One Ghastly Sculpture?
As soon as the new sculptural group at the Clay Center was unveiled last summer I hopped into my car and went downtown to take a look. Having been dumbfounded often enough at what passes for sculpture in the city (please check out the sculpture deck at the Department of Culture and History building), I wasn’t very sanguine. It seems really good sculpture is almost impossible to obtain — witness the 11-year-struggle to complete the Veteran’s Memorial on the Capitol campus. Meanwhile, the crappy stuff is fairly easy.
Finding a site, though, is another matter. But site difficulties can be overturned if a person has an obvious “in.” For example, a worthy cause. Or deep pockets. Take firefighters: who can argue that firefighters are heroic? Surely they deserve better than the horrific memorial they got at the W.Va. Department of Culture and History, which is laughably incompetent. Of all its inadequacies, the first is that it is life scale, not heroic scale.
So there I went to the Clay Center. The hoopla of the dedication the day before was all over. There, poking our eyes out on the corner was a weird grouping of children in Renaissance Era dress, dancing around a purported tree to the distant music of childhood. So far, so good. Ya t’ink?
I admit to being perplexed. All I could wonder is: What in the hell is a memorial to the Black Death doing on a corner of Charleston, West Virginia? Doesn’t it belong at some debarkation point memorializing the tragic episode of the Children’s Crusade in Medieval Europe? Because that’s no tree, that’s a ghastly rose, rising stiff, thorny, and unyielding as any of the scentless wonders sold by florists these days. Pre-dedication publicity made much of the “tree” and that excited my interest. I believe I’ve only seen one sculptural tree done well, and it’s on the campus of Vanderbilt University.
You remember the rhyme, dating deep into the plague era of the Medieval period: “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy / Ashes, Ashes, we all fall dead.” As a nursery rhyme, it occasioned much hilarity as little kids fell over in giggly heaps, or at least it did when I was a child. I hear today that in many playgrounds it’s a forbidden game, as some kind of black magical mantra. Now, we have it memorialized at the Clay Center. That’s a hoot. (NOT-SO-FUN FACTS: The “ring around the rosy” was the livid color of the skin surrounding the buboes (swollen lymph glands), while the “pocket full of posy” were herbs carried in vain attempts to avoid the contagion of the bubonic plague, most active in Europe in the 14th century. It coincided with the Crusades and the Renaissance.)
In a way, the dark subtext of the sculpture echoes the dark horror of childhood: being always at the mercy of others, of bigger, often unseen monsters of reality and imagination. Maurice Sendak knows this all too well.
As the natural trees grow up around the site of this sculpture (if they are allowed), they will create a glade about the group, which can only make the site and sculpture more intriguing. Right now, it’s terrible.
— By Jane Claymore
June 4th, 2006 at 9:50 am
This is an interesting intepretation for the sculpture. When I first saw the sculpture, I thought, what better sculpture to be placed before the Clay Center? What better represents the purpose of the Clay Center than an image representing a form of European “high art”; that purpose being, in my opinion, to enlighten the uneducated West Virginians with non-native “high art”? What West Virginia needs is more institutions committed to preserving West Virginia’s native culture, not institutions committed to diluting that culture by imposing “high art” on the alleged “uneducated” masses. I’ll take the Vandalia Gathering over La Commedia any day.