Friday, August 27, 2010
Pondering Sculpture Under the Trees
Fuck pigeons. Whitish, greenish blemishes streaming down the sides. The maple overhead stretches, yawns, and retreats to stillness once again while leaves flutter down to lace the ground. I don’t recall being that alive. Man form, nature not. Who knows what he was thinking, can only be within those confines, these wooden thoughts. Form representing isolation. Form of the formless. Boards leaning to the left, then the right, arc and pole, tall, sitting here with the pigeon presents running from top. Rustic boards he’s too lazy to sand. Would probably be itchy if feeling was real considering termites are gnawing through, not to mention those damn pigeons. Pigeons would often swoop down to perch upon the arc leaving runny deposits, their gift to the strange leafless tree. Sometimes they come up, stare, mutter something to their spouse or friend, who knows. Don’t think they get it anymore than this gets them. They seek familiar images, not uncomfortable ideas. They walk inside the building to those figures which represent figures, pretty, nice, not stiff and conceptual. Still, stiff, still. Maple obeys nature. Stiff, movement, life, green, oh the beauty in it. How dreadfully dull, have been assembled to represent man, maple God. Can’t make out that black mirage in the distance. Concrete, rush and zoom, the madness, prefer stillness now, only state of being. Ah one of them. A curious child makes his way towards what seems like an avant-garde tree house. Oh wait it’s just art. Off again. What is it, August? Black ahead. Rounder. Closer. The noises and the madness beyond the tree. Provides nice shade. Noise, chains, noise, giant ball, closer, beep beep. Never seen this before. Yeah we’ll make it into wood chips. This maple could use some insulation.
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I wrote from the point of view of a giant wooden outdoor sculpture of sorts that sits below a tree, so it's just a stream of thoughts that an abstract tower of wood has with insertions of omniscient narration. I literally cut short the sculpture's thoughts at the end I think so it wasn't terribly difficult to do. I doubt sculpture thoughts could make much more of a story.
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting piece and reminds me, at points, of some of Beckett's confinement pieces: the voice an individual working out the specific physical and spiritual geometry of his isolation, considering on the one hand the physical space, such as it is, and on the other, the internal space of memory, impression, emotion. I think it's worth having a look at these, particularly the short novels in Nohow On. One question I see here is the omniscient narration you mention. Do we need the external point of view? Can the sculpture itself not be the only voice? That is, the subject's (whatever it is) efforts to describe its spaces (internal/external) in its unique language, its unique way of knowing is interesting in itself, the defamiliarizing capacity of its observations of "us," regardless of whether we consider it a story or not. It can be an effective fiction, in the sense that it is a thought experiment, an invention, a fabrication. So the piece is most effective when it pursues its own way of thinking, in precise, but unexpected language, and less interesting when it tries to ground us in what we know. Love the ambiguity and word play of "Still, stiff, still."
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