[ Lost in the Landscape ]

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »