We are a domesticated lot. So often art viewers go to galleries and seek out bold new experiences and then stand in front of the work waiting for it to happen to us. In Tomas Saraceno's Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web the viewers walk to the threshold of the gallery and look in, amused, perhaps even awestruck.

Many smile and walk away.  But Saraceno does not content himself to make art that merely happens to the visitor/viewer. Like many of the artists who show in this gallery, he demands that if he makes the work happen, that the viewers participate, that we, too, make the work happen. Walking into the tightly wound bungee cord web is indeed off putting, but until one participates in its web, walks through it, eroticizes it with the body, the thrill of the work is only pornographic (viewed fetishistically, fragmentary, distant). And, like any good carnival, Saraceno pays off your intrepid journey with a galactic tug and a few more pieces in the back room.

- Keith Miller

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web, March 22-April 19, 2008; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web Installation view, 2008, elastic rope,  installation dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.  Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web, March 22-April 19, 2008; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web Installation view, 2008, elastic rope,  installation dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of A Spiders Web, March 22-April 19, 2008; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,  Installation view, 2008, installation dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.)