The Cloud Gate

Chicago, IL (Feb 22, 2009)

On Sunday we went to downtown Chicago, in one of these sunny cold days that you would expect in this city in February. We left the car in the parking lot below the Millenium Park, which I thought was managed by the city and thus cheaper than the other private garages we have used in other occasions. Well, it turned out to be not that cheap after all ($25), but at least we were right at the center of the park, which is where I wanted to be, to take some photos of the snow-covered architecture (it had snowed the day before).

The huge drop of metal in the figure above is the “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor, the indian artist known for his sculptures that “blur the boundaries between the limits and the limitless”. The sculpture is quite striking, and resembles an enormous drop of liquid metal just touching the plaza, reflecting the high rise buildings of the Chicago Loop and the cloudy sky (hence the name). When I saw it for the first time it reminded me the antithesis of the 2001 Space Odyssey monolith: the blackness of the monolith contrasting with the reflective surface of the gate, the sharp angles of the parallelepiped versus the smooth seamless surface of this sculpture, both of them a gate to infinite spaces.

The sculpture is certainly a tourists magnet, and is always surrounded by group of people taking pictures of themselves reflected on the shiny surface of the cloud gate (which is affectionally called “the bean” by the locals, because of its side-shape). It is as if Kapoor succeeded in allowing the public of create its own piece of art by “entering the scupture”, rather than passively absorbing whatever canned image the artist could have wanted to deliver. What I find most impressive is the total lack of seams between the 168 welded 1-cm thick steel panels used to fabricate its surface, by contract assembled to last for at least 1,000 years. The absence of flaws in the surface makes the object absolutely unreal, destroys the sense of scale, and gives the impression that a large chunk of the landscape has been removed, and substituted with the sky as if looking through a wormhole.