The first part of this essay concluded by elucidating a gradual turn in the reflective public works of Anish Kapoor from a strategy of displacement, in the sense of Smithson’s Mirror Displacements, which uses the mirror to reorder its surroundings, to one of capture, which instead deploys the mirror to stage a functional relationship between the work and its observer; the second part will consider the reverberations of this turn more generally. To distinguish these terms further, we might say that displacement, which precludes the viewer, in some sense requires photographic documentation to complete its reorganization of the pre-existing image, embedding one image (sky) into another (ground). As the critic Craig Owens wrote in the essay “Photography en abyme,” regarding Smithson, “the photograph,” not merely evidence of the artist’s temporary intervention in the landscape, “is the work.” (Emphasis Owens’.) The notion of captur…
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