Saraceno: The Sky is Not the Limit
The glory of the skies over Manhattan was featured in Tomas Saraceno's sprawling installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer. Visitors climbed a maze of stairways, made their way across criss-crossing platforms, and encountered 12 'pods' along the way. Each was configured out of hexigons in which the panels continually presented sky-views.
Overhead, sections were vacant, opening to the vast blue vista overhead. Others were filled with mirrors, directing this gorgeous territory of clouds and sun to the area beneath the feet of the visitors. Gravity may not have been surmounted, but the visual experience of free floating in the atmosphere was emotionally transcendent.
Expanding ways to experience space is not the limit of Saraceno’s explorations. He is equally devoted to exploring ways to inhabit it. He has created huge solar-powered balloons, created physical prototypes for self-sustaining floating cities, and designed airborne pods for growing the foods to feed the populations who may some day join the clouds by taking up residence in the skies.
The commentary inspired by these innovations typically identifies them as ‘utopian’. However, they seem less motivated by the desire to enhance human pleasure than to compensate for human misdeeds. Schemes enabling entire cities to rise off the Earth and stay there can be interpreted as desperate last minute effort to give our planet time to recover from human abuse which has been intensifying for the last few millenia.
Saraceno’s photographic experiments combine these impulses. They direct the attention skyward while demonstrating how humans can accomplish their goals by working cooperatively with existing forces, instead of establishing an adversarial relationship with these forces and inventing others to replace them.