One rainy evening during rush hour, on day Christine Blasey Ford testified about being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh, a large oak tree fell in a ravine near our house. The trunk struck a bridge, and the branches struck two cars. There were no injuries. By morning, the road and sidewalk were clear. The bare trunk rested in the gap it had made in the massive limestone block. The scene was festooned with emergency tape.
Most of the tape was gone by February 2019.
In April, six months to the day of its toppling, the tree was removed.
The fragments of limestone remained.
In September, the smaller fragment of the limestone block was thrown from the bridge to the ground below.
A year later, the larger fragment remains where the tree put it. The peak seems to be the point of impact.
I have considered this situation as I walk, ride or drive by it nearly every day, for a year. What it is. How it comes to be. What or who acts upon it, or doesn’t. The materials, the form, the composition. The engagement with it in passing, in stillness, from above and from below. The energy embodied, the inertia. The natural, the manmade. The institutional and community and political implications. The difference between thinking and looking and acting (though I’d intended to do it for months, I only got photos from under the bridge at the last possible moment, when I happened to pass by just as the crane rolled up.)
I thought of Giuseppe Penone and Barry Le Va; Richard Serra in Pasadena; Chris Burden; of Christopher Wool and Robert Gober; of Charles Raying that tree or Vija Celminsing those blocks. Obviously, I thought of declaring it a work, but when? And for what? (I think about that one a lot, obv.)
I’ve been thinking of sudden disasters and emergency responses, then marveling and acclimation, assumptions and deadlines and invisible machinations, and mobilization, and indifference and vandalism and normalization and acquiescence and prioritization, and weathering and patination and aestheticization and rationalization.
And it is only as I have pulled this together, and thinking through and articulating what has (and has not) happened that I determined the medium of this work is time.