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used without my consent in a politicised advertisement for the National Rifle Association
(NRA), entitled The Clenched Fist of Truth. The NRA’s ‘advertisement’ –as they
describe the video on their own website – seeks to whip up fear and hate. It 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. Hidden here is a need to
– in truth the sculpture of the people of Chicago – used by the NRA to promote their vile
message. Recent shootings in Florida, Las Vegas, Texas, and a number of other towns
and cities, make it more urgent than ever that this organization is held to account for its
Cloud Gate reflects the space around it, the city of Chicago. People visit the
sculpture to get married, to meet friends, to take selfies, to dance, to jump, to engage in
communal experience. Its mirrored form is engulfing and intimate. It gathers the viewer
into itself. This experience, judging by the number of people that visit it every day (two-
hundred million to date), still seems to carry the potential to communicate a sense of
wonder. A mirror of self and other, both private and collective, Cloud Gate – or the
‘Bean’ as it often affectionately referred to —is an inclusive work that engages public
participation. Its success has little to do with me, but rather with the thousands of
residents and visitors who have adopted it and embraced it as their ‘Bean’. Cloud Gate
has become a democratic object in a space that is free and open to all.
In the NRA's vile and dishonest video, Cloud Gate appears as part of a montage
of iconic buildings that purport to represent ‘Liberal America’ in which the ‘public
object’ is the focus of communal exchange. Art seeks new form, it is by its nature a
dynamic force in society. The NRA in it’s nationalist rhetoric uses Cloud Gate to suggest
that these ideas constitute a ‘foreign object’ in our midst. The NRA’s video gives voice
to xenophobic anxiety, and a further call to ‘arm’ the population against a fictional
enemy.
The NRA's nightmarish, intolerant, divisive vision perverts everything that Cloud
Gate – and America – stands for. Art must stand clear in its mission to recognise the
Gun violence in the United States affects every citizen of your country—all
religions, all cultures, all ages. The NRA’s continued defence of the gun industry makes
them complicit in compromising the safety of the many in favour of corporate profit. I
support Everytown for Gun Safety and their efforts to build safer communities for
Anish Kapoor
Artist