The Day After

The opening at the Vermont Supreme Court last night was wonderful. I usually don't like openings, but I had a great time and I think other people did too! Part of the reason was that people got to interact with the work a bit, using finger LED lights to cast shadows from the work onto the wall. Unfortunately I forgot the lights in my concern with getting the refreshments packed at home and then set out at the reception, so I had to wait until my husband arrived with them, about a third of the way through the 2-hour opening. I brought a camera, but I was having so much fun that I didn't take any photos.

Today I saw this quote from the artist Robert Morris (who made installations with platforms, ramps, and other constructions that visitors could move around on) which seems to speak to the pleasure people got from having an actual, physical way to interact with the work:

"Personally, I'd rather break my arm by falling off a platform than spend an hour in detached contemplation of a Matisse. We've become blind from so much seeing. Time to press up against things, squeeze around, crawl over - not so much out of a childish naivte to return to the playground, but more to acknowledge that the world begins to exist at the limits of our skin and what goes on at that interface between the physical self and external conditions doesn't detach us like the detached glance."
- Robert Morris in a letter to Tate curator Michael Compton in 1971