DIANE COX
Counterclockwise is kinetic: an eight-foot wheel like a windmill turns slowly at the end of a treadmill-like fan belt moving at an infinitely slow speed, like Butoh dancers. Each of the windmill’s four spokes is lined with a row of blackened feathers, which look real because they are: they’re turkey feathers dipped in beeswax with an overlay of graphite. The resulting dull metallic sheen makes them resemble bronze, as if they were commemorating something.
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In fact, the piece starkly condemns the gulf war and its grimy oil spills, which blacken the environment as they have tarred so many feathers. The work’s slow, repetitive mechanical drone is like the barrage of 24-hour news reports and constant images of the war. Even when you turn to contemplate the sleek Zen-like lines of Below, you can still hear the squeaky sound of the engine in Counterclockwise in its never-ending circular motion. In a way, this piece is as ironic, romantic, and hollow as the foolish knight tilting at windmills in Cervantes’s novel. But Don Quixote was fighting imaginary monsters with a real sword, while in Cox’s sculpture the monsters are real and our weapons against them are ineffectual: no matter how hard and how often artwork may cry for peace, it can’t create it. The work’s dead-end path runs counter not only to the ecological order but to life itself. All that’s left after its deadly passage are the charred feathers, which resemble skeletal remains still eerily creaking. The gulf war comes to mind most readily, but the piece could be protesting any environmental catastrophe.
What seems real here, no matter how convincing, isn’t. The rocks–held in surreal suspension by fishing line strung through them and attaching them to the trees–are only amazingly realistic imitations. Like faux marble, they’re painted styrofoam. Contemplative reality is just as surreal: the eight suspended trees may be symbolic of infinity, and some extra space in the middle of the row is like a doorway into it. The stark, bare-bones whiteness of the trees–each like a long white branch–creates its own layered reality. It’s a rare sculpture that, like a dance, can alter your plane of perception, so that you view it on a multitude of levels simultaneously. From that heightened or lowered level, it’s an easy step into meditation.
