Has 3000 pounds of alabaster ever been mistaken for gossamer? Ever, anywhere? In Des Moines, Iowa, in the final month of 2011, it might just happen. The vision was made manifest by Jaume Plensa, and here’s one man’s rough video, which I couldn’t get to stand upright:
Plensa calls the piece Alexandra. The artist is Catalan, born in Barcelona in 1955, and other memorable work of his broods over the campus of MIT, and elsewhere. Des Moines in fact has a second Plensa, Nomade, rather well-known, a peaceable giant made of letters and crowning a downtown park:
months every year be too much to ask from such an Ariel? Seen one way, she’s a willowy thing of barely two dimensions; seen another, she’s a ponderous block of three. Surely she can manage more than one abode.
John Domini is the author of Bedlam, Highway Trade, Talking Heads: 77, Earthquake I.D., A Tomb on the Periphery, The Sea-God's Herb, Movieola!, and The Color Inside a Melon. Domini has won awards in all genres, publishing fiction in The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere; and journalism and criticism in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere (including Italian journals). He live in Des Moines, Iowa.
Oh, I love Plensa’s contemplative sculptures. I was first introduced to his work when I chanced upon Echo, one of his epic heads, in Madison Park in NYC this past summer: http://www.madisonsquarepark.org/things-to-do/calendar/jaume-plensa-in-madison-square-park
John, thanks. The guy has given our landscapes some uplift, hasn’t he?
Also, I’d be interested to know if that video works, if it conveys a decent sense of the piece, despite its uncorrectable sideways-ness.
Well, the footage is a bit disorienting, which might contradict the feeling that Plensa might want viewers to have, but that might be a good thing.
Disorienting, whew. Imagine how I felt trying to *post* the thing!