American Magic

One of the things that made the biggest impact on me when I travelled to America is the number of really amazing, immersive art installations I saw while I was there. I absolutely love being able to get lost in something to the point that it feels like the whole world is that thing. Maybe that isn't very coherent, but let me give some examples:

The Heidelberg project:
This is a street in Detroit which is home to an art project that revitalises a number of abandoned/derelict houses. It is beautiful and it was kind of surreal to walk around the neighbourhood in the rain when there was absolutely no one else around, just all these crazy amazing installations like something out of a dream world. I wanna live there, or just make the rest of the world look like that.

Plymouth Rock 2 (Trisha Baga)
Plymouth Rock 2 is a video installation I saw at The Whitney Museum. It is probably nothing ground-breaking in the grand scheme of things, but for me it was the first time I really connected with and fell in love with a video installation. It was like being immersed in a collage with a really tacky 90s aesthetic, but there was this kind of sad, lost undertone of  forgotten history. The whole thing felt like a disconcerting twinge of deja vu.

Tender Love Among the Junk (Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt)
This was a crazy glitter-fuelled display of sparkly colourfulness which also had a really beautiful, heartbreaking narrative. It probably errs a little more to the side of a traditional exhibition than the others, but the aesthetic was so wild and trash-opulent and it was very immersive in the sense that you got swept up in the work and the atmosphere.

Salvation Mountain
I've written about Salvation Mountain before on here, so I won't get into too much detail about it. Like Tender Love Among the Junk it also has a very colourful, unrestrained nature, which is something I lament a lack of in Australia. Also, it is a project that is at once ambitious yet entirely without ambition in the sense of its maker trying to achieve gains for himself. I am always deeply encouraged by artwork that has a total disregard for the conventions of the commercial art world, because I find the commercial side of art kind of gross. I'm not against people making money from their art, however the qualities I aim for in my work are mostly mutually exclusive to commercial success so I guess on a personal level I love other artworks that also have no intention to be saleable.

Anyway, the reason I actually started on this topic is because I was going to write about the photo at the top of this post. I took it in a subway car in New york, one which was painted entirely orange. The walls, the doors, the seats, they were all orange. It literally took my breath away when I saw it, it looked so amazing. Like those art installations I mentioned above, stepping into this carriage was a sort of magical immersion into an alternate reality. It is a simple thing, just a coat of colour, but I find myself obsessing over it often. The colour of the photo doesn't really represent what it looked like either. I'm talking a BRIGHT shade of orange. I guess the fact that it was orange, and not any other colour, is also part of the reason I obsess over it. I have a thing for orange. I don't like it any more than any other colour, but it has a weird pervasiveness in my life. For me it belongs to the 1970s in a way no other colour belongs to no other decade. Orange peaked in the 70s. I have a large collection of orange things, most of which were made in that era. I live in a house with very 70s decor. Orange is a colour that doesn't apologise, it isn't trying to be nice. It's not very popular, or common. You want to buy orange bedsheets, carpet, gloves, shoes? Good luck with that. Orange feels like an outsider of the colour spectrum. While I was in New York I also saw a subway carriage that was all blue, which was similarly mesmerising, but didn't quite have the same effect. Why was orange so powerful? I'm not sure. Maybe because it's a little bit tacky, a little bit unloved.

The other thing I love about this orange subway carriage? I have no idea why it was orange. Who made it orange? How? Why? I don't know. It's a mystery, a small one, but I love it. I love imagining the answers.