Lean Back In And Float

One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds; so many different sounds coming from so many different directions. Are they communicating to each other? What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination?

The slow climb up the spiraling interior of the Guggenheim felt disorienting. Had we been in this spot before? Was the music changing? Why are there repetitions? A speaker next to my ear burst forth with some sort of high-pitched noises; I winced like an old lady encountering stairs, but then braved my way upwards. I've not always been the biggest fan of performance art, but I've always tried to be open-minded.

1. Transverse Temporal Gyrus: "For the Guggenheim's 50th Anniversary, the band Animal Collective has collaborated with artist Danny Perez on a site-specific performance piece that will transform the museum's rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment."
2. Transverse Temporal Gyrus: the part of the brain that processes auditory information.

We listened, we drank, we climbed. Are the walls closing in? As we neared the top, I noticed my beer was nearly empty. "We drank our way to the top," I said, and looked down.

Oh. Down.

The walls of the inner balcony of the rotunda are just at waist height; we both had this instant horrible feeling that it was the perfect height to cause one to lean a little bit too far into the center, fall, fall, fall onto the scary rabbit men in robes below.

(The stuff of nightmares, no?)

The sensation of vertigo is not something new to visits to the Guggenheim. Everybody gets it. The slowly spinning climb, peering over the edge, watching the walls spiral up as the floor falls away from you. What was new for me was the sensation not of falling, but of floating. Near the top of the climb, I steadied myself with my elbows on the ledge, moved my center of gravity to my heels, and stared for a while into the lights below. I was above it all.

There was something familiar about all this.

Flip the calendar back a month. (Really, imagine it. I love old movies that show the passage of time by ripping pages from a calendar.) At Sundance, in what could only be described as a fit of bourbon-induced masochism, we subjected ourselves to the singular experience of an 8:30am screening of Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (described a bit unfairly by Reuters as "virtually unwatchable"). The colors—bright blues and pinks, harsh whites (the "dead-white" that Frank Lloyd Wright so loathed) and yet an ever-permeating darkness—were identical. The sensation of floating above the action, of being perched in the air like the recently dead—the very same.

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void. Solomon R. Guggenheim's Contemplating the Void.

Two voids converged, contemplated, and entered.

I can see how people let themselves be disappointed. The band wasn't performing live (though we were made aware of this when we bought our tickets). It was three hours of noise and light (which is what a lot of movies are anyway). But the woman who took the elevator to the top to get a beer, and then insisted to her boyfriend that they head back down to catch a cab? Really?

The longer you sit awake in bed listening at night, the more you hear.

Over time, if you gave it time, it started to feel a little bit more interesting. Things became more significant, more surreal. And I don't even think I was trying that hard. A couple of tables draped with black tablecloths and lit by candles halfway up the rotunda for an earlier charity event didn't seem to be part of the show, but simply by being present, cast with pink light, they suddenly were. The security guard rubbing her temples, the people dangling expectantly over the walls—they became part of it too. Even the woman on the corner of 88th and Madison cutting through the line before we were even inside, painted eyebrows raised high, asking "what's this FOR?"—the memory of that question became part of it too.

Art (and I'm completely aware that, dear lord, I'm about to make a sweeping, obvious, and potentially pretentious statement about Art) is about the entire experience.

It seemed that some in the rotunda were focusing all of their energies on the men on the platforms below. Do something, they commanded them with their minds. Perform, they seemed to say. ENTERTAIN us. But if you looked away from the unmoving be-costumed men below and looked around at everyone watching, illuminated by Perez's pinks and blues, this collective expectation building inside the void—the whole thing suddenly made a lot more sense.

Yet the cuts in the walls slowly emptied of people. Plastic beer cups left behind on the sloping floor like ghosts. It was becoming the void again.

The images seemed to be looping, then just as we were thinking about leaving, something new would appear. Little blue lights twinkling across the faces of those who remained. "We haven't seen this one yet." And again we leaned back in.

As time passes it is our hope that you will wonder if you are hearing songs or patterns or maybe simply hearing more.

Then, toward the end of the night, a moment of silence broke through the forest of noise. The music cut out, and, as if exploding with expectation, an army of kids in tribal face paint let up a junglistic howl into the rotunda. Across the way, I saw Danny Perez smile from behind the engineer's desk.

Those kids. (Kids! Yes! Born in the nineties, I swear.) The ones in animal masks, the ones waving their hands through the air like they were swimming. The ones who traveled in packs. They filled the void with their excitement, with their willingness to follow the single, final, underlined instruction at the bottom of our entry tickets: "have fun!"

They got it, those kids. They understood the full experience, the importance of not just standing still and expecting it to come to you. The itching desire to let yourself get dizzy, to fill the void with noise.

To lean back in and float.

(I'm coming at this not as the world's hugest Animal Collective fan. If you want that kind of perspective on the event, hop on over to Hipster Runoff. They LOVE them some Animal Collective. Thanks to Brandon for bringing to our attention something he could experience vicariously through us.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.