Left-Right: Flip that Leaf

I don’t want to be predictable, but if you’ve been following these posts, you know that whenever I get to talking about dynamics, tension and counterpoint in an image, the Lift-Right flip cannot be far behind.

Look at this. I flipped Linné’s original drawing, horizontally.   Isn’t this a funny image!

How can that be?! Same factual information.  Yet in the original (see previous post) the lone leaf sticking out of the margin looks mysterious and important.  Here in the flip, doesn’t it look ridiculous, clunky and contrived?  The bare stems in the original were energetic and full of promise, but here in the flip, they go nowhere, they seem to die on the page.  The peak in the horizon line is tired here, where in the original it feels up-beat.

I don’t theorize about this in class or give specific instructions. But we often play with cropping, i.e. placing strips of white paper over a finished drawing to see what happens.  That’s an important seeing exercise because it focuses on “what makes an image.”  These marvelous compositions in my students’ work come about because I encourage them to practice seeing  how elements on the drawing page relate to one another and the edge and the negative space they create, rather than just what they depict.

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Anish Kapoor, “Cloud Gate”

Cloud Gate?  Nobody calls it Cloud Gate.  It’s “The Bean.”

Cloud Gate/The Bean, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, was installed in Millennium Park in Chicago in 2006.  I’ve been fascinated by it ever since, not just by the object itself, but also by how it affects people who flock to it—and under it.  It seems to be both ridiculous and sublime.  The behavior of the visitors, also both ridiculous and sublime.

Just calling it The Bean makes it cartoonish and trivial.  The fact that it offers a distorted reflection turns it into a carnival piece.  People go there to goof off, to strike a pose and be photographed with their distorted reflections.    These observations seem to explain the ridiculous part.  But I don’t think the love of distorted reflections is ridiculous at all.  No matter how you slice this Bean, it is sublime.

The “gate” in the original name suggests that the sculpture is intended to be seen as a transition from one domain to another.  What are these domains?  We don’t know.  The hollow under the dome of the sculpture is said to be reminiscent of the omphalos of ancient mythologies.  Omphalos is Greek for navel.  It was represented as a hollow stone, with the opening wider at the bottom. Omphalos stones were believed to allow a glimpse into the future, into one’s fate and the will of the “gods.”  The oracle of Delphi functioned as an omphalos, a supposed gate between the known and the unknown. Turns out, the woman who voiced the oracle was bribable.  If she advised against war but you were itching to attack, she could be persuaded to see things from your perspective.  The oracle, in other words, could be distorted.

Anish Kapoor named his sculpture Cloud Gate, going for the sublime.  But notice, he didn’t carve it out of granite or marble or sandstone.  If he had, the thing might qualify as an omphalos and no one would care.  Its essence, to use another Greek word, is in its accident:  the façade of the mirror.  And what the mirror gives us is a distortion.  You call this distortion a gate?  That’s ridiculous.  So ridiculous, it’s sublime.

For the first three or four years after it went up, people would just go there and gape at it and find their tiny reflection and take pictures.  Then a shift occurred and I can’t be sure exactly when.  People started to touch the surface of The Bean.  Now everybody does it.  Everybody.  It’s THE way to be photographed at The Bean.  Children, adults, folks from Buffalo, folks from Bengal, everybody poses with fingers—or feet or chest or knees—touching the mirrored surface of The Bean.  But it’s not a mystical kind of touching. You wouldn’t go there when no one’s around and then have this omphalos moment because you’re communing with your fate, none of that.   It’s all about posing.  It’s about being photographed –you touching your distortion.  Your distortion touching you.

“You touching your distortion, your distortion touching you ”—we need someone to write lyrics about that.  Swelling music, with violins.

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