“Tower”, Ann Hamilton: Steven & Nancy Oliver Ranch, Geyserville, California
I been thinking about Towers and Columns, particularly Ann Hamilton’s Tower, Brancusi’s Infinite Column, the Trajan Column in Rome, and David Nash’s column (name?) that is currently installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I visited each earlier this summer and I am particularly attracted to the way these various works infect our sense of attention to the landscape and, in so doing, the way they heighten the interior experience of consciousness, particularly the one that comes with the act of looking and being in their literal physical presence. I do not think I am alone in this experience. My blog pieces on Ann Hamilton’s 87 foot highTower at the Oliver’s sculpture ranch in Northern, California, remains by far one of the most frequently visited sites on this blog.
[http://stephenvincent.net/blog/?p=617]
Unlike the external view of Brancusi’s singular Infinite Column (below), the Hamilton tower has it both ways, inside and out. Her piece is extraordinary in the way that it embraces the landscape - the slanted empty window frames indicate an interior world but reveal nothing as to the content of that interior. Then, once inside, however, after crawling through a bottom slot entry, you find yourself, depending on the position of the sun, standing over a dark or reflective pool of water, the opposites sides of which form the bases of a double spiral staircase. Rising up to the landing around the top rim of the tower, one is offered a 360 degree view of the upper end of the Alexander Valley landscape.
Brancusi’s Infinite Column spellbinds the eye by its repetition of the planes of its geometric sawtooth. The purity of its intention - mathematical in a way - assures a progression into the sublime and/or cosmic. There is nothing ajar in the work that might mitigate or distort the power of this progression. It’s shape is singularly ecstatic.
If there is an interior world to the Brancusi column that may offer the potential for shadow, for human disturbance, nothing is indicated as such. For that potential, one must go back to the Hamilton and learn of the ways the Tower has been used for performances (theatrical, dance and musical); different mediums have used water and light, and the spiral staircases to explore a complex range of subjects and materials. This was Hamilton’s intention, as I understand it; not to create a singularly iconic and/or sublime tower that might be simply revered for its aesthetic proportions and qualities, but to create and insist on a a space that would permit other mediums to use the circumstances in and outside of the tower as a way to make more profound articulations of whatever might be of human or other issue. Unlike my sense of the Brancusi, the Tower in that provides is an infinite cradle of aesthetic possibilities, private and public
David Nash’s Trunk and Buttt clearly takes its lead from Brancusi. Made of a redwood trunk, it’s geometric shapes are carefully sawed in ways that are also reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly’s work.
Trunk & Butt by David Nash
Yet, it is inaccurate to say this piece is entirely mimetic of the work of either artist. First, the shades of red and vanilla white colors within the wood are alluring and deeply sensual. Nash is insistent that the eye be taken in by the fresh charm and tones from the recent saw cuts. But it is more than “charm” here.
Detail section from Trunk & Butt
In way quite similar to Brancusi - the plane of the cuts take the eye into the horizontal waves created by and within “the lips” of each of the trunk’s sections which further enhances the piece’s sensual character. But looking even closer - unlike Brancusi’s polished marble surfaces - the interior ebb and flow of the wood’s grain elevates a level and sense of time within the piece itself. The lines become a kind of cardiograph of a natural life whether or not that life has any correspondence to our own. As this piece ages, of course, it’s tonal character will continue to change from its current almost “youthful” sense of juice. Indeed, ultimately, the wood may well become shaggy with gray age. Looking even more closely, however, even as much as one might dwell on the work’s visual pleasure, I find this experience to be ambiguous. Like the seductive waves of an ocean, the lumber is, conversely, also intensely inhuman. Nash and his chain saw might play its tree trunk like a master musician’s refined use of bow on a violin ways that make transparent the trunk’s interior contours & various chromatic features, there is nothing even obliquely anthropomorphic, or humanly soft and compelling about the timber’s presence. We are drawn close but simultaneously held back. Any awe - like looking at the beauty of a large, wild bird - is pushed back by the proximity of its literally hard materials.
(Title? Piece by David Nash)
Yet, the context of Yorkshire park, its hedge and tree filled grounds, compel us to look at Nash’s particular kind of tower in the presence of his other works, including the grounds and ever-changing sky that surrounds it.
Title? Work by David Nash
In the case of the current exposition, unlike the Hamilton or Brancusi works, the presence of Nash’s other pieces democratize the space; our eyes cannot but look backwards and forwards across the lawn to see other objects - some purely geometric, some looking animal like. The Yorkshire circumstance,does not permit a sustained sense of reverence as one may have particularly for the Brancusi These Nash tower ’siblings’ keep the mind busy, the consciousness active, even unsettled. What we might be get from the complexity provided inside and outside Hamilton’s Tower, we can get from the play of clouds, light, and the intense presence of other works. Does interaction provide a ‘human drama’ in any traditional, theatrical sense? I don’t think so.
Though Nash’s early work provided an anthropomorphic sense of play, in these large outdoor and indoor works (not permitted to photograph), I believe, with some exceptions, we are introduced to a much more inhuman landscape in which actual nature - no matter how much more revealed, and awesomely so here - it is an acknowledgment of nature as a presence that may well have nothing to do with us (no matter how our machinations may screw it up, try to destroy it, make it over, whatever). Whatever, Nash does now is a raw revelation of the character of nature, not the character of us. I came away with almost a “spook” sense of distance from the creatures, these works, that his work has revealed unto the human eye. So, as say different from the more human centered theater of Hamilton’s Tower, or Brancusi’s provision of an experience of the sublime, Nash is busy giving us another kind of theater, one in which the actors - trees et al - emerge with their own sense of potency from the play of nature, one that is ultimately stronger - one begins to realize - than any of us! Which accounts, no doubt, for the deep respect that Nash gives it.
Undoubtedly more will emerge here, but I appreciate any private comments along the way. The public comment box does not work, but my email address is in the upper left sidebar.
