Dev Murphy
In the art gallery, the door opens inward, but when they leave, visitors try to push instead of pull. I suspect there is something about small spaces—or art, maybe—that makes a person feel they are bursting forth when they leave, being born. They try to push, and then they look at me at my desk, they are embarrassed, and then they pull.
The difference between pushing and pulling—or more interestingly, or just as interestingly, the difference between being sure you can push out, and finding you must instead pull in. . . . People leave the gallery with a strange confidence sometimes. Jules Michelet wrote that a bird uses its whole body to build its nest. "The instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle."
I like to believe visitors to the gallery are empowered by the minutes spent walking about the room, nesting. But the nest energy, the building-out, is interrupted by the jolt of a door that won't obey, and by the realization that they cannot reenter real life by bursting forth, but by making themselves smaller for a moment.
