The Space Between

DAY: 279 CITY:47 Country:16

GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS

I visited the Groniger Museum today in the Northern Dutch city of Groningen. One of the architects of this building was the Frenchman Phillipe Stark.

Downstairs they had a display of sacred altar pieces in sliver and gold. The crucifix above really caught me with great detail in the metal work - all silver, very shiny. Hey - this is like a Homer Simpson review of art huh? Mmmmm shiny... silvery....crossey.

There was an amazing exhibit of sculpture by Marc Quinn, a well established, well collected contemporary artist from the UK.

Quinn is now famous for his marble sculptures of handicapped people, or more specifically, people born with birth defects. It's a geometrically and visual intense group of sculptures, and all together it's a very thought provoking exhibit.

Here is a statue he did of super-model Kate Moss doing a yoga pose.

Followed by one of a pregnant women who lives with no arms and has tiny legs and feet.


What is beauty? What is Women?

Is her ability to create life and mirror the divine what our culture worships? or is it her heroin induced runway waifness?

Visit his website when you have a moment.

www.marcquinn.com

And visit my Flickr page to see more of Quinn and more of the Groningen museum.

www.flickr.com/photos/89708962@N00/

Quinn is the first artist I have found that explicitly remarks on the power of the moments "in-between". He made a self portrait out of 5 liters of his own blood - frozen into a mold of his face.

When is the blood no longer him? When it's in a syringe? In a beaker? Is it no longer really a part of him as soon as it leaves his body?

Frozen in a replica mold of his stern face it is a direct and visceral representation that asks - is this stuff a part of him any longer?

These in-between moments fascinate me.

Birth... the moment of birth...

He did a piece using the placenta and a clay sculpture of the same baby's face. The placenta is the part of the birth process that is not the baby and not the mother, it's in-between the two - both mother and child created it as a bridge. If you had to think of it as part of one of them, who would it end up with? It's odd to see it turned into the baby's sculpted form.

It's an awesome body of work and the whole idea of finding the powerful and magical moments that exist in-between is something I've been obsessed with for a several years - in my head, in my photos, certainly in my music.

That sacred moment between night and day, the sound of the piano before I let up on the sustain pedal after switching between two disharmonic keys - it's a cool sound. That micro-second of eternity just before orgasm, the strange other-world moment between being asleep and awake, that moment when the second glass of wine gives you the first tingle of a buzz, when spring delivers the first bloom, kills winter, and you first realize your getting more hours of sunshine in the day, when your and my lips almost touch, that buzzing energy between our lips before they connect. A dear friend wrote me recently and talked about her new passion - skydiving. Can you imagine the moment just before you jump out of the plane? These are the times and places where magic resides and we are transformed when we find ourselves fully in the moment. And now, just now, right here, is the end of this post.