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Millennium Park both engages traditional urban ideas and inverts them in ways that are startlingly original. The blurring of the line between sculpture and architecture is found, not just in the billowing, stainless-steel proscenium of Frank Gehry's Pritzker music pavilion but in Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (now "Da Bean," in Chicago parlance) and Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain. In our fast-paced, technology-rich age, just as new composite materials are being created that are unprecedented in both strength and lightness, traditionally segregated disciplines of art and design are fusing into new hybrids of escalating sensual intensity. On
Friday July 23rd, Gehry, Plensa, Kapoor and Kathryn
Gustafson, designer of the Lurie Garden, all flew in to Chicago to
attend opening ceremonies and participate in The Architecture and Design
Society of the Art Institute's day-long Kapoor
and Plensa share a concept of contemporary public sculpture that is both
deeply architectural and obsessed with making the viewer more than a passive
consumer of static objects. "The question I'm trying to address,"
says Kapoor, "is about space, about the nature of the lack of interaction
with the public." Plensa talked of the fountains he encountered on
his walks through Rome. "Unfortunately, they carved the figures in
stone," he observed, "and for 500 years they have exactly the
same position. I think today technology allows us to go a little bit farther."
As in the development of Frank Gehry's signature architectural style,
this is a Baroque journey, like that from the flat icon
paintings to Bernini's sculpture Ecstasy of St. Teresa, a three-dimensional stage set of a drama at
its climax. In our time that journey is mirrored in the transition from
a modern sculpture of abstract, static objects to the 1,000 different
faces that display in rotation on the giant LED screens of the Crown Fountain's
facing Plensa
conceived the Crown Fountain not as an object, but as an environment.
"I At
the end of each cycle, the faces on the LED screens on the fountain towers
purse their lips, and a stream of water appears to flow directly from
their mouths. "I Kapoor takes a very different path to interactivity, one that's as much about disappearance as presence. "In a way," he says of Cloud Gate, "it's also a kind of hole in the space, a non-object. An attempt to make physical the non-physical. Perhaps the history of sculpture is the history of matter, and the sense that I have of the making of objects, of the use of matter, is towards non-matter, where here a 110-ton structure object is light, is not present." So,
what the hell is he talking about? Well, Cloud Gate is a huge, amoeba-shaped
The
massive size of Cloud Gate awes the spectator even as it dissolves in
the images it reflects. You look at it, but Ultimately,
however, a work of art must stand on its own, apart from the artist's
explanations and intentions. While the crowds circling Cloud Gate at times
appear The
ultimate question about these works is in the relationship of technology
to modern life. An infinite selection of images, texts and ideas are at
our fingerprints. Is it a revelation, or a numbing distraction from tackling
the fundamental questions posed by human existence? Those old, unchanging
stone sculptures Plensa talks
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Millennium
Park After
the Hype - A Millennium Park Post-Mortem
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Text and photographs © Copyright 2004 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.
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