Smooth and shiny. Inside the belly of The Bean is another story, Dec 2014 This is The Bean. It's a nickname for one of Anish Kapoor's sculptures, a moniker that the British artist is quoted as saying is 'completely stupid'. It's stuck though because it tells you exactly what it is on the tin, in this case a stainless steel kidney bean. Its design was more inspired by mercury and it does look like a blob of liquid mercury fell from the sky and landed in the middle of Chicago's Loop. It feels like a semi-solid substance, held in space of its own accord. You don't feel like you're in the presence of 168 stainless steel plates seamlessly welded together in a year-long construction project that cost an estimated $23 million. The Bean is so much more ethereal than all that.
I only ever walked around, or by, the The Bean on the way to somewhere 'more important', more pressing. It's never been a destination point for me. Yet, if in my path, I've always stopped by to pay my respects. Always intrigued by its distorting reflections of the skyscrapers that make up the city's skyline or of a full moon -- a master reflector itself -- or of the people around me. Always admiring its shiny, metallic, newness after more than 10 years in a public park as well as its fun-house playfulness and how this playfulness seems to affect everyone who comes near it. There is almost a collective rapture around this thing.
But until recently, I never actually walked under it, or through it. In fact, I didn't know you could. I didn't know it was possible. Because I never quite saw the arch in the first place. This is extraordinary. The arch is 12 feet high! It's not some inconsiderable, dark arch as it may look in photos. It hits you: how tricky the eye is, how things can be obscured in plain site, and how our power of perception relies on so many intangibles. Which is the point of this masterpiece -- it obscures, limits, and plays with the viewer's field of vision and thus its comprehension. Two-thirds of its surface reflects the sky, and yet it is by traveling on the ground underneath -- and I don't lightly use the word travel -- that its official name makes sense. Kapoor named it Cloud Gate months after the 'completely stupid' nickname had taken hold.
It is only by walking underneath and looking up -- not looking through as in earthly gates -- that we see the true gate, a 27-foot high indentation in the belly of this beast. We don't know it's an indentation when we look up. We just see a circle, a navel -- the omphalos, an ancient Greek symbol with its unrelenting echo of 'know thyself'. We can't distinguish this navel at all from the surface of the sculpture though. When you look up, staring back at you are endless reflections of yourself and others -- and of Cloud Gate itself. It is self-reflecting, spiraling and morphing into quicksilver blobs with each move. Cloud Gate is a modern version of a stargate, a portal, a wormhole of infinite proportions, a metaphysical gate and motif used in art and architecture the world over to represent the crossing over from one realm to another.
I only ever walked around, or by, the The Bean on the way to somewhere 'more important', more pressing. It's never been a destination point for me. Yet, if in my path, I've always stopped by to pay my respects. Always intrigued by its distorting reflections of the skyscrapers that make up the city's skyline or of a full moon -- a master reflector itself -- or of the people around me. Always admiring its shiny, metallic, newness after more than 10 years in a public park as well as its fun-house playfulness and how this playfulness seems to affect everyone who comes near it. There is almost a collective rapture around this thing.
But until recently, I never actually walked under it, or through it. In fact, I didn't know you could. I didn't know it was possible. Because I never quite saw the arch in the first place. This is extraordinary. The arch is 12 feet high! It's not some inconsiderable, dark arch as it may look in photos. It hits you: how tricky the eye is, how things can be obscured in plain site, and how our power of perception relies on so many intangibles. Which is the point of this masterpiece -- it obscures, limits, and plays with the viewer's field of vision and thus its comprehension. Two-thirds of its surface reflects the sky, and yet it is by traveling on the ground underneath -- and I don't lightly use the word travel -- that its official name makes sense. Kapoor named it Cloud Gate months after the 'completely stupid' nickname had taken hold.
It is only by walking underneath and looking up -- not looking through as in earthly gates -- that we see the true gate, a 27-foot high indentation in the belly of this beast. We don't know it's an indentation when we look up. We just see a circle, a navel -- the omphalos, an ancient Greek symbol with its unrelenting echo of 'know thyself'. We can't distinguish this navel at all from the surface of the sculpture though. When you look up, staring back at you are endless reflections of yourself and others -- and of Cloud Gate itself. It is self-reflecting, spiraling and morphing into quicksilver blobs with each move. Cloud Gate is a modern version of a stargate, a portal, a wormhole of infinite proportions, a metaphysical gate and motif used in art and architecture the world over to represent the crossing over from one realm to another.
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