Anish Kapoor criticizes 'intolerant, divisive' NRA after video used sculpture

Anish Kapoor, the celebrated British artist, has blasted the National Rifle Association for its “nightmarish, intolerant, divisive vision” after the group used a clip of one of his works in a promotional video.

Kapoor said the use of footage of his Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millenium Park by the NRA “perverts everything that Cloud Gate – and America – stands for”.

Known colloquially in Chicago as “the bean”, Cloud Gate is a three-storey high arcing, metallic-mirrored form that has been the visual centerpiece of the park, and a major tourist attraction, since its dedication in 2006. The NRA showed it for a brief, second-long cut in a provocative video released last August titled the Clinched Fist of Truth, which was widely criticised for directing violent language at media outlets like the New York Times, and generally, anyone perceived as a political opponent of the association.

“The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of [media] lies with the clenched fist of truth,” NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said in the minute-long spot.

Kapoor said that the use of the image by the NRA “plays to the basest and most primal impulses of paranoia, conflict and violence, and uses them in an effort to create a schism to justify its most regressive attitudes”.

Source: theguardian