LIZ SAYS: I love installations, when they work. I love the Grand Palais. Two of my favorite things came together to make the fantastic MONUMENTA's Leviathan.
Once inside the Grand Palais the viewer is funneled through a revolving black door, the space is pressurized to keep the installation puffed up. Simply put, its like a gigantic aubergine bubble. But, you don't see any of that (the outside) until you have exited the interior of the bubble. Inside, it is all deep red. It's as if the Grand Palais had a body that you had entered. For some reason it seems lung-like in my memory, but it may have been the effect of the canned air. There is a warning before you go in, telling anyone with respiratory or heart problems to be cautious.
So, okay, once through the black door, the red translucent interior lets the sunlight define the skeletal ironwork that makes the Grand Palais' superstructure. The interior has a few lobes. The roundness of the bubble and lobes transforms the straight angles of the ironwork's shadows into an luscious ebb and flow of distortion. Everything is curved. I can feel the awe of all the other visitors. It is so precious and soft, intimate, beautiful and intoxicating.
The entrance is also the exit, back through the revolving door and into the exterior of the balloon which is contained in the building. Then, we see that it is a the giant aubergine balloon, riveted to the floor, the curves filling most of the space and re-defining the paths and lines of the exquisite ironwork, again, in yet another way.
Loved it!
*a footnote: something about the interior made spots on my pictures. Dick thinks it was the density and particulate matter in the canned air.
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