shiny metalic sculptures
I bought a bouncy ball at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It is half green and half blue, has a diameter of about 6cm, and bounces really high! I will feature this bouncy ball in video projects I’ll execute in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Yippee! I like my bouncy ball. I played with it in the streets after I bought it.
While I was playing with my bouncy ball, I thought about how the location of a piece of artwork affects how I see and experience that artwork. Here is what I mean: If a painting is in a gallery does it look differently than if it were outside? The answer is yes, because indoor lighting is different than outdoor lighting. Color is the eye’s interpretation of how light reflects off of an object; thus if the light is different, then the color of the object will be different.
Ok, so objects appear differently when they are viewed under different light conditions. This is old news, I know. But here is where I am going with this: shiny metalic sculptures.
When you look at a shiny metalic sculpture in a museum you see the other museum-goers and the artwork on the opposite wall reflected in the sculpture. If you put the sculpture outside, you would see reflections of trees, buildings, or even the ocean. If you bring the sculpture into outer space you could see a reflection of the entire earth. And if you put your nose a centimeter from the sculpture, the only reflection you will see is that of your face. So as paintings change subtly when we view them in different environments, shiny metalic sculptures change drastically. In fact, I believe that shiny metalic sculptures become new pieces of artwork depending on their external environment.
The fact that I can see myself physically reflected in the art is just as much a part of the sculpture as the physical material of sculpture itself. The reflections in the sculpture are not permanent and change as the sculpture’s environment changes, but this does not imply that these reflections are not part of the artwork.
Regarding shiny metalic sculptures: The environment permeates the art.