Taurascatic Ekphrasis: Storm King

…before the mind intoxicate

With present objects and the busy dance

Of things that pass away, a temperate show

Of objects that endure.

~ Wordsworth

I guess it started with Instagram. Not a very high minded medium but there it is. Post after post of people walking through wide open fields, standing beside, underneath, and inside of giant sculptures. There was even some sort of tram. What was this place? Well, it’s not too difficult to be confused about Storm King because there’s nowhere else like Storm King. Its size and mission are unique and extraordinary. I hit the New York Public Library for some books to acquaint myself with the site’s history and focus and planned my trip.

It’s not so bad getting there — an hour and a quarter from midtown Manhattan, most of it on the scenic Palisades Parkway. You can even shake off the oppressive city vibes with a stop at State Line Lookout half an hour into the trip.

A few twisty miles on back mountain roads and you’re there, pulling alongside a little toll-booth shack where you purchase your ticket. An Official Looking Person points the way into the parking lot. You’ll see quite a few Official Looking People around the grounds, usually zipping around in carts and keeping a careful eye on things. They are there to answer questions and to make sure you don’t do anything too stupid. They are ever-watchful but not intrusive, like CCTV in London, or the Holy Spirit.

So now I’m inside the grounds. I walk out of the parking lot and in all three directions the scenery, or viewshed as they say around these parts, stretches off into the distance and out of sight. There are no borders, natural or man made, until you reach the nearest mountain. Everything is very beautiful and very vivid but the size is intimidating — where to start?

There’s a visitor’s center and a museum which is supposed to be quite lovely but I had no patience for that. I was here to see great sweeping vistas and sculptures that could crush a truck, not a few swirls of paint or delicate statuary. I pulled out the handy visitor’s map and began looking through the names of the artists. I was unfamiliar with them. I looked instead at the names of the artwork, which weren’t something helpful like ‘Statue of Strong Nude Man with Sword’ by Leonardo Da Vinci, but rather enigmatic and possibly practical jokes. I’m thinking especially of ‘Mozart’s Birthday’ by Mark Di Suvero. I put my map away and started walking.

The original 180 acres between Schunnemunk and Storm King Mountains (now over 500) were purchased in 1958 by Ralph Ogden with the intention of housing a museum for Hudson River Paintings. In 1960 when the museum was first opened, the type of monumental sculptures to be found on the grounds now didn’t exist yet. In 1961 when the first modestly-sized sculpture arrived, Ogden and co-founder H. Peter Stern didn’t know where to put it. Eventually they decided to place the work by Josef Pillhofer outside the museum and, as Stern put it, “The dialogue between art and nature opened.” A further emphasis on sculpture occurred in 1967 with the purchase of thirteen statues created by David Smith. Here’s one now:

(Volton XX by David Smith)

Now hold on — I can hear you saying, “I thought I was brought here to look at sculpture? This doesn’t look like a Greek wrestler or fallen angel angel or any sculpture I’m familiar with.” Well Straw Man, that’s because David Smith is an abstract expressionist. I don’t want this to deter you from visiting so before you close your browser tab, give me a few moments before going back to Reddit.

In A Case for the Importance of Culture in a Prosperous Society, Dorothy Kosinski quotes John Dewey: “The moral function of art is itself to remove prejudice, do away with scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.” In other words art helps us to connect not just to those like us, but creates “a bridge of understanding between ‘us’ and ‘them’.” This would seem a pretty noble goal, no? Why then, knowing all the benefits of art do we, as Michael Fried would have it, shy away from “…life lived as few are inclined to live it: in a state of continuous intellectual and moral alertness.”

A succinct and hilarious response was given by Shirley from the show Community. When asked to watch one of Abed’s meta-films, which would have required her to be in the elevated and attentive state of mind recommended by Dewey and Fried, she had this to say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCE0hiUWlcU&feature=youtu.be

And indeed, some of us do have work in the morning, Charlie Kaufman. Well, if you don’t care for art at all, just google the pictures of how lovely the grounds are and imagine wandering around all of this luxurious verdant space instead of sitting in your cramped apartment. Or here, look at one of mine:

Not bad, right? Your kids could run all the hell over that space and they’re even allowed to touch some of the art. And given that it’s welded steel there isn’t much chance they’ll break it. Can’t say that about the Guggenheim. And sure, there’s an object in the picture above that may trouble you, but if it’s causing you too much distress just look in a different direction.

A few weeks before my trip to Storm King, I had the pleasure of visiting Williams College Museum of Art and viewing Elliott Erwitt’s photo ‘Jackie Kennedy at Funeral, 1963’. I suggest you google it for a better view because I can’t afford the rights from Magnum, sorry. It is arresting and affecting with a pathos that is palpable and all but throbs through the glass. This glamorous, strong, intelligent woman is depicted as we’re not used to seeing her: with a childlike, naive expression of wonderment in the face of death. She is not reduced by grief, but simply stripped of the artifice of Camelot. We seem to have caught her in a moment of understanding. The pain registers immediately.

Only a few steps away from this incredible picture, the viewer is confronted by an object. I present here a picture of this object, which is not an effective medium for conveying the art form, but the best I have at my disposal.

At first glance it appears to be an engine casing or similar piece of heavy machinery, suspended by chains and wire and encased in a self-supporting frame. Careful study and reflection didn’t reveal much to this viewer. Nothing was immediately apparent. I retreated to a description on the wall.

The plaque informs us that this work is named Chaino, and that it was completed by Melvin Edwards. As Mr. Edwards’ other art is referred to as abstract welded sculpture and this is welded steel and chains, I can be confident that what I have just witnessed is an abstract welded sculpture. I glance at the sculpture again and read on. The sculpture is attempting to evoke a violated human body. Mr. Edwards is evoking a duality, “…the chains as indicators of slavery and oppression, as well as a means of connection and kinship…”

I look at the object again with knowledge of its artistic intent. Now informed of the meaning, the engine casing begins to look to me like a heart. A heart surrounded by tensed wires that vibrate, now, with new knowledge. A heart at once locked together and pulled apart, this tensile juxtaposition and metallurgical transubstantiation possible through the cruelty which the piece invokes.

Back to the plaque again. The artist’s secondary message is indicated in the title — a nod to Chano Pozo, the Afro-Cuban jazz musician credited with introducing the genre to the United States. The music of the oppressed, a binding agent, born of the tortured heart. Back at the sculpture I lean closer now, noticing the cracks, the blackened burns from a torch. The closer I look, the more I see, the more it changes. The chains, which I first saw with puzzlement, then with sorrow and anger, evolve into something different — something supportive. The chain links become a community, each bearing the weight of their burden, each assisting the next.

I walk back over and look at Jackie. One tortured heart, one face compared to countless millions. Photography cannot speak the language of one million dead. Our minds wouldn’t know what to do with the images, even if they were lined up individually, one after the other. It wouldn’t register the tragedy. If it is germane to ask after the utility of sculpture beyond its artistic merit it is this — to capture in a separate language what words and pictures are unable to do. Their insufficiency a product of our inability to comprehend the magnitude of certain subjects. Sculpture is a symbolic language, our code for matters too big for other mediums.

( Mozart’s Birthday by Mark Di Suvero)

Now look, I’m not telling you that every sculpture you encounter was designed to pack the wallop and emotional resonance of Chaino. I’m simply trying to make the case that in art, as in much of life, you get out of it what you put into it. Sometimes you have to stop and read the signs.

Anyway, back to Storm King. After the death of founder Ralph Ogden in 1974, Peter Stern assumed full responsibility for the institution. This was a fortuitous time. Monumental abstract sculpture was coming into its own and after the gallery showings, there really wasn’t anywhere to place these colossal pieces. A collector couldn’t exactly put a fifty foot sculpture in his foyer. After Mark Di Suvero’s exhibition at the Whitney in 1975, Mr. Stern found out the sculpture would be packed away and placed into storage. Inspiration struck. He invited Di Suvero to store his sculptures in the fields of Storm King.

You can see them from a distance out there in the fields, indelicate and looming. Di Suvero’s sculptures, some constructed from welded I-beams painted candy apple red, are feats of engineering that impress for their sheer extravagance as much as their artistic merit. They are intimidating. Di Suvero anticipated my reaction: “…most adults are deficient children; they don’t know how to play anymore. The pure response is the child’s response.”

(Frog Legs and Neruda’s Gate by Mark Di Suvero)

In other words, there’s no wrong way to approach them — use your imagination. Perhaps because I’m used to having a camera slung around my neck and eyeing my surroundings up for potential snapshots, I found myself framing the grounds and other sculptures through the changing shapes of the structures as I circled them. The closer I moved, the larger the frame. The more acute my angle of approach, the more angular and constricted my view became — shocking green grass or bright blue sky, electric between red slashes. A dynamic, vibrant geometry.

(Mozart’s Birthday through the legs of Neruda’s Gate by Mark Di Suvero)

Over time Storm King purchased more land and there were more options for Stern and his staff, as well as the artists themselves, as to where these pieces would be placed. It was and remains a complex chess game — the pieces must be situated in genius loci: perfectly situated not just for the particular attributes of the artwork, but in relation to the environment and to the other artworks as well. It was a fluid process, which is perhaps why it has been such a successful process. Peter Stern says in the introduction to Earth, Sky, and Sculpture: Storm King Art Center, “We wanted to being the interrelationships of a remarkable landscape and great sculpture to its full potential. We were not burdened by rigid ideas or concepts.”

The flexibility shown by Storm King has been reciprocated by the artists, not just in sharing control with a committee regarding where their work is placed, but in putting aside their egos and sharing space with so many other artists on the grounds. During the 1985 retrospective of Di Suvero’s work, he was photographed alongside fellow artists Isamu Noguchi and Louise Nevelson. Mark’s comment on the photo: “Only at Storm King would we all agree to be in one photograph.” This attitude of Mark’s helps illustrate his appreciation of the truly remarkable effort put into Storm King by its founders, both financial and physical. This landscape has been blasted, drained, dug up, built upon, and reinforced — changed in countless ways to accommodate and accentuate the art that it displays.

(Mother Peace by Mark Di Suvero)

A simple way to distinguish what Di Suvero does is to examine his process. His brand of abstract expressionism is largely improvisational — he doesn’t know what he’s going to make until he’s in the act of making it. Abstract expressionists like him were influenced by existentialist writers such as Sartre and Camus whose philosophy was that life in the face of inevitable death is absurd, and trying to confront this absurdity with reason is a fool’s errand. What was left, then? Despite the grim eventuality of death you musn’t submit to despair, you must construct a life of your own by remaining open to change and living in joyful expectancy.

(Neruda’s Gate by Mark Di Suvero)

This credo was more than just theoretical in Di Suvero’s case. In 1960 his body was crushed under an elevator and he was told he would never walk again. Within months he was back to work in a wheelchair and before long he was back on his feet. In fact, after the accident he didn’t just return to his old sculpture, he began making his largest works yet, wanting to, “emulate the gesture and the immediacy of ‘big’ abstract expressionist pictures.”

Observing these feats of construction made me think of walking through my Brooklyn neighborhood. Amidst the concrete, asphalt, steel and glass a lone tree sticks up through a square in the sidewalk, a single sprig of nature amidst the chaos of metropolitan life. Here we have the opposite — the I-beams balanced gracefully, grounded in the soft earth and surrounded by the living trees and swaying branches. Wind blows through the leaves and across the bright surface of the artworks, a testament to man’s industry and creativity amidst nature’s own splendors.

Wandering away from Di Suvero, another piece caught my eye. From far away, it looked like a Christmas present. Maybe because it looked so different from the pieces I was just admiring, or maybe because I’m a sucker for awning stripes, I spent some time admiring it.

Partially remembered articles by Michael Fried, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Clement Greenberg swam before me, their precise meaning just out of reach. Ok let’s see, would this be considered minimalist art, or as Fried would call it, I thought smugly, literalist art? Well, literalist art is a plea for a new genre of theatre and theatre is the negation of art according to…someone. Theatrical art, if I remember correctly is supposed to be non-personal and distance itself from us. Hmmm, the striped box didn’t seem to be distancing itself from me. It certainly didn’t seem very theatrical. I mean it’s just sitting there after all. Maybe Fried isn’t who I need.

How about Clement Greenberg? I know he was a pretty important critic. Also that he was played very well by Jeffrey Tambor in Ed Harris’s’ Pollock, which probably won’t be of much use here, but is worth noting. Old Clem had a lot to say about the ‘presence’ of literalist art. I wasn’t feeling too much of a presence, to be perfectly honest. It looked like a goddamn green and white box. How about Robert Morris? Morris states that ‘the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation, one that…includes the beholder.’ Well here I am. Just a boy, standing in front of a box, waiting for it to love me. Wait, that was Notting Hill.

Exhausted by my mental efforts I moved on, secure in the knowledge that I would never be a tenured art professor. I simply don’t seem to have the knack for it. If I had bothered to turn to the other side of my visitor’s map, I would have seen that there were ten of these identical objects scattered around the grounds, doing double duty as both seating and art objects. It’s basically a fancy bench. Created by Daniel Buren, the title is Sit Down.

I may have missed my opportunity to sit down on Buren’s bench, but the little illustrated hand on my map let me know that I was now approaching an interactive artwork: Gazebo for Two Anarchists: Gabriella Antolini and Alberto Antolini by Siah Armajani.

The eponymous brother and sister transported explosives during the Youngstown Affair of 1918 for the noble cause of anarchy, which landed the distaff portion of the duo in the clink. The two blue portions are meant to represent the separated siblings while the white bridge represents their enduring connection.

The picturesque outside contrasts with the inhospitable inside, illustrating some sort of duality I was too tired to care about at the particular moment I was there. I was using it more as a chair than as an interactive experience to reflect on anarchy, a casualty of mixing High Art and low blood sugar. I had fallen out of Dewey’s platonic ideal of art viewing and I needed sustenance. I left to find the cafe.

The day I visited, the cafe was not a hotbed of activity. This suited me just fine. I wanted to regroup and put myself back in the proper mindset to appreciate what I was seeing — to hold myself to a higher standard. I felt this called for a drink.

How was I feeling at this point? Overwhelmed. Sort of stunned by the scale and scope of what I was seeing mingled with disbelief that the sculptures worked so well in their surroundings — beautiful, harmonious, and of-a-piece. The best of what I’d seen, or more accurately the pieces that resonated with me the most at the times when I was at my most receptive, gave me the same feeling as my favorite short film, All My Life by Bruce Baillie. You can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxN0bB64Xxg&index=69&list=WL&t=0s

This film fills me with hope and gratitude. You know, the way crappy mass-produced art prints at TJ Maxx and Kohl’s tell you that you should feel.

The closest cognate I can find in narrative film is Amelie. If you enjoy that film, you’ll understand the message of joy through creation and experience and mere existence. Your mileage may vary according to tolerance for subtitles.

At times even when I was dialed in a la Dewey and Fried, I found myself so overwhelmed by the 360 degree assault of stimulus on the senses that the individual artworks seemed simply a part of the environment. I understand many of the staff at Storm King would be happy to hear that, but I couldn’t help but wish for a frame, or simply a label pointing simply to ‘front’ and ‘back.’ I recognize this as simply another form of laziness to be fought against, but felt the need to confess it here.

Put another way, viewing these pieces at times felt like attempting to take a picture of an object that keeps increasing in size. As soon as you have it properly framed, you have to step back to account for the increase in volume, the increase in information. So you take a few steps back, reframe, and once again the size, the information, the totality that needs to be framed and accounted for in order to present the object in an accurate context has increased yet again. You sigh and repeat the process. It becomes exhausting. I resolved to try a little harder. Refreshed, I headed out into the fields again.

With Di Suvero and Armajani I was given a sense of balance, of counterpoise. Waving at me over a nearby hill was a different animal altogether.

Unlike Di Suvero, Alexander Calder seems to keep the viewer (at least this viewer) off kilter. Instead of counterbalance we have elements that contradict one another, as in The Arch, which appears to shift and change with minuscule change of viewpoint. Far from being improvisational like Di Suvero, Calder designed miniature models, referred to as maquettes, before fabrication was begun on his colossal pieces. Di Suvero disparagingly called this practice ‘designer art.’

Tal Streeter caught me off guard as well and not just because his name makes him sound like an 80’s pop icon instead of a conceptual sculptor. A fellow with the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and internationally renowned kite artist (!), his Endless Column was originally installed in Central Park at the corner of 79th and 5th. I hope the four different angles below illustrate just how oddly wonderful, magical, and of all things natural it appears in its current setting.

Like Calder he used maquettes to get the design just right, but there were unforeseen complications and both he and Storm King’s staff had to learn on the job, so to speak. Endless Column suffered from exposure to the elements, including having a portion blown off in a windstorm and being repeatedly struck by lighting. An internal lighting rod solved the latter problem.

Some sculptures weren’t lucky enough to survive the wear and tear of the elements. Built between 1970 and 1971, Alexander Liberman’s Adonai was constructed from welded oil drums which had been buried underground for twenty years before being purchased by the artist. Protective coatings were applied, but numerous welds broke and it was at risk of collapse. The sculpture had to be refabricated in 2000.

In the critical and academic journals I leafed through there were many eyebrow-raising descriptions and interpretations of the artwork on display. A personal favorite is by Irving Lavin from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He describes the sculpture below, another Liberman titled Iliad as “stalk(ing) across the earth like the armored Achilles before the walls of Troy, resounding with the hollow clangor of bloody war.”

(Iliad by Alexander Liberman)

Given his august stature I’d hate to disagree with Mr. Lavin, but after examining the object from all sides the most creative description I could come up with was a McDonald’s PlayPlace designed by someone who hated children.

(Iliad by Alexander Liberman)

It seemed I was once again slipping out of the rarified air of intellectual and moral alertness — about time to pack it in. Right before the parking lot is a mound and on that mound is a striking piece: Frog Legs by Di Suvero. When I’d walked by early that morning, it had seemed to be wielding a sword or javelin, ready to attack any mortal challenger foolish enough to attack its position.

This evening, approached in a different light, from a different angle, and in a different frame of mind it appeared on the defensive — holding shields, a final bulwark against an unseen foe.

I climbed to the top of the hill and sat by this inscrutable figure. I thought of playing king of the hill at my grandparents house. About being indestructible one minute and airborne the next, rolling down the grass slope, legs flailing, chest pounding, and coming to rest in an undignified pile in front of a long-gone acorn tree. I thought of all the things I don’t understand about art and about people and about life and about how it all doesn’t really matter. It’s just nice to be here.

I have good news: you can call the art whatever you’d like — it doesn’t care. What matters is that you understand that this land, this magnificent public trust, these pieces of art (whatever label they’re given) — all of it is for you. This is your space. It feels unlimited, too big to explore. Unfillable. Let your kids run around. Hell run around yourself. Roll down a hill, the people in the carts don’t mind. Probably. I left thinking that I didn’t see enough. Thankfully it will be waiting for me when I come back.

END. **Originally published in CinderQ