A Balancing Act, 1998

Job Koelewijn’s (1962, the Netherlands) varied body of work oftentimes has a certain fragility to it. These works are conceptual intonations wherein contradictions manifest before dissipating. In A Balancing Act (1998)—a photograph taken during his residency with PS 1 in New York—all of Lower Manhattan is set askew. We see the artist stood between sternly towering facades of concrete, steel and glass. He is carrying his own tower, built eighteen stories high from drinking glasses and wooden boards, but the curve of his tilting tower opposes the city’s structure, and the tension is set in the artist’s body. It is a single moment granting neither the certainty of permanence, nor the certainty of silence after the crash; a moment where humanity, always vacillating between the two, takes its place.