Chicago 2010: Cleaning the Bean

August brings the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit; followed by a time back home of catching up with various jobs off the guilt list.

This year’s GL included another bit of cleaning — reconditioning the disshevelled fish tank in our front hallway, but that’s another story...

From GL to GLS —

Chicago was in fine fettle. Every year I think there cannot be a new angle to photograph on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, and every year I come back with another thirty new angles! Look on the cleaning of the bean in glorious clean early morning light as a metaphor for the whole trip.

For a start I realise that learning about leadership is something worth giving a couple of days of regular sustained reflection to, among friends. I will comment separately on what I think I’ve learned this year in particular, but if life is a “school for the Lord’s service,” a period of structured reflection and learning helps, I find, to sharpen up the whole pattern of my work.

People this side of the pond sometimes seem to think it’s clever to be superior about US Evangelicals. Some of them, of course, are doubtless the most appalling people — but then so are some UK Anglicans, and others. Lay all that stuff aside, engage the irony over-ride, and there’s plenty to learn and to enjoy. The warmth, honesty, openness, empathy and positive faith of many US Evangelicals I meet refuses to be bound by all snotty stereotypes, and brings its own honest inspiration.

I found worship this year, especially on the Friday of the Leadership Summit, brought me directly to where my journey in faith began forty years ago — faith in Jesus Christ. I see I have 2.4 days of Bach in my iTunes library to enjoy back in Blighty, but at for a couple of days a year it does me nothing but good to learn and throw myself wholeheartedly into an American Evangelical environment. It’s also good, every year, to catch up with Anglican friends from the Diocese of Chicago. We are sometimes prey, this side of the pond, to a rather flat and stereotypical view of the Episcopal Church, and it’s good to be disabused of that by contact with real people. Real people, real faith, is the great reality checkpoint.

Anish Kapoor: Goo and Mirrors

Arty types will recognise from my blog header my respect for the work of Anish Kapoor. It was a great joy to spent a day off yesterday at his latest, largest and most absorbing exhbition at the Royal Academy. He’s still fascinated with space, bigtime, playing with mirrors and reflections. Vistors are greeted by a socking great pile of 76 mirrored bubbles in the courtyard outside which, like Cloud Gate, entertains all day.


Inside, there’s a good selection of dense colour works — strangely deep and absorbing even in poster paint primary colours. Somehow he manages to make the spindliest and sharpest geometry look as though it was simply powder that could blow away at any moment. As ever, he’s interesed in the plane as well as the shape, with a pregnant wall, hinting at things to come — a wall of pure sunshine orange that turns out to have depth when you get close to it (denser of not quite as monumental as the sun in Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate the other year).

So far, Kapoor been before. The new dimension is goo. There’s dusty scatalogical goo, that being intestinally shaped coils and turns of concrete loaded on pallets like piles of guts or one of those snake scenes in an Indiana Jones movie. “Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked” is the finished resentable title. Many fellow visitors were drawn into the texture of various squigglies loaded on the pallets, longing to touch.

But the most spectacular way Kapoor claims his space, blasting it out or dominating everything, is with shimmering waxy scarlet goo. For those who like their goo monumental, Svayambh (Sanskrit for “self-generated”) is a 40 ton slow train that takes one and a half hours to scour its way through five galleries, splashing blood-red wax and vaseline on the high imperial gilded arches as it goes. Like the original juggernaut it slides noiselessly through the huge space, drawing children of all ages back again and again to check on its progress.

If you prefer indoor fireworks, there’s Shooting into the Corner. Every twenty minutes a ritual is enacted by which a shell shaped red wadge is fired at the wall of the next gallery, filling the smaller room gradually with goo. Even though it’s powered on compressed air, I would guess, and there’s no conventional explosive bang, the whole thing makes a predictably intense indoor game. Various people near me were holding their ears, and somebody near me jumped. The kids loved it.

The show manages to be a monumental, dynamic and playful workout for the imagination. I shall certainly be back before December.