In Which the Magpie Enters the Silence

A synthetic desert . . . a forest made of foam . . . the privilege of quiet

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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First, you wait. You wait outside the museum, standing under the white overhang, with all the white curves spiraling above you. Then you wait for your turn at the desk. You get your ticket, check all your belongings as required for this particular exhibit, and go up to the tippy top of the curving ramp. You wait there, watching people take selfies in front of the art. The guard soon unclips the little barrier, and you sit on a white bench in a white waiting room with that funny low ceiling all the rooms have off the main galleries. There are at most five of you at a time waiting on the white bench, although on the day the Magpie was there, we were four. The guard explains that you are not to use cell phones or any kind of recording equipment, nothing that makes a noise or takes an image. You are instructed to leave all coats and belongings outside the exhibit room. There is a cube of white foam on the bench. The guard tells us we can touch the cube here, because we can’t touch the foam in the exhibit. What is he talking about?

None of us asks. Already, a quiet has fallen. It feels oddly like waiting in just your paper gown for a medical test; among the four of us is something of the feeling of, I hope one of us doesn’t have it, but also a feeling of specialness, and of anticipation. We will be entering the profound silence together. Who knows what will happen to us in our allotted ten minutes?

We are waiting for our turn to enter Doug Wheeler’s installation PSAD Synthetic Desert III at the Guggenheim Museum. The installation, says the brochure, is “‘a semi-anechoic chamber’ designed to minimize noise and induce the impression of infinite space. Wheeler likens this sensation of light and sound to the perception of vast space in the deserts of northern Arizona.” It’s been a long winter, in so many ways, and the thought of a sojourn in the desert, however brief, is appealing. Downstairs, the line to get in is quite long; advance tickets are all booked up.

When it is our turn, we are taken by the guard from the white room we’re in to a smaller white room with many doors. We don’t know behind which one lies the desert—not in that closet, apparently. Or that one. The guard leads us through the right door to a large-ish, grayish, whitish, curved-ish space in which many long triangles of foam, a miniature forest of pointy foam that looks like Harry Nilsson’s The Point, surround the carpeted platform on which we walk, and then sit, and before too long, lie down. It is very, very, very quiet except for a faint swishing-whooshing sound that is a little like the ocean and a little like wind far away and a little like cars passing in the distance and a little like one’s own breath.

It is very quiet.

It is very quiet.

If one of us stands up, that one is outlined against the luminous gray, like a sudden insight. The sense of safety is overwhelming, as is the desire—now we understand—to touch all the pointy grayish-whitish foam tops or possibly eat them. The shadows on some of the points look like snowcaps on mountains at dusk.

It is very quiet.

The guard stands by the exit door while we have our experience. The experience is more like being an astronaut, or what one might imagine being an astronaut is like, than it is like being in a desert. Everything around us is, as the title says, synthetic; it is built. We know the pointy forest is made of foam, because it looks like foam, and because we touched the cube on the bench outside. There are no animal or insect sounds or the weird noises plants make in the wind; the swishing-whooshing is there to frame the silence, to make us able to hear the silence, as it were. It does not touch our skin the way wind does. The penumbral light is not the kind of light that ever actually happens; it is far too pure, and it doesn’t change, no matter how much time goes by. We have been informed by the brochure that the work is abstract, not a description of the landscape, but it is also as if the artist has spun silence in a centrifuge or a particle accelerator to make it cleaner, more radically distilled, than it ever is in life.

Before we went in, the guard said that the artist originally wanted the exhibit to be visited by people one at a time, but that would be impractical, of course, as we all saw from the line to get in. Impractical, but perhaps something else: too lonely to bear. One wonders if Wheeler meant to give us this shot of pure silence as a gift, or as a warning of what it might feel like to have to live in a completely constructed environment. The trees, or mountains, are already foam. What if there weren’t any other people in here besides the guard? To find oneself one of two carbon-based life forms, the other one being a guard, in a gray and white synthetic world seems closer to solitary confinement, or perhaps a space station where all the other astronauts have died, than the wild freedom of a desert.

It is very quiet.

And then it’s time. The guard leads us out. There are the curious faces of the next round of visitors, and an anxious waiting line of many more. The downward sloping ramp is crowded with noisy people wearing various colors of clothing, with awkward haircuts, some shouting to one another in different languages across the rotunda. It feels like coming down from an ice-locked mountaintop to the honky-tonk of a village. The four of us immediately disperse and blend into the crowd without saying goodbye, like spies.

Already, the radical silence is a memory, but it is a memory of having been somewhere created with great effort and at great expense, a small, hyper-designed place that only admits a select few at a time. It feels, I realize, not as much like the desert as it does like privilege. I wait for the bus, feeling it.

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Doug Wheeler, PSAD Synthetic Desert III, Guggenheim Museum of Art, on view March 24–August 2, 2017. Tickets required.