“To See the World in a Grain of Sand”: Wolfgang Laib and the Aesthetics of Interpenetrability

For the artist Wolfgang Laib, pollen is an extraordinary substance that signifies renewal, boundless energy, the temporal, the eternal, and the memory of the seasons. Laib’s pollen works are the result of an intense process of gathering, a pursuit of art as a way of life even that gives rise to works of art that are remarkable in their visual luminosity and textual delicacy. This essay considers Indra’s net as a metaphor for interpenetrability to conceptualize the folding of the subject and object that Laib’s pollen works allude to, and offers a deliberation on the spiritual within art.