Dancing sunflowers hide their sunlight under Brussels

Debora MacKenzie, contributor

(Image: The Field of Turning Sunflowers by Alexandre Dang)

The point of art is that people should see it, right? When someone announces an exhibition, one assumes one will be able to see the art that has been announced. And so, last week I trotted briskly from my home in Brussels to the nearby Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission, to see The Field of Turning Solar Sunflowers by one Alexandre Dang.

Sadly it was not to be. There was, to be sure, art to be seen at the mega-building known affectionately as the Berlaymonster, including another rather sweet piece by Dang in the building?s sunny entrance hall: a European flag with its twelve stars jiggling about on solar motors, titled ?Europe dancing for joy?. Well, eleven stars were jiggling - one, possibly the financial expert of the group, was not feeling up to it.

But no sunflowers. The man on the reception desk was friendly and apologetic, but sorry - members of the public are not allowed into the space beside the staff restaurant where the flowers were apparently dancing.

By asking nicely and coming back the next day, however, I managed to get signed in for a few minutes to see the show. After all that, they were, I confess, a little underwhelming: a thousand flat cardboard flower shapes in yellow and light brown, which didn?t actually look much like sunflowers, but were all revolving languidly on short wire stalks under a wide skylight, powered by solar motors in their bases.

The overall effect was calming, if not quite as breathtaking as a field of actual sunflowers (which are of course also solar powered). Nor did these pale replicas track the sun across the sky - although, Belgian overcast permitting, they apparently spin faster as it gets sunnier.

The hundreds of Eurocrats who work in the building could see them, of course. We were unable to establish whether the many energy experts in Brussels that week for the conferences of EU Sustainable Energy Week? - one reason the exhibition was there - could get in.

But never mind all that - what impressed me in the end is that this is art that earns its keep. The last day of the exhibition, the flowers were sold off to the Eurocrats at ?15 apiece. A large chunk of the proceeds, via a development charity run by the staff of the EU institutions, will then build solar electricity plants for a school and hospital in Togo, west Africa.

So a lot more practical than your average look-at-me-I?m-on-a-plinth artistic effort, and I can forgive the temporarily quasi-exclusive viewing - especially because, it turns out, similar Solar Flowers form a component of other exhibitions

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