Thursday, March 16, 2006

when I close my eyes I see...


I can't help it.
I have to post about The Weather Project.
I found out about it via other, wiser blogs (Spiro's, Kristina's)
and it swept me away. I saw one picture and dreamed about it that night. In the dream the installation was in Moscow and I was desperate to find it.

It is one of those things that makes me lose my breath because I didn't know these things were really possible and really going on, these constructions of otherworldly Experiences, glimpses of the wonder. Things I dream and look for even the palest facsimiles of, and suddenly...wham. There it is, a full-blown dreamworld. I can't help but ask why more of these things are not in existence, and why they are confined to the label of Contemporary Art when they do; can't they just be Wonders? I suppose to get the money to create such a thing, you have to be part of a Set of some kind....

why, oh why, oh why, are millions of dollars put up for hideous, standard-issue skyscrapers
instead of for more and more breathtaking Surprises? Oh, human race, where are our priorities??

Look at these... http://www.olafureliasson.net/exhib_proj.html
I am particularly drawn to "Mediated Motion."...
does anyone know of more people making experiencespheres?
Any simple poorfolk out there dreaming these into existence?
I had a dream of one once, to be lovingly planted in a dark shack on the side of a country highway in the south.

I think it's the Incarnational beauty that appeals to me-- like God in flesh, Jesus in hay, and like Christ in me, like the Holy Spirit Himself stooping to live in this shabby person. You enter the molding shanty and suddenly, unexpectedly, you find the closest thing to Home you've ever known.

And a p.s.: Thank you to Philadelphia's finest residents for a weekend that reminded me that God is a Person, Alive and now. Just by being people. I've been dissolving away; God used you to tell me I could materialize again.

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