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Royal Academy hails Russian hit

An art exhibition threatened by a row between the UK and Russia became one of the Royal Academy's biggest successes.

A life in art: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor's studio, a sprawling collection of warehouses in a quiet street in south London, is both artistic crucible and thriving workshop, the kind of place where charts stuck to the walls indicate what kind of hot beverages are preferred by the employees (should Kapoor ever pop round, offer him black coffee, not tea). Twenty-five people labour here, either coolly in the fresh white offices above, or in the sweat of masks and overalls below. As we meet, Kapoor has just designed two stage productions: Pelléas et Mélisande for La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called in-i for Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London. He is also preparing to open an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London; and he has a clutch of projects, ideas and commissions simmering away - not least Britain's largest piece of public sculpture, for the Tees valley, and a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts next year.Kapoor stands alone in the British art world: he is a touch younger than the so-called New British Sculptors such as Richard Deacon and Richard Wentworth, though he has often been spoken of in the same breath since he is represented by the Lisson, the gallery indelibly associated with that group of artists. And, when he won the Turner prize in 1991, aged 37, he was the senior artist on the shortlist, a decade or so older than the other contenders, who included Rachel Whiteread - this was a new generation of Young British Artists snapping at his heels. But he also stands apart because his work is entirely sui generis: strongly voiced, unmistakably his. Kapoor conducts a vigorous tour of his studio. The first thing he shows me is an enormous, deep resin tube, on which one of his masked accomplices is working amid the noise and dust of the workshop. It looks like an enormous semi-erect penis, I cannot help observing. "But it isn't!" Kapoor laughs . "It's the opposite. I'm interested in the opposite, and in the not-opposite. It's both. It will have a very, very dark interior. The idea is that a person will be able to walk in ... I have always been interested in antiphallic form - the opposite of which, of course, is deeply phallic. Hahahaha! It's not onwards and upwards ..."It is inwards and downwards: Kapoor is a psychic tunneller and excavator. Seeing his sculptures en masse in the studio, it makes one almost queasy sensing how many of them are concerned with feminine holes, clefts, entrances, slashes - often sculptures in a deep, primal red that screams of female human flesh, menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth. But Kapoor has never been interested in anything other than abstraction. The exploration of the feminine bypasses a lurid fascination with the specifics of the female form; it is more, perhaps, to do with an investigation of the dark places of the imagination. Not for him the world of art as commodity; not for him irony. He says: "Donald Judd used to say that art doesn't get made, it happens. The implication of that is that the studio is a place of a certain kind of practice. And there things occur that hopefully have deep quotidian recall - but are not directed by the quotidian world. So the post-Warholian notion that everything in the world is all art - it's fine, but what it avoids is the truly poetic, or the poetic of a slightly different order. And it's that order I am interested in."Figures such as Damien Hirst represent one branch of post-Duchampian art; Kapoor, however, takes on that history in a rather different way. "If Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art," he says, "then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by Beuys in some way - that all the objects in the world are symbolic. Now Duchamp, to be fair, was very careful about what was the found object; the found object was always deeply symbolic. So the arguments in fact come together and they don't get confused by the idea that you can put anything in a glass case and it's art. It isn't. It is the artist's duty to find poetic meaning in things." More baldly, he declares of the Hirsts on sale recently at Sotheby's: "It's just stuff , you know. It's not an artistic challenge. it's just stuff ... It's completely irrelevant." Later he adds: "It's almost not art. I'm going to go as far as to say it's not art."From the Hephaistian busyness of the artistic forge, Kapoor now ushers me into another large warehouse, silent and empty but for a number of tables covered with maquettes and models for large-scale sculpture. This is normally Kapoor's private space, the thinking place. The models are laid out in preparation for display at the Riba headquarters in London. "All these projects are about a certain kind of architecture," he says. "Many of them are thoughts about a certain kind of almost religious space. This, for instance, is a very crude model of a piece made in a museum in Japan - a void in the floor - called L'Origine du Monde, for obvious reasons." He laughs. This, he says moving on to a model of a silvery bridge that resembles an elongated bead of mercury, "is a bridge that we've been working on for years and years and years. Whether it happens or not is another matter. It's a kissing bridge. It opens in two halves, and both parts open and slide across the channel." Where is it? "I'm not allowed to tell you. I'm not going to tell you because it's still a bloody confidential pain in the backside, but anyway. It's quite a heavy shipping route in the UK."He's off again, to another model. This seems to be pure fantasy: it is an enormous circular hole in a valley in a mountainous landscape, a deep void leading to nothing and nowhere. "It's massive. It's kilometres across - and completely dark," he says. "One of the things that has emerged out of my work over all these years is this idea of the non-object, the absent object, the immaterial part of the material."Kapoor is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present. He recalls: "I made a work at Documenta [the five-yearly sculpture exhibition at Kassel, Germany] many years ago. You walked inside a building like a bunker, and inside there was a hole in the ground. It was completely dark - so dark that the hole resembled a carpet on the ground. One person was let in at a time. And there was a man who waited for 45 minutes, and when he went in he was absolutely furious. 'I've done many things in the cause of contemporary art,' he said, 'but I have never stood in line for all that time to look at a piece of carpet.' And he took his glasses off and flung them on to the carpet - and, of course, they disappeared down the hole. And then he was truly terrified. That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole, it is a space full of what isn't there."Kapoor has also investigated this notion by way of his mirror pieces - a large group of sculptures of varying scale that include concave, circular wall-mounted mirrors several feet in diameter, and the huge Sky Mirror that was mounted near the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 2006. His Cloud Gate, a 110-tonne sculpture with a reflective surface for the Millennium Park in Chicago, also perhaps falls into this category, though it is a three dimensional piece, shaped somewhat like a kidney bean. He talks about these objects in terms of painting: the effect, he explains, of a traditional painted surface is to draw the viewer into a space that apparently recedes beyond the picture plane. In the mirror pieces, by contrast, "the space doesn't recede - it comes out at you ... a new sublime that's forward of the picture plane."We are now in a quiet warehouse, where various sculptures sit awaiting their fate and the scrutiny of their creator. One mirror has a surface made up of a tiled pattern of squares and hexagons. Looking into it, parts of your reflection seem to dance in the space between you and the mirror; others seem to float back in the distance. Kapoor says: "I'm interested in the almost idiotic phenomenology of this. On one level you might say it's not art, it's a silly game. But I think there's something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal."Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, his mother an Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi, his father a hydrographer in the navy. He went to the prestigious Doon School, in Dehra Dun. "The good thing about education in India in the context I knew it was that it was really cosmopolitan. We learned just as much about Jahangir and Akbar as we did about Louis XIV and Elizabeth I." His parents were "modern, wonderfully modern"; and for Kapoor, there was a deep sense - as a Jewish boy with a white mother growing up in a household speaking English in India - of being an outsider.Kapoor's parents were keen for both their sons to see something of the world. "In those days, a plane ticket cost more than my father's salary for a year. So we were both encouraged to emigrate to Israel, because they paid for the plane ticket." It was there that "being an artist became not only an option, but something I could actively do something about". He moved to London, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and at Chelsea School of Art, as it was then known. College was "a total liberation" - partly from a state of deep psychological disturbance that afflicted him in his late teens. "I was seriously fucked up, full of inner conflict that I didn't know how to resolve." To tackle this turmoil, he eventually went into psychoanalyis, which lasted for 15 years and ended just before he met his wife Susanne (they now have two children, and have just built a new family home in Chelsea).Art college was a "kind of respite" from his psychic turbulence. He recalls his student work, much of which was performance-based. "The pieces were all very symbolic and they normally involved interaction between two people. They were non-narrative, but there was a process; and it was normally left to the two people to enact the piece with props. The props were really important - quite sexual. All the language was there already, dammit!" He left art school in 1977. At that time, Kapoor reckons there were perhaps 10 artists in Britain who were able to make a living just from selling their art: he assumed he would find some kind of teaching post. He rented a studio in Wapping, and for a while scraped money together by making furniture for the society decorator Nicky Haslam."Then," he says, "in early 1979 I went to India . . . and I suddenly realised all these things I had been making at art school and in my studio had a relationship to what I saw in India." And this relationship? "It was a certain attitude to the object. I was making objects that were about doing, about ritual. It was that 'doingness', that almost religious doing, that I saw everywhere ... It felt like a huge affirmation."It was from this idea of ritual that his first significant works sprang: his pigment pieces ? bright shapes set on the ground covered in pure pigment. "I would almost ritually lay on the pigment; they are very much performed," he says. "I made them all in three years. It was an incredible time of discovering something new every single day. I really didn't know where they came from; I felt that they had tumbled out into the world."This feeling of unforced creation still happens, once in a while, for Kapoor. He shows me something he has been working on over the past couple of days: a model for a huge installation for the Grand Palais in Paris for 2011. What eventually gets seen in that vast space may bear no relation to what he shows me, he says, but what has come to him is a scenario in which the glass roof of the space is covered over with red gel, JCBs busily tunnel into the ground, and a large inflatable sphere, 25 metres in diameter, hovers over proceedings. There is something hellish about it."It's got a sense of being an excavation of the interior. I would never have made a model like this 10 years ago. I would never have allowed this kind of apocalyptic moment." The mess and the chaos of it have an imaginative relationship with the recent works he has been making out of gunky, visceral, blood-coloured Vaseline and wax, such as My Red Homeland (2003), 25 tonnes of the stuff in a circular container constantly formed and unformed by a large steel arm. "After years and years of looking for a kind of wholeness in my practice, I find myself over the past couple of years dealing with tragedy and anxiety - with things that are fragmented," he says.The sculpture for which Kapoor is most famed is Marsyas, the trumpet shaped structure, like a flayed skin stretched over a framework, that occupied Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002. It was seen in some quarters as a triumph of size over substance. "Every idea has its scale," he says. "Marsyas wouldn't be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture."While vast, Marsyas will seem small in comparison to Temenos, the first of a five-part installation known as the Tees Valley Giants, which will be the largest public-art initiative ever, the design for which was unveiled in July. Has public art become a clichéd response to the urge to regenerate post-industrial cities? "I think we've gone totally public sculpture mad," he says with vehemence. "I hate public sculpture." So why are you doing it? "It's really a problem, I've got to say it's really a problem. Public sculpture ... oh God, even the phrase makes me feel tired. Why I am engaged in it? Well, I think, as a sculptor, that is something of one's lot. Because scale is a tool of scultpure, and it needs to be worked with."He shows me the model for Temenos, which will be 100 m long. It is a tube of nylon cut from a pair of tights stretched between two rings, one of them propped on a pole - blissfully simple. Temenos is the Greek word for a sanctuary, a place set apart; and Marsyas is also a reference to ancient Greece: he was a man flayed for daring to challenge Apollo to a musical contest. "It is a myth of conceit, the conceit of art," Kapoor laughs. "The conceit of the artist!"Kapoor on KapoorThere had been a long tradition in sculpture that said that materials have to be what they appear to be ? this thing of truth to materials. I couldn't deal with that. Even as a student I didn't know what that meant. It seemed to me that art's all about illusion and the unreal. "Truth to materials" ran, and runs, contrary to everything I want to do. Quickly I realised that when you make an object and place pigment on it, the pigment falls to the ground like a halo around the object. And the implication is that it's like an iceberg: that most of the object is hidden, is invisible.And so I became more and more interested in the invisible object. There was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them. Sometimes I long for that kind of ebullient outpouring. That year I started making them was unbelievable. I didn't know where they were coming from. I didn't think them up, they popped into my head.Anish KapoorArtguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Turner prised billionaire takes Tate works to Moscow

A stunning collection of 112 Turner oils and watercolours has been transported from Tate Britain to Moscow, paid for by billionaire Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Usmanov was in London yesterday to look at more, while in Moscow's Pushkin museum the lent Turners were being hung in preparation for an exhibition opening on November 17 which, it is hoped, will help improve the still frosty relations between the UK and Russia.Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council, said: "This exhibition provides an opportunity not simply to see the outstanding art but also to use it as a means of developing a whole set of new understandings between the UK and Russia. Cultural relations for us are a vital way of supporting the bonds between two countries, never more so when there are other differences." The exhibition is being paid for by Usmanov's art and sports foundation which also funded a Whistler exhibition in Moscow two years ago. Last year he bought the art collection of late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Usmanov, best known in Britain for his 24% stake in Arsenal FC, said he was a trustee of the Pushkin museum. "When they asked me to support this exhibition I didn't have a choice," he said. Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar said it was an exciting day. "This is a project we have been debating, pursuing, arranging for quite a time now."The Tate and the Pushkin already have strong ties, although there are no plans for a reciprocal show. Earlier this year the Royal Academy staged the successful From Russia exhibition, in which works such as Matisse's The Dance were lent by Russia's principal collections.In total the Tate is lending 40 oil paintings and 72 works on paper for the first Turner exhibition in Moscow since 1975. It includes his masterpiece Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845); Venice scene The Dogano, San Giorgio (1842, pictured); and many people's favourite, the epic Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812).ArtRussiaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Adrian Searle gets a ringside seat as the Royal Academy casts off its stuffy image

First came the sobbing, and the sound of sculptures smashing to the floor. Later there was a lot of Neanderthal gibbering and wailing, and a great deal of domestic violence wreaked upon the furniture. It feels just like home at GSK Contemporary, a rolling season of events and exhibitions at 6 Burlington Gardens in London, once the home of the Museum of Mankind and now part of the Royal Academy.The constant snivelling and weeping that accompanies visitors up the grand staircase is a recording, by far the best bit of an otherwise dreary work by Rémy Markowitsch. During last week's opening party, I witnessed one of several colourful statues of semi-clad women pitched from its plinth and smashed to the floor, part of a performance by Georgina Starr. The sculptures were terrible neoclassical tat, the noise of their destruction satisfying and loud, even though it was impossible to see anything of the artist or the performance itself through the crowd. For a moment, everyone stopped drinking. The following morning all that was left was a pile of neatly swept fragments and dust. Performance art and theatre, stage sets, installations, and multi-screen films and videos fill the first part of this series of shows, which continues until mid-January. There's also a cafe, a temporary restaurant and evening cabarets, and the gallery is open until midnight. Next weekend, Martin Creed's band will be performing. The Royal Academy has to do something to attract new audiences, and GSK Contemporary (it's sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline) is set to have a three-year run of winter seasons. The RA is also strapped for cash, which is why, come January, they will be leasing the building to Haunch of Venison gallery, which is owned by Christie's.I had really come for the pole dancer, who performs all day, every day, in an empty, darkened gallery. Bumping and grinding up and down the pole, slithering and twirling, the dancer finally gets into some tiny yet teasing oscillations. For ages, I was the only one in the audience. The performance had all the raunchiness of an old lift, interspersed with periods of skewed, robotic energy. The dancer is nothing but a mechanised spotlight on a vertical pole, performing for no one, and fitfully illuminating the space as it goes about its pre-programmed business.This, by Olaf Nicolai, was fun, especially compared to René Pollesch's play Tod Eines Praktikanten, or Death of a Trainee, performed for three nights over last weekend. Apparently concerning a successful neo-leftist artist and his relationship with his assistant, this provided an opportunity for three actors to declaim in German for what felt like a very long time. Pollesch's play and Nicolai's dancer are part of Molten States, a show-within-a-show that continues until December 4, to be followed by an exhibition on the artistic legacy of novelist William Burroughs (who included firing guns and shooting up smack in his forays into multidisciplinary art). Curated by David Thorp, Molten States also presents Catherine Sullivan and Julian Rosefeldt. Theirs are the most substantial works here, and worth the visit alone, even though Sullivan's Triangle of Need is a frighteningly opaque, nearly incomprehensible multichannel video and film installation. Even the curator admitted he hasn't got to the bottom of it. This is probably because it hasn't got one.The protagonists of this bizarre production wear period costume, from all kinds of periods and none. Some speak an invented Neanderthal language, others appear to talk backwards, or mutter gobbledegook of their own invention. We slip from the 18th century to early 20th-century Miami. The actors mime ludicrous or extreme acts; they bark, they gibber, they mime doing things with their genitals. They go into antic convulsions, in what is called "disfigurement choreography" (devised by Dylan Skybrook, an American choreographer based in Belgium). According to the production notes, the performers act as though "riddled with clusterbomb fragments", or as if they were "wrestling with the antlers of an elk"; they roll their eyes as if "watching a humming bird dart about".Triangle of Need overflows with ideas; it drowns in them. In the end they are distractions, as one attempts to follow a storyline of intractable complexity, involving Nigerian email scams, a project to encourage a dying race of Neanderthals to breed, and the forgotten films of the Pathéscope Company of America. The mannered pretensions of Sullivan's work teeter into the exquisite. Triangle of Need bears all the hallmarks of genius - originality, bravery, ambition, even obscurity - but without the focus, synthesis or flair that someone such as Pina Bausch, or even Robert Wilson, might have brought. In the end, as with Pollesch's play, you just don't care, no matter how beautiful or arresting the details. You just want it to be over.After these overcomplicated machinations, the three long film works of Julian Rosefeldt's Trilogy of Failure are a joy. You may remember his clown, endlessly trudging in circles through the jungle in the Hayward Gallery's Laughing in a Foreign Language show this year. In The Soundmaker, a foley artist in a sound studio provides the noise effects for his double, who occupies a rancid one-room apartment. (The set for the apartment has been reconstructed here, somewhat redundantly.) Both the character in the apartment and the sound guy are trapped in wretched worlds that reek of testosterone and failure. Coffee is drunk; cigarettes are smoked; the guy in the apartment stacks all his belongings and furniture in the middle of the room and leaves, only to change places with his other self, who puts the room back together again. The film is a closed loop, like the mathematical infinity sign. This is followed by Stunned Man, another closed, flawed world of weird synchronicities, in which we think we see another man in a different apartment (this seems to be a Rosefeldt leitmotif). The action is mirrored on two abutted screens. The man goes about his day, maundering from room to room, sitting down to write, fixing something to eat, and eventually smashing the place to bits. Our hero clearly has anger issues. He kung-fu's the bookshelves, destroys the kitchen with whirls of the floor-mop, crashes through the ceiling and dives through the bathroom mirror into the world of his double (who nonchalantly steps through the door on the other screen and begins setting the place to rights). Except things are infinitely more complex than this. The two near-identical apartments don't present the mirrored views we think they do. How come the Luis Buñuel poster on the wall isn't reversed in its reflection, like everything else? Why does the study suddenly fill with a jungle of plants? Things are unhinged, and become more so the longer one watches.Stunned Man is full of mental trap doors, false endings and sleights of hand. The camera circles the action, first in one direction, then the other. As it goes back and forth we become more aware that this is an impossible world, reminiscent of the paradoxical spaces in MC Escher's drawings. I thought of Michael Snow's experimental 1960s film Back and Forth, and of early Paul Auster stories. We also get trapped in Rosefeldt's words, mesmerised by their internal conundrums. They are mind-mangling entertainments.The third film, The Perfectionist, takes place in an apartment, a flight-simulator cockpit, and a locker room in which a man folds and unfolds a parachute and gets caught in an indoor wind. In the apartment, a turbine engine crashes in. This last and least successful work in the trilogy feels trapped by its own mannerisms. Like his protagonists, Rosefeldt needs a way out. And by now, so do we ·Molten States runs until December 4, GSK Contemporary until January 19, at the Royal Academy, London W1. Details: 020-7300 8000ArtTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Video: Jonathan Jones looks behind the beauty of Byzantium at the Royal Academy in London

Jonathan Jones explores the treasures of Byzantium at the Royal Academy's exhibition

Treasures Of Byzantium 330-1453 At The Royal Academy Of Arts

The Royal Academy of Arts, in collaboration with Benaki Museum in Athens, exhibits Byzantium 330-1453, a collection of over 300 works of the Byzantine Empire.

Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque At The Royal Academy

Learn about the patrons, Aime and Marguerite Maeght, who gave support to great artists like Matisse, Miro and Braque, alongside a display of their work at the Royal Academy.