Now @ Modern One — Katie Paterson
My friend and I stepped into the gallery (Modern One in Edinburgh). We were both in a ridiculously good mood, the kind induced by a morning of good food, good coffee, good company, good weather. I know, ‘good’ is possibly the most boring descriptive word in the English language, ‘nice’ being another strong contender, but I mean it quite exactly. We just felt really good.
A man just inside the entrance gave us the familiar rundown. Standard COVID gallery etiquette. Follow the one-way system; wear your masks; bottles of hand sanitiser are located here, here, and here. Then, and I can see that he is smiling behind his face mask, “enjoy the exhibition. It’s really fantastic.” As we thank him, I can feel that he is genuinely excited for us. As we move into the first room, the next security guard in the sequence that you can follow like a dot-to-dot around most exhibitions moves towards us. “He’s right, you know. This one’s got everything – science, space, poetry, lights, romance, music. It’s amazing.” The three of us stand looking at part of the first exhibit – the words:…..
Gravity
released
one unit at a time
are mounted on the wall in icy silver letters. The COVID rundown deliverer nips back over to us – “These are cut from metal by a high-pressure micro-waterjet”, he explains excitedly. We stare at these words, two friends and two staff, looking intently at every edge and every curve of every letter. We wonder by what insane innovation water, with its propensity for slow erosion, could cut into metal with the sharpness and absolute precision of a laser.
Photography courtesy of Orla Schätzlein
I’d never really thought about gallery staff before, or the security guards who are scattered around every art gallery like comforting monoliths. Silent enforcers of order, cultural babysitters. Visiting a gallery can be a really insular experience – it’s easy to forget that you are around people as well as art, especially people who seem to be as permanently installed in the room as the art is. In my mind they had always existed separately from me and my fellow anonymous gallery-goers, and now here I was having this moment, experiencing art and sharing wonder with them. The realisation felt awful. How awful to have thought about the fact that these people, with minds and emotions just like me, might have a relationship with art beyond the guarding and supervising that they are paid for. It raises some really interesting questions – what does it mean to go to work every day and stand amidst the same pieces of art for weeks, maybe months? Does the novelty wear off? Do you tire of it, or fall more in love with it every day?
In this case, it was definitely the latter. We shared some enthusiastic thoughts before moving on, and this was how we entered NOW, Modern One’s current exhibition of Katie Paterson’s work. It’s really stunning. She explores space and time, carefully positioning us meagre humans in this cosmic conundrum by scaling our experiences against the astronomical. Such projects are in danger of bringing on existential dread – if our physical insignificance is exposed, of course we feel small and meaningless. We can’t compete with the intergalactic. Yet Paterson’s works somehow spins this on its head. Drifting around, looking at and reading about art so conceptually steeped in space, I felt connected to rather than alienated from the universe.
Somehow, this brilliant woman has managed to humanise the whole thing. When I went home and told my flatmates that I had just seen the moon playing the piano they didn’t believe me, but I maintain (at the risk of sounding a bit unhinged) that this is what looking at Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) really felt like. For those of us who aren’t astronauts, this is as close to the mysterious moon as we can get. I could picture it really vividly, and we laughed about this: a little moon boy with arms and legs sat at the piano, the gaps and absences in the score caused by a craterous lunar surface are fumbles in his playing. He is making mistakes; he is getting frustrated. But he is trying his best.
I see the moon so often, but never has it been so exciting. Totality makes disco balls, which are already exciting, even more exciting. And Paterson’s art is so exciting that even the people who stand around it all day are still excited by it. I walked away thinking carefully about how I now look at two things in a completely new way: the moon, and gallery security guards. I’m not sure what this means, but I feel like both are taken for granted and deserve to be thought about.…
Words Alice Keeling