Anish Kapoor: The prince and the artist

Everyone is drawn to Anish Kapoor's exquisite work. Everyone, that is, apart from Prince Charles. So what is it about the quiet man of British art that gets his Royal Highness in such a tiz? Sholto Byrnes visits the sculptor at his London studio to talk about politics, posterity and 'the importance of having an inner life'

The "wound" after which the work is titled is laser cut through 261 thick pages, and each of the editions contains three other variations. Four editions of this "book", which contains no words, were installed for the launch at Norman and Elena Foster's magnificent penthouse overlooking the Thames. Guests walked round them carefully; nobody wanted to be responsible for tipping red wine onto one of the precious exhibits. Alain de Botton was particularly impressed. How much better, the television philosopher mused, to be able to sell 10 copies of your book for £100,000 rather than attempting to shift 100,000 units at £10 a throw. (In fact, there are 25 limited editions, each selling for £50,000; but de Botton's point stands.)

The Fosters' apartment was packed; everyone comes out for Anish Kapoor, who is often to be seen himself at openings. A compact, fizzy, friendly man, he stands among but apart from the YBAs a few years his junior. Not for him the Hoxton chic of ripped jeans, dirty t-shirt and dirtier vocabulary. He is always discreetly smart, and his voice is rich and polite - a verbal and visual rebuke to the artists who look like tramps and whose language is of the gutter.

Kapoor is at the top of his game. His work is now to be found all over the world, from museums in New York, Sydney and Tokyo to public spaces such as the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, where his Cloud Gate has been fondly renamed "the silver bean" by locals. A Turner Prize winner in 1991, Kapoor memorably created Marsyas for Tate Modern three years ago. His 150m long sculpture, made of a red plastic skin, twisted the length of the turbine hall, fascinating visitors without them necessarily being able to explain why. But they came to see it, because everyone is drawn to Anish Kapoor's work. Everyone, that is, apart from Prince Charles.

It seems bizarre - although, given the prince's ultra-conservative tastes, quite possible - but Kapoor seems to think that the Prince of Wales is out to get him. The subject comes up over coffee at Kapoor's studio in Camberwell when I mention the Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park. Kapoor was on the shortlist of two, but lost out to the US architect Kathryn Gustafson, whose design has since been plagued with problems. I bring it up as a matter of duty; I suspect Kapoor has said all he wants to about the competition. It turns out that he hasn't.

"Technically we were supposed to have won that," he says. "All the jury said they voted for us, but they were overruled. Now that's the second time I've been in that situation; actually, technically it's the third time, but I won't tell you about the third one because, oh," he grimaces, "it's too complicated." The first time involved a font Kapoor was to make for St Paul's Cathedral. "You go through all the bloody hassle of making a proposal," he says. "I didn't read about the competition; someone called me up and pushed me to take part. So I take part, OK, with very wonderful colleagues, and for whatever reason they chose mine." (I saw the design at the time - the font looked like a very large, and very beautiful, chocolate Minstrel.)

"We were just about to start making it when, from what I understand, the palace, in the form of Prince Charles, had a hand in putting the kybosh on it. And that was that. End of story. The Dean of St Paul's and myself were in daily conversation about developing the designs, and then whatever gets said - I heard afterwards that it was Prince Charles - it was dead overnight. The Dean refused to talk to me again and I didn't get paid. Appalling behaviour. A disgusting lack of conscience. Just cavalier. Unbelievable.

"So, idiot that I am," he continues, "I do this a second time and take part in a public competition for the Diana memorial. I should have known that the palace was going to have a hand in it. I won't say any more, ha ha ha." I ask if he's ever encountered Prince Charles. "I've met him a few times." Has he raised the subject with him? "Oh, it's too difficult. Now, idiot that I am, I'm doing the memorial in New York."

It was announced in the spring that Kapoor was to create a memorial to the British victims of the 11 September attacks on the Twin Towers. His sculpture was to be the centrepiece of a memorial garden in Hanover Square, a site which Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall visited on their recent trip to New York. Surely the prince wasn't going to put the kybosh on that too? "Ahhh," says Kapoor. "Who knows? We're supposed to have signed the contract a long time ago, but it's still in abeyance. I'm still waiting for something to happen. It's idiotic. I don't know what it's about. I'm doing plenty, I don't need to do these projects. But hey, I'd like to do the memorial, because I think it could be wonderful."

Kapoor speaks heatedly, but attempts to be humorous. It clearly rankles, though, and after the disasters that have befallen Daniel Libeskind's plans for reconstruction at Ground Zero (the architect's designs are now barely recognisable), he can hardly be blamed for worrying about the New York memorial; especially if he thinks the heir to the throne is out to stop him at every turn.

Prince Charles won't be able to interfere with the many other projects Kapoor is involved with, though. His studio is filled with works in progress and scale models, from highly polished mirror pieces to great lumps of Portugese marble. In one corner a brick of red wax stands on Hornby-sized railway tracks. "That's going to be train tracks laid in a very big space," he says, "with one block of colour pushing another. It's going to be happening in Germany in a place the size of a football field. It's enormous. A mad idea."

At the other end of the room a huge sphere made of the same red wax is being slowly smoothed at its edge by a metal cutter. It looks like a giant Edam cheese. Kapoor picks at the wax shavings. "Bleeurhh," he says. "It's blood. It's wax. It's very much of the hand, isn't it? I wanted to make these things visceral, really woooah."

A long tube, similar to Marsyas at the Tate, runs through a model hillside. "That's going to be at a private estate in New Zealand," he says. "It's absolutely vast. It's in the great traditions of the Sixties and Seventies, that idea that sculpture isn't a little bijou piece on the lawn, that it participates in the scale of the land. The Egyptians, you know? Why shouldn't we think like that?"

Another model, for a metro station in Naples, shows a fat, curving hook surrounding a staircase leading underground. "In the city near Salerno, which is Dante's legendary place of descent into the underworld," says Kapoor, "I felt it was impossible to continue the tradition of the great Russian or Parisian metro station, the palace of light. So you enter the object, in a way, between its legs. It's got some of that danger of entering a cave, or a womb." He marvels that the commission has come his way. "Civil projects like this have only recently been given to architects," he says. "Previously they were done by civil engineering bureaucrats. How incredibly courageous of them to give it to an artist. After all - bloody artists! On one level, it's bonkers."

And off he dashes to the next piece, and the next model. No one could fault the sculptor for a lack of enthusiasm. At 51, Kapoor has more than proved his father wrong when he urged the young Anish not to become an artist; his son would never make a living, he thought. Now Kapoor's works sell for six and seven figure sums; as a Royal Academician, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he has the official recognition of his peers; and he and his German wife, Suzanne, live very comfortably with their two children in a house in Notting Hill.

It wasn't always so easy, though. For many years Anish Kapoor's life was a series of battles. Although he has won most of them, I think that battling spirit continues to fuel the ambition in his work. At school in India, Kapoor, the son of a Jewish mother and an atheist father, was the only non-Hindu in his class. "My mother was a foreigner, so I carried with me this sense of exclusion," he says. "I've had it all my life."

In 1971 he and his brother went to Israel. Did they feel like Jews there, I ask. "Yes. But there was always this thing - you're dark-skinned Jews. So it was a continuation of a situation I'd known, just a different variation on it."

Next Kapoor came to England to study at Hornsey College of Art. Soon after he arrived, he had a breakdown. "It was horrific, very distressing," he says. "It was about the usual things - mum and dad, my place in the world, all that." I ask how it affected his work. "It indicated to me the importance of having an inner life," he says. "That, and for many years after I had this feeling that if I didn't make something, if I didn't exteriorise, if you like, continually, that somehow I wouldn't survive. I depended on my work to have a sense of being."

For 20 years he underwent psychoanalysis - "the hardest thing I've ever done" - until, most unusually, he decided he was finished. "I've never met anyone who had the same experience I had," he says. "I felt that was it. I was done. I didn't need to do it ever again."

Within two years of leaving art school, Kapoor was making a living from his work. To begin with, to his intense irritation, he was pigeon-holed because of his colour. "20 years ago this country was one damn racist place, there's no doubt about it," he says. "In the early Eighties, when I first began to show, much of what was written was about this Indian artist making exotic work. That's not what I'm about. I'm not interested in you being able to put me in a nice little package and say 'this is Indian'. Forget it. I'm not going to let you do that."

Art, says Kapoor, should be seen clear of its "cultural baggage". "Judge an individual as an individual. It's one of my pet subjects," he explains semi-apologetically. "I think it's a very important diatribe, even if it is a diatribe."

He still feels like an outsider today. "I've always thought of myself as a foreigner who lives in England, not an immigrant," he says. "When I go to India they say 'you speak with a British accent', so I'm a foreigner there too. I have always been a foreigner in some way. And that's OK."

That sense of "otherness" is apparent in his work, and perhaps that is what draws people to it so strongly. Nothing is explicitly referred to; no country or language springs instantly to mind when viewing a Kapoor. The word that is often used about his work is "spiritual". Certainly there is something timeless, often peaceful, and sometimes rather eerie about his work. "I've said ad infinitum that I have nothing to say as an artist," says Kapoor. "What I can do, I think, is stumble on things that might feel as though they're relevant."

His denial of having a particular message is often misunderstood. He means that he has nothing formal to say, nothing that can be expressed clearly in words, and nothing with an old-fashioned narrative story. But that's not to say that he isn't reaching towards something. He talks of the Modernism of Barnett Newman, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. "It's the kind of Modernism which says that the object has deep symbolic potential, but in order to reach it one has to get the narrative out of the way. Painting, in a way, has always been a narrative medium. It worked for a while as a non-narrative medium, but then it somehow wanted to return, and we are now in a full-blown narrative phase in painting at the moment.

"Sculpture on the other hand," he says, "has always had a tangential relationship with narrative. At one level the history of sculpture may be seen as the history of material, not just as the history of image. To carry on that thought: if sculpture is also the history of material, then the sculpture I want to make is towards the history of the immaterial."

Kapoor is obsessed with material. He compares the curves on one of his marble sculptures to pieces of meat; on another to an armpit; and praises the sexiness and body-like qualities of another. But he is also obsessed with its ability to transcend its physical manifestation. When he talks about the rounded, mirrored surface of Cloud Gate, he becomes very excited about the fact that, despite its size, it has been so well made that no joins can be seen. "When an object gets made to that level of perfection," he says, "it sort of becomes a non-object again. The hand is completely removed." It's true; looking at an image of the sculpture reflecting the Chicago skyline, one could almost imagine it as a huge lump of mercury dropped from the heavens by some non-human agent.

One might not put it in the same terms as Kapoor, but standing in front of one of his concave mirror pieces the viewer has a strong sense of what the artist calls "the immaterial". The work exerts a pull, seeming to want to drag the viewer into some bottomless void. "Those pieces do say 'come and stand here'," he says. "It's very manipulative."

The language of specialists can seem fabulously opaque. One critic described Kapoor's studio as possessing "the irregularity of a holy city or the landscape of the soul". What Kapoor is attempting to deal with, he says, employing simpler terms, is "awe and wonder". "It's a wondrous world, and it is possible to find 'fuck me' moments. They are there, and they're to be worked with."

With such aspirations, it is no surprise that Kapoor takes a long time over much of his work. "I've always tried to hold on to the idea that I make something, and then it sits in the studio for some time until I know what I'm doing. Until I've looked at it, listened to it, until it slowly says 'yes, OK'. And it often says 'no - this has not quite done it', which is disappointing. But that's part of a creative life."

He contrasts that with the effect that a hungry art market has had on other artists. "What it seems to have done is to lead to very quick art. Make it today, sell it before it's made. That is detestable. It's not what's going to happen in the next five years that matters, it's what's going to happen in the next 50 years." A long, relatively slow career, he says, is what artists should strive for.

Kapoor doesn't explicitly criticise the younger artists who came after him. But he does make it clear that he thinks his generation laid the ground for them by exhibiting internationally and putting modern British art on the map. When he mentions the YBA penchant for the "readymade" tradition of Marcel Duchamp his voice does not betray active disapproval, but hints at a withholding of approval. He would never say it but, in his heart, I think Anish Kapoor believes he is producing more lasting, and better, work than the pop stars of contemporary art. He's probably right, too.