lapsedmodernist | Belatedly / Day for Night

I keep meaning to post some of the pictures that I took at the Whitney opening.

These are of the video installation of our Shocking & Awful series

I briefly thought this sculpture by Urs Fischer was going to be my favorite piece. There was something very ritualistic aboutu it: two overlapping circles chalked on the floor with these contraptions of suspended branches rotating around the circle, candles burning on the ends and dripping wax onto the floow.

But as soon as I walked into this room it was clear that this was going to be my favorite piece, just like last year it was the Mirror Room. The artist is Paul Chan and it's called 1st ~~light~~. It's a very slow-moving digital animation projected onto the floor, and I spent about 15 minutes transfixed looking at the shadow objects, like eyeglasses and bicycle wheels and remnants of subway cars sailing in and out of view, through the patch of light, as music that weirdly reminded me of those first few cords of Nine Inch Nails' "Something I Can Never Have" except without resolving into anything else produced low-grade anxiety. At first I didn't really comprehend the piece, then I started thinking that the tiles on the floor made the lit area look like the grid of Manhattan from bird's eye view, and that the streetlight and the birds perching on it at a weird angle somehow reminded me of that famous photograph, then I realized that in between the eyeglasses slowly sailing through and birds flying back and forth in and out of the frame, little figures, people were falling amid debris and then something clicked in my unconscious. I am sure everyone else "got it" long before I did, but I think I failed to process it at first in the same way that I sometimes have a blind spot for the most obvious symbols in my own dreams, not in a "failure to engage" way.