DryStoneGarden

This is an aside from my posts about my Europe cycling trip. I’ve read a few books on Nash and I liked his totems at Kloster Schoenthal, but I haven’t visited Ash Dome and am unlikely to ever do so (it’s location is secret and apparently it’s dying of ash dieback). I only know about it from videos and photos on the internet, but I think it’s great and an interesting contrast to the Tree Museum. The Tree Museum is about the ability to transplant and display mature trees; Ash Dome is about the patience to train trees as they grow in situ. In any case, Ash Dome is a terrific project, and when I recently mentioned it to an arborist and a landscape architect, neither one had heard of it even though they seem like the exact target audiences for it. So… Ash Dome.

David Nash – Ash Dome from Culture Colony on Vimeo.

All three videos are worth watching for anyone interested in trees or sculpture from trees. The first two focus on Ash Dome, the third is more generally about how Nash describes his working process, compiling clips from a longer video about an artist residency he did at a college in North Carolina. He’s an oddly compelling talker. His idea of art as stiff and constipated or loose like diarrhea is not one I’ll forget any time soon.

A few days before the Tree Museum, I went to Kloster Schoenthal in Langenbruck, Switzerland, another fantastic sculpture park. It’s a couple hours from Basel by bicycle in the foothills of the Jura Alps at a monastery that dates back to 1145. The land is part of a private farm, and the home of a collection of sculpture and land art. I didn’t love any particular sculpture, but I liked most of them, and I loved the setting. It’s a lot of fun to wander around and see the different sculptures and the church building and the landscape. Switzerland has an amazing combination of rustic charm and sophistication, and Langenbruck is one of the best places to see that. (more…)

Happy new year. I’m still posting things from my bike trip from Amsterdam to Bologna last summer. This is another garden, but quite different from the others. It’s branded as a Tree Museum, which is a great concept, but I’d describe it as a sculpture garden, with the trees as the sculpture. Maybe those are not mutually exclusive terms; it certainly has the rarefied air of a museum. The creator is a Swiss landscape architect/nurseryman who specializes in moving large trees. Over the years he built up a collection of trees and at some point he decided to create a garden to display them. I love the way the walls are used to frame the trees.

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Nobuo Sekine Interview: Sensibility of a Rock from Louisiana Channel on Vimeo.

‘One day, as one large rock that was on the ground was being lifted into the air — at that exact moment — I had an epiphany that this action had changed the meaning of its existence’ Nabuo Sekine

Japanese Sculptor Nobuo Sekine passed away a few days ago. He was one of the originators of Mono-Ha, a conceptual art movement from the late sixties that I find interesting but elusive, I’m hesitant to even try to describe it, other than to say that a lot of it has roots in the Japanese rock garden tradition. There are other influences at play as well, but I recognize elements of both the rock garden philosophy and craft, and kindred ideas about materials and context and spatial relationships. A lot of Sekine’s works use found objects, frequently those found objects are stones, and, as can be seen in this video, a lot of his work seem to have its origin in the artist standing and staring at a stone and meditating on how to transform it into a work of art.

After Brion I visited Castelvecchio Museum, one of Carlo Scarpa’s other masterpieces, a beautiful restoration of a 14th century castle. Scarpa did a masterful job of revealing the historic architecture while adapting it to its new use as a museum. Like Brion, it’s been written about a great deal; Carlo Scarpa/Museum of Castelvecchio is one example that can be read online. I loved the building, but I was also fascinated by how he displayed the stone sculptures in the museum. I don’t usually pay a great deal of attention to this kind of figurative and religious statuary, but some of the ones at Castelvecchio are particularly expressive and Scarpa did a terrific job of displaying them. Almost every one has some touch from Scarpa to make the piece better. This statue of Jesus is a brilliant composition, immeasurably better because of the window. It’s lit like a Vermeer.

It might be the most anguished single stone I’ve ever seen. Apparently it was originally placed at the entrance to a leprosy hospital, the idea being to remind everyone that no matter how much the people with leprosy might suffer, Jesus suffered more.

Displayed across from the Jesus statue, Scarpa placed a statue of Mary collapsing as she witnesses her son’s suffering. The chiaroscuro lighting, emphasizing her face dropping into shadow and the crumpling S curve of her body, is straight from a Renaissance painting. (more…)

The other thing, along with drawing, that saved Venice for me was going to the Biennale. I hadn’t planned on going, but it was out of the heat and away from the main tourist hordes and in the end I liked it a lot.

I found a lot of the pavilions interesting. Maybe the best was the German exhibition about the Berlin Wall, with a couple of perspective games — isolated panels that from a certain vantage point appeared to be a continuos wall, and a mirror trick that made the wall appear infinite — and genuinely interesting info about the wall’s past and present. I gave it my highest rating, a full Hasselhoff.

But my favorite was the Mexico exhibition: architectural models fabricated in stone and mounted as wall panels. Maybe I’m the exact target audience. Afterwards I found it was completely absent from all of the ‘best of the biennale’ listicles; maybe it’s not flashy enough, there’s a lot of gray and a lot of the same stone. But I think it’s a great series; there’s a nice range of scales, a varying degree of abstraction, and the fabricators used a few different techniques to make the models.

Another half dozen are below. (more…)