Scale of Anish Kapoor's sculpture is frighteningly extraordinary

Anish Kapoor – Dismemberment, Site 1, 2009, mild steel tube and tensioned fabric. Each end 25x8m, length 85m, Gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand
Photo: Paul Kramer

North of Auckland, in a stretch of land called Gibbs Farms, sits Anish Kapoor’s Dismemberment, Site 1 (2009). The scale of this sculpture is frighteningly extraordinary and is the largest one that Kapoor has ever created; it is the height of an 8 story building.

Unsurprisingly, the sculpture makes little effort to blend in with the expansive landscape; however, it does a great job of complementing it. The sculpture imposes itself on you, and it draws you in, dominating the area in which it sits, so much so that the sculpture appears to have always been there. This speaks to the work that went into the sculpture’s construction and design.

Kapoor had to create a free standing sculpture that would last for long, which is why the monumental sculpture was created using Serge Ferrari textile that is set up to survive harsh winds and severe weather conditions. The sculpture elicits various visual sensations and interpretations from the scores of people that arrive daily at Gibbs’s farm. At first sight, the Dismemberment sculpture looks like a swollen ear whose primary purpose is to capture the sounds and the spirit of the landscape. However, with every winding turn that you take, the sculpture transforms into a large external trumpet that appears to be signaling and calling travelers from distance lands.

In a way, it bears a resemblance to the trumpet that Joshua used to spy on the town of Jericho in the Bible. Like with every art installation, the audience reserves the right to interpret a masterpiece depending on the feelings that the piece evokes. Some people have interpreted the sculpture and found it to represent a large sized vulva, while others think that it represents the head and nucleus of a large bright flower.

Kapoor created the sculpture as a way of connecting the body to the sky. The tubular red structure symbolizes colostomy bags, and the red color represents the insides of the human body. The red is internal, but it externalizes itself in various ways. The sculpture also suggests that it may be a motherly creature that is brought forth by the earth and the tube represents flesh, skin, or a dismembered artery that is bleeding on the ground possibly feeding and rejuvenating the soil it rests on. From within, the sculpture is intimate and private, however, from inside it, the landscape emerges paving the way to new life in a fragile earth.

Anish Kapoor – Dismemberment, Site 1, 2009, mild steel tube and tensioned fabric. Each end 25x8m, length 85m, Gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand

One Response to "Scale of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture is frighteningly extraordinary"

By Exercise 1.6: The Contemporary Abyss | Portraying Landscape September 5, 2018 - 6:00 pm

[…] For now, I’ll just briefly mention Anish Kapoor. Marysas (2002) was an enormous maroon trumpet – 150 metres long and ten storeys high – too big to be viewed as a whole object . When I explored this more it seemed to me to be more about size and splendour than the sublime. However, I discovered that this was recreated in ‘smaller dimensions (each end 25x8m, length 85m) as Dismemberment, Site 1 (2009) at Gibbs Farm, Kaipar’a Harbour, New Zealand. , with a title inspired by the Greek myth captured in Titian’s painting The Flaying of Marysas (1576) – capturing the terrified sublime of the satyr flayed alive by Apollo for playing the flute better than the god. How dare we humans aspire to be like gods as you cannot compete with them! Kapoor’s aspiration with this was to make body into the sky and an outdoor location seems such a more appropriate location The installation was compared to the trumpet that Joshua used to spy on Jericho in the Bible story. Some observers thought it represented a large sized vulva whilst others though it represented the head and nucleus of a large bright flower. There’s a lot more comment on it here . […]