#artjealousy

[srohlfs-blog-blog]

Seriously why the fuck am I not in NY right now? RoBERT GoBER at MoMA.

[jealousyj]

Momentum: United Visual Artists @ Barbican - Last Chance To See

Photo: James Medcraft

Photo courtesy of UVA

Photo courtesy of UVA

Momentum, the installation in the Curve at the Barbican by United Visual Artists, closes on June 1st, this Sunday. As with many exhibitions or installations of its type, Momentum is at home in a Brutalist wonderland like the Barbican Centre, a cavernous, warren-like masterpiece that is even pre-emptive of Postmodern architecture, its interior especially.

Over the last few years I have become increasingly fascinated and enamoured with the kind of immersive, all-enveloping and deliriously disorientating gesamtkunstwerke of artists like Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, both of whom featured notably in the Hayward Gallery’s phenomenal Light Show last year. To be able to lose oneself physically and mentally, completely and totally exploring an artwork is a wonderful experience; I sat for about half an hour in blissful detachment in the Grafton Architects room at the RA’s Sensing Spaces.

Very sensibly the exhibition assistants have been limiting entrants to a strict maximum of thirty people at a time. A crowd would be critically detrimental to this installation; the queues are worth it.

“Meditative…hypnotic,” says UVA co-founder Matt Clark of ‘Momentum’. I agree. This kind of art is for the individual to project their own ideas and feelings onto; in the absence of any narrative we are naturally inclined, compelled even, to integrate our own intensely personal emotions. I suppose the unreal high I’ve been trying to attain is made real in these ethereal spaces made of light and shapes, contemplatively stimulating spaces to revel in. “The tension between the…synthesised and the natural,” or for me the unreal and the real, is the major attraction.