How It Is: A box of darkness
At the far end of the enormous Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern is a correspondingly huge metal box: thirty metres long, thirteen metres high and sitting on two-metre stilts. One end of the box is open with a metal ramp leading up to the pitch-black interior. The artwork entitled How It Is by Miroslaw Balka is said to allude to the Holocaust, whereby the huge metal container is akin to the trucks that took the Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz.
Walking up the steel ramp towards the vast dark opening of the box is certainly unsettling. Even the sound and vibrations of footsteps on the metal ramp feels cold. Once you are inside the structure it gets progressively darker as your move further in. People beside you become less discernable and those at more than an arms length away cannot be seen at all. Were it not for the cheerful and exited chatter of most of the visitors the experience would have been decidedly eerie.
I went in with my sister while her boyfriend remained outside taking pictures. Once we had gone in some way and I could no longer make out or hear any people in front of us I stopped so that my sister’s boyfriend could catch up with us. While we waited for him we simply appreciated the odd sensation of being in a dark box. Before long my sister’s boyfriend appeared beside us. I was surprised that he managed to find us so quickly but also glad because I was eager to step into the absolute darkness that lay ahead. As I took a step forward though I came smack up against the back end of the structure. The wall was lined in soft black velvet, which felt nice to touch and was as unexpected as the wall itself. Turning around I was surprised to see how much more brightly lit the box now seemed and how close the entrance actually was. I had expected it to be further away.
For me the experience of walking into the box was comparable to ones journey through life: as you move forward you don’t actually know what is coming next or whom you will bump into. You might link arms with someone and walk beside others but most of the people you see or hear you’ll never know. When you reach the end it comes as a surprise, it’s disappointing, although you knew it was coming all along. Like the unexpected touch of velvet on the box however death is probably comforting. Our lives will also most likely seem like a much quicker journey than we imagined when we look back on them. Even at this point my life seems to have passed by ever so quickly. Lastly, I imagine that our lives in retrospect will seem far simpler than we experienced them to be, just as the box was much brighter looking back towards the entrance where we started out.
Since the box is supported on stilts you can walk underneath it and hear the footsteps of those inside. If the box is symbolic of life then the space under the box could be likened to the netherworld of ghosts perhaps, or the life one leads after we have left this box that we are now in. I don’t believe in life after death mind you, but if there were such a thing I would imagine that it would eclipse life as the Turbine Hall eclipses the box. Perhaps the after-afterlife would be the world outside of the Tate Modern and so on, until such a point that we live a space that is infinite.
