Nature’s Invasion of the White Cube

Entering a white cube, often windowless gallery space can feel like a safe haven, an artificial capsule that removes art and its audience from the dangers, influences, context, and stimuli of the outside world. Most often the spaces that house contemporary artworks are located in major urban centres, where this holy white cube is further surrounded by a broader man-made world in a bubble of artificiality, the furthest removed from the infinite uncontrollable variables of the natural world. To preserve artworks we control this internal environment down to the minutia: humidity levels, temperature, distance from human bodies, and from the aging effects of UV from sunlight.

When these meticulously maintained spaces are infiltrated by free-flowing, moving, growing biological or ecological elements the contradictory forces create an otherworldly experience: it feels like an oxymoron, unnatural and dystopian. This past spring environmentalist sage and giant of contemporary installation art, Olafur Eliasson opened Life, a surreal invasion of aquatic microspherical biomes engulfing the white cube gallery spaces of the Foundation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. As guests to this habitat resembling somewhat of a primordial oozing pond, visitors traverse across pierlike walkways as aquatic plants, bacterium, micro-animals, ducks, and everything in between chart along with their cycles of life with little regard to the carefully curated and protected space that was the gallery was just months ago and will return to in some short months after the exhibition is over.

Για περισσότερα δες εδώ.