anti 2004

Carsten Nicolai made *anti*, and when you look at it you're thrown off kilter! The deep black, almost like ink, pulls your eye in. It's a really arresting thing in person. I can only imagine what it must have been like to make this, figuring it out with the material itself. Maybe he wanted to make something so monolithic that it almost disappears. There’s something very solid about the way it sits on the floor, it feels like it's been there forever. The angles feel sharp, almost violent. I can see some of the material's surface, not quite reflective. But it still carries this sense of dark depth, like a void. It's like he’s saying something about permanence versus ephemerality. Artists riff off each other; we're all in this big conversation! And that's how new ideas come about. This piece, with all its contradictions, its presence, reminds me that art lets us hold onto that uncertainty.