About two months or so ago I visited Lucerne, Switzerland. I posted a few photos at the time, and I promised to write a bit more about the trip, becauseI encountered one of the most bizzare things I have seen in a long time.

Lucerne is apparently quite the town for art, given that there are two musems there with fairly large collections of works by Picasso. There is also a contemporary art museum (which I am distinguishing from “modern art”) that had a special exhibition underway.

The very first room of the special exhibition gave a small clue regarding what was to come. We entered a large, dark room. When I say large, I mean that the two bedroom apartment I lived in when I was going to graduate school would have fit in there comfortably, even if it had 20 foot high ceilings. Every surface in the room was black with the exception of a structure in the center of the room that would be best described as the anti-universe version of the Monolith from the move 2001: A Space Oddessy, anti-universe because even in the almost pitch-black room, it was obviously white and highly reflective. Then we heard echoing footsteps, and in looking at the anti-Monolith, we could see an image of a man in the far distance walking towards us projected onto the reflective surface. The image on both sides seemed to be identical, but with one side having a faint blue tint, and the other side a slight orange hue.

When the man reached the point to where if he approached any closer his image would have been larger than the anti-Monolith, he stopped, and spread his arms slightly apart from his sides, forming an inverted “V” with his head and body bisecting the inverted letter, as before on one side of the anti-Monolith tinted blue and on the other with a slight orange hue.

Then the noise started, the noise beyond the footsteps and the subtle breaths that had been almost below the level of conscious hearing. A noise with multiple elements, as on one side drips of water fell on the man projected on the ant-Monolith and embers of a fire began to glow on the other.

Soon, the noise was a torrent of water and a raging of flame as the drips slowly increased to a cascade and the embers ignited into an inferno,

Eventually, the figure of the inverted, bisected “V” of the man on each side of the anti-Monolith disappeared in the respective blue torrent and orange inferno, and the cascade, flames, and intermingled noise subsided into the silence and darkness that we encountered when entering the room.

This was the most comprehensible of the “special exhibits”.