DESCENT INTO LIMBO HOW TO

But the new technology that makes the Descent so uncanny is actually proprietary to Kapoor. One other piece on display at Serralves is a giant red funnel that looks as if it can suck you into it. Kapoor has always been fascinated by voids and darkness, particularly in architecture, and has built other pavilions with holes in them. The hole is only eight feet deep but is painted in a patented high-tech ultrablack paint that absorbs all light, making it look bottomless. Here is art that without being overtly political succeeds in being truly dangerous. I do feel sorry for the unnamed patron, but I also can’t help seeing in this unfortunate accident the greatest success of the piece. The man survived but was treated in hospital.

There is a guard in the room, and there are warning signs, but that didn’t stop a 60-year-old Italian man from falling into it on Aug. It is only eight feet deep, but its interior is painted in a patented high-tech ultrablack paint that absorbs all light, and so it looks bottomless. It is inside a concrete cube that he had built in the gardens of the museum. The art in question was Anish Kapoor’s creepy installation Descent into Limbo (1992), now at the Serralves art museum in Porto, Portugal. In fact, as far as I know, no one has complained at all.

DESCENT INTO LIMBO HOW TO

The artwork was physically dangerous, and designed to be so, and no one is quite sure how to complain about it. I mean it actually injured him – not in the sense of creating an “unsafe” emotional environment or in the sense of “erasing his identity.” I mean the guy went to hospital.

Descent into limbo