You'd probably lean against the wall too.
Gonna be in Turin, Italy, any time soon (like before January 10, 2010)? Yeah, me neither, but if I were I’d want to check out the Gianni Colombo exhibit at Castello di Rivoli. Colombo puts the viewer at the center of his art and if the picture is anything to be believed may attempt to cause projectile vomit through an overwhelming sense of dysphoria.
This Turin exhibition thus fills a research-based gap regarding an artist who, particularly as a member of kinetic-art collective Gruppo T (founded in Milan in 1959), radically focused his artmaking on what became an essential design premise: to place the viewer at the center of the work. The resulting pieces are functional “machines” that led their users to perform a series of discrete actions and movements of the body and the eye—beginning with 1959’s Rilievi intermutabili (Interchangeable Reliefs) and Strutturazioni pulsanti (Pulsating Structuralizations).
I actually really enjoy pieces that play with your senses like this. The permanently installed James Turrell Skyspace at The Henry Art Gallery here in Seattle does something similar. The lack of symmetry causes your brain to process the light and sound completely differently. For me, I find I can’t spend too much time inside without dizziness overcoming me. Strange, isn’t it? Something so beautiful can be so challenging to senses that have been lured into a sort of code of comprehension that we all intuitively understand. We actually get sick when the laws of our geometric manufactured landscapes get toyed with.
Have you ever been in one of these pieces of art that play with your senses? What was it? Was it enjoyable or seriously displeasing? I can see this one cutting either way.
