Maxxi, Rome’s new National Museum of 21st Century Art is due opening on Friday, May 20th, 2010.
It is a building designed by today’s most sought-after architect/designer, Zaha Hadid who creates ‘architecture as landscape.’
The Maxxi building looks like a functional machine to be inhabited by humans. Whereas, the museum plaza has structures
lived by humans, and ‘grew on its users.’There in are to be exhibited some of the representative 21st century space artists.
Our Anish Kapoor is represented with his 2004 sculpture, Widow, a 49 feet long tube that is suspended in the air and is
culminating in a wide spout ‘shaped like a gramophone.’
Three reactions come to my mind seeing Kapoor’s sculpture:
• that it is functionless well wrought artifact trying to vie with the architecture.
• It is an exaggerated exhibitionism of Surrealists’ ‘found object,’ a cold
passive statement.
• its ambiguity generates responses according to the onlooker’s ideas, so,
the ‘presence’ and ‘ambiguity’ create forced responses.
Ruminating on all this, the current disaster of oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico comes to my mind seeing the area of the spill
through the air photos. The whole patch of oil looks like an artifact created by Nature creating awe of the sublime, as Kant would have put it.

Explore it here.

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