On a recent visit to the Norton Museum of Art, five young people—say, 20 and under—were camped out on the sofas in the middle of the gallery of the museum’s lone summer exhibition, “Giverny: Journal of an Unseen Garden.” It was unclear whether they were dragged there, or visited through their own volition, or were enjoying the serenity of the exhibit, or were fantasizing about the video games awaiting them upon egress. But, whether enraptured or bored, meditative or distracted, they respected the placid silence of the experience, and that’s what matters most.
And it is a most experiential exhibition, one that reimagines our world, or at least an unseen part of it, and places us under its spell. It’s up to us to take from it what we wish.
Mark Fox, a Brooklyn-based video artist, recently received the opportunity of a lifetime: to spend three months as an artist in residence on the grounds of the Monet Foundation in Giverny, France. The grounds include the iconic gardens that Claude Monet famously painted in his “Water Lilies” series. Fox spent his time shooting under the garden with an underwater video camera and fastidiously documenting the lighting shifts on an hourly basis.
The results, projected soundlessly across five screens running simultaneously in a wrap-around, Cinerama style, channel Andrei Tarkovsky more than Jacques Cousteau. Each screen is a conveyer belt of aquatic flora—leaves, lily pads, unidentifiable particulates—proceeding at a sloth’s pace. This could have been a slog to sit through, but instead, it envelops you in its Zen beauty. There’s an alien quality to Fox’s images, which look so foreign under his lens that they might as well be from a science-fiction set, or from the depths of some watery planet we haven’t found yet.
Tinted by naturally luminescent purples, greens and yellows yet to be marketed by Crayola, the atmosphere of the Giverny ponds is primordial, conjuring a place that will exist long after the extinction of homo sapiens. It’s easy to see, through Fox’s eyes, what Monet had found so ravishing.
And the fact that it compelled kids to sit still is an achievement on its own, the exhibition being a definitive antidote to the fact-paced action they’re used to seeing on screens. “Giverny” is the prolonged, languorous antithesis of a Vine video, one showing actual vines moving really, really slowly. Yet even when these young museumgoers did speak to one another, they never raised their voices above a whisper. It just about gives me hope for the future.
“Giverny: Journal of an Unseen Garden” runs through Oct. 30 at the Norton, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach. Admission is free, though be aware that construction of the “New Norton” is underway, and some museum entrances are closed off. For information, call 561/832-5196 or visit norton.org.
