Last year an image of my work Cloud Gate (in Millennium Park Chicago) was

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

believe in a threatening ‘Other’ different from ourselves. I am disgusted to see my work

– 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

ongoing campaign of fear and hate in American society.

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

dignity and humanity of all, irrespective of creed or racial origin.

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

everyone across the United States.

Anish Kapoor

Artist