Is it a Cloud or is it a Bean?

I love the arts, and I marvel at pieces that truly engage us.

Guess who?

An artist friend, whom we call Japat, had his first solo exhibition at Tashkeel in Dubai in 2009.  It was a breathtaking collection.  Larger-than-life paintings of human figures, portrayed in a gruesome dystopia of machinery and flesh-and-bone.  He also showcased his fine-art photography.  Superb resolution, colors and composition of people, including himself and his family. 

An hour into the exhibition, we were wondering, Where's Japat?  Someone said he was coming.

Another hour later, he finally ambled in.  Wearing the very outfit and clown makeup he wore in one of his self-portraits, along with the small red wagon of stuff which he was tugging in that same photo.  We immediately saw that he was in character, and moving about the gallery picking off pieces that he had masking-taped at various places on the floor.

In the meantime, we all followed him along, as though he were the Pied Piper.  Except we were not following in a line, but more like a amoeba that opened around him fluidly, then closed after him and oozed along.  Once we had circled back to where he entered, he stopped, opened containers of paint from his wagon, and offered a brush for any of us to paint on his shirt.

In general Japat is shy and quiet, but as a performance artist he was naturally social and thoroughly engaging.  We were so enthralled by his entrance, that many indeed took turns with that brush and painted freely on him.  It was a tour de force effort, and one memorable evening, for sure. 

Cloud Gate, by artist Anish Kapoor

So it was with The Bean, our nickname for Anish Kapoor's enormous installation at Millennium Park in Chicago.

You see, there are masterpieces hanging so sacredly at museums around the world, that we viewers dare not come close.  Lest our breath or touch mar their sanctity.

For example, I literally rushed to the Louvre, during a layover in Paris, en route from Bahrain to Chicago, just to see the Mona Lisa.  After all that excitement, however, I was very disappointed to see that it was a small piece of work and also to find roping that kept us a few feet away from it.

But Kapoor's artwork is a social masterpiece.  It definitely draws a crowd to it, beneath it, and around it.  We touch it freely, and play at taking all kinds of photographs.  Walk underneath in the middle, for example, look up, and we are transported into science fiction, with an odd array of shapes, shadows and reflections.

Better known as The Bean

In a way, Kapoor fashioned an artwork that re-created itself every moment that people were there.  What it reflected of the day and of the night also shifted from one moment to the next.  The changing light, the passing clouds, the ebb and flow of traffic.

Japat disturbed our notion of what it meant to be human by merging metal with flesh.  In a radically different vein, Kapoor challenged our notion of metal by making his installation breathe with the life of the city.