I’m terribly sorry that it had to be the poor viewer’s injury that brought it to an astounded world’s attention, but he did us all a favour. ![]() You could look at Descent into Limbo as a comment on the terror created by military stealth: This is art as weapon, man-eating art, a descent into the underworld of war. The first use of oil paint to create the illusion of three-dimensional reality was just such a use of the newest science in the service of trompe l’oeil. The fact that such advanced and terrifying technology can be used creatively and abstractly is almost subversive, and representative of what art at the highest level is always doing. It seems won in a brutally one-sided capitalist competition, and one can see why this pains the communitarian art world.īut the fact that this powerful artwork relies on the fruits of the military-industrial complex actually excites me. I, too, am uneasy about Kapoor’s monopoly on the pigment, which he is able to hold only because of his personal wealth. This is perhaps what fooled the viewer/victim. This paint is so unusual that it actually creates an optical illusion when coating the inside of the pit – it looks from some angles like a two-dimensional circle of black on the ground, not like a hole at all. Other artists were outraged at this selfishness – how can one own a colour? One critic tweeted that it was Kapoor’s narcissism that was at 99.6 per cent. He told the BBC in 2016, “'Imagine a space that’s so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of who you are and what you are, and also all sense of time.” So he paid the manufacturer an undisclosed amount for the rights to exclusive use of this paint. He has been using the paint as it was being developed, as early as 2014, and had always expressed at its marvellous capacity for disorientation. Kapoor created this piece in 1992 for exhibition at Documenta, but Vantablack wasn’t around yet. A piece of crinkled tinfoil painted with Vantablack will appear flat. It absorbs 99.6 per cent of light and so makes it impossible for the human eye to detect the outlines of the shapes it covers. It was invented by Surrey NanoSystems, a British firm, and it was intended for military use such as stealth planes and satellites. It is a black pigment that hit headlines in 2016 as the blackest black ever developed. But the new technology that makes the Descent so uncanny is actually proprietary to Kapoor. One other piece on display at Serralves is a giant red funnel that looks as if it can suck you into it. Kapoor has always been fascinated by voids and darkness, particularly in architecture, and has built other pavilions with holes in them. The hole is only eight feet deep but is painted in a patented high-tech ultrablack paint that absorbs all light, making it look bottomless. Here is art that without being overtly political succeeds in being truly dangerous. I do feel sorry for the unnamed patron, but I also can’t help seeing in this unfortunate accident the greatest success of the piece. The man survived but was treated in hospital. There is a guard in the room, and there are warning signs, but that didn’t stop a 60-year-old Italian man from falling into it on Aug. It is only eight feet deep, but its interior is painted in a patented high-tech ultrablack paint that absorbs all light, and so it looks bottomless. It is inside a concrete cube that he had built in the gardens of the museum. The art in question was Anish Kapoor’s creepy installation Descent into Limbo (1992), now at the Serralves art museum in Porto, Portugal. ![]() In fact, as far as I know, no one has complained at all. The artwork was physically dangerous, and designed to be so, and no one is quite sure how to complain about it. ![]() I mean it actually injured him – not in the sense of creating an “unsafe” emotional environment or in the sense of “erasing his identity.” I mean the guy went to hospital. It also shows Mantegna's interest in rock formations, which he studied from nature.Please log in to bookmark this story. The composition is famous for the unusual placement of the figure of Christ, with his back to the viewer as he enters into Limbo. The attribution of this print to Mantegna himself is based on comparison with the preparatory drawing, revealing changes engraved directly onto the plate. 28 cm Paris, Ecole nationale suprieure des Beaux Arts, inv. He is known to have been looking for a professional engraver from 1475, but one is not known of until the 1490s. The Descent into Limbo circa 1468 Pen, ink and brown watercolour on vellum H. There is some debate about which prints Mantegna engraved himself, if at all. He occasionally employed drypoint for finer lines, but in this example the drypoint marks have worn down and are no longer visible. Mantegna used two sizes of burin to vary line thickness and favoured the lozenge or diamond-shaped burins used in Northern Europe to the Italian rounded ciapolla. This print shows how Andrea Mantegna (1430/1-1506) varied his shading lines with parallel lines and zigzagging lines with hooked ends.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |