Friday, July 26, 2013

Scary Fun: A 27,000-Square-Foot Hammock Hung 6 Stories High

In recent years, as smartphones have reprogrammed us to consider constant stimulation a basic human right, and as Google has continued to make the art world’s old masterpieces available to anyone with a web browser, museums have been left with the challenge of finding new ways to attract visitors. In a world awash in visual media, paintings, and photographs just don’t sell tickets. So what does? Interactive spectacle, visceral performance art, and, of course, the irresistible allure of crawling around a vast playground suspended stories above the quotidian concerns of the world below.
The creation process included consultations with architects, engineers, and even arachnologists.
That’s basically what you get with In Orbit, an installation by Tomás Saraceno that recently opened at the K21 Staendehaus museum in Düsseldorf. Visitors there will find a massive landscape of netting–some 27,000 square feet in all–separated into three layers by giant plastic orbs and suspended precariously some 65 feet above the museum’s main foyer.
It’s not Saraceno’s first exploration of playscape as artwork. Last year, the Argentinian installed Cloud City on the roof of the Met in New York, a climbable sculpture that resembled a giant molecule rendered in steel and plexiglass. In Orbit, however, is his most ambitious and complex work to date. It took three years to design, a process that included consultation with architects, engineers, and even arachnologists–scientists specializing in spiders, and, more importantly their webs.
To call it a spider web on a human scale wouldn’t really be right, though. Saraceno sees the piece as having echoes of all sorts of natural structures, big and small. “When I look at the multilayered levels of diaphanous lines and spheres, I am reminded of models of the universe that depict the forces of gravity and planetary bodies,” he explained of the work. “For me, the work visualizes the space-time continuum, the three-dimensional web of a spider, the ramifications of tissue in the brain, dark matter, or the structure of the universe. With In Orbit, proportions enter into new relationships; human bodies become planets, molecules, or social black holes.”
Saraceno gives us a totally new physical space to inhabit.
The last part gets to the conceptual heart of the project. Sure, it’s a gigantic playground. But at a time when most of our genuinely new spaces are digital ones–the sterilized townhall of the Facebook feed, or the cacophonous water cooler we get with Twitter–here Saraceno gives us a totally new physical space to inhabit, one that’s nothing like the city or the suburb or apartment complex or any other structure or system we’ve grown accustomed to orienting ourselves within. One definition of art is something that provokes us to look at the world in a slightly different way. Here, the approach to carrying that out is jubilantly literal.
But for Saraceno, the installation isn’t just a one-off diversion (or a way to sell museum tickets). Instead it’s a sort of small-scale exploration of his greater vision for a city of the future, a floating construct where digital and physical boundaries break down and the material concerns of the Earth are traded in for the boundless opportunities of the skies. Of course, this is just a small taste of that utopian future, and you’ll need to be over the age of 12, healthy, and willing to wear the museum’s special extra-grippy shoes to experience it.
Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf 2013 Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno
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