Visitors to the Whitney Biennial examine Sam Lewitt's "Fluid Employment." Photo by Andrew Hinderaker for The Wall Street Journal

There is a haunting melody that runs through the multiple works of sculpture, painting, installations and photography in the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art which marks it as distinctive.

Following with a special tour of “2012 Whitney Biennial” from members of the Whitney Teen Program, Youth Insights, we check out almost every work of the exhibit. There is an architectural piece in the first floor. Like an unfinished floor construction, it leaves empty space between rooms for the visitors shuttling back and forth. After experiencing and interacting with the artwork, we went upstairs to watch a clip of video projected on a gigantic screen about the communication between two smoking people. The overexposed and expanding image in the film created a sense or an experience of second hand smocking, and was dazzling to us. Then we walked to Nicole Eisenman’s installation, hanging various frames over a wall. It is called “Breakup” which possessed of remarkable clarity of vision and a striking spiritual, physical and sexual emotion.

The most intriguing piece is Sam Lewitt’s “Fluid Employment”. After the third Industrial Revolution, new equipment and new technology rapidly developed. People depended on science and engineering for their way of daily life. Sam Lewitt’s practice examines technology that is central to our contemporary life. For the 2012 Biennial, his subject is ferrofluid, a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid form that is used in wide variety of technological applications- from audio speakers, to educational tools, computer hard drives, military aircraft and other equipment. In the presence of a magnet, ferrofluid coagulates to resemble a solid mass, its contours conforming to the magnetic field yet retaining the plasticity of a liquid.

The tourists illustrate the enthusiasm that the magnets attract and hold the particles in place, creating the illusion of solidity, while the fans circulatie air over the work to hasten the material’s evaporation and put its liquidity on display. This explanation of the piece shocks the senses and draws us, the viewer, in for a closer look, to be reward by the quiet and tiny changes.

Through this explanation we also know that Lewitt has described his work in part as an effort to “put constellations of graphic and plastic material into motion around subjects that resist representation.” Every other Sunday, he pours new fluid over what remains, and the repeated pouring and evaporation allows layers of “solid” and “liquid” to separate and gradually accumulate sediment. I love this piece of work also because I find a sense of creativity and vitality from the cold and technical materials during this transformation between two forms. I hope you can find it enjoyable as well.