How would you fill a really large room?
There is a REALLY large room in London’s Tate Modern - Turbine Hall. It is 500ft long and 115ft high. (152m x 35m). Currently it is filled with 14,000 white polythene boxes as part of sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s installation.
It got me thinking. The two clear questions that rose for me are below. Am particularly interested in your thoughts on the second question:
1. Have you ever wandered about how the context impacts your thoughts on subject matter, even an every day object?
Put an egg on a dish and watch it in your kitchen somehow doesn’t have quite the same effect than if that same egg on a dish was hanging out in the Tate, or MOMA for that matter, with an interesting side note explaining its perfection and relationship to the artist, life etc…I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way either. I love that you can walk into a modern art gallery and learn to appreciate things in a way you never saw them, as if you are discovering them for the first time. Note: In this case we are talking about art galleries but the concept extends across contexts.
2. Rachel Whiteread is only the 6th artist to be given this space. Let’s suppose you are told you will be #7. What would you fill it with?
When I first read about this a story came to mind that I don’t remember clearly except to say there was a challange and three brothers each of whom were given the task to completely fill a room. After a room filled with wood, and one with hay, it was the youngest brother whose response won. He put a single candle in the centre of the room. The entire room was filled with light.
So me - I would fill it with light.
Happy musing.
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October 25th, 2005 at 6:26 am
If you’re going to fill the place with light, I would rather have the room filled with darkness, and give people small flashlights so that they can shine light on themselves.
I wonder if the artist didn’t give her reasoning behind the 14000 boxes, would anybody be able to figure them out. At that point, is an observer of the art viewing the art and drawing his/her own conclusion, or analyzing what the artist said and determining if it agrees with the piece.
October 25th, 2005 at 6:41 am
Sometimes I think that when one views the art they extend it - engage with it, re-intepret it, posit all sorts of things the artist may/may not have considered and or intended. A question that comes to mind now is when does art start being art and stop being art.
October 26th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
One website defines art as “Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation.” Perhaps this is not the defintion you had in mind, but it can still shed some insight to your question. Art stops being art when one stops observing it, interacting with it, analyzing it. A mural can be considered as just a brick wall with paint. But if you perceive a special meaning to the arrangment of the paint that reflects on some aspect of life (or you just think it looks pretty), than the piece becomes art. When you study art, you’re practicing techniques that allow you to observe more details in everyday life. In my mind, that’s a very important skill to have.
BTW, there is also this archaic defintion of art: “A second person singular present indicative of be.” Using this definition would imply that as long as the art continues to exist… it remains art.
As a follow-through to my previous comment, everybody takes many things for granted in everyday life without questioning it. At some point in our lifetime… often during school… we are told certain facts, and in many cases, we accept these facts without knowing all the reasons behind them. We don’t always attempt to come to the same conclusion ourselves, or to criticize the logic behind that conclusion. If people don’t analyze everyday life, how can they be expected to analyze the abstract and unusual. Of course, this doesn’t apply to some people, and you might be one of those exceptions.
October 27th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
This thought may seem odd, but it speaks to one of Yoav’s comments. I’d like to fill the room with a supercomputer. Connected to that, a video screen displaying some cool visual being generated in real time by the computer.
Why? Because a supercomputer is big, messy, noisy, sometimes smells weird, takes up a lot of space, and uses a tremendous amount of electricty. I bet most people haven’t actually seen one. We’re reaching a point now where we take computation, and this internet, for granted. But don’t forget that, according to some estimates, 10% of the US’s energy budget is spent on running the internet. It’s by no means trivial. An installation which displayed some glitzy computation together with the actual, ugly machine needed to do that computation might remind us of some questions we should be asking ourselves while we gaze at our computer screens.
Ah, another thought. Most big computer installations have halon fire protection systems. Listen to this. When a fire is detected an alarm is sounded. You’re usually given 5-10 seconds to clear the room. After that, the room is sealed and halon is pumped in. Halon is inert and doesn’t burn, so the fire will go out very quickly. However, anyone who happened to be in the room would be die. The justification for using these systems is that often big server rooms have millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars worth of equipment. Having spent many years working in rooms like that, I’m still can’t help thinking that as far as certain people are concerned, these machines are more important than I am. We ought to be reminded of that reality, too, that someone might actually die to ensure your email is delivered or your blog has no downtime.
So thats why I’d fill the room with a computer.