are there acorns in the narrative forest?

September 21, 2002

Steel and light. Mysterious by night. Everything is illuminated. By day uncompromising and gray. Uncompromising? Isn't that kind of what you want in a hurricane barrier? Art is supposed to make you look at things in a new way. Sometimes, though, what it needs to do is make you look at things in an old way. Or at least see things for what they are, not for what we may wish them to be.

After experiencing the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier as a light sculpture I appreciate it much more as a hurricane barrier, as a 1960's public works project, as a big wall with enormous gates in it and a brick building full of huge pumps. But not as art. Not an eyesore, but not art.

I sit on a granite bench under an oak tree on South Main Street. Acorns fall all around me. Falling acorns. Oddly, I know how to say that in Hungarian. Hullo makkok. When I scrawled that on a fax to Zsolt, he was puzzled. It wasn't the right season. Too early for falling acorns. I meant they were falling in the herbarium, not the forest. It's the right season now and acorns are falling on South Main Street. One comes close to hitting me on the head. I dodge out of the way and a bunch of artists laugh. I sit there until one does hit me, on the leg. Experience of acorns complete.

"A screever's an artist of highest degree" -- Bert in Mary Poppins

Wind whips down South Main Street making little eddies of colored chalk dust. The street is full of artists wearing a FAQ on their backs chalking away. Dragons, fantasy images, blue skies with white clouds, peace doves with olive branches, a bald eagle who looks like a muppet, a spaceship full of aliens headed straight for a giant ice cream cone... Is it art? Is it Carmen? No wait, no Carmen this time.

They're taking the robot spiders out of the river when we finally get ourselves there. Small boys - and one girl (you go, girl-geek ) - dressed in miniature white lab coats with Dance of the Waterspiders emblazoned on the back clutch radio transmitters as they stand on the edge of the river in front of RISD. They guide the robot spiders carefully toward a winch that lifts them out of the water. One particularly small kid dashes around with a walkie-talkie radioing other kids which spider is to come out next. Apparently these spiders are pretty heavy and unwieldy on land because it takes two grownups to carry each one back to the Ryder rental truck that will take them bakc to the geek clubhouse or wherever the Cyberarts club meets. It occurs to me that somebody should take DNA samples of these kids to test for that mythical geek gene.

As we walk along the Riverwalk we encounter poems on metal plates mounted on wooden pedestals that look like stylized short stumpy trees. This must be the installation called Narrative Forest. I recognize a sonnet by Willis Barnstone. Wait, all these poets are named Barnstone. So is the artist, Robert Barnstone. It starts getting dark and it gets harder to read the poems, but we keep an eye out for the stumpy things as we walk around Providence after dinner. I like the idea of a forest that grows poetry.

Waterfire proves far more compelling than Steel and Light. Maybe they should extend Waterfire downriver to the hurricane barrier.

Are there acorns in the narrative forest?

Today's Reading
Birds of Siberia by Henry Seebohm

This Year's Reading
2002 Book List