[ 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.”

This tree–the dead-looking gray one towards the left of this frame–plays recorded spo­ken things.

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.

This one plays music. Some­one had brought in a plas­tic chair so they could sit and lis­ten to the giant lead-plated iPod.

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.

The trunk of the spoken-word tree

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 | Categories: art • landscape • places | Tags: natural cycles • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 15 Comments »

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 »