Access a slow-looking exercise of this work.

Transcript
Narrator: This installation from 1991 by Mike Kelley is titled "Riddle of the Sphinx" and composed of yarn, stainless-steel bowls, and an offset photolithograph.

A knitted yarn blanket is placed on the floor like a huge rug. It is shaped in a rectangle roughly 26 feet long by 13 feet wide. The shorter edge of the blanket is placed a few inches from the gallery wall while the other three sides are open to the gallery. The blanket is knitted with a chevron pattern, giving the two shorter edges opposite each other a precise zigzag border while the long perpendicular edges are straight. The side farthest from the gallery wall is primarily deep blue and purple. The strands closer to the wall have sections of lighter tones, primarily yellow mixed with blues, purple, orange, and green, repeating in neat zigzag stripes. About midway down the blanket’s length, the sharp transition between the light and dark sides follows the zigzagging chevron pattern.

Placed beneath the blanket are stainless-steel bowls. We can’t see their surface but only clearly defined humps. In the yellow section, four bowls form the corner points of a square. In the middle of the blanket, along the transition from light to dark, two bowls are placed apart from one another. In the deep-blue part of the blanket, three bowls underneath form the points of a triangle.

Hanging on the wall, centered above the edge of the blanket, is an offset photolithograph print, a foot and a half tall by 2 feet wide. It’s an image that is visually reminiscent of the bowls beneath the colored blanket. It’s a deep blue mountain poking up through lavender clouds, sitting beneath a pink, orange, and yellow sunset sky. In fact, it’s an image of Mount Fuji—but the print’s size, a small fraction of the size of the great blanket, reduces the image of the mountain to a size similar to the dimensions of the bowls. The colors of the print mirror the hues present in the blanket beneath.

In "Riddle of the Sphinx," Kelley refers to the question posed to Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The metal bowls are placed under the blanket in corresponding numbers and the passage of the metaphorical day is echoed in the hues of the afghan, ranging from pale-yellow tones of dawn to the deep tones of dusk. Oedipus conquers the Sphinx and secures his own tragic fate by solving the riddle with the answer, “Man.”

Ver todos los episodios