Anish Kapoor. Marsyas.

Three steel rings and a skin

Marsyas was shown in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London from 9 October 2002 to 6 April 2003. It was the third commission in The Unilever Series, which each year invited an artist to work with this vast hall.

The structure consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a dark red PVC membrane. Two rings stand vertically at the ends of the hall. The third lies horizontally, suspended parallel to the bridge that crosses the Turbine Hall. The membrane stretches between them, narrowing in the middle and flaring at the ends, filling almost the full length of the space.

According to Tate, Kapoor began the project in January 2002. He made many drawings and models, looking for a way to use the length of the hall to challenge its height. Human scale and the relation between object and viewer were central to his thinking.

Nowhere to see it all

The most unusual thing about Marsyas is that it cannot be seen whole from any position. From the ground floor, visitors see a huge red opening above their heads. On the bridge, they see the narrowing middle and the horizontal ring. From another level, another angle.

Tate describes viewing the work as a series of separate encounters, after which viewers must construct the whole themselves. No photograph replaces walking around it. Every picture is only a fragment.

This reverses a familiar habit of sculpture. A statue is usually placed so we can walk around it and grasp its form. Marsyas is larger than the eye, larger even than what can be held in memory at once. Viewers cannot possess its shape. They can only gather pieces.

The myth of a flayed body

The title comes from Greek myth. Marsyas was a satyr who challenged the god Apollo to a music contest, lost, and was flayed alive. Painters returned to the story for centuries, as an image of punished pride and of bodily pain.

In words quoted by Tate, Kapoor described the PVC membrane as rather like a flayed skin. The dark red, he said, is the colour of the physical, the earthly, the bodily. He also stated his ambition in a single line: to make body into sky.

Standing under the red membrane, visitors feel as if inside a body opened and stretched so wide it becomes a vault. The pain of the myth is not illustrated. It is suggested through colour, tension, and the sense of being enclosed by something that is both flesh and sky.

A great hall learns to breathe

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954 and lives and works in London. He is known for forms that swallow light, mirrored surfaces, and voids that leave viewers unsure where surface ends and depth begins.

The Turbine Hall is a difficult space. It was once the machine hall of a power station, so tall and long that most works placed in it look small. Marsyas was one of the earliest answers to that challenge: instead of placing an object in the hall, Kapoor stretched the work to both end walls, so the hall itself became part of the form.

The following autumn, the Turbine Hall received Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun. The two works are very different, but they share one understanding: in a space this large, what is made is not an object to look at but an atmosphere to stand inside.