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They are one of the oldest symbols of child’s play – found in the ashes of Pompeii, in the tombs of ancient Egypt and in Native American tribes. But while millennial children may have left them to gather dust, a new installation is asking people young and old to reconnect with the simple joy of marbles.
In the Gana Art centre gallery on a mountainside in Seoul, South Korea’s bustling capital, Snarkitecture co-founders Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham have built Loop, one of their most complex works to date involving 400 metres of metal track down which 100,000 glistening white marbles will constantly roll.
Snarkitecture has been breaking down the boundaries between the worlds of art and architecture since it began in 2008. This newest work is, according to Mustonen, at once a giant artwork and a rigorous architectural structure but also simply a universally familiar toy, upscaled for grown-ups – a tangled, labyrinthine marble run for visitors to both watch, duck under and play with.
Their work has become renowned for uniquely fusing the precision of architecture with the otherworldly and surreal elements of art, and for Mustonen, the child’s marble run – like their record-breaking giant ball pit, which was staged in both the US and Australia – felt like an ideal everyday item to take on and reimagine through the playful Snarkitecture lens.
Alex Mustonen: ‘This is just about creating these experiences that are a balance of being very playful but also contemplative.’ Photograph: Noah.Kalina/Cos x Snarkitecture“We are becoming increasingly interested in spaces of play and spaces of exploration in our work, how to create that sense of escape,” said Mustonen. “So with this work, on the one hand here you have that that looseness and chaos and unpredictability of marbles, but on the other, there’s the architectural precision of the armature which puts the marbles on a set path.”
Viewers walking into the first gallery are first greeted by the 100,000 white marbles spilling out over the floor, having fallen from a small stretch of metal track which emerges from the wall. The effect is one of a vast glistening pool, which, in Mustonen’s words, “looks like it is going to take over and swallow the space”.
The main installation itself, in the adjacent gallery, can be heard before it is seen. The marbles, released into the sculpture every five seconds, fill the building with a hypnotic hum as they slide down the four tracks and then disappear into the floor. The vast marble run, made up of four entwined tracks, fills the entire white room at almost four metres high and 17 metres long and is suspended from the ceiling.
People coming into the gallery are also encouraged to play by picking up a marble, dropping it anywhere they like on the track and watching as it makes dizzying loops around the room. How the marbles fall into the floor in one room and re-emerge in another is “a mystery – and we’re keeping it that way,” said Mustonen.
Mustonen admitted he had thought his own experiences of play as a child had not directly shaped Loop, saying: “I was definitely more of a lego than a marbles kid.” But he was recently proved wrong. “I thought not, but then my parents were visiting the studio in New York recently. I was showing them all the work we’re doing and they said to me: ‘Oh we’re so glad that so many of your projects are directly influenced by the childhood toys you had,’” he said with a laugh.
The work’s debut in Seoul, commissioned and staged by COS, clothes brand, also comes at a time when the city is emerging as a hub particularly for design and architecture, with the the city’s first architecture biennial ending just this week and the first retrospective of modern Korean architecture recently opening at South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Mustonen and Arsham named their practice after a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll about a bunch of misfits on the search for an unknown, and the unknown is precisely how they define Loop; as Mustonen was keen to point out, the installation may sit in a gallery but “we wouldn’t consider the work we are making fine art”.
“We’ve established our practice in the space between the disciplines, in this blurred territory, on the peripheries,” said Mustonen, who said that they aimed to be the antithesis of the “so self-contained or self-important” worlds of art and architecture.
“This is just about creating these experiences that are a balance of being very playful but also contemplative,” he said. “And hopefully providing a bit of a break from the everyday.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/09/south-korea-seoul-on-a-roll-art-installation-takes-marble-run-to-the-next-level
In the Gana Art centre gallery on a mountainside in Seoul, South Korea’s bustling capital, Snarkitecture co-founders Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham have built Loop, one of their most complex works to date involving 400 metres of metal track down which 100,000 glistening white marbles will constantly roll.
Snarkitecture has been breaking down the boundaries between the worlds of art and architecture since it began in 2008. This newest work is, according to Mustonen, at once a giant artwork and a rigorous architectural structure but also simply a universally familiar toy, upscaled for grown-ups – a tangled, labyrinthine marble run for visitors to both watch, duck under and play with.
Their work has become renowned for uniquely fusing the precision of architecture with the otherworldly and surreal elements of art, and for Mustonen, the child’s marble run – like their record-breaking giant ball pit, which was staged in both the US and Australia – felt like an ideal everyday item to take on and reimagine through the playful Snarkitecture lens.
Alex Mustonen: ‘This is just about creating these experiences that are a balance of being very playful but also contemplative.’ Photograph: Noah.Kalina/Cos x Snarkitecture“We are becoming increasingly interested in spaces of play and spaces of exploration in our work, how to create that sense of escape,” said Mustonen. “So with this work, on the one hand here you have that that looseness and chaos and unpredictability of marbles, but on the other, there’s the architectural precision of the armature which puts the marbles on a set path.”
Viewers walking into the first gallery are first greeted by the 100,000 white marbles spilling out over the floor, having fallen from a small stretch of metal track which emerges from the wall. The effect is one of a vast glistening pool, which, in Mustonen’s words, “looks like it is going to take over and swallow the space”.
The main installation itself, in the adjacent gallery, can be heard before it is seen. The marbles, released into the sculpture every five seconds, fill the building with a hypnotic hum as they slide down the four tracks and then disappear into the floor. The vast marble run, made up of four entwined tracks, fills the entire white room at almost four metres high and 17 metres long and is suspended from the ceiling.
People coming into the gallery are also encouraged to play by picking up a marble, dropping it anywhere they like on the track and watching as it makes dizzying loops around the room. How the marbles fall into the floor in one room and re-emerge in another is “a mystery – and we’re keeping it that way,” said Mustonen.
Mustonen admitted he had thought his own experiences of play as a child had not directly shaped Loop, saying: “I was definitely more of a lego than a marbles kid.” But he was recently proved wrong. “I thought not, but then my parents were visiting the studio in New York recently. I was showing them all the work we’re doing and they said to me: ‘Oh we’re so glad that so many of your projects are directly influenced by the childhood toys you had,’” he said with a laugh.
The work’s debut in Seoul, commissioned and staged by COS, clothes brand, also comes at a time when the city is emerging as a hub particularly for design and architecture, with the the city’s first architecture biennial ending just this week and the first retrospective of modern Korean architecture recently opening at South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Mustonen and Arsham named their practice after a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll about a bunch of misfits on the search for an unknown, and the unknown is precisely how they define Loop; as Mustonen was keen to point out, the installation may sit in a gallery but “we wouldn’t consider the work we are making fine art”.
“We’ve established our practice in the space between the disciplines, in this blurred territory, on the peripheries,” said Mustonen, who said that they aimed to be the antithesis of the “so self-contained or self-important” worlds of art and architecture.
“This is just about creating these experiences that are a balance of being very playful but also contemplative,” he said. “And hopefully providing a bit of a break from the everyday.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/09/south-korea-seoul-on-a-roll-art-installation-takes-marble-run-to-the-next-level