Sculptor Anish Kapoor's striking "Cloud Gate" occupies a prominent place in the heart of Chicago's Millennium Park and a prominent place in the hearts of many Chicago residents and visitors.
Parking lots and rail yards filled the space now occupied by Millennium Park until its development in the late 1990s as a major waterfront park and public gathering space chock-full of attractions like an ice skating rink, concert venue. Millennium Park always seems busy when we've visited, whether it was a hot and humid July day, or a cold November afternoon.
Kapoor, a British artist born in India, won the commission to create Cloud Gate in 1999 as his first public art installation in the United States. Complications and cost over runs resulted in a final cost of $23 million for the piece, up from the original $9 million cost estimate, with Cloud Gate's final completion and dedication in spring of 2006.
The 110-ton sculpture is 33 feet tall, 66 feet long, and 42 feet wide, but its massive size isn't the only thing attracting and fascinating the throngs of people we always saw around it.
Kapoor's sculpture may look, at first glance, simple, but as you circle the work to explore it, it presents you with many complex images reflected and multiplied by its shiny surfaces. From a distance, Cloud Gate looks like a big drop of liquid mercury or a huge silver bean, but moving closer to the piece allows visitors to see wonderfully warped visions of the city, themselves, and others in its highly reflective surfaces.
Maintaining the sculpture's shine requires twice-daily wipe downs by hand of its lower portion and semi-annual overall cleanings with liquid detergent.
Kapoor named the piece Cloud Gate, referring to it as "a gate to Chicago" and "a poetic idea about the city it reflects". People usually call it "The Bean" due to its overall shape.
Cloud Gate appears as if it is a single object, but it consists of 168 stainless steel plates over a steel frame. Workers polished the surfaces until the seams between the plates disappeared from view. The structure is hollow inside, and the 12-foot clearance underneath the bean-shaped sculpture creates a gateway into the piece.
I was particularly fascinated by taking photos from underneath the sculpture, where the concave surface, or "omphalos" (Greek for navel), of the sculpture reflected and re-reflected the people below it to create cool abstract images that sometimes reminded me of either of beautifully symmetrical kaleidoscope images or something I might see in a carnival fun house mirror.
These reflections are the result of Kapoor's wish to create a piece that encouraged visitors to enter and interact with it, while the sculpture's exterior reflects the city and its surrounding environment.
Mathematician Ivars Peterson has an interesting take on the sculpture at his blog, The Mathematical Tourist, where he explores the laws of reflection and geometry in relation to Kapoor's sculpture. Peterson says the piece offers "an enthralling lesson in optics" with its reflective images that include the viewer as part of the sculpture and visual experience.
Be sure to stop back here tomorrow for more of my Cloud Gate photos.
Want to learn more about Anish Kapoor and his work? Check out a new monograph of his work, Anish Kapoor by Bhabha, Bourrriand, de Loisy, and Rosenthal or a catalog published to accompany a 2008 exhibition of his work, Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
These are so cool! I didn't know about "the bean" until I read your posts. Neat.
Posted by: Anne Harris | August 13, 2010 at 08:25 PM
Anne-Thanks...I like the way these photos turned out. I'm glad you enjoyed them, too.
The Bean is a lot like the Calder in Grand Rapids, MI--a real point of pride for the city and a cool piece for photographs!
Posted by: Dominique King | August 14, 2010 at 03:17 PM