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Lost in Space
John Haberin New York City
Tomás Saraceno
In an ideal world, artists would design entire cities. In an ideal world, art and habitation alike would comport with nature. In an ideal world, art would have anyone lost in the clouds.
In an ideal world, too, that would not take patience and timed tickets, not even for Tomás Saraceno. His Cloud City atop the Met takes both. Like other purveyors of coy theme parks in art today, he often lets you touch, if not at the museum, though his art cannot in a more traditional presentation at his Chelsea gallery. (Have a drink instead. with proceeds to the museum.) Thanks to Saraceno at the Shed, I may never be afraid of spiders again. I might, though, be more aware of my fears facing a work of art. 
From the very start at The Shed, one plunges into darkness, and I could only wonder if I would make it out safely, if at all. The feeling only grew as I ascended to the next floor, for nearly half a million cubic feet of air and mist soaking up the light. I had barely found my way when this, too, went pitch black for a very long eight minutes. A museum world of track lighting and precious objects seemed further and further away. Each time, I was trapped amid simulated spider webs, but that part was nothing short of exhilarating. For Saraceno, the spider webs in the dark corners of your attic are gateways to nature's resilience and to the entire cosmos.
Lost in the clouds
Tomás Saraceno was hard at work one fine spring day, bolting together sixteen polyhedra into a single fifty-four foot structure. Photos show him resting within a chamber, contemplating Central Park and his handiwork. One can circulate it from below, looking up at scattered reflections and visitors within. The industrial parts include mirrored, transparent, and missing faces, with the minor challenge of deciding is which. They include black rope, which probably does not contribute to the work's stability, but no matter: it surely should.
One can also wait one's turn (weather permitting) to ascend twenty feet above the rooftop café. For all the work's multiplicity, one follows a strict path up, from chamber to chamber, and another back down. Oddly enough, the mazes and playgrounds of South American "relational esthetics" tend to run in one dimension, as for Hélio Oiticica or Thomas Hirschhorn. Conversely, the shapes lack the modularity and symmetry of an obvious point of reference, Buckminster Fuller. They also cease to evolve after opening day, unlike the Met's 2010 summer sculpture by Doug and Mike Starn. Their painstakingly bound bamboo leaned more toward the Romantic sublime—from Frederic Edwin Church in his tropical journeys or Central Park as romantic garden visible from the Met now.
Still, if Cloud City is one-dimensional for a ride into space, that has advantages. It obliges one to puzzle out the disruptions and reflections, including one's own. It reflects the discipline of an artist who studied at NASA's Ames Research Center, if you can imagine that. It also refuses a strict break between experiences—on the roof and from above. It even allows for a certain sense of humor, like all good family rides and attractions. This larger version expands on Saraceno's Cloud Cities/Air Port City series (most recently in Berlin), and one could call it music for airports.
One could call it a lot of things. The artist, born in Argentina in 1973, is something of a global citizen—or perhaps a citizen of the art fairs, the art world, and the global city. He does not evoke buckyballs himself, but he throws in pretty much everything else. He describes the work as an orbital landing-take off platform, a foam constellation, a flying museum, a molecular structure of perfectly close-packed spheres, and interstellar distant suns. He invokes the Mayan calendar, "Inter(net)citizenship," and clouds over Central Park. Like Tom Sachs on his own interstellar journeys, he does not make it easy for art to tell a story that will last.
Not that he can stop trying. At his gallery, scale models worry much less about dazzling and much more about the clouds and city. Polyhedra of blond wood seem to float, air pumped into the space between glass sheets and transparent tape makes the idea of close packing more real, and laminated panels create an interior of refracted color. The bungee cords play a more active role as supporting structures or the polygon itself, and it changes one's perspective to realize that one may step over them. A digital rendering the size of a wall inserts a cloud city and its upside-down inhabitants into a panorama of the Met roof itself. In abandoning the amusement park ride, Saraceno recovers its utopian architecture. His very need to entertain may derive from a native idealism.
He would assign that idealism a long cultural history, of trust in observations and visions, and he is not altogether wrong. His sketch at the Met has its own ancestry, back to cloud studies by John Constable, and his models appropriate Modernism's ideals down through solar panels. Look again, and the black polyester is networking. In an ideal world, artists would play fewer games and need fewer metaphors, but hey: come summer, one may as well not worry about it. Line up and join the show.
Natural and ultra-high tech
Saraceno opens at the Shed in near darkness, but then he will never lose his footing. Like many an idealist, he can be a bit sure of himself and more than a bit pretentious. He gravitates toward big installations in public spaces. When he built Cloud City on the Met roof for 2012 summer sculpture, its windowed polyhedron paid tribute to Fuller. And he, too, was out to remake the modern city while taking off into space. Now, with "Particular Matter(s)," I could not question his commitment to the art object, and it is not nearly as dark as first appears.
Galleries make awkward theaters, and rooms for video are often scary, as with John Akomfrah and his invocation of global warming and the refugee crisis just last fall. Saraceno favors static media instead, but with a heightened awareness of the body in motion. A good half dozen vitrines break up the space, with no obvious path from one to the next. Each glows with its own seeming inner light. The light picks out carbon fibers and spider silk. Sculpture here is at once all natural and ultra-high tech.
Some of it takes the shape of a biped, on the scale of the viewer. Others may suggest human heads. His sense of beauty is clearer still in a second room, bathed in red light, and a final gallery, with large glass and metal spheres. Could spiders serve as models? If you are still scared, they never once put in an appearance. Yet he takes them as keys to what it means to be human and to something greater as well.
In between comes a room for what he sees as his place in history. Documents find antecedents of all sorts for his experiments, including a proper meeting of art and science. Back in the 1940s, Bell Labs in New Jersey was making music from equipment that responded to the ambient air. Later, it played a key role in the discovery of the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang. Sure enough, Saraceno describes his work as universal cosmic webs. He incorporates sound art into his larger installation as well.
He is not through with you either—or through with the allusions. As puns go, "Particular Matter(s)" may sound like corporate speak, but it also describes smog. One remaining gallery gets around to that, too. Rows of shaded circles map the air quality in different cities. The longer the row and the larger the circle, the dirtier the city. As the title has it, We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air.
Is politics out of place in cosmic time? The artist could not conceivably have manufactured all this alone, and he sees himself as a collaborator and community activist. One artist collective, Arachnophilia, helped with the cool stuff, while another, Aerocene, has a studio on site. Its work in progress looks like a grounded blimp, of recycled plastic bags. It may not help much with toxic waste, but its limpness and logos update Pop Art for the luxury of Manhattan's Hudson Yards. Saraceno calls it a "portable flight starter kit."
The spider or the fly?
All that, though, is a mere prelude to the really big show. The Shed has had trouble from the start using its vast space—even with its "Open Call" to art from New York City or Drift's "immersive performance." Credit Saraceno with letting nothing go to waste. His installation sure takes up space, and one can enter on either of two levels, one twelve feet above the galleries and another a full forty feet above. He has stretched woven rope as twin platforms, ninety-five feet in diameter. Each has a slightly more solid walkway as a periphery, but not by much.
As Free the Air, the work reflects his native optimism and concern for breathable air. It also sums up his concerns from the galleries below. He has filled the air with black carbon, which accounts for the mist and its aura under strong light. As air currents buffet the carbon mist, it stimulates sensors to produce a not quite regular beat. The flooring brings the web back into the picture. As a subtitle explains, this is How to Hear the Universe in a Spider/Web, which highlights the role of sound and chance.
You may not notice the sound at first, with so much else going on, only starting with the chamber and the light. Depending on which level you choose, you can see people seemingly suspended in midair high above or far below. (Timed tickets are required, no more than ten people at a time.) They are finding their own way and enjoying every minute of it. Some use their weight to bounce gently—although the curators, Emma Enderby with Alessandra Gómez and Adeze Wilford, warn you not to use the platforms as trampolines. Be polite to neighbors who can barely stand as it is.
You will have plenty of time to lose your balance as the lights descend. And yes, it can be terrifying. On my visit, a woman cried out for someone to turn on the light before she could fall. (Assistance came quickly.) I envied people young and athletic enough to bounce. I found my way back to the surrounding circle for surer footing, but the vibrations extend there, too.
And then I found my way back to the rope. It was just too central and too far beyond my experience to resist. The work may be most convincing under bright light, but Saraceno himself prefers the darkness. Spiders, after all, are tactile creatures and nearly blind. He asks visitors to lie at full length, with their fingers through the rope, to share their discoveries. For him, those eight minutes are the work.
His rooftop installation was a carnival ride as much as an ideal city, and this show, too, has its cheap thrills and unconvincing connections. It also takes waiting—waiting for a reservation, waiting for one's time slot, waiting to sign a waiver, waiting to check one's phone and loose change, waiting for one's place in line, waiting for the sound, and waiting for the light. Spiders webs have their victims at that, and you may feel more like a fly. That, though, opens onto other metaphors and another Hollywood entertainment. Still, there is an emotional resonance to the returning light. Like the light in the vitrines, it makes up for all the fears.
Tomás Saraceno's "Cloud City" stood on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art through November 4, 2012, with a show at Tanya Bonakdar through July 27. Saraceno later ran at The Shed through April 17, 2022, and at Tanya Bonakdar through March 26.