Keeping up with Kapoor – Memory at the Guggenheim NYC

by Erik Wennermark

Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, aka The Bean, has become a Chicago icon. It is mandatory that all tourists have a picture taken pressed up against it, lying underneath it, or some such other myriad configuration of tourist and sculpture. They then must post this picture on their Facebook page and have all their friends comment on what a neat picture it is and how cool they look and wow, you went to Chicago, huh, that’s pretty cool. Neat pic.

Cloud Gate is a rare success in public art: it is attractive, it is sufficiently art-like, and the people almost uniformly dig it. It is also kind of fawning. If it were a Jeff Koons it would be a puppy dog. But if anything were a Jeff Koons it would be a puppy dog, so maybe that’s not the best comparison. Perhaps it’s like a Rothko, rooted in the canon of art history, conceptually sound, imbued with its creator’s spirit, yet makes one helluva pretty postcard.

Anish Kapoor’s new sculpture on view at the Guggenheim museum in New York through March 28, called Memory, is not so interested in playing nice with the public. In almost every way it is the anti-Bean. Memory is the Yin to the Bean’s Yang. It is the Dark Side of the Force to the Bean’s Skywalker-like goodly (and goofy) intent. “But I was going into Tashi station to pick up some power convertors!” Yes Luke, but C3PO does need that oil bath and you can goof off with your friends anytime.

The most startling thing about Memory is that, by virtue of the installation, it is impossible to ever see in its entirety. The room, like the Grinch’s heart, is two sizes too small making Memory impossible to “take in” and thereby leaving the viewer unsure, unsettled, and, in my case, slightly terrified by the possibilities of the creepily amorphous sculpture living inside the Guggenheim’s twisting tower. It is difficult to describe the piece because it can only be taken in piecemeal and then reassembled in one’s mind. As a result, every viewer is likely to have a completely different perception of Memory—tricky title, eh?

Of the material, Memory is made of raw oxidized steel. According to the press release 24 tons of it. The red and orange rust giving the mass an organic warmth, but one cut with the unforgiving corners of raw metal and industrial weight. It is womb-like, or egg-sac-like in its presumed shape, though almost certainly the coming birth will be one of alien origin. It is a pod descended from above, filled with malignant beings with mouths brimming the sharpest teeth.

A viewer has four angles to work from, and must traverse at least two levels of the museum to do so. One view is down a long corridor, others from the side, and, perhaps most disturbingly, a hole cut into the work’s pitch-black interior. A fellow patron with whom I shared this view muttered, “I would love to go in.” I thought, “You’ll never come out.” But instead fall into the unknown depths within.

The inability to approach the sculpture in a traditional fashion most raises the question of scale: how big is this fucking thing? What does it hope to achieve in its undefined immensity? Is it friendly? The not knowing is what makes this piece, the wily invitation to imagination, surprise and fear. In contrast to the Bean’s happy snapshot secure in time, Memory is an especially hungover morning spent in a futile attempt to recollect the night before — a series of fractured images that will never quite cohere. The smiling faces of last night’s bar give way to gaps growing ever more ominous.

As Memory attests and Cloud Gate reflects, truth is ever-pedestrian compared to the fiction of an active mind. Like a good novel, Memory allows the viewer to build on and amplify the story in a way the more static Bean never could. Fiction however, doesn’t make for much of a profile pic. You went to Chicago, huh? Neat!