NivEou's BlOg: September 2011

Anish Kapoor

Cloud Gate (2004), Millennium Park, Chicago

Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.

1.Research Kapoor's work in order to discuss whether it is conceptual art or not. Explain your answer, using a definition of conceptual art.

Conceptual art is art in which the concepts or ideas involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions.This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:

“	In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

2. Research 3 quite different works by Kapoor from countries outside New Zealand to discuss the ideas behind the work. Include images of each work on your blog.

Anish Kapoor with giant curved mirror sculpture in London's Kensington Gardens - photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

I like how he make his art works and his idea. mirror as a reflection, we can see things or etc through the mirror. it could be any meaning we have to think about.

I found this is very interesting work he had make, Typically Kapoor's pieces are simple organically curvaceous forms in single bright colours that evoke the pigments used in Indian markets and temples. Convex and concave elements trick the eye and the viewer often experiences a kind of illusion of depth.

Cloud Gate is a large public sculpture which was first unveiled at the opening of Millennium Park in 2004. It soon became one of the city's most photographed attractions, and is now one a famous symbol of Chicago.

Cloud Gate

The Cloud Gate further cemented Chicago's reputation of a city at the forefront of public art and follows in the footsteps of earlier well-known public installations such as Alexander Calder's Flamingo at Federal Center, Picasso's untitled sculpture at the City Hall and Jean Dubuffet's Monument with Standing Beast at the James R. Thompson Center.

The Name

Even before it was given an official title, Chicagoans were quick to dub the reflective steel sculpture 'the Bean' after its peculiar shape and the name stuck. The official name however is Cloud Gate as it represents a gate to the city it reflects.

Design

Cloud Gate

Cloud Gate was the first public sculpture of Indian-born and London-based artist Anish Kapoor. His work was selected out of two proposals that were submitted in 1999 for a showpiece sculpture in the new, modern Millennium Park, which was scheduled to open in 2000.

Kapoor designed a stainless steel construction consisting of 168 plates, each 1 cm (0.4 inch) thick and seamlessly welded together. The structure weighs 100 tons and measures 10 meters high and 20 meters wide (33 x 66 ft). People can walk through the 3.7 meter high central arch, where they can look up to the large 'dent' and see numerous distorted reflections of themselves.

Unveiling When the new Millennium Park was officially inaugurated in 2004 after a four year delay, the city was eager to show the sculpture to the public, as it had spent the hefty sum of 23 million dollars on what was to become one of the highlights of the park.

Reflection of the skyline in Cloud Gate, Chicago

Reflection of the
Michigan Avenue Skyline

Unfortunately the assembly of the sculpture was well behind schedule and Kapoor was reluctant to unveil the unfinished artwork to the public. And not without reason; the structure was still unpolished and the seams were visible.
As expected, many Chicagoans were highly critical and dismissed the unfinished 'Bean' as a piece of metal. After the inauguration of the park, the structure was put back under wraps. Not until it was completely finished in May, 2006 became its almost magical appeal visible.

Now seamless and polished, the Cloud Gate reflects and distorts the skyline of Michigan Avenue, the sky, and the people nearby, who always seem to have the urge to touch the sculpture's silvery surface. Cloud Gate instantly became an icon of Chicago, and an attraction that every visitor to the city wants to see.

3.Discuss the large scale 'site specific' work that has been installed on a private site in New Zealand.

i t hink Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. The actual term was promoted and refined by Californian artist Robert Irwin, but it was actually first used in the mid-1970s by young sculptors, such as Lloyd Hamrol and Athena Tacha, who had started executing public commissions for large urban sites

Anish Kapoor has undertaken the third in The Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Anish Kapoor is renowned for his enigmatic sculptural forms that permeate physical and psychological space. Kapoor's inventiveness and versatility have resulted in works ranging from powdered pigment sculptures and site-specific interventions on wall or floor, to gigantic installations both in and outdoors. Throughout, he has explored what he sees as deep-rooted metaphysical polarities: presence and absence, being and non-being, place and non-place and the solid and the intangible.

4. Where is the Kapoor's work in New Zealand? What are its form and materials? What are the ideas behind the work?

30 St Mary Axe, also known as the Gherkin and the Swiss Re Building, is a skyscraper in 's London main financial district, the City of London, completed in December 2003 and opened on 28 April 2004. It is 180 metres (591 ft) tall, with 40 floors. Its construction symbolised the start of a new high-rise construction boom in London.

The building was designed by Lord Foster, his then business partner Ken Shuttleworth[1] and Arup engineers, and was constructed by Skanska of Sweden in 2001–2004.
The building is on the former site of the Baltic Exchange building, the headquarters of a global marketplace for ship sales and shipping information. On 10 April 1992 the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb close to the Exchange, severely damaging the historic Exchange building and neighbouring structures.
The UK government's statutory adviser on the historic environment, English Heritage, and the City of London governing body, the City of London Corporation, were keen that any redevelopment must restore the building's old façade onto St Mary Axe. The Exchange Hall was a celebrated fixture of the ship trading company.
After English Heritage later discovered the damage was far more severe than previously thought, they stopped insisting on full restoration, albeit over the objections of the architectural conservationists who favoured reconstruction. Baltic Exchange sold the land to Trafalgar House in 1995.[9] Most of the remaining structures on the site were then carefully dismantled, the interior of Exchange Hall and the façade were preserved, hoping for a reconstruction of the building in the future.
In 1996 Trafalgar House submitted plans for the Millennium Tower, a 386 metres (1,266 ft) building with more than 140,000 m2 (1,500,000 sq ft) office space, apartments, shops, restaurants and gardens. This plan was dropped after objections for being totally out-of-scale with the City of London and anticipated disruption to flight paths for both City and Heathrow airports; the revised plan for a lower tower was accepted.
The gherkin name dates back to at least 1999, referring to that plan's highly unorthodox layout and appearance. Due to the current building's somewhat phallic appearance, other inventive names have also been used for the building, including the Erotic gherkin, the Towering Innuendo, and the Crystal Phallus

5. Comment on which work by Kapoor is your favourite, and explain why. Are you personally attracted more by the ideas or the aesthetics of the work?

Youtube has some excellent footage on Kapoor-take a look at Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy.

The Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor is probably best known in the United States for his 2004 chrome installation piece “Cloud Gate” for the Millennium Plaza in Chicago, but Europeans—especially Londoners—will know him for his massive, bloodred, site-specific sculpture “Marsyas” displayed in the Turbine Room of the Tate Modern during its grand opening in 2002. Kapoor appreciates what engineers and tensile fabricators do because it affects his work: “I am concerned with the way in which the language of engineering can be turned into the language of the body,” he says. “Marsyas” relied heavily on the skills of both Arup for the engineering and Bo Hightex for the piece’s fabrication. (See FA, May/June 2003, p.22.)

Although the Tate sculpture was temporary, Kapoor often creates his outdoor sculptures for permanent residence. Such is the case with his recent installation for “The Farm,” a 400ha (1,000 acre) private estate outdoor art gallery in Kaipara Bay, north of Auckland, New Zealand. Kapoor’s first outdoor sculpture in fabric, “The Farm” (the sculpture is named after its site), is designed to withstand the high winds that blow inland from the Tasman Sea off the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The sculpture is fabricated in a custom deep red PVC-coated polyester fabric by Ferrari Textiles supported by two identical matching red structural steel ellipses that weigh 42,750kg each. The fabric alone weighs 7,200kg.

The ellipses are orientated one horizontal, the other vertical. Thirty-two longitudinal mono-filament cables provide displacement and deflection resistance to the wind loads while assisting with the fabric transition from horizontal ellipse, to a perfect circle at midspan, through to the vertical ellipse at the other end. The sculpture, which passes through a carefully cut hillside, provides a kaleidoscopic view of the beautiful Kaipara Harbor at the vertical ellipse end and the hand contoured rolling valleys and hills of “The Farm” from the horizontal ellipse. Fabrication and installation of the art piece is by Structurflex Ltd., of Henderson, Auckland, New Zealand, overall engineering is by Structure Design Ltd., membrane engineering by Compusoft Engineering Ltd.

A view of the Kaipara Harbor is visible through the vertical ellipse.
“The Farm” transitions from a vertical ellipse seaward to a circle at midspan, to an identical, but horizontal ellipse at lands end.
Thirty-two mono-filament cables provide displacement and deflection resistance to the high winds that blow inland off the Tasman Sea toward Kapoor’s sculpture on the New Zealand coastline.