Vivid

A field of tulips, a hand enters the frame and grabs the pink petals.
Grass at eye level, through the blades a naked woman is crawling, furiously shaking a mane of red hair.
A dark puddle of water, someone in purple sweatpants and bare feet walks, kicking water and brightly colored debris.
Now we’re underwater, looking up at the trees on the bank, lily pads float, an apple is trapped under one of the big, waxy leaves.
Taking Chance

A small pig eats an apple whole, saliva dripping.
A bare breast.
A trickle of blood.
The wrinkled skin of a cheek as seen through a magnifying glass.

Michael Jackson’s This Is It

Projected 25 feet high onto the walls of a museum these images seemed at once more magnificent and more mundane.

Yesterday morning 120 New York yogis made a pilgrimage. We assembled outside the Museum of Modern Art before opening and were led by museum staff to the atrium, the current home of Pipilotti Rist’s video projection: Pour Your Body Out.

Kenny movie full Training Day full

We quietly removed shoes, coats, and outer garments. We unrolled mats and placed them artfully around the room, careful to leave space for others who would be joining. We sat in odd groupings, wandered from friend to friend, said hello and aren’t we lucky to be here? Some watched the video. Some sat in meditation, or tried to.

During those first minutes, it was the sheer scale of the installation that made it nearly impossible to find normalcy.  We tried to settle in and center ourselves but the room was abuzz with anticipation. None of us were sure how this would go or what the experience would be. We strained to leave expectations behind. We took photos…perhaps to process it all later in a more digestible format, in a safe and familiar place where we might look at an image and say, “Oh yes, I was there. And he was there. We did that there and wasn’t it all too much?” Aware that we were doing something no one had done before we weren’t exactly sure how to behave or even what to think.

Just after 9:00 Elena Brower called us to attention. Seated on an enormous dais in the middle of the room, looking small but projecting a big capacity to help us make sense of this experience together, she opened the session with words of gratitude. She asked us to rise to the occasion, to try for the morning to embody the spirit of Rist’s work, intended to evoke a visceral response. She asked us to do what was nearly impossible in that moving room full of visual wonder: close our eyes. So we did, sometimes peeking to make sure it was all really happening. She reminded us over and over to breathe because it was the only hope of finding one’s own experience in this breathtaking moment. Breathe and make this moment yours, she advised. We did and indeed it was the only thing that made any of it seem containable, graspable.

For an hour we moved. Each asana offering up a unique perspective on the piece: between the legs, upside down, on our backs. Through the silhouettes of our neighbors’ torsos, legs, arms and hands stretched towards the images and each other. Sometimes by coincidence we would mirror the image on the screen. A giant grasping hand would be met with 1000 outstretched fingers. Our feet stretched back to meet 10 giant toes on a field of hot pink.

The experience was a condensed dose of life in all its confusion and contrasts. I felt imperfect, small, foolish in the presence of the art’s majesty, while at the same time understanding this: WE are the art in all our intimate details. Those pores, those toes, those fingernails, those breasts, that blood. Those earthworms, that pig, those tulips. The destruction, the decay, the light and dark, bugs and rotten fruit, water and soil. All of this on the video, projected larger than life. And in the room the smell of sweat, the sound of breathing and sighs, the undeniable reality of bodies moving with effort, strain, and finally release.

The Black Pimpernel movie We were reverent of ourselves in a way that was only possible because of the tension between intimacy and scale. The intimacy made us perfectly self-conscious. While the scale helped us lose ourselves completely–the ultimate effect being one of timelessness. It was like being a child, discovering the world without the limits of time and space.

2001: A Space Odyssey movie And maybe also a little like dying, for I imagine these are the deathbed images and sensations one conjures in the last months, weeks, days. Not the wedding. Not the graduation or the promotion. But, the earthworms and apples, the pores of another person’s familiar face, the feel of grass, and the dawning awareness that maybe this was the whole point.

(photos courtesy of Arnold Brower)

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