Goldberg

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for that Goldberg link:
[URL now obsolete]
 Cold Springs Mall; Cold Springs Granite Company.
Obviously the format suggest the buried hands are also
Mr. Goldberg's work, but it doesn't look like at all the
same enviroment as the downtown mall.  If that is Mr.
Goldbergs work it makes a very good impression on me.
The suggestion of the buried person wiggling her fingers
in the sunshine is very nutritious and satisfying as
picture filling out from a detail always is.  Art is
suggestion as someone recently said.  Of course funny as
well, in this case.  But the ringer is that the fingers
themselves are only suggested by lathed forms which
obiously have a platonic identiy altogether seperate from
flesh and blood so that the audience enjoys the leap from
objectiviy to subjective idenity, from turned forms to
animate spirit.  That it is stone provides the method of
prodcution where lathing is common.  Though one could
lathe a wax model for a bronze it would be rather
non-sensical.

The scultpure also work on the level of information
supplied by the sculpture as a whole which crunches nicely
with the information supplied by the seperate monoliths.
Idenity information is not oversupplied leaving a very
nimble metaphoric maneuver.  One monolith does not a hand
make or even a finger.  Two monoliths still not
recognizable as fingers.  Five monoliths and yes we have a
hand.  Two get the whole person with personality and full
animate vivacity we need all ten figures.  He supplies
only what is necessary.  The is  not extra wieght of
repetition or pedagodgery.   Had he gone into detail
development such as cuticles and knuckle wrinlkes the
lightness of the transforming metaphor as well as the
dignity of the individual liths would have been hidden in
the thicket of identifying infromation.  When one makes an
artistic suggestion one must have confidence in the powers
of the audiences imagination, as well as one's own.   To
trudge out fact after fact to prove the actuality of the
metaphor one actually is creating doubt.  If the stones
are covered with finger prints and skin grain the rigors
ot the testimony only create the mood of a trial being
prosecuted and doubt mounts.  As the details of the
metaphor flower with complicated alibi, the prosecution
possesses a single undebatible fact which gains in its
devestating power: ''Your Honor, though the defendent
claims to be of flesh and blood, we can prove beyond all
doubt the defendant is, in fact, stone".  So better to
keep the suggestion light and information minimal, which
Mr. Goldberg does.   I probably need an editor here and I
haven't said a fraction of what might be said about this
wonderful work.  Though it works as metaphor the elements
stand alone as literal entities.

The boulders on the terrace are cunning and smart.  The
contrast between the hard edge checkered terrace and the
textured body of the boulder really pops.  The space snaps
with the contrast of material components creating a
poetics of substance versus optics.  Thre real time
boulders seem to be occupiing virtual space.  The
dissonance creates a vibrating portal of perception into
the ideas of space and place and what it is to be a part
of the world.  A map of the world built of suggestion with
plenty of blankness and unknown to be lost amidst.  One
wanders in a desert of a grid to come upon a boulder
crashing through like a meteor through empy space