(090904) Friday night jazz concert. Includes running into Mara Mayor and her granddaughter.
(091021) They're preparing for both the ice skating rink and a new outdoor sculpture.
(091108) Graft by Roxy Paine.
At the National Gallery, art that goes out on a limb
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009
The problem with most sculpture gardens is that they're more "garden" than "sculpture." They risk making the major works of art they contain come off as fancy yard ornaments. Art shown inside museums doesn't run that risk.
Roxy Paine, a 43-year-old New Yorker who grew up in McLean, is a rare sculptor who has got the problem beat. In a few days, Washingtonians will get access to a major new commission he's just finished in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. It belongs outside, in a yard. It's a full-size tree, 45 feet high by about the same around, leafless and formed entirely of polished stainless steel -- something like 16,000 pounds of it, welded together on site from 37 different components that came in on three trailers.
Set against the live trees already in the garden, Paine's piece has the strangest effect: It's grander and more impressive than them, but also so much deader. The trees, in a sense, critique the human artifice -- "That's the best you can do?"
But the art also seems to flatter trees we might otherwise ignore -- "I wish I could be live like you," says the stainless version.
Paine's new piece is part of a series he began in 1998 that he calls "Dendroids." (He's got two other major series he works on: "Replicants," which includes one owned by the Hirshhorn, features perfect plastic versions of wild-mushroom fields; Paine also makes robotic artmaking machines, such as the automated paintingmaker shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art a few years back.)
When a bunch of Paine's "Dendroids" went up in New York's Madison Square Park for several months in 1997, they were spellbinding, ...More...
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