The British Asian sculptor behind Chicago’s Shiny Bean and London’s Giant Red Intestine is finally coming to the Big Apple. Anish Kapoor will attempt to mount what appears to be the world’s biggest dildo in Lower Manhattan. It even comes in a gift box:

… another work… will be installed at Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, the site of the British Memorial Garden now being built to honor the 67 Britons who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The sculpture, which was selected in a juried competition, is a 20-foot-tall funereal block of black granite into which a vertical opening, again highly polished, will be carved. The chamber will reflect light in such a way to create the illusion of a column floating in the void of the stone, with a flamelike apparition hovering inside the column. [Link]

He’s also doing a temporary installation by Rockefeller Center which resembles a strider warping space-time in Half-Life 2:

The world’s biggest dildo in Lower Manhattan“Sky Mirror,” Mr. Kapoor’s dish of highly reflective stainless steel almost three stories tall, is being welded and polished in Oakland, Calif.; it will make its way by truck across the country and be on view from Sept. 19 to Oct. 27. Its concave side will face 30 Rockefeller Plaza and invert the skyscraper in its reflection…

… the mirror is curved and warped, a postmodern funhouse version of verisimilitude, one that, on its convex side facing Fifth Avenue, will stretch the images of passers-by into exaggerated El Greco elongations and, on the other, will turn them upside down, along with the rest of the world. [Link]

I for one welcome our tax dollar-spending British Asian overlord.

Because Mr. Kapoor was born and raised in Bombay, the son of a Hindu father and an Iraqi mother, there is also a chance that the work could be seen as a sly riff on Western power and hubris, with the Rockefellers’ triumphal architecture as its target. Mr. Kapoor did not discount such interpretations but said that they were not part of his conscious intention… [Link]

The Giant Corpuscle whomps anyone who gets in its way. Yes dear, this does make your butt look fat.

The Big Red Intestine; Kapoor’s encore will be called the Colonoscopy

More about the Bombay-born Kapoor:

Anish Kapoor, RA, was born in Bombay in 1954 and has lived in London since the early 1970s. He studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art Design… he is represented in such public collections as Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Tate Gallery, London; Hirshorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Italy; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Samsung Museum, South Korea; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo…. in 2003, he was named a CBE on HM the Queen’s birthday honors list. [Link]

Update: Amardeep takes a more serious approach to Kapoor and minimalism.