without form

On Christmas Eve, the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis in a live telecast from the orbiter: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

The Earth is without form and void, but there is air.

“Marcel Duchamp led me to discover art without form — the experience is not in front of your eyes, but inside the brain, cerebral not retinal,” she said last week in her East Village gallery, Perrotin, which will exhibit a site-specific installation in late June.

It will look billions of years back in time to observe the early formation of molecular hydrogen from a universe void and without form.

In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules.