Anish Kapoor Quotes

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible” that “has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are “cathedral like”, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind “up and up and in on oneself” on the spiral walkway.

There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

It was there [India] I realised that engineering was not my cup of tea. I proceeded to London to look for avenues and got myself enrolled into Hornsey College of Art there. Initially, there was no hope for me, but one exhibition in 1979 made me. That proved to be extremely lucky for me.

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.

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.

The UK has two things, the arts and education, and both of them it pushes into the corner. It's the hugest, hugest mistake. Why do British ministers meet anyone from the arts other than to cut them? Compared to Germany, Britain has got quite a long way to go there, frankly.

In Germany, it seems that the intellectual and aesthetic life are to be celebrated and are seen as part of a real and good education, whereas in Britain, traditionally – certainly since the Enlightenment – we've been afraid of anything intellectual, aesthetic, visual.

In the UK, while the arts are the second biggest sector after banking, they probably form less than one tenth of 1% of government spending. It's completely scuzzy.

It's a shame that I haven't done an exhibition in India till now. But I am working on one in Delhi for January 2005. If things go well, there will be another in Mumbai too.

Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together.

It is precisely in those moments when I don’t know what to do, boredom drives one to try …a host of possibilities… [to] either get somewhere or not get anywhere.

Do you know there’s a wonderful Christian idea in which Thomas stretches his hands out to try to touch Christ’s wound and Christ says ‘Noli me tangere’ (do not touch me). What your eyes see your hands will always try to affirm. Much of dealing with the non-material is about this confusion between the hand and the eye, the ear and the eye, when the thing that you look at is uncertain, your body demands a kind of readjustment, it demands certainty. Something happens to where you are, to space; time changes. Time, I think, becomes slower. The mystical truth of art is time.