The sculptor has produced a brutish, gaping funnel sculpture called Dirty Corner for the Versailles gardens. Oh dear, is this how men still see women?
Anish Kapoor has made another whacking great sculpture for the Versailles gardens, called Dirty Corner. And it’s meant to be Marie Antoinette’s vagina. I know the queen had her faults, but it’s a very odd vagina – a vast, brutish, metal, grubby-looking, gaping funnel into a black hole. I must say I’m a bit fed up with this sort of idea of a vagina. I thought we’d done all that to death more than half a century ago, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover had just come out in paperback; everything long and pointy was a penis and every orifice was a vagina.
Olga, an artist and female critic, thinks this one is more like the entrance to a storage unit. She is right. Oh dear. Is this how some men still see women? As dirty storage units? And I thought feminism had got somewhere. We still have a million miles to go.
Michele Hanson