Anish Kapoor Sculpture - Turning the World Upside Down

Turning the World Upside Down

Visiting Jerusalem for the first time two weeks ago, I had not seen a story in the re-opening there of the Israel Museum until its director, James Snyder, mentioned that a major outdoor sculpture commissioned for the occasion had been fabricated in Oakland.

Ethan Silva, who directs the Oakland custom metal fabrication shop Performance Structures Inc., had made the whole thing possible, Snyder told me.

Baseball fans already know the work of Performance Structures - the company assembled the giant mitt atop San Francisco's AT&T Park.

Everyone who works in media, if not everyone period, assumes that the craving for publicity, especially among businesspeople, pervades American society. But when I contacted Silva by e-mail, he politely replied that he prefers to keep a low profile and suggested that I contact the artist - Anish Kapoor - for comment.

Based in London

Kapoor, based in London, has become a world figure in contemporary art. I reached him by e-mail while he was traveling in Italy.

"Over the last 15 years or so, I have been making concave mirrored works," Kapoor said. The Israel Museum piece is an example. "Mirrored objects have been with us at least since the Egyptians. These have been for the most part convex forms. ... Concave mirrored objects are complex in that they both camouflage themselves in their surroundings and do something visually confounding to the space around them."

An understatement

That might sound like an understatement to anyone who sees "Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem" firsthand.

Shaped something like the midsection of an hourglass, the 16 1/2-foot-tall stainless steel object has a mirrored surface that seems to suck the surrounding space - and the viewer - into it.

From a distance, viewers see themselves reflected, inverted and miniaturized near the upper lip of the sculpture until, at a certain point, looking down, they see their faces, slightly magnified in the bottom periphery of the sculpture, as they might looking over the edge of a pool. But the pool is the sky, because the sculpture does what its title promises.

"The hourglass form of 'Turning the World Upside Down' is interesting to me because it is both convex and concave," Kapoor said. "Jerusalem, and especially the site of the Israel Museum, is a place where the hills and the sky are in a constant play. I wanted to do something here that engaged this. A form that reverses the reflection of earth and sky seems appropriate. Of course, this seems to fit with other things about Jerusalem."

Kapoor began working with Performance Structures years ago to realize his giant piece "Cloud Gate" (2004) for Chicago's Millennium Park. It quickly became the most popular work of contemporary public art in America.

"It has taken Ethan and me 10 years or so to learn how to make objects like this," Kapoor said of "Turning the World ... " "They need to be made to a level of perfection that gives the object visual clarity. This is extremely difficult to do. Ethan has helped me achieve this through his inventiveness and enthusiasm. I do not consider him a collaborator, but I could not do these things without him. ... The whole point is perfection. No compromise."

Like a planet

At the proper viewing distance, the upper profile of "Turning the World ... " appears reflected along its bottom edge, like a nearby planet breaching the horizon. Circulate the piece at this distance by day, and you can see the sun pass behind this virtual "planet" in a manner that brings to mind classic NASA moon-based photos of earth.

Jerusalem strikes the American visitor powerfully as a city in which worlds incessantly collide, so the cosmic insinuations of Kapoor's "Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem" give it a site-specific relevance and immediacy that any sculptor working on a public project must envy.