This cross-departmental collaboration between choreographer, Jennifer Salk (Associate Professor, Dance) and Maja Petrić explores concepts of tenderness and fragility with a multi-sensory journey allowing viewers to experience the entire museum in unexpected ways. Upon entering the Henry viewers move through the interstitial spaces — hallways, stairwells, elevators, ramps — experiencing sound, light, and dance. These small environments create places of vulnerability, playfulness, intimacy, fragility and cruelty among a tightly knit group, choreographed by Salk.

Using light and video mapping projection technology, Petrić’s installations will appear in distinct locations in the Henry where the dancers interact. In the Stroum gallery, a large wall provides the backdrop to the main dance; it slowly “cracks” and discloses an illusion of a realm behind the wall by use of lights and video mapping projection.

Mixed Media Art Installation
Artist: Maja Petrić
Video Mapping: Hrvoje Benko
General Assistant: Jovanka Uzelac
Technical Assistant: Kim Brown

Dance
Choreography: Jennifer Salk
Stage Designer: Amiya Brown
Stage Manager: Monique Courcy
Light Board and Assistant Stage Manager: Esmeralda Valenzuela

*Title of the dance performance is inspired by Juhani Pallasmaa’s book Architecture and the Senses: The eyes of the skin.

Dry Falls is a 3.5 mile long scalloped precipice in central Washington. It is the remnant of what was once the largest waterfall known to have existed on earth. In the ice age catastrophic flooding channeled water from Dry Falls at 65 miles per hour through the Upper Grand Coulee and over this 400-foot (120 m) rock face covering parts of today’s parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Today, the site remains to be a great representation of 18th century philosophical ideas of sublime in nature that combines profound horrors with harmony.

Red of the Dry Falls intends to reiterate the representation of the sublime in nature by pointing at both horrifying and harmonious aesthetic qualities of the site. This is done by capturing beauty of the landscape and interrupting it through subtly disjointed stitching of the panorama and physically coloring red objects found in the scenery. Behind the image are red lights that are programmed to change intensity and shape over the course of time to create slowly increasing flood of red over the Dry Falls.

I returned to the basement and after some  difficulty I got my bearings and found, from the inside, the  place that corresponded to the skylight’s position. I looked for cracks, secret doors. The search was to no avail, for the  wall was smooth and very solid. I thought that the wall must surely conceal a hidden treasure; but when I decided to  break the wall to see what was behind it I was motivated by  the hope of finding, not machine guns and munitions, but  the food I needed so desperately.

I removed an iron bolt from the door, and with increasing  weariness, I used it to make a small opening in the wall: a blue light appeared. I worked with a kind of frenzy and soon  I made a hole large enough to crawl through. My first  reaction was not disappointment at finding no food, or relief  at recognizing a water pump and a generator, but ecstatic,  prolonged amazement: the walls, the ceiling, the floor were  of blue tile and even the air itself (in that room where the  only contact with the outside world was a high skylight  obscured by the branches of a tree) had the deep azure  transparency of a waterfall’s foam.

Again I pressed my ear to this wall that seemed to  be intact. Reassured by the silence, I looked for the  spot where I had made the opening, and then I began  to tap on the wall, thinking that it would be easier to  break the fresh plaster. I tapped for a long time, with  increasing desperation. The tile was invulnerable. The  strongest, most violent blows echoed against the  hardness and did not open even a superficial crack or  loosen a tiny fragment of the blue glaze.  I rested for a moment and tried to control my nerves.  Then I resumed my efforts, moving to other parts of  the wall.

Chips fell, and, when large pieces of the wall  began to come down, I kept on pounding, bleary-eyed,  with an urgency that was far greater than the size of the  iron bar, until the resistance of the wall (which seemed  unaffected by the force of my repeated pounding)  pushed me to the floor, frantic and exhausted. First I  saw, then I touched, the pieces of masonry— they  were smooth on one side, harsh, earthy on the other:  then, in a vision so lucid it seemed ephemeral and  supernatural, my eyes saw the blue continuity of the I pounded some more. In some places pieces of the wall broke off, but they did not reveal any sort of cavity.  In fact, in the twinkling of an eye the wall was perfect  again, achieving that invulnerable hardness I had  already observed in the place where I had made the  original opening.

I shouted, “Help!” I lunged at the wall several times,  and it knocked me down. I had an imbecilic attack of  tears. I was overcome by the horror of being in an  enchanted place and by the confused realization that  its vengeful magic was effective in spite of my  disbelief.  Harassed by the terrible blue walls, I looked up at  the skylight. I saw, first without understanding and then  with fear, a cedar branch split apart and become two  branches,- then the two branches were fused, as  docile as ghosts, to become one branch again. I said  out loud or thought very clearly: “I shall never be able to  get out. I am in an enchanted place.” But then I felt  ashamed, like a person who has carried a joke too far,  and I understood:  These walls—like Faustine, Morel, the fish in the  aquarium, one of the suns and one of the moons, the  book by Belidor—are projections of the machines.  They coincide with the walls made by the masons (they  are the same walls taken by the machines and then  projected on themselves). Where I have broken or  removed the first wall, the projected one remains.

Since it is a projection nothing can pierce or eliminate  it as long as the motors are running.  If I destroy the first wall, the machine room will be  open when the motors stop running—it will no longer  be a room, but the corner of a room. But when the  motors begin again the wall will reappear, and it will be  impenetrable.  Morel must have planned the double-wall protection  to keep anyone from reaching the machines that  control his immortality. But his study of the tides was deficient (it  was probably made during a different solar period),  and he thought that the power plant would function  without any interruptions. Surely he is the one who  invented the famous disease that, up to now, has  protected the island very well. Perhaps I can find the switch that disconnects them. It took me only one day to learn to operate the light plant and the water pump. I think I shall be able to leave this place.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, 1940

The video juxtaposes the performance done by Maja Petrić in New York and Jelena Mihelčić in Zagreb. Both were attached to the wall and performed stylized movements of the gestures done by the traffic controllers. In specific positions the bodies became placeholders for the documentation of the attack that happend in New York City and Zagreb, which points to the universal nature of the aggression.

One of the characters is brute as described in the following Edward Lear’s limerick:

There was a Young Lady of Parma,
Whose conduct grew calmer and calmer;
When they said, ‘Are you dumb?’
She merely said, ‘Hum!’
That provoking Young Lady of Parma.

The other character is frisky as mentioned in Edward Lear’s limerick below:

There was an Old Man of the West,
Who never could get any rest;
So they set him to spin
On his nose and chin,
Which cured that Old Man of the West.

Directors and performers: Jelena Mihelčić and Maja Petrić
Music – accordion: Damir Zagorščak
Photography: Damir Kudin

This exploration of the daylight quality and it’s reflection in the environment is inspired by the three-line poetry form of haiku and other short explorations of the meaning of nature.

This world
A fading
Mountain echo
Void and
Unreal

Ryōkan, Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryōkan, 1758–1831

After ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

Zhuangzi Chuang-tse, The Zhuangzi, c. 286 BCE

Following are photographs that are installed affront of the dynamic lights in color of the landscape. The lights are programmed to change the shade and intensity to compositionally direct the focus on photographs and video.

Below is a section of the video that is integrated with the photography strips.

As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.

Albert Einstein

Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.

Louis Khan

Following are the screens shots of the wall cracking over the course of eight hours.

Below is a simulation of dusk appearing through the cracks.

Simulation of the daylight ranges from blissful environment to eerie atmosphere in the moments of lightning.

Image: Maja Petrić
Sound: Maja Petrić and Michael McCrea

The imagery is divided in four groups according to colors that prevail in four depicted landscapes and that dissolve from one into another. As the blissfulness of the natural environment is established, it is juxtaposed with daunting events that appear there. This experience of events is enhanced by use of dynamic LED lights that are mounted behind the floating and translucent screen. The dichotomy of the sensations ranges from comfort to discomfort and as such relates to Maja’s research of the sublime and the multiplicity of the sublime experience in nature and catastrophic events.

Below is the full animation.

My work is about changing the perception of space in function of art. Therefore, the subjects of my work are perception, space and, art. To change perception, I study sensation, experience, and phenomenology. To create spatial situations, I practice designing spaces, fabricating structures, manipulating materials, and integrating lighting and audiovisual systems. The core of my artistic research is the pursuit of the unknowable— the sublime.

The sublime has been a subject in philosophy and art since circa 1200 B.C. when the sage Veda Vyasa described it as a mystery in the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita.1 Since then, the meaning of the term has been vigorously debated, but it remains indefinable. My interest is not to define the sublime. Critical history has proven that the sublime cannot be precisely put into words, just as the meaning of life is inherently unknowable.

The Sun Must Bear No Name

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .

The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

Notes toward a supreme fiction
Wallace Stevens, 19422

Nineteenth century Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist Søren Kierkegaard argued that logic of the objective knowledge and rational belief is unimportant to existence. If the deity could rationally be argued, existence of the supernatural being would be unimportant to humans. It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is essential. Kierkegaard wrote, “Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”3

The sublime, as an agnostic term, cannot be made into an object of knowledge through language, reasoning, logic, and concepts. But it can be experienced. Since it is unknowable but can be experienced, it is profoundly valuable to experience it. My interest is in the experience of the inherently unknowable sublime. This experience has been described both as awe and terror. Variations of the experience include the dark and the light, the beautiful and the ugly, the bliss and the horror, the true and the false, the sacred and the profane, the good and the evil, the pleasure and the pain, and so forth. My interest is in the division and range between two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory sensations as distinct instances of the single sublime. Therein lies the opportunity for the multiplicity of an experience, which can than also be created in art.

The sublime object is of a dual sort. We refer it either to our power of apprehension and are defeated in the attempt to form an image of its concept; or we refer it to our vital power and view it as a power against which our own dwindles to nothing. But even if, in the first case or the second, it is the Occasion of a painful awareness of our limitations, still we do not run away from it, but rather are drawn to it by an irresistible force. Would this be even possible if the limits of our imagination were at the same time the limits of our power of apprehension? Would we so gladly accede to the reminder of the overwhelming power of natural forces if we did not possess something else in reserve which need not fall prey to those forces? We delight in the sensuously infinite because we are able to think what the senses can no longer apprehend and the understanding can no longer comprehend. We are ravished by the terrifying because we are able to will that which our sensuous impulses are appalled by, and can reject what they desire. We gladly permit the imagination to meet its master in the realm of appearances because ultimately it is only a sensuous faculty that triumphs over other sensuous faculties; but nature in her entire boundlessness cannot impinge upon the absolute greatness within ourselves. We gladly subordinate our well-being and our existence to physical necessity, for we are reminded thereby that it cannot command our principles. Man is in its hands, but man’s will is in his own hands.

On the Sublime
Friedrich Schiller, 18014

Contradictions of the sublime have been depicted in art since the beginning of art history. The range from hell, through purgatory, to heaven can be traced in the Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Bible, Homer’s The Odyssey, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Illuminated manuscript, Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, Luca Signorelli’s fresco of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment in Orvieto Cathedral,  Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Gustav Mahler’s The Symphony No. 8, and so forth.

These works differ in a degree of simulating and emulating the experience of the sublime. For example, Dante’s The Divine Comedy uses the narrative to create a representation of soul’s journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.5 It simulates, projects the idea, of experiencing Dante the Pilgrim’s journey. To a degree, it also emulates the actual feeling of being on a path from hell to heaven. It can make a reader experience the poem as if they were the first person of the poem. But it is predominantly a representational narrative of the sublime simulated in an afterlife of any everyday sinner.

My interest is in works of art that predominantly emulate the experience of the sublime, which aligns with twentieth century French philosophy that includes the thinking of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Their work is in the domain of post-structuralism that views the structural relationship between the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. In the artistic discourse the structure creates nonlinear meaning, and the audience replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. These ideas extend to the philosophical concept of phenomenology that focus on the “first person” viewpoint, which can then be examined as phenomena that not only appears to “my” consciousness, but to all consciousnesses. According to German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the synthesized experience is what constitutes total human knowledge.6

One of the first artists exploring the phenomenological experience of the sublime was English Romantic landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. His most notable painting, the Snowstorm: Steamboat Off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water (1842) portrays a ship in distress off the English coast with a high degree abstraction, asymmetrical composition, and monochromatic palette. The painting documents the ship caught in the storm by depicting the experience of witnessing the ship in the storm, instead of merely realistically reproducing the look of the scene. The painting not only informs us about what happened to the steamboat at the Harbour’s Mouth during the snowstorm, but it also physically immerses us in the event. It is a beautiful and terrifying visceral experience, creating an example of the sublime in painting.

Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead
Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842
Oil on canvas; 36 in x 48 in
Tate Britain, London, Turner Bequest

Several centuries after Turner, vision as the highest in the historical hierarchy of senses was slowly making space for other senses—and a fuller sensory experience. Artists including Anish Kapoor, Mark Rothko, Bill Viola, and James Turrell marked the twentieth century as an age of expanding our sensing apparatus to experience the sublime. Through their abstract but integrated use of materials, space, color, light, and image, they excite our senses and intrigue our minds to the point of reaching the essence of the unknowable.

The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.

The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985
Jean-François Lyotard, 19937

Svayambh
Anish Kapoor 2007
213 foot long railway across the Royal Academy of Arts in London, UK
Installation in motorized wax blocks
© Anish Kapoor

Four Darks in Red
Mark Rothko,1958
Oil on canvas, 102 in × 116 in
© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 1998

Stations
Bill Viola, 1994
Five-channel video (color, sound), five granite slabs, and five projection screens,
Overall 20 in x 50 in x 50 in
© 2010 Bill Viola

Bridget’s Bardo (Ganzfeld Piece)
James Turrell, 2009
Light installation for the Wolfsburg Project Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany
Overall 7500 square feet
© James Turrell, photo: Florian Holzherr, 2009

Anish Kapoor works in a large-scale sculpture with a variety of materials and color, which combines senses of sight and touch into a sense of space. Mark Rothko applied complex technical procedures in abstract painting to use color and surface for creating a sense of space. Bill Viola integrates moving image and sound at specific sites to fuse the senses and change the experiential topology of those spaces. James Turrell uses light and architecture of the space to create a perceptive shift from being in the physical reality to the metaphysical reality of the space.

The success of their work is in experimental manipulation of senses through which the space is experienced cognitively and emotionally. Their innovative use of materials that engage sight, hearing, touch, smell, emotion, memory, and imagination transforms the spaces that they work in into places that demonstrate the existence of the unpresentable.

The technological age is allowing for more multisensory engagement. My interest is in exploiting those technological advancements that can fuse perception of senses and add to the phenomenological experience of my artistic intention of presenting the presence of the unpresentable.

My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 19628

To be fully present in the world, one needs to use all available senses and intimately interact with the environment using their eyes, nose, ears, and skin. Only through receptiveness of the entire sensing mechanism is it possible to have a profound sensation of the place that can then be emotionally and cognitively processed into a meaningful experience. In the context of art, maximized engagement of the senses can direct memory and imagination into a place where the sublime can be experienced.

The phenomenological approach of the artist implies a pure looking at the essence of things, unburdened by convention or intellectualized explanation. All artists, including film directors, are phenomenologists in the sense that they present things as if they were objects of human observation for the first time. Architecture re-mythologizes space and gives back its pantheistic and animistic essence. Poetry returns the reader back to an oral reality, in which words are still seeking their meanings. Art articulates the boundary surface between the mind and the world.

The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema
Juhani Pallasmaa, 20019

My approach combines traditional and progressive principles of spatial design (composition, computational simulations, engineering, model making), fabrication (cutting and milling of wood, metal and plastics, rapid prototyping), lighting design (composition, daylighting analysis, lighting metrics, computational lighting analysis, electric lighting technology, programmable LED lighting, computer modeling, fixture design), audiovisual systems (photography, graphics, motion graphics, animation, video, sound, music), and multisensory devices (mechanical and electrical engineering, interactive environments, responsive lighting and audiovisual systems). By utilizing technological advancement in traditional mediums and untraditional integration of those mediums I aim to discover, interpret, and develop novel body of knowledge for enhancing the multisensory spatial experience that provides access to the sublime in the purpose of art.

1 Sivananda. The Bhagavad Gita. Sivanandanagar: Divine Life Society, 1969.
2 Stevens, Wallace. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Cummington: The Cummington Press, 1943.
3 Auden, W H, and Søren Kierkegaard. The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard. The living thoughts library. New York: D. McKay, 1952.
4 Schiller, Friedrich, and Julius A. Elias. Naive and Sentimental Poetry; and, On the Sublime: Two Essays. Milestones of thought. New York: Ungar, 1966.
5 Alighieri, Dante and M. Gustave Doré. The Divine Comedy. New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co, 1890.
6 Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge, 2008.
7 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
9 Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2001