This is Kapoor’s first public work in the United States, and it represents a stunning debut, rivaling Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion as Millennium Park’s aesthetic centerpiece.
What could have seemed slick and flashy, the kind of showy attraction you’d expect to be plopped onto a Texas fairground, is instead a highly sophisticated exploration of surface, scale and space.
Throughout his career, the Bombay-born sculptor has explored such opposites as absence and presence, solid and intangible, heavy and light. This $11.5 million piece, already popularly known as “the Bean,” launches that investigation on a heroic scale — an ellipse-shaped structure 66 feet long, 33 feet high, weighing 110 tons and sheathed in a highly polished stainless steel. (The work is scheduled to be finished later this year, with additional grinding, welding and polishing to make its now-visible seams disappear.)
Originally, the sculpture was to go in the park’s southeast corner in the space now occupied by the Lurie Garden. Instead, in a shift that turns out to be fortuitous, it was placed on a plaza above Millennium Park’s ice rink. There, it captures a warped reflection of the downtown skyline, a prospect so captivating that “Cloud Gate” has rocketed to the status of instant icon.
Is it a mirror for a narcissistic city? Hardly.
Even in its unfinished state, the sculpture grabs you with its fun-house distortion game, then holds you, mystifies you, and eventually delights you with its sophisticated play of opposites.
On a gray, cloudy day, with the sky reflected in its surface, it almost seems like a non-object, ready to disappear. As you move closer, it plays another game: The same object that, from a distance, drew comparisons to a teeny jelly bean appears from up close to be dwarfing, destabilizing and even dislocating you with its monumental presence. “There’s a vertigo in it,” Kapoor says.
The final flourish of “Cloud Gate” is its gate: A 9-foot-high arch that allows you to walk beneath the sculpture and suggests a similarity to traditional city gates.
As Kapoor admits, however, the gate doesn’t really lead anywhere; its true purpose, which it fully achieves, is to extend the sculpture’s visual adventure from two-dimensional surface to three-dimensional space.
The lone problem is the setting for his sculpture: a bare concrete plaza that makes “Cloud Gate” seem if it had parachuted onto the harsh surface of the moon. Even so, this is a superb study in pure form and primal response.
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Rating the park
Millennium Park is so filled with ingredients that deliver entertainment and enlightenment that we thought a handy guide, rating how each piece works, would be appropriate and fun.
Here’s what our star-ratings mean:
(star)(star)(star)(star): Excellent
(star)(star)(star): Very good
(star)(star): Good
(star): Fair
