Anish Kapoor’s Versailles Sculpture Creates Uproar

Sculptor Anish Kapoor has sparked an uproar by installing a work he described as a ‘queen’s vagina’ in Versailles.

Visitors are walking alongside “Dirty Corners” by British artist Anish Kapoor in the gardens of the Chateau de Versailles outside Paris. (Photo: AP)

Is that new sculpture in the gardens of Versailles a massive tuba? Or is it supposed to represent Marie Antoinette’s private parts?

Artist Anish Kapoor isn’t saying exactly what the centerpiece of his latest installation, called ‘Dirty Corner,’ represents.

He told French newspaper the Journal du dimanche that it suggests ‘the vagina of the queen who takes power’ and called it a ‘provocation’. But he also said that viewers can interpret it as they like.

A work has multiple interpretive possibilities. What I am doing here is kind of taking the surface of (renowned French landscape designer) Le Notre’s ordered garden and looking inside. Inevitably, one comes across the body, our bodies and a certain level of sexuality. But it is certainly not the only thing it is about.
– Kapoor said.

The conservative Versailles mayor tweeted his disapproval, and some far-right bloggers expressed theirs, but viewers seemed largely unperturbed.

Brittany Watson, a 28-year-old visiting from Virginia, said, “I think it is appropriate. I mean, a human body is a work of art.”

This is a bit of a mess, a heap of metal, rocks. I know it is a composition, but this is ruining the perspective that visitors of the castle may have.
– said Pierre Dhainaut, Versailles resident and retired professor

Sexually controversial art is not rare in and around Paris, but occasionally prompts anger.