Anish Kapoor’s sculptures make whiteness perceptible only from oblique angles.

Evidence

In the process of writing this essay I happened to visit an exhibition of the sculptor Anish Kapoor’s work at the Hayward Gallery in London. The first installation looked from a distance like a large rectangular painting of the deepest blue imaginable. Close up, it invited the viewer to locate its surface on a two-dimensional plane which seemed to retreat into the distance the more one tried to fix it. The security guard had her work cut out to prevent people from leaning over the ropes to touch the blue surface, to feel with their hands what their eyes refused to tell them. In another room, the installation described above by Homi Bhabha had a similar effect although this time it was white and the perceptual disturbance was produced by the surface protruding into the room rather than disappearing into the wall. It was a curiously exhilarating experience trying to fathom what had happened to the bulge as you looked straight at it, seeing only a dense white flat surface. Only when you moved to the side could you see the profile re-emerge, and make sense of the title of this piece. I encountered a similar sensation with Kapoor’s “White Dark” series as I stared into his hollow three-dimensional shapes without being able to see corners, sides, edges, and depths. The white space inside was uncannily vacant, but also powerfully empty. It was hardly surprising that many complained of dizziness once they left the building. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 742

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Richard Dyer’s work on whiteness as invisible to those caught in its glare, and to the author’s own framing of whiteness as optically elusive.