"Private" Art

Interesting to see that some of you are also bridge admirers, especially about that folding/curling bridge I posted yesterday. My sister Susan wrote to me about it:

... it's mesmerizing: a mechanized ballet, or a cirque du soleil maneuver. Or maybe the world's slowest abdominal crunch. Dunno, but it's quite wonderful.

I agree.

I thought the music that played while the bridge operates was overdone, but it is interesting to see a purely mechanical event--- a routine bridge opening--- treated as a performance. Bridges really can be art.

And you know what I like best about the curling bridge? It's the image of the bridge rolling out in that slow dramatic unfolding with the music playing, even when no one's there. Truly ars artis gratia; art for art's sake.

There's something in the same vein near my house. It's nothing that elaborate, and it's not even a bridge.

It's a roughly sculptured stone standing in the forest along a foot trail, maybe a 20 minute walk from the nearest highway if you knew exactly where to go and walked there directly and speedily.

"Sculptured" is probably too fine a word to suggest the stone's appearance. "Hewn" might be better. Something more than merely "shaped," but not at all smoothed or "finished."

It looks like a monolith. It stands maybe 10 feet (3m) high, a gray granite slab whose base is buried in the earth. It has no sign, no signature, no explanation.

But it's clearly artificial; crafted and placed with great deliberation in that specific spot. It couldn't have been easy. The rock weighs tons, and required a large hole to be dug to erect it vertically. Plus, shaping/hewing/crafting a chunk of rock that large involved no small amount of work in itself.

I had passed the rock many times, registering it as a man-made artifact: A large, curious stone placed at what seems to be a more or less random spot deep in the local forest.

One day, I walked the woods in a different pattern and approached the rock from a different direction. From one specific distance, and from one and only one perspective (which is not along the axis of the trail) the rock changes and you see that it's actually roughly hewn in the shape of New Hampshire.

There's a wonderful Aha! moment when it clicks into perspective. From that moment, you can never see it as a monolith again: from any angle, you'll see it as a 3d physical representation of New Hampshire. Think about it some more, and you'll realize it's also a sculptural pun: the Granite State.

I have no clue who put it there, or why, or whose effort it represents.

It's not great art: Put that same monolith in a public park, and you wouldn't give it a second glance. Put it in a museum, and you might read the explanatory note on the wall to try to understand the significance of the piece, because in that setting, the innate significance would be lost.

What makes the rock special is that it's someone's private art: Art done for its own sake, and for no other reason. Few people will ever see the rock; fewer still will stumble across the one perspective that makes its real meaning evident; yet fewer still will grok the underlying pun.

How could the artist ever know who, if anyone, would understand or appreciate what he'd (or she'd) done? But s/he did it anyway. Art for art's sake.

Now close your eyes and picture in your mind's eye that bridge from yesterday's post, performing its balletic curling and uncurling with unnecessary grace even when no one's there to see. Art for art's sake.

And now, the bridge is dismantled and gone. Except it's in your memory now, and mine. It's no longer a thing, but the mere idea of a thing.

Let the bridge slowly roll and unroll in your mind. The bridge is gone, but the art is still there, alive in a way that steel and hydraulics never could be.

That's ars atis gratia.

You gotta love it.