Prometheus and Sky Mirror, part two

Yesterday I wrote that understanding why Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror so wonderfully matches its setting and its time, first requires a look at Paul Manship's Prometheus.

Sky Mirror is installed up against Fifth Avenue, directly facing 30 Rockefeller Center. (Take a look at Flickr for a few hundred shots of Sky Mirror and its surroundings.) If you stand in front of the mirror, where the person in the red sweater to the right of the mirror is, you'll see Prometheus hovering above the Rock Center ice rink. Behind Prometheus is a plaza and the entrance to 30 Rock. The two works are installed as if they're in an art historical showdown. And they are.

Kapoor's mirrored pieces, such as Chicago's Cloud Gate, are a further abstraction of mirrored surfaces explored by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter and, especially Jeff Koons.

While artists in the 1960s used mirrors and reflection to raise questions about perception, Koons took the same materials and used them to squint at conspicuous consumption. Made in 1986, when it was morning in America's highest tax brackets, Koons' Rabbit is a witty take on a materialistic culture. Rabbit points out that a consumer's purchases often glorify the purchaser, who can see himself in his new possession.

Sky Mirror, in its current location, takes Koons' commentary on materialism and adapts it for an globalist era defined by increasing corporate power. Sky Mirror doesn't reflect the sky, it reflects one of America's most prominent corporate towers, the GE Building. In fact, as the photo here plainly shows, Sky Mirror is 'pointed' directly at 30 Rock.

When Prometheus was made it glorified the builder/creator of Rockefeller Center with a common art historical trope of its day: allegory. By reflecting its host, Sky Mirror does the exact same thing, using the slick abstraction of ours.

Did Kapoor intend this reading? Who knows. Works of art often live in the world in ways their creator didn't quite intend. (But Kapoor certainly consented to have the piece installed in Rock Center, where it is now.) When a previous, smaller version of Sky Mirror was installed at Nottingham Playhouse, it was pointed at the client, a theater.

Related: Kapoor is currently showing at the UK's Lisson Gallery. Simon Hattenstone profiles Kapoor in The Guardian.