museums, knitting, and (sometimes) more

Friday, July 08, 2005

VENICE


Venice was great. The greatest thing about it was spending time with my nifty Dad, but the second best thing about it was Olafur Eliasson's installation "Your Black Horizon" on the island San Lazzaro in Venice's lagoon. True to Dan Flavin's philosophy that religious-pilgrimage-type trips, or at least working a bit, enhance the viewer's perceptivity and openness to the art (or whatever it is that Dan Flavin's philosophy was), the almost-solitary vaporetto ride from busy San Marco to the wee island (which otherwise is home only to an [abandoned?] Armenian monastery) had me contemplating the horizon, and the marvelous color of light in the lagoon. After this the experience of horizon-inversion (a dark room with a line of light where the horizon should be instead of a horizon line in a bright field) was really neat. Not so easy to describe, so I'll just say it was even better than grappa, and just as consciousness-altering. For slightly more literate info see the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, who funded the project. Thanks guys!