Mr. Big Stuff

Photo by Dave Morgan. © Anish Kapoor

"Model for Temenos" (2006)

© Anish Kapoor and Ove Arup

In collaboration with Cecil Balmond, rendering of "Temenos" (2006)

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Not long ago, at the opening of his exhibition in São Paulo, Anish Kapoor declared, “I hate public sculpture.” This statement was particularly provocative coming from the artist responsible for Chicago’s Cloud Gate (2004), which resembles a gleaming, massive blob of mercury and is one of the largest, most popular, and, at $23 million, most expensive public sculptures in the world. “Too much public art is whimsical,” Kapoor elaborates during this writer’s recent visit to his studio in South London. “It’s often an enlargement of something done elsewhere. One’s first recourse is to what one has done already, which is very comforting; but you have to find the courage to discover something you would never do anywhere else.”

Kapoor could be accused of having done exactly what he is criticizing: reworking his gallery pieces at a larger scale for public settings. Of course, his museum installations already seem to want to explode out of the institutions that contain them; Marsyas (2002), for example, which was coiled inside Tate Modern’s huge Turbine Hall. But now he seems to be working on an increasingly gargantuan scale. His Sky Mirror in Rockefeller Plaza in 2006 stood four stories high, but his proposed sculpture for a new building by Herzog & de Meuron seems to literally hold up a New York skyscraper. Meanwhile, he has revisited Marsyas, and made it more gigantic, for a public art proposal for Middlesbrough, Teeside, Yorkshire, in northeast England. “This is without doubt the biggest art project in the world,” Kapoor has said of Temenos. “In terms of ambition and scale—everything. It’s massive.”

Scattered over a table at his studio—three factory buildings full of people beavering away on various projects—are models for Temenos, a project so vast it will dwarf everything Kapoor has done so far. Stretched between two plywood rings is a tube of cheesecloth; unlike Marsyas, which was very fleshy and intestinal, Temenos will be constructed from high-tension wire and, suspended above the docks in Middlesbrough, should appear as light and insubstantial as a wind sock.

To make it, Kapoor will work with structural engineer Cecil Balmond (of the acclaimed engineering firm Ove Arup), who helped him to realize Marsyas. It will be the first of the Tees Valley Giants— five environmental pieces destined for other towns in Yorkshire. The other Giants are little more than vague schemes. “One idea,” says Kapoor, “is for an actual bridge and another for an arena that will work like an aural mirror collecting ambient sound. Scale is one of the tools available to you as a sculptor; making something big changes its relationship with one’s body. It’s something to do with meaning; size and color contribute, but scale is mainly about imagination.”

If scale is about imagination, though, it needn’t always extend outward and toward the sky, and Kapoor does preserve a degree of intimacy, particularly when his work openly refers to bodily functions and orifices. For despite their dramatic physical impact, his sculptures often suggest the presence of a hidden realm and thereby function as portals or antechambers to imaginary spaces within or beyond. This is most immediately evident in his designs for an underground subway station in Naples. The first sketch shows people disappearing into an unmistakably vaginal opening, which has since been refined into something more subtle but equally suggestive. There are two entrances, one a roll-neck collar of Cor-Ten steel colored rusty orange, the other a ring of gleaming aluminum shaped like an elastic band. “I brought the tunnel above ground and folded it over like a sock,” explains Kapoor. “In the city of Vesuvius, how can you not acknowledge that you are going underground?”

The idea of an interior materializes again when he takes me into a room full of models he is preparing for a show of architectural projects at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. “Out of the 40 or so projects here, I’ve built only three,” he tells me. “It’s a long, slow process. I have ideas all the time; some are instigated by commissions, some are a way of thinking about scale, some are an attempt to create a certain kind of religious or symbolic space.”