More about We'll See How Everything Reverberates

Contributor

We’ll See How Everything Reverberates is a really clever title, and I’ll tell you why.

Reverberation can be sound, music, rhythm. If you banged your head against one of the suspended cymbals of this giant mobile by Carlos Amorales you’d create it. You’d fill the air with a deep sibilance, and you’d feel your bones shake, if slightly, to the pulsating soundwaves. Reverberation can be about time, echoes, and inspiration, too. Amorales looked at, perhaps heard, the clinking-and-clanking mobiles of Alexander Calder and said Hey, I like that. Like Everything Reverberates, Calder’s work is toy-like : playful, colorful, animal-like, and interactive.

Amorales wanted to move away from the flirtations of the abstract of Calder and create a piece that was grounded and communal. A piece that could be used to create harmony or chaos based on how the audience worked together, or maybe a piece to draw out temptation for chaos. It could also be used for musicans. Just imagine hearing Take Five fill up the museum space on all those cymbals. Or maybe everyone would just sit and let wind and gravity play percussion ever so gently, like a meditative rain.

The title also carries with a heartwarming message that everything – and, by extension of us, the human participants, everyone – has the capacity to send a reverberation through the world, for better or for worse.

Everything Reverberates also confuses multidisciplinary with multi-sensory. The artwork is a visual object made of different materials and different visual histories, but also an auditory and performatory object of chance. It’s sight, sound, and touch all wrapped up into one. It recalls ever so slightly the term gesamtkunstwerk, where every artistic medium comes together in harmony to uplift the spectator to a place near transcendence. But this piece is much more about a calm, or a “quietness” as Amorales himself describes it. It’s not about grandeur or the operatic.

And that title really is something wry and clever.

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