Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
Perchance to Dream

One perfect, clear blue, puffy cloud day, during a brief break between
the almost interminable heat waves of August, I found myself in a
marvelous place. The passage from the bright blue of the sky to the gold/green stubbled landscape of rolling fields was bridged by a series of Brobdingnagian constructions in rust-orange Cor-Ten steel: groups of precisely measured arcs (233.5° out of 360°, 235°, and so on) nestled together like ribs in a dinosaur graveyard, looser coils of solid, four-inch-square steel stood on their sides, drawn like the doodle of an absent-minded giant across the crest of the hill, each of them towering over my head as I drew closer. Silently, and almost too poetically, a hawk reiterated the forms of the sculpture for me, gently circling slowly just overhead.

When I started this column (almost three years ago now—where has the time gone?!?), the editor wanted to know what I’d like to call it. Toying with a few ideas that didn’t go very far, I tried to figure out for myself what, exactly, art criticism is and what I’d be trying to accomplish in writing this monthly missive. Vague forms took shape in my mind, something about communicating between worlds…and then, suddenly, the term lucid dreaming popped up. Yes, I thought, that’s it! Dreaming, as in allowing a free chain of associations, right-brain creative thinking, made lucid, bringing a certain left-brain order and communicative logic to consider these apparitions, hopefully making it all a little less intimidating, and more inviting for the artworld “outsider”.

Well now I’ve discovered what is perhaps the most conducive environment in the Hudson Valley to contemplate that creative path between the known and the unknown, at The Fields sculpture park at Art Omi, near Ghent. The work described above is part of a temporary exhibition of work by French artist Bernar Venet (BEAR-nar ven-AY), who began in the 1960s as a conceptualist and who has since worked in just about any medium you can imagine. In the sculpture on view now at The Fields, he has managed to combine elements of the conceptual approach (such as embossing his Arcs with their precise degree measurements) with the organic substance of his materials, allowing the forging process itself to pull the steel coils of his Indeterminate Line series out of geometrically perfect alignment, ultimately creating an amazing sort of industrial/expressionist fusion.

The high point of the exhibition, literally and figuratively, is Venet’s 83° Diagonal Line, a towering shaft of Cor-Ten steel impaled in the Earth, but seven degrees shy of vertical. It’s amazing the chain of associations made possible by such a single grand sculptural gesture. It struck me as a cross between early 20th Century modern master Brancusi’s Endless Column (a modularized tower that, as its title implies, threatens to continue to all the way to heaven) and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One of the original Conceptualists, Piero Manzoni, once made a pedestal which he placed—upside down—on the ground, thereby making a sculpture of the entire planet. With that in mind, looking at the Venet prompted me to think about the boast of ancient Greek scientist Archimedes, “give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will lift the earth.” Venet’s geometric vocabulary transcends a potentially tight-lipped, Minimalist interpretation by opening itself conceptually to these sorts of references, bridging the gulf between abstraction and representation in the process.

Peter Franck and Kathleen Heike Triem, co-curators of The Fields, have organized another temporary installation that challenges the boundaries of what one considers “sculpture”, by inviting a number of artists and musicians to create Sound in the Landscape. Joshua Selman has dotted the walking paths of the park with Listening Points, abstract maps marking a sort of “you are here” and bits of language (“the process of listening invokes its own echo”), drawing the visitor’s attention to the abundance of sound even in an apparently “silent” walk through the woods. Brazilian sound artist Paulo Vivacqua’s Sound Field consists of long lines of plexiglass domes installed across a sloping meadow, each containing a tweeter/speaker matrix, generating musical sounds that need to be heard at close proximity. Where the notion of concrete poetry was an attempt to draw attention to the materiality of the word on the page, here something like the inverse is the case: the sound manifests itself in its immateriality, its fugitive nature bringing an entirely different sense of what terms like “space” or “dimension” or “sculpture” can mean. After pondering such deep abstractions, you can cleanse your mental palate with Matthew McCaslin’s Over the Rainbow, a sound collage of passages from The Wizard of Oz, played back at intervals alongside a poetically spooky swamp near the center of the park. After taking a few minutes to recognize what I was hearing, I looked out over the algae-festooned tree stumps poking through the surface of the swamp, half expecting to see flying monkeys coming my way.

The permanent collection on display at The Fields, some 30-odd works and counting, also presses the boundaries of contemporary sculpture (which can often be a pretty conservative field), with literally a new surprise around just about every corner. The walking paths loop through the park, connecting at a number of points to allow visitors to create their own itineraries through the fields and woods on the grounds. All it takes to access these “fields of dreams” is a sturdy pair of shoes, good weather, and a little imagination.

One of the major charms of life in the mid-Hudson Valley is the fact that it’s possible to have an international-class cultural experience one day, and find yourself appreciating the panoply of local art production the next. One new place to immerse yourself in “homegrown” painting, photography, pottery and related arts is the freshly-minted Main Street Gallery in Rosendale. September’s featured artist is Karen Schaffel, who creates collaged images that tread the divide between the abstract and the figurative. The contents of the ‘picture’ refuse to be contained by the frame, spilling out to incorporate the frame itself in the composition. Lately, she has emphasized the rich textures of her materials, especially fibrous, handmade Japanese paper in building her complexly layered collages, giving them a veiled, dreamlike effect. The scale is much more intimate, more personal than the work at Art Omi, but we all need to go “home” sometime…hopefully dreaming all the while.

> “Bernar Venet” and “Sound in the Landscape” through October 31 at The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi International Arts Center, 59 Letter S Road, Ghent. (518) 392-7656 or www.artomi.org/fieldsoverview.htm.

> “Karen Schaffel” opening August 31, 5-7pm, through September 22 at Main Street Gallery, 325 Main Street, Rosendale. 658-9113.