Fia Backström


Ask not what art can do for you, but what you can do for art! Art's rough life in the limelight of late must make it shy and FRAGILE. So with tenderness I sang a melancholic, somewhat abstract, Scandinavian lullaby for the crates in the basement of the Whitney Museum. In this hidden storage room—more of a morgue—the reverence for a wooden box sets up a perverse tension to the public display of its content. The space made me think of Magritte's painting with the craterlike coffins. His signature icon, the umbrella, is stenciled all over this graveyard. One can only hope for a true goth ending of resurrecting corpses.