ANISH KAPOOR< "MEMORY" GUGGENHEIM, Mar. 2010

Anish Kapoor's installation of copper and emptiness is an immersion in dreamspace.  Made of curved steel that folds into elliptical space, the larger than human scale frame of the structure is designed to startle the eye.  One seeks to grasp the entirety of the piece, but it evades containment.  Kapoor's investigation into both out of scale solidity and emptiness that humbles the viewer is an inquiry that has antecdents.  The scale of perspective of the Angkor Wat is one site where such an inquiry into visuality's limits haunts the viewer.  At the temple of Angkor in Cambodia's Siam Reap, it is impossible to grasp the full scale of its temple frescoes with the human eye.  Angkor's walls of paintings demand the viewer scroll around the temple to unravel the epic narratives pulsing on its walls.  In Kapoor's monumental piece, one is similarly haunted by the sensation of such a demand to scroll around the installation in search of its contours, its lines of flow, its curvature and modernist abyss hung in painterly silence in a white room away from the structures embedded skeleton.