Walter De Maria Time/Timeless/No Time, 2004

The room is a cavern and sunlight bends around the slab that blocks the opening in the ceiling, and the light reflects off the golden bars. The people who let you in ask you to speak quietly and step softly, and it feels like a throne room, ascending the three flights of stairs to the top. Now I am looking back at the immense black marble sitting on the middle platform, in the middle of the room. There are gold bars on gold platforms, each around four feet high, formed in geometric shapes: square, triangle, and hexagon. Each set of three contains one of the three shapes, asides from the set of three at the top back wall, which is three squares. Math, geometry, rationality, symmetry; shapes and forms that do not exist outside of our minds. Where there should be a throne, there is a blank patch of concrete and the expected thrill of discovery at the top of the stairs gives way to wondering why you were invited into the room. What it was you came to see.

You walk back down the steps, and walk closer to the marble, and in its polished surface you begin to see a reflection of the room: the concrete, the steps, the divots in the walls, the seams, and the gold bars standing behind you. And then there is you, standing inside the marble surrounded by the concrete, the steps, the divots in the walls, the seams, and the gold bars standing behind you, reflecting the sunlight. And here, from this perspective, the impossibly sharp edges of the room bend inward toward the center and soften. The marble contains this frozen world as a mind contains a thought. Not a feeling, fleeting pleasures or pains, or the sound of another's voice or footsteps, but a thought centered precisely from where you stand.