Towards a sensibility of infinity : the abyss and Anish Kapoor

Abstract

This essay critiques notions of the abyss as articulated through the “void” artwork of Anish Kapoor, whose practice is informed by the primary physical sensation of insignificance that elicits the sublime as a condition of emptiness. At once grounded in a Western art-making tradition and influenced by the Indian cultural tradition into which he was born, Kapoor challenges the limits of representation and the reflective power of art to evoke discourse on the groundlessness and indeterminacy of our late-modern cultural condition. This essay demonstrates how Kapoor’s concave forms and homogenous surfaces, along with his dark, dense pigments, are attempts to create impossible spaces—at once finite and seemingly infinite—that invite the viewer beyond the threshold of a sensorial uncertainty. Thus, while the abyss per se evades adequate determination, it is by mapping these creative responses that connections can be made between those concepts intangible and quotidian.