Academics From India

"So that actually adds another dimension but that’s not the reason (why he was commissioned). We really felt that the spiritual and immaterial aspects of his work would really make for a strong statement with respect to a work paying tribute to Teddy.[ Teddy Kollek, long-time Mayor of Jerusalem]."

"We picked him because he is a great sculptor. The flip side is it makes it quite interesting to work with him because not only was he born in India – he has an Indian father and a Jewish mother of Iraqi heritage – but he lived in Israel for a few years as a young man before he moved to the UK."

"It’s magnificent, it’s really great. It is quite simple and quite a pure piece."

"It looks stunning and it does exactly what we hoped.”"

"Discover how Kapoor’s continual experimentation with structure and medium has led him to work with a wide variety of materials from clay, fibreglass and paint pigment, to steel and wax, creating beautiful, strange and intriguing works that counter conventional ideas of art."

"The artist is a magician... nothing short of extraordinary … this is a staggering exhibition by a major artist."

"This rare and inspiring exhibition could hardly help but elicit wonder."

"A ground-breaking exhibition that challenges, intrigues and excites’"

"A piece of vainglorious sub-industrial steel gigantism, signifying nothing.... [artists] may be imaginative... not more than a poet. Poets do not make millions."

"Everything about the process by which public art is commissioned today militates against the commissioning of good artists and the creation of good art."

"A drunken party animal of a building and ultimately a celebration of the people of London."

"This is why Kapoor and Balmond have emerged as embattled heroes of public art. Their Orbit tower is not consensual, or easy to make sense of. It is wild and unexpected. It is, I believe, the most exciting British public artwork since House. Those who commissioned and created it deserve acclaim for choosing electricity over dull consensus."

"Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's Orbit is a daring, imaginative and exhilarating work of art. It does not deserve to be pilloried – on the contrary, if all British public art were like this, it would be an age of glory."

"It is almost as if the 49-year-old global Indian was an alien in his place of birth."

"I wake up early, does some meditation, take my children to school, and then go to the studio to begin my day's work. The food for his soul is typically India, but with lots of salad on the side."

"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."

"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."

"This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall. It's three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It's almost brighter than it is outside."

"It is more than a month that he's been completely disappeared. It is a true tragedy. Accuse him of something. Give him a lawyer. Let him defend himself …"

"I've never met Ai Weiwei but he's a colleague, an artist. In a very simple way he is heroically recording human existence. All he's done is to record death by administration, death by corruption, inefficiency. I don't even think he's pointing that sharp a finger, frankly."

"It's a building with a curious, difficult history that is inexorably linked to the history of Berlin, [he said] That's very potent. You can't make a show here without some reference to all of that. And it certainly makes a show here so much more interesting."

"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 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."

"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."

"Germans have a rather healthy respect for the arts and artists, [could] not be more different from the British perspective."

"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."

"It is a conjunction of images I have always loved in his Sonnets to Orpheus and this work is, in a way, a kind of eye which is reflecting images endlessly"

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

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

"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."

"Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relation with both space and time. Time, on two levels; one narratively and cinematically as a matter of the passage through the work, and the other as a literal elongation of the moment. This has to do with form and colour and the propensity of colour to induce reverie. Consequently, I hope, an elongation of time. Space is as complex, the space contained in an objectmust be bigger than the object which contains it. My aim is to separate the object from its object-hood."

"Red is a colour I’ve felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it’s one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. Of course, it is the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre."

"I think I’ve had three or four moments in my work over the last twenty-five years that have been real discoveries. The pigment pieces felt to me as if they were a discovery about an object and what an object can be; how an object can be and not be. Then, of course, the void pieces. The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don’t empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that’s more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object."

"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."

"Architects have always hoped to find a way to skip that stage between design and finished building."

"In India, there's lack of appreciation of the need to cross-examine data, the responsibility of a statistician."

"If Mahalanobis had done nothing else, if he had only founded Sankhya, the Indian Journal of Statistics, even so his contribution to science would have been outstanding and memorable. Sankhya is an international journal in the sense that it receives contributions from statisticians and probabilists the world over; international as in the sense of maintaining a standard comparable to the best in the world. And this has been from the very beginning. This is something that cannot be said of many scientific journals in the country"

"l have liked your article very much. The way you have narrated the history of my humanism in an evolutionary perspective has made this aspect of mine clearer even to me."

"What you have written after analyzing everything connected with my achievements and fame is altogether correct."

"l have always noticed how you are always capable to maintain objectivity in your judgement about people and l have always recognised that to be a great quality in you."

"Everybody knows him as the founder of the Indian Statistical Institute, the architect of the Second Five Year Plan, a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore and as one who had richly contributed to the social, cultural and intellectual life in Bengal. All those in the statistical profession were aware of his deep contributions to statistical theory, his efforts in providing a sound database to the Indian economy, and the part he played in placing India not far from the centre of the statistical map of the world. Those who have been closely associated with him have witnessed the indomitable courage and tenacity in fighting opposition for a good cause and clearing obstacles for propagating right principles."

"No technique of random sample has, so far as I can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy or in economy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis."

"Seng in "Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in India""

"What at first strongly attracted my admiration was that the Professor‘s work was not imitative….The experience of India will serve as a guidance and as an example worthy of imitating."

"I need hardly say that I refer to the emergence of a statistically competent technique of Sample Survey, with which I believe Professor Mahalanobis name will always be associated."