I was going to write about Tokyo Olympiad, a documentary film on the 1964 games that I saw recently on DVD, and how just when it seemed like an affecting document of the Olympics could not possibly exist, jaded as we are by base and commercial television coverage, here was this film. I was going to write about how the film pieced together small stories through well-selected images. How at the opening ceremony, a loud overhead something (jets or released doves?) is briefly interrupted by the image of one frightened child in a huge stadium, bringing to mind the bombs that were dropped on Japan a generation before. How the film showed us not just the shots put and discuses thrown, but also the channels on which the projectiles traveled back to the projectors. How much the director, Kon Ichikawa, got across by the selection of the odd detail (athletes in the village putting away huge plates of heavy, Western food, for example) and the sequence in which those details are delivered. But also how the formal elements of sequence and selection worked in concert with the extraordinary texture of the images – the color of the film, the lighting. Some quality that made the matter of life seem beautiful. I was going to write about how there is an analog in poetry, how we select images and sequence, but how the language in which images and details and utterances are rendered gives the texture, makes the poem’s matter sound in the mouth and in the mind.
Then I was reading Jon Woodward’s Rain (reviewed here, and lots of other places), and I was going to write about that, too, in the context of Tokyo Olympiad and sequence and texture. Because the book employs so much interplay between regularity (5 lines per stanza, 3 stanzas per page, no title per poem, title per section, consistent world and characters) and variation (the situation of sentence and utterance within the line, the sequence of precise images). I was reminded of rippling water.
But then I went to see Take Your Time, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition currently at San Franscisco MOMA. Because I’m a sucker for the aesthetics of science, I was expecting to like it. But when we entered a room in which only one frequency of light (yellow) was present, I was not expecting the childlike glee on other faces and the attendant knowledge that I too was grinning like a fool.
The audio tour explained our sensation: the white-painted walls were yellow, but everyone else in the room was in grayscale, because in order to see color we need more than one kind of light in order to make comparisons. It also explained that Eliasson often creates a space of transition from the outside world into the installation’s world and concerns. I was thinking about how this strategy solves a very recognizable problem, that trouble of adapting from the mundane busy world to the writer’s world. I often experience this at readings. No matter how compelling the work is on its own merits, it can be hard to be fully present with it right there, right then.
Among the least flashy components of the exhibition were sequences of photographs, all the same size and shape, regularly arranged (example below). By playing with regularity and variation, pattern and violation, they showed similar shapes occurring in diverse natural settings, and they highlighted that same impulse at work in many of the installation’s other facets, which included takes on kaleidoscopes, rainbows, and rippling pools. (We were rendered infinite by well arranged mirrors).
When we left the installation I was wondering whether reading or listening to written work can ever be as surprising, “immersive” (courtesy of audio tour), and participatory an experience as Taking Your Time. We walked right past the painting galleries and looked down onto the main lobby and the people entering and circulating and clumping up and waiting, and nothing looked the same.