Tag Archives: Terry Allen

art, landscape, places

keeping your dead tree healthy

15 Comments

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.

art

talking trees

4 Comments

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.

treesingingLeft: 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.

treetalkingfrombelowRight: 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…).

treemutebarkLeft: 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.

treemuteLeft: 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.