The Indian born artist Anish Kapoor has a major sculpture going up at Rockefeller Center in New York next month, and there’s a detailed profile of him in the New York Times (thanks, Tamasha).
The sculpture is called “Sky Mirror,” and it’s essentially a large, convex piece of highly polished stainless steel, roughly in the shape of a contact lens. From the image at the Times (which is computer generated) as well as images of the same sculpture at other sites, I have a feeling this piece is going to be a bit of a tourist sensation.
This high-profile placing of one of Kapoor’s sculptures is a coup for the artist, but hardly the first time he’s been given pride of place in the western art world. Major pieces of his are on display in the MOMA and the Tate Modern in London, the most famous of which might be Marsyas, a massive construction that filled the Tate’s vast Turbine Hall four years ago. Kapoor is one of the most important and influential practitioners of a movement in abstract sculpture called either minimalism or post-minimalism, depending on how exact we’re being.
It’s a long way to come for a Doon School boy. Let’s get into the art a bit more. Here is the Times:
Both works are extensions of Mr. KapoorÂ’s almost career-long interest in sculptural incorporeality. Borrowing ideas from Minimalist and post-Minimalist predecessors like Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse but using deep matte colors, reflectiveness and other illusions, he makes boundaries seem to disappear with an effect that is often overtly sensual and spiritual. Mr. Kapoor, who first rose to prominence in the mid-1980Â’s and won the Turner Prize in Britain in 1991, calls them nonobjects. (link)
Minimalism came of age in the 1960s, and was displaced somewhat by postmodernism and conceptual art, though it never really went away. For the most part I tend to prefer more congenial, conversational art, but a number of Kapoor’s pieces do something for me that Donald Judd’s roomfuls of black cubes don’t really do. Kapoor’s best works clearly are social objects, even if they operate in the same general mode as minimalism does.
A bit more from the same article:
Though his public work is unabashedly crowd-pleasing, Mr. KapoorÂ’s intentions are often deeply philosophical. His mirrored piece might be thought of as a sculptural twist on the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Fichte, who wrote about self-consciousness being possible only through the resistance an individual encounters from external objects; in other words, something defined by what it is not. (link)
What I like about the “Sky Mirror” piece and a related piece now installed at Millenium Park in Chicago called “Cloud Gate” is the way they present a kind of prism through which to view the world. They are solid, stainless steel, and point at the monumental architecture around themselves — and in that sense they are completely of a piece with the modern American city. But in that they have the general look of liquids, they resist the sense of fixity of massive public sculptures, which are sometimes more in the vein of decorative buildings than art objects that inspire contemplation. As the Times notes, in the convex mirror of “Sky Mirror,” the towering buildings facing the sculpture are vertically inverted — another kind of anomaly.
Incidentally, many of Kapoor’s early works made oblique references to Indian religious rituals — some of his minimalist forms from the 1980s, for instance, were coated in bright red powder in the manner of Hindu religious shrines (see this piece, for instance). The tie back to India seems to be less evident in Kapoor’s recent ‘big’ works, though many art critics draw on Buddhist concepts of space and being (or non-being) in attempting to analyze Kapoor’s work. So it might still be there.
ItÂ’s a long way to come for a Doon School boy.
Doon school is India’s Eton/ Andover/ Phillip’s Academy. Read their alum on wikipedia. What stuck me on wikipedia article is this: Over half of Doscos attend college outside of India. And half a dozen squash champions of India are Doscos. I bet the remainder 50% all went to St. Stephen’s for college to play squash.
Some preppies.
Kush, I know. Doon School grads are such heavy over-achievers, they are sometimes referred to as the “Doon School Mafia.”
Squash may be preppy, but so are golf and tennis. Cricket also was classically a super-preppy sport (now democratized).
I understand that the student body of Doon School has transformed. No longer does it cater as much to the so called anglicized elite – the classes and communities prominent during British Raj, but rather to the children of newly rich merchants from the provinces, particularly UP. And the South Indian population has declined.
Whoa! That thing looks cool. Er, I mean; it challenges me to explore my inner conciousness vis a vis the existential confrontation between my own metaphysical being and the external (non)object reflecting, in a very dialectical way, that very being.
Either way, it’s certainly more-awe inspiring than a tomato soup can.
Manju, I think “whoa — that thing looks cool” will suffice.
Ahh, count me as one that finds Anish and his works–from the first I saw at the Tate Modern on a trip to London–so inspiring that I named my son after him. That says enough, doesn’t it? A wonderful person and a humanist, his works could very well be in places (of for some, objects) of worship.
NYCers are in for a treat!
Looks more like the Chicago bean to me …
Oops! My bad! Should’ve read the whole article before opening my mouth. Lesson learnt.
So true. “Cool” things make people who might not otherwise be interested in art (especially this kind) more interested. That’s enough to make me happy.
In other NYC news – the Nek Chand exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum is fabulous. If you’re around, go see it. It’s up until 9/24.
What does “elegant accent” mean? It would have been so much more interesting to know whether he sounds British or Bombay.
And he is also called “a little disingenous” in the article. Hmmmmmmmm.
This is a heckuva lot better than those junk metal sculptures passing as modern art. Well done.
For a moment I thought James Lipton started posting on SM.
So Manju, do you blog?
later //
That is an amazingly simple and beautiful piece of sculpture. I wonder who keeps it clean?
Atul http://www.thingsivenoticed.com
speaking of the tate modern. i’ve never been in a museum so full of so much “rubbish” that passes for “art.” but then again i find it hard to relate to a lot of modern, minimalist art, so it was probably my ignorance. but some of it really was stretching incredulity. (none of this is any reflection on mr. kapoor’s art above).
So Manju, do you blog?
Just here, //.
Being in Chicago people love the “cloud gate” aka “the bean” but people are also getting mad at this kapoor guy. This scuplture was supposed to be ready more then a year ago and is still not finished and was millions of dollars over budget.
I cant believe how New York has to always one up everbody. This kind of scuplture was supposed to be a Chicago original. DAMN YOU NEW YORK!!!
Good for Mr. Kapoor, but the whole deal doesnt impress me.
the ‘bean’ is my most fave..(and no i’m not biased ;))
Hey, I mentioned this a few days ago too, in one of my comments on SM. See comment # 34 here.
Whoa! That thing looks cool. Er, I mean; it challenges me to explore my inner conciousness vis a vis the existential confrontation between my own metaphysical being and the external (non)object reflecting, in a very dialectical way, that very being.
You say it challenges you to explore your inner conciousness, but is that not because it is the conceptual Singularity that is the mother-complex of morphological Forms in higher dimensional planes that separate the Animus, or the Spirit, from the merely Mortal?
Interesting tidbit about Anish Kapoor: his father is punjabi, his mother is jewish and his wife is german….
actually ‘chick pea’ or whatever your name is… ‘the bean’ is called CLOUD GATE. yeahh thats right get that up and around yee
FLCIK MA BEAN
MY NAME A BORAT I VERY MUCH LIKE THE BEAN CAN I EAT
WHAT IS THIS ? IS THIS A CHEESE?
kxcgg
my name rat nat..
and i’m a sex addict.
his father is punjabi, his mother is jewish and his wife is german….
so that means his entire family is a bunch of shameless f*ck ups. go figure.