“This brief scene excited me to the point of delirium. I was undoubtedly not able to explain it to myself fully and yet I was sure of it, that I had seized the moment when the day, having stumbled against a real event, would begin hurrying to its end. Here it comes, I said to myself, the end is coming; something is happening, the end is beginning. I was seized by joy.”

—Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

“I like natural disasters and I think that they may be the highest form of art possible to experience,” Walter de Maria wrote in 1960. I think about this with some admonition, as de Maria’s statement, no doubt, runs the risk of romanticizing the worst imaginable. Still, the deployment of risk seems worth it, namely, as it moves us to think into the small margin of possibility invoked in suspended actions, rote gestures, and frozen frames—to consider the limits of experience, or language, here intimated in the artworks. Maurice Blanchot suggests some safety measures for those who…