The same thing happens when you walk under Anish Kapoor’s bean-like Cloud Gate in Chicago: you, the sky, and the cityscape are part of the work. Some of Kapoor’s work is heavily influenced by Minimalism - simple forms, industrial materials, and embedded into the world of the viewer. As you circumambulate the gallery, your own presence changes and animates the installation. Minimalist sculptures like Robert Morris’ mirrored cubes (below) ( 10) were created with viewer experience in mind. I would call his a radical viewer experience, although not a positive one.Īrt critic Leo Steinberg was an early proponent of art-viewing as an embodied experience, and described artworks as “situation” involving “the beholder” (9). The visitor who fell into the work in Portugal was certainly surprised by the depth of the work’s interior. This was the case with Descent Into Limbo (above), which looked like a flat circle painted on the floor of the gallery. Many allow visitors to enter and experience them, while others are such voids that they block even the visitor’s gaze from entering the space of the artwork.
Art historian Sarah Andress describes Anish Kapoor’s sculptures as “at once about presence and vacancy, materiality and ethereality…” (8). There’s something very unsettling about this whirlpool. When it was installed in San Gimignano in 2015, gallery visitors could walk right up to the edge of Descension and watch as the dark, churning water was sucked loudly down an invisible drain. Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada.Īnish Kapoor’s Descension (above) is also part of the expanded idea of sculpture as formless experience that compelled artists like Donald Judd, who once said that “a work needs only to be interesting” (7). 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-1970. Cubed building with a dark hole in the floor, 6 × 6 × 6 m. There are certainly parallels between the black hole of Descent into Limbo and the human-sized hole in Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument.Īnish Kapoor, Descent Into Limbo, 1992. Donald Judd described contemporary art as “neither painting nor sculpture,” moving away from “forms” and toward experiences (5) like Joseph Beuys’ participatory, outdoor “social sculpture” ( 6). Other artists in the 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied with this as well.
These artworks raise interesting questions about the boundary between natural materials and artistic creation as well as the nature of sculpture as an art form.
The LA times called Double Negative “A Hole in the Ground” ( 4). Less than a decade later, Land Artist Michael Heizer created another “negative sculpture” that resembled Oldenburg’s grave-like Placid Civic Monument on a much larger scale: the 1970 earthwork Double Negative (below), whose two canyon-like trenches changed the landscape of the Nevada desert ( 3). In the late 1960s, Claes Oldenburg created his Placid Civic Monument, a prototype for what became known as “negative-space sculpture” ( 2). In 2018, an unfortunate visitor to the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal accidentally fell into Anish Kapoor’s 1992 sculpture Descent Into Limbo - an eight foot deep black “pit” in the gallery floor ( 1). Whirlpool, 8 m diameter. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano. Minimalism and Radical Viewer Experience in Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into LimboĪnish Kapoor, Descension, 2014.
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