May 7, 2009

TREES ON THE SKYLINE


This view makes you wonder why maybe about three years ago you said that you might leave New York and yet, you are still here. It’s the awesome metal tree sculpture that Roxy Paine has installed on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum. It will be there until October. Just bringing the whole thing up there must have been a nightmare: those trees are made out of 10,000 different pieces welded together. It's worth the effort: now the view is spiced up with a dream-like forest of metal branches that seem to be whispering strange words to New York.

(picture by Michael Berens)

Those trees, lying on the floor, throwing themselves towards the sky, give the visitor a mixed-feeling: you could be entering a scene of Blade Runner (if there were any day scenes in that movie) or you might just be walking through what the artist himself called “a tree in the process of becoming abstract; that is stretching, expanding and contracting, breaking apart and coalescing again or a metaphor for a mental storm, such as occurs during an epileptic seizure”. These sculptures are made with the same kind of tubes that the petrochemical industry uses: I like to think that something that was born to transport dirty and poisoning material can transform itself into this beautiful piece of art.

2 comments: