality In: Arya, R. (ed.) Contemplations of the Spiritual in Art. Oxford: Peter Lang pp. 77 – 96
Fisher, E. and Fortnum, R. (2013). On Not Knowing: How Artists Think. 1st ed. London: Black Dog Publ.
Juniper, A. (2010). Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. 1st ed. Tokyo [etc.]: Tuttle Publishing.
Kandinsky, W. (1912). Concerning the spiritual in art. 1st ed. New York: Dover.
Lucie-Smith, E. (2001). Movements in Art Since 1945. 1st ed. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Marden, B. (2017). Landscapes of the mind. [online] Tate.org.uk. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/landscapes-mind [Accessed 31 May 2017].
Philosophynow.org. (2017). Burke, Kant and the Sublime | Issue 11 | Philosophy Now. [online] Available at: https://philosophynow.org/issues/11/Burke_Kant_and_the_Sublime [Accessed 30 May 2017].
Rosen, A. (2017). Art & Religion in the 21st Century. 1st ed. London: Thames and Hutton
Weintraub, L. (2003). Making Contemporary Art: How today’s Artists Think and Work. 1st ed. London: Thames & Hudson.
Yoon, J. (2015). Spirituality in Contemporary Art. 1st ed. London: Zidane Press.
