[ Lost in the Landscape ]

keeping your dead tree healthy

There’s this dead tree out­side my week­day office. A crew has been work­ing on it for the last two weeks.

It’s one of three very dead trees that make up an 1986 instal­la­tion by Terry Allen. Set in an area of the UCSD cam­pus that’s seen many of the cam­pus’ sig­na­ture euca­lyp­tus cut down to make way for build­ings, they’re in part sup­posed to embody trees that were lost to the chain­saw of progress. The writeup at the Stu­art Col­lec­tion web­site has lots of things to say about the project, includ­ing: “Although they osten­si­bly rep­re­sent dis­place­ment or loss, these trees offer a kind of com­pen­sa­tion: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and sto­ries cre­ated and arranged specif­i­cally for this project.”

Yes. Two of the artist’s trees make noise. Loud, annoy­ing noise. So in effect this artists has taken a tree–something that to me rep­re­sents the pos­si­bil­ity of the quiet that you find in a grove–and replaces it with devices with speak­ers in them that pol­lute the thin grove with poetry and loud music. By ban­ish­ing what’s left of the quiet it’s the aural equiv­a­lent of clearcut­ting what’s left of the trees. You call that compensation?

I do not love this work.

The trees in the project started out their lives in the adja­cent groves but were removed. They were then dis­sem­bled and soaked in wood preser­v­a­tive. Once thor­oughly embalmed, the trees were reassem­bled and sheets of lead nailed all over their outer sur­faces. Over the course of 25 years the one mute tree–the one with the scis­sor lift next to it in the first phot above–developed the sort of white and yel­low oxi­da­tion that lead can acquire over time. Oxi­dized lead makes up the artist’s pig­ment lead yel­low, and sul­fides of lead can turn the lead white.

I guess the nat­ural processes went against the artist’s inten­tions of hav­ing a dark ghost of a tree the color of raw lead. The two work­ers have been pound­ing and clean­ing and maybe even replac­ing some of the lead plat­ing. The tree is start­ing to look really dead again.

My final thoughts? I don’t think this artist really gets nature. Nat­ural processes are being denied. And now, you can’t hear the for­est for the trees.

July 24 2011 05:30 am | Categories: art • landscape • places | Tags: natural cycles • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD

15 Responses to “keeping your dead tree healthy”

1. maggie on 24 Jul 2011 at 9:41 am #

   I haven’t vis­ited the instal­la­tion so I can’t com­ment on the qual­ity of its sounds. I won­der if the main­te­nance on the lead sur­face is to keep its color and tex­ture dis­tinct from the liv­ing trees around it, in order to rein­force its dif­fer­ence from them?
   I love your photo of the chair pulled up next to the sound tree. It con­nects the instal­la­tion to its actual set­ting and the peo­ple who visit, and puts the sound tree on equal foot­ing with all the other things around it.

2. Elephant's Eye on 24 Jul 2011 at 11:40 am #

   I love your punch­line. Per­haps some­one could cut the power sup­ply, accidentally?

3. Jean on 24 Jul 2011 at 4:44 pm #

   James, I think, like you, I would find this art work irri­tat­ing rather than evoca­tive. In a world in which many peo­ple go around plugged into their mp3 play­ers or on their cell phones most of the time, I think the appre­ci­a­tion of quiet or of nature’s real sounds are becom­ing rare.

4. James on 24 Jul 2011 at 8:58 pm #

   Mag­gie, I’m maybe a lit­tle harsh in eval­u­at­ing a work for fail­ing to do some­thing it didn’t intend to, par­tic­u­larly with the way the lead plat­ing pati­nated. It’s only a small sub­set of art that aspires to rot or cor­rode into the earth, and this isn’t one of those works. I can see that bat­tling nat­ural forces could return the work to how it came from the work­shop. The “com­pen­sa­tion,” thing, though did get me going.

   EE, I’ll have to work on that. It, and the cable attached to the source of the music is all underground.

   Jean, very much agreed that quiet and nat­ural sounds are get­ting rare. Destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment isn’t all visual. And even if the music were great to one per­son, isn’t it pre­sump­tu­ous that every­one else would think so? (I’d hate to sub­ject too many peo­ple to my very par­tic­u­lar musi­cal tastes. I felt sorry for the neigh­bors this morn­ing who got an ear­ful of the new piano piece I’m work­ing on…)

5. Faisal on 25 Jul 2011 at 8:10 am #

   Ja,es, unless I’m read­ing this all wrong, isn’t there some­thing really awful about killing a tree and then pre­tend­ing it’s emit­ting music or poetry while it is encased in lead, when in real­ity, any­one with feel­ing might sug­gest, if the tree were able to emit a sound of its own, or if it were allowed to be heard, it would actu­ally be lament­ing its plight? Is this art at all, or just some ter­ri­ble arti­face? ( For­give me any­one affected, if I’ve mis­un­der­stood this )

6. Benjamin Vogt on 26 Jul 2011 at 5:10 am #

   They make noises? Why? Besides, peo­ple walk­ing by with their ipods won’t be able to hear it any­way. In the UNL cam­pus, out­side my office win­dow, is a sculp­ture by Roxey Raine (for another week anyway–I was laid off from teach­ing). It’s a stain­less steal dead tree. I kinda like it, but it doesn’t make noise. There’s always been controversy–is it art? Is it in the way? I find it mov­ing in the win­ter more so than summer.

7. hb on 26 Jul 2011 at 4:59 pm #

   Man do I hate out­door speak­ers of all kinds. They are an abom­i­na­tion, an offense against every bird­song and every whis­per of wind through foliage.

   Yes indeed, the artist does not “get nature”. Same with all the walk­ers in our beau­ti­ful neigh­bor­ing coastal scrub sage park, who wear their head­phones and miss a whole other aspect of the nat­ural scene, the towhees rasp­ing in the brush, and the mock­ing­bird arias from above, even the crunch of gravel and leaves underfoot.

   But a dead Euc gives me no end of sat­is­fac­tion. “What a relief,” I think. “It’s dead and won’t shed no more.” I only wish it was the neighbor’s Eucs on my prop­erty line that were the dead ones.

8. sprig to twig » Blog Archive » a weekend in the high desert on 26 Jul 2011 at 6:08 pm #

   […] am lead­ing with this photo because I just read a post over at Lost in the Land­scape where James has a few things to say about dead trees as ART. I hap­pen to think (and I think James […]

9. ricki on 26 Jul 2011 at 6:23 pm #

   I find dead trees beau­ti­ful in a sad sort of way (see snag in my Bend, OR post). Don’t you love the way ART gets peo­ple talking?

10. ryan on 27 Jul 2011 at 11:38 am #

    I think UCSD must have the worst art col­lec­tion in the coun­try. Ter­ri­ble embar­rass­ing stuff; peo­ple laugh when I describe the var­i­ous pieces. Some of it was some­what suc­cess­ful, though, as things to walk to and make fun of late at night after drink­ing in the dorms. That idea of embrac­ing the suck, art so bad you start to cel­e­brate it. I still can’t believe how bad that art col­lec­tion is.
    But I actu­ally kind of liked the talk­ing tree. I passed through that euca­lyp­tus grove quite often and I liked how there was some­times music com­ing from the tree and it would take a while to find which one. As an art piece I thought it was at about the level of a fifty dol­lar stu­dent project, but that’s a lot bet­ter than any­thing else in that collection.

11. Breathing Treatment (Brent) on 27 Jul 2011 at 4:14 pm #

    I was there when they were installed and they were more iso­lated from the cam­pus at that point. Stum­bling across them while tak­ing a short cut or hear­ing them late at night was always a mild plea­sure — per­haps because they were so unex­pected. The talk­ing and singing trees didn’t do so all the time, so you might not know they were there if you were unobservant.

    The cam­pus has grown towards them since then, so per­haps los­ing their iso­la­tion has dimin­ished their impact.

12. James on 27 Jul 2011 at 8:00 pm #

    Faisal, you point out some­thing very inter­est­ing. Who are these trees speak­ing for? You clearly feel they’re not speak­ing for them­selves, and I’d add that we’ve put words in their mouths.

    Ben­jamin, yikes, so sorry to hear about the teach­ing sit­u­a­tion! What will this mean for your place in the Deep Mid­dle? As far as the trees, your tree and the ones I showed seem to strad­dle the nat­ural and cul­tural worlds, in part both, in part nei­ther. Part art, part tree. That can raise all sorts of asso­ci­a­tions and expectations.

    HB, that these are eucs are some con­so­la­tion. In the end it’s a tiny notch out of the 200,000+ that were planted early in the last cen­tury. The cam­pus is a quick walk from native tor­rey pine habi­tat, and I’d love to see the pines brought back as some­thing other than iso­lated quo­ta­tions placed around the cam­pus. MUCH qui­eter than trees with speak­ers. The worst is the talk­ing tree, when one of the poems has a shriek­ing back­ground sound effect of a jet streak­ing overhead.

    Ricki, cov­er­ing a tree in lead sure gets you look­ing at it closer. The snag that you showed in your post, though, has lots of char­ac­ter of its own. Too bad peo­ple don’t pay them the kind of atten­tion they should.

    Ryan, although I’ve dished deep on this piece I think the cam­pus has a cou­ple stun­ning pieces in its out­door zoo. My fav is prob­a­bly the one that folks might make the most fun of, Robert Irwin’s del­i­cate and sen­si­tively place Run­ning Vio­let V Forms. The piece is just pur­ple fine-mesh chain­link raised up on stain­less posts in the mid­dle of the grove, but damn it’s the most won­der­ful thing to move around and watch the light change. It’s inter­est­ing how the col­lec­tion takes to the out­doors works by artists who usu­ally live indoors in gal­leries. Some works would be bet­ter house­plants and don’t hold up well to big out­door space.

    Brent, I pre-date the trees on cam­pus and can appre­ci­ate how things have changed around them, chang­ing how the work is per­ceived. Inter­act­ing with the work fre­quently over the years I’m start­ing to feel that how I see the work might be more like a museum guard’s take on a work they see all the time ver­sus an infre­quent vis­i­tor. Some pieces have grown richer over the years, this one didn’t get much beyond the surface.

13. tina on 29 Jul 2011 at 3:36 am #

    I remem­ber when you first posted about these trees. It’s a most inter­est­ing idea. Like you though I see no need for speak­ers in them. I find the dis­col­or­ing of the lead most inter­est­ing. That lead sur­round­ing the trees make the trees really dif­fer­ent. Not a good kind of dif­fer­ent as I’d hate to imag­ine a world full of trees encased in lead. Still, a neat sculpture.

14. Janet/Plantaliscious on 29 Jul 2011 at 8:35 am #

    I con­fess I rather like the tex­ture on the dead trees from all that metal, and it some­how rep­re­sents the way we keep destroy­ing nat­ural edi­fices to replace them with man-made edi­fices. But sound too?! Ghastly idea. I think you should get dig­ging, the cable can’t be that deep…

15. The Good Home on 09 Sep 2011 at 4:08 am #

    Ha ha. Giant lead plated ipod tree, just what nature intended.

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