Something amazing happened to me not yet two weeks ago. I saw something I absolutely loved at The Museum of Modern Art.
Usually, I laugh at a lot of what I see. A rope hanging from a ceiling is not art, in my mind. Neither is the "4x4 squares of steel" below it, or as I call it: a tile floor. But this, I could stay -- and did stay -- in one place, experiencing it, for 15 minutes with little movement.
What was this amazing thing?
Real-life black-and-white.
Coming down the escalator onto the third floor, the entire lobby area and a long hallway were flushed with bright yellow lights with walls painted the same color. Yellow is a very disorienting color when not contrasted with anything, and it made me feel slightly uneasy about the world.
After about a minute or two getting used to the yellow -- which was so intense that I actually flipped my sunglasses down from atop my head in order to feel more comfortable, though they did little to my actual vision -- I realized that I was black and white. In fact, so was everything that wasn't the bright yellow. Whether the yellow itself or a special kind of light bulb, I am not sure, but all colors were washed out.
I had suddenly stepped into my favorite films -- only sharper -- and was living in a world that was both real in the sense that it is, well, real life, and formalistic in the sense that it made you so keenly aware that you were in the real world while at the same time not so sure if you were.
I may say bad things about MoMA at times -- see the "tile floor" comment above -- but I do enjoy the museum. I usually do not enjoy the exhibits, but I love to watch people interact with them. For once, I loved interacting with one, too. As for watching others, I was amused watching people take pictures only to go out into the regular white-light parts of the museum to see that their pictures did not capture the world in black-and-white but rather in its real color.
How upside-down: The human sees black-and-white while the camera sees color.
I need to go back...
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Olafur Eliasson. I saw him talk at Columbia when that show opened. He's a genius. In the west suburbs of Berlin, on the horizon, he built a huge flat shiny yellow metal circle between several buildings. When the sun rose in the east it caught the light and there were two sunrises.
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