Each morning at exactly 8:30am, I stroll underneath Jean Dubuffet's sculpture Group of Four Trees at the Chase Plaza on Wall Street. During the first week of this daily work commute, I was mildly amused by the sculpture and it's absurdly stark contrast to the surrounding hyper-vertical building elements. But over time, I have found more than general amusement, rather a kind of preoccupation with the changes in the space as the season progresses. Light finds it's way through the sculpture in a slightly different way each day--a nuance that is a kind of reward for routine. I have been speculating what the space might be like in snow. And then in spring. And then again in the summer. At the unveiling of the sculpture, commissioned by David Rockefeller in 1972, Dubuffet expressed pleasure at the location of his sculpture. He explained, "I do not believe that these four trees, which I hope will not be taken as representations of real trees, but as semblances of the thrust and fertility of human thought, bear contradiction in any way to the site upon which they now stand.... They give an impression of feverish intoxication. But they seem to me, by this same febrility, to manifest the ardent source of the enormous intellectual machinery of which this plaza is the core".
There is certainly no shame, however, in a sculpture that may represent more abstract ephemerality of a literal inspiration. Especially in a context where the mind has to concoct and interpret a natural world that seems so far away.
2 comments:
Okay, yes, this is exactly the sculpture that I was thinking you meant.
I remember seeing this from across the street and being overwhelmed by the intense impulse to walk underneath it.
So I did. Several times.
I (heart) that space. Glad you've had the experience of walking under it. I'm gonna miss it from my morning commute.
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