Scared by Art: Confronting Fear in Tomás Saraceno’s In Orbit

I want to believe in Tomás Saraceno’s dreams of floating cities. Several years ago, I was first in line one morning to see and climb through his installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was unconvincing, I thought. The structure was too sturdy to let me think about floating into the clouds.

So after several longs days of work in Düsseldorf last summer, I was happy on my last afternoon there to have a chance to climb into, walk around, and then think about Saraceno’s huge steel mesh installation, In Orbit. (It’s still on view at K21. The exhibition was extended until June 2016.)

I had imagined lying down on a surface firmer than a hammock, but softer than a floor. I had expected to feel both sheltered and supported by it. But I wasn’t. Mostly, I was just afraid.

A guide held my hand delicately as I walked all around the installation, and she cautioned others (who were running and bouncing and having a great time) to notice that die dame was heading their way. She said something like “we are all in this together,” echoing Saraceno’s claim that the work is really about communicating through the vibration of the mesh, as spiders do. (Did it cross my mind then that perhaps a fly doesn’t want to communicate with a spider?)

The guide came to my rescue after noticing that I was having trouble standing up and gaining a footing. The mesh wasn’t as tight as I’d expected. The tension varied from one place to another, so it wasn’t obvious how springy the surface would be until I stepped on it. Parts of the installation – including the entry point – were steep, creating the effect of climbing on a narrow path beside the face of a cliff.

But the biggest problem for me was that when I looked down at the floor far below, I was very nearly convinced that my visual experience couldn’t be trusted. It seemed entirely impossible that I could be where I was, walking on a springy surface that I could see through.

On exiting, I told a second attendant that I was amazed by how frightened I had been while I was inside the work. He replied, calmly, peacefully, “Das ist normal.”

I’ve sat on this post for months and re-written it again and again, trying to figure out why the experience was so disquieting and ultimately so disappointing. One problem was that I was trying so hard to remain vertical in a space that clearly would have rewarded lying down and looking up into the sky. I was mad at myself. But I was mad at Saraceno, too. For making what had seemed so appealing way too difficult? For not realizing that someone like me might want to be there? For telling the guards to be too nice? For creating a metaphor of floating that required so much work and so many turnbuckles? Or just because he scared me?

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Tomás Saraceno - in orbit, installation view K21 Ständehaus, Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno © 2013

Images from inside the installation are very tightly controlled – don’t they look relaxed? Visitors are only allowed to take photos from outside the structure.

Museums as Solace

Three weeks ago, tears streamed down my face as a waiter put in front of me a beautiful, fresh, whole fish.

I’d overheard someone say there was Wi-Fi in the restaurant and, having been disconnected for many hours, I had checked my email just as my lunch arrived. There I found the sad news that a friend and former colleague had died suddenly.

I was in a city full of churches, many of them with their doors wide open. Over the next few days, I surprised myself by wandering again and again into a church near my hotel, to sit for a few minutes and look.

I’d gone to Venice to see art, and of course I did. But entering a museum (not to mention getting into the Venice Biennale) was a production – standing in line, buying a ticket, getting offered an audio guide. Not so at the nearby church. I could walk in any time I felt like it.

The church was dedicated to Moses. Behind the altar was a massive sculptural pile-up of boulders, of stone angels holding metal trumpets, of swirling clouds, drapery caught by the wind, and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. For reasons I couldn’t explain to myself (and, for once, I didn’t try to), I needed to be there, soaking up that baroque human accomplishment. It was gaudy. It was probably tasteless and definitely capitalistic. I didn’t care.

As Paris emerged into a darker reality last weekend, I was dismayed to learn that the city’s museums had closed for the three days of national mourning that followed the attacks. I understand security concerns. But still, I wish the museums had thrown open their doors and left them open, to anyone, for free.

We can argue, as museum people have for decades, about whether museums have any business acting as temples. Right now, that argument simply doesn’t matter.

In times of grief and stress, a museum can offer a place to focus on what, besides carnage, humans can create.

Sometimes, like now, the value of museums is simply that they exist.

To Museum Directors: Open the doors. Stop charging. Find another model. And, coincidentally, prove what you’re worth.

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700 Miles an Hour and I Don’t Feel a Thing

“There is no opportunity in our normal life circumstances to experience that magnitude of speed in such close proximity.”  - Mitch Benoff[1]

Here in Boston, the Earth is rotating at over 700 miles per hour. While “sitting still,” here in my living room, I am rotating with it.  I’m also traveling around the sun

at 67,000 miles per hour, and around the galaxy at 483,000 miles per hour, and “on from there,” as Otto Piene used to say. And so are you.

Yet, although I “know” that I’m not really sitting still, I don’t feel a thing. All of that motion embedded in motion is simply an abstraction to me—something I learned in elementary or junior high school and then forgot, while I attended to the really important issues like whether my hair looked stupid.

I have managed, over time, to move a little past those important issues, and to become a big fan of works of art that help us to understand our relationship to scales much larger and much smaller than our own. Mitch Benoff’s The Speed of the Earth is one such work.

On a June night in 1993, I walked onto an athletic field at MIT[2] and saw the work, a ball of light that appeared to travel very fast down a 600 foot-long path. The motion of the ball of light, 700mph, matched the speed of the earth’s rotation at that exact place on the surface of the planet. The effect was to make clear to viewers that although our planet seems stationary to us, it is in fact moving at a great rate of speed. But it did a whole lot more.

The work was astonishingly beautiful and utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen before: a white light streaming past me at tremendous speed. (Look at the images on Mitch’s website—you’ll see what I mean.) Many people reacted as I did: awestruck. One MIT student spent two nights on the athletic field where Mitch had installed The Speed of the Earth, just to be closer to the experience.

I live in the hope of running across works like The Speed of the Earth. How amazing it is that a human—a being seemingly so insignificant in the big universe—through exerting the combined force of his imagination and his ability to organize things, can and then does create something so poignant and so emotional from a single, solitary fact. That’s what art can do.

[1] Speed of the Earth: The Illusion and Experience of Speed and Scale, MIT Thesis, 1993.  http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64515/28737748.pdf?sequence=1

[2] The Speed of the Earth has been installed in several locations and venues, including the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The MIT installation was in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, where Mitch and I both studied.