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Steel Mass

• Winter 2010
• Site specific performance - Carrie Furnace, Braddock, PA

The Oceanic Experience concerns the relationship between the self and the external world, coined as such by Romain Rolland in his 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud. Freud responds to his friend’s condition in Civilization and its Discontents, characterizing the experience as “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded…of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole.” Freud posits this unique sensation at the heart of all spiritual sentiment.

In my practice, the restful unity attributed to the oceanic experience is perpetually destabilized by the body’s diminution, that is, the recognition of its tiny, discrete position within the vastness of the universe. For me, the oceanic feeling is simultaneously an experience of immensity and of smallness—it is a simple, yet staggering discrepancy of size.