Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner
Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner is a modern art installation that used to be housed in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles until these incidents. This sculpture was vandalized thrice. For what reason? Why did this spur such a heated debate about what is able to be displayed as public art and who gets to decide?
Dirty Corner
Artist Anish Kapoor created this piece in 2011 but it became famous when he was invited to install it at the Palace of Versailles as part of their contemporary art summer program, in the summer of 2015. The resulting sculpture, named Dirty Corner, is made from steel and rock and is over 60 meters long and 10 meters high. Kapoor made it immediately controversial by describing it as “the vagina of the queen who is taking power” (Couraud, 2016). Depending on the source I saw that he either later took this statement back to focus the message of the piece or he denied saying it all together but now he says the piece is meant to “create dialogue between these great gardens and sculptures” (Couraud, 2016).
In addition to the controversial statements made by the artist, or perhaps because of them, this piece has been vandalized three times (!!!) since 2015 when it was installed.
First Incident
Dirty Corner was installed at Versailles in early June 2015 and by June 17 it had already been attacked. Unknown vandals splattered yellow paint across and within the large art piece. Not a lot is known about this attack from what I can tell, it’s thought that it was brought on by the comments made by the artist that was later rescinded.
Regardless, the work was cleaned, at great expense to the artist, and it continued to live in the gardens at Versailles as intended.
Second Incident
This second incident was much more inflammatory than the first. After the sculpture was cleaned it was vandalized again but this time the perpetrator spray-painted anti-Semitic statements and slogans across the metal sculpture and the surrounding rocks. Kapoor’s mother is Jewish so it’s not clear if the vandalism is a direct attack on the artist or if it is more general hatred.
The work was cleaned again and again Kapoor said that he spent a large amount of money cleaning the offensive slogans from Dirty Corner. To the China Morning Herald, he described the response to these attacks by Versailles officials as “pathetic” because more wasn’t done to protect the piece in the first place and nothing was improved even after the first attack.
Third Incident
Turns out the Kapoor was right to call security and the response from the palace was pathetic because there was a third attack. Again, the sculpture had horrible anti-Semitic slogans written across it as well as the rocks. I won’t be showing photos of any of these slogans or writing them here, they’re available online but I don’t want to give them any attention or space here.
This time Kapoor had a different response to the vandalism. He had cleaned the sculpture twice and after this third attack, he decided to leave the graffiti where it was. He said that he wanted to leave it to highlight intolerance in France. “The sculpture will now carry the scars of this renewed attack. I will not allow this act of violence and intolerance to be erased," he said “Dirty Corner will now be marked with hate and I will preserve these scars as a memory of this painful history. I am determined that art will triumph” (BBC, 2015).
This act was met with both support and protest. In response to Kapoor not removing the slogans, right-wing politician Fabien Bouglé took him to court for displaying these words. To Kapoor the speed of this seemed extremely suspicious, he said: “I’d made three reports to the police and to this day have had no response from them, the councillor managed to get a court hearing within hours” (Cascone, 2016). All of this led Kapoor to begin to believe that the vandalism was an inside job and was politically motivated. He says the fact that Versailles did nothing to help him protect the sculpture or pay for cleaning it and then the speed with which Bouglé was able to bring charges against him was very suspicious. Personally, I’m not really buying this but it’s an interesting theory.
At the hearing, the court ruled that the offensive words had to be removed or covered up. So ultimately it was covered with gold leaf (to stand out from the rest of the piece and make it clear that something was being covered) and the work was put in storage. This hearing served to open up a very interesting debate in France and within the artistic community about moral rights and artistic freedoms. The court’s decision about Dirty Corner had to take many things into account, not least of which being moral rights which refer to an artist’s right to transfer their personality into a work and have it represent them. “First, the public installation of Kapoor’s work subjected it to a public order. Second, the public installation of Kapoor’s work subjected the public to “protections of human dignity”. Though the court recognized Kapoor’s moral rights, the moral rights could not outweigh “other fundamental liberties” of the public, alluding to the requisite for public peace over artistic scandal” (Couraud, 2016). So essentially, if I’m getting this right, the court was like yeah sure an artist is allowed to reflect themselves in artwork and have control over it but this one is in public so it affects more people than just the artist and these words were extremely hateful and not suitable to be displayed.
After the court had come to their decision Kapoor clarified that he didn’t agree with the statements and didn’t want to see them on his work but he refused to just remove them and pretend like nothing ever happened. He said “we have to experiment in public, it’s our role as artists, that’s how society grows. If we stop that, we might as well live in a fascist state” (Couraud, 2016). Ultimately, though, the words were covered with gold leaf as stipulated by the court.
Apparently, a second appearance of the sculpture is in the works. Kapoor has said that it will be going to some remote place in Denmark, some think it will be headed to the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art.
Works Cited
Cascone, Sarah. “Anish Kapoor Calls Vandalism at Palace of Versailles an ‘Inside Job’”. 2016. ArtNet News. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anish-kapoor-says-dirty-corner-vandalism-an-inside-job-674039
Couraud, Adrienne. “Whose Rights? Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner Exposes a Battle Between Artists’ Moral Rights and the Rights of the Public”. 2016. Center for Art Law. https://itsartlaw.org/2016/08/30/whose-rights-anish-kapoors-dirty-corner-exposes-a-battle-between-artists-moral-rights-and-the-rights-of-the-public/
BBC. “Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner Sculpture Vandalized Again”. 2015. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34170908