Leviathan

Now for something completely different - the most astounding artwork I've seen this year. Anish Kapoor's Leviathan has now closed at the Grand Palais in Paris, but I was so intrigued by it I went back three times to take pictures from different angles, so while I'm digging out some of my better photos of recent months for web immortality, I thought these had to go in.

It's impossible to capture how monumental the work was, but I hope these give some kind of sense! I was lucky enough to see Kapoor give a lecture on opening night, in which he talked about the opposition he was trying to create between the feeling suffocated inside the hot, red space, and feeling protected by its womb-like quality; I must say I definitely found the inside much more oppressive, but it's the sense of the work being alive that most appealed to me, especially from outside where the movement of the rubber felt like animal breathing and the leviathan seemed to be on the verge of waking from its slumber and bursting through the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais at any moment. Kapoor hopes his work evokes something universal in all of us - I'm usually the first to get cynical about that and call on context and cultural conditioning as an explanation for all our responses - but this work made little overawed me feel very tiny and insignificant indeed, and I suppose there's something pretty fundamental about that.