A Few Thoughts on Perspective

This evening, Lily, Annika and I met some of our favorite friends--another mother with two girls--at a gallery in Chelsea. The other mother, my friend, had discovered the place while wandering the neighborhood with her husband and called me afterward to tell me what a great place it would be to bring the kids. She was right.

The exhibit is pretty small, three rooms, really, but the art itself is enormous. "Humongous," as Lily told her father later on the telephone. The main room consists of giant dinner plates, six feet across, stacked in piles ten feet high. The other two rooms feature giant-sized folding chairs and card tables--the girls speculated you could fit "a hundred and one kids" on each chair seat--and another tall stack of pots and pans, each as big as an oven. There was also a room filled with 888 red objects: a Red Room.

We were all enchanted. The three older girls ran from stack to stack, threw their arms up in delight under the chairs, imagined how much pasta could be cooked in the largest of the pots. I found myself fascinated by the way the unexpected scale made me feel a little dizzy, disoriented. My friend told us all to walk around the stacks of plates in circles and see what happened. We did, and in a three-dimensional optical illusion par extraordinaire, the stacks appeared to be spinning themselves, around some invisible core.

The six-year-old and I were especially impressed by this. She asked me to watch her walk around and tell her if the plates spun while I was watching. I knew she was puzzling it out for herself, and I complied. "No," I said, as she circled. "They're not moving for me." Then, she wanted me to circle so she could watch. I walked around and around as she stood, hands on hips, head tilted, considering.

"No, not for me, either. I guess they only move if you're moving." Yes, I thought, as I kept circling, my eyes on the plates, which spun and spun. And then I stopped, finally, and they did, too.

"It's true," I said, as we walked away, leaving the stacks of plates--still, until the next circler would make them move again--behind us. "It's your own eyes, your own brain, that makes the moving happen. I can't make it happen for you, and you can't make it happen for me." She nodded. We walked toward the room where the rest of our group was contemplating the giant pots and pans again.

"But Amy?" she said.

"Yes," I answered.

"I like that it happens at all."

I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket as long as I can.