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Tram service has recently been added at Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park located on 500 acres in New York's Hudson Valley, and it's a boon to patrons who happen to be visiting during a midsummer heat wave.
Many of the monumental pieces on display profit from observation afforded by the tram—from afar, from multiple vantage points. At 200 yards, the wit of
Menashe Kadishman's Suspended is still legible.
The works are pedestaled by a managed and shaped landscape. Fields of native wildflowers are being encouraged at the same time that maples are being grown in rows, in order to provide a natural canopy 25 years hence.
But the quietly powerful Storm King Wall by Andy Goldsworthy, has to be experienced on foot. Nearly 3000 feet long, the dry-fitted stone wall consists of two sections, separated by a pond. The eastern section seems to rise from the pond, and then climbs gradually uphill through a maple-oak-beech wood like a stony inchworm, before tumbling into the brow of a hill.
The western section for its part marches up through a mowed pasture, crests a ridge (which offers a fine view of the Art Center property and some of the pieces near the visitors' center),
and descends to meet the New York State Thruway.
The context for this piece of land art is the small and the ordinary elements of a hot summer day: grasshoppers and Monarchs fly; an annual cicada sings; phoebes and bluebirds hawk for dragonflies; a woodchuck scurries away; a cormorant drowses on the pond. The wall provides a little shade from the blazing sun.
Up close, the wall reveals some of its secrets: an opening in its base where the wall spans a gully, so that water can drain through; stones that jut out from the relatively even surface of the side of the wall. One stone on the top course has acquired a mat of moss.
posted:
5:29:09 PM
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