New York City, Guggenheim

The show at the Guggenheim was The Third Mind, all about how art, literature and philosophies of the East influenced American artists. An interesting show and I'm sorry you missed it but a piece of the best part of it is shown in this video.

In the video you'll hear the sound of the bell carriage but you won't see the people all watching it as it moves down. Everyone waited patiently for the bell carriage to drop and watched as it wafted through the rotunda. Magic. The special part for us isn't always the art but instead the people looking at the art. In the picture above you can barely see the bell carriage, it's just below the woman in the white shirt on the top left.

"The museum invited Ann Hamilton to respond to The Third Mind with a site-specific installation in the museum rotunda. Her work, human carriage (2009) is a mechanism composed of two elements: 'book weights' made from thousands of cut-up books that ascend and descend the rotunda heights via a pulley system, and a pair of Tibetan cymbals encased in a white silk 'bell carriage,' which cascades down the balustrade around the rotunda spiral, its purifying ring awakening visitors with random chimes. Human carriage is a metaphor for the power of the transmission of ideas through books, which, in the artist's words, 'leaves no material trace but which might forever change you.' "

Thank you, Ann, for a beautiful transient piece of art.