online: 13 june 2005
modified: link to photograph 18 june 2005

12 june 2005 not a table and chair


19:46 the gigantic sculpture of a table and chair has arrived on the heath. I thought it was going to be installed on the top of Parliament Hill and would be too dominant. But now that i see it in its place, below the hill, visible from above as well as from below, i like it. It is the colour of chocolate.

There are already 10-20 people congregating between the chair and table legs and from a distance these people look like toys. This vastly enlarged furniture (the table top is about the height of 5 people) seems to distort my judgement of size and distance - as if, being furniture, so familiar and known, it imposes its own scale and forces the people to appear as midgets and the surrounding trees to look like toys also. I guess it interferes with the 'a priori' perception of space and distance which Immanuel Kant saw as part of mind, not nature. I go now to see it close to.

As i approached, the people standing and sitting beneath it continued to look unnaturally small until i got so close that i too was almost beneath it - a gigantic chair above all of us, about the size of a large tree. But when i tap a leg i hear a hollow sound and suppose it is made of thin panels of reconstituted wood and i wish it were of metal or something more durable.



Later... There is an unfenced field of tall grass before me... as i gaze at and into it (the purpleish seeds and the yellow-green stalks) i realise that it is more astonishing than any artifact i can think of. The grasses are so similar and yet so various, each one is different while being so evidently of one species. Is it any wonder we come to such places in which to seek rest from the mechanical sameness, and the crudeness, of the things we manufacture and surround ourselves with, most of the time? Has anyone ever made a sculpture of a blade of grass?

But soon, i believe, digitally composed objects could become as various as living things.






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