Kapoorian Geographies of Relationality: The Baroque, Topological Twists, Phase Space in Action

Abstract

The Baroque offers architectures of vision that situate the viewer in a distinctly spatial relationship to the representation. Rather than providing a statically ordered perspectival arrangement, the ‘center’ continually shifts, the result being the ongoing articulation of complex spatial conditions where the subject is coextensive with that of the observer. This paper develops a ‘Baroque sensibility’ by offering a geographical perspective on the work of Anish Kapoor—one of the most celebrated and definitional artists of our time, and an expander of the notion of public art—and linking this to ongoing debates on spatializations in human geography. The paper suggests that Kapoor's work of ‘moving narratives’ and ‘processional methods of viewing’ is an example of ‘phase space’ in action—a critique and extension of ‘thinking space relationally’ in human geography. Focusing specifically on Kapoor's 2008 Memory, a commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim, which travelled to New York in 2009, it deploys a Kapoorian geography of the polycentric logic to illustrate this. From the experience of Memory, the paper then discusses two interrelated conceptual perspectives, fractal spatiality and plasticity, to take the human geographies of relationality forward.

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