One of us recently had the immense (and probably unrepeatable) chance to spend a day at the Yves Klein retrospective With the Void: Full Powers at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn museum. I recommend Blake Gopnik’s review in the Washington Post. Gopnik has a pair of great lines that sum up the experience of Klein’s artwork: “They aren’t just a feast for sore eyes. They’re more like a lifetime’s worth of ocular nourishment.” Klein has been particular influential on our recent thinking, especially as we experiment with creating experiences that focus an observer onto the framing of singular experiences of beauty (see our earlier posts on laying aside “Manyness” as Kierkegaard calls it and entering the Wilderness).

That phrase really struck me as I was reading Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing by Kierkegaard recently. As I’ve meditated on it further, I’ve found it to be a real challenge personally and artistically: personally, in that it demands a level of particularity and focus that I’ve allowed to be diluted with constant distractions; artistically, in that it calls me to dig deep rather than cast wide – the anti-internet, if you will.

Many of the light and space artists that have deeply impressed some of us in this journey create experiences that are notable for their singular nature – the one-dimensionality of the experience, like Olafur Eliasson’s 360 Room for All Colors:

It is one thing to notice that our culture is in a hysterical pattern of diversionary consumption of tidbits of interest. It is quite another thing to create spaces where that reality is not only called out, but powerfully controverted in action and environment.

A typical art gallery or exhibition can unintentionally tend in the direction of diversion and distraction if it is not arranged to provide one experience at a time. When artworks are placed within the same visual space, yet are meant to be experienced singularly, the viewer (especially one trained by the interface of the internet) can flit from one to another, never really letting the art take root in the mind. This is one of the reasons that the Cube is going to be immersive: not to overwhelm the viewer, but to allow the mental freedom from Manyness, from distraction, from the experience of “doing” the museum without taking anything in.