Museum Hours

  Orbital  by Samantha Harvey is a short book about which the only complaint is perhaps that it should be even shorter, so that the lapidary sheen on this multifaceted jewel might be yet more polished for even greater effulgence; a confit for which even slower cooking might have reduced the constituents into a yet deeper and more refined reflection of their parts. As a piece of fully immersive metaphysics, Orbital probes away at our perspective on ourselves and our planet, on our simultaneous insignificance and grandeur, and on the need for a true sense of awe rather than the gimcrack variety applied in a ludicrous diminished form to the flashy and superficial attention grabbing detritus of modern existence. So why would a short piece about six people orbiting the earth in a space module open with a reproduction of Velasquez's 'Las Meninas'?  In short, because it is a 17th century painting (more on the baroque sensibility later) profoundly concerned with perspective, in whi

  "There was a silence, as if the fountain felt embarrassed or rebuffed. Then the fountain was suddenly a porcelain soup tureen, with frilled and ruffled edges. It just metamorphosed, even while she was continuously staring at it, the way an animation might transform - and Celine realised as she stared at it in amazement how disturbing she always thought soup was. Perhaps, she wondered, it was the way soup has no edges, or the way the elements which are contained in it are unprovable and undefined." The legendary film director, Andrei Tarkovsky was obsessed by pools of water, particularly the almost limitless movement that is possible within them. 'Nothing is more beautiful than water.' 'It transmits movement, depth, changes'. The most thoroughgoing treatment of this observation may be in his film  Nostalgia. With extraordinary composition of shot, Tarkovsky's obsession with water in buildings and confined spaces - particularly the sulphur pool - is plumb