An art installation that sums up 2017

New York

EVERY once in a while with Twitter, you find something that breaks through the bilge and recrimination. Or, sometimes something finds you. One night, The Mechanics of History found me. It is an art installation by Yoann Bourgeois that sat in a daylit rotunda at the Pantheon, in Paris. And for a long while in late autumn, I found myself mesmerised by a video of it, starring men spinning off a staircase and onto a trampoline.

The staircase curved around the outer edge of a circular slab that rotated, like a sundial. No laptop screen seemed wide enough to explain what was going on. And yet here was something that seemed, in an oblique, yet attractively obvious way, to capture an important aspect of 2017.