Charon

Charon, by Peter Hudson, was my favorite piece of art in Black Rock City this year, and one of my favorite pieces of art in general. As I was saying in the other art post, it's hard to make great art, and it's hard to make participatory art, but the real trick is to make great, participatory art that also creates a community. The Temple is beautiful as it stands (especially this year!) but the folks who add their memories to its walls make it so much more beautiful--that's collaborative, participatory art!

On the other hand, the Man--it's stupendous, and it's beautiful and it's spectacular and meaningful... but for the vast majority of people, it's a thing you sit and watch. You can climb on it before the Burn, but when you do you aren't really adding to the piece in a meaningful way.

Or this other installation that I saw: a series of metal objects suspended from a rack--pots, pans, bells, gongs, and half of a fire extinguisher. Drum sticks were also hanging from the rack, and folks could create a little percussive concert in the desert! It was nice, but most of the time it was just some metal hanging from a rack. When I hit it, it was just a guy hitting some metal on a rack. It required a really talented participant to make it something special, at which point for the rest of us it became another non-participatory experience--a concert.

But this piece I liked so much, Charon, was both aesthetically and philosophically beautiful, and it became more so with the participation of the crowd. It was a humongous wheel with several near-identical sculptures mounted around the inside. The sculptures depicted a life-sized skeleton, poling his boat: Charon. Each skeleton was minutely different, however, and when the thing was in full swing it the entire wheel would spin, a strobe light would flash, and the skeleton would pull his oar and turn his head to look at you. In short, it was an enormous stroboscopic zoetrope.

When the strobe flashed and the wheel spun at the correct speed, instead of appearing to be several separate sculptures it looked like one moving skeleton--exactly the same effect as with film at a movie theater. The big difference, though, was that the images in movie theaters are all two dimensional and far away, whereas Charon was clearly three dimensional and right in front of me! Seeing this  inanimate-but-moving skeleton turn to look at me was a delightful feeling.

If that had been the sum of the piece--a 3D zoetrope, perhaps powered by an electric motor--then I would have been impressed. But the artist made a series of choices in how to power the piece that elevated it into something much cooler. For one thing, the entire wheel was human powered. There were eight ropes connected to four devices (turbines, I guess?) that converted force pulling the ropes into force turning the wheel. It was pretty difficult to get moving, too--whether the artist deliberately made it challenging, or whether it simply required a lot of work to move that wheel, I'm not sure. But even with eight people on the ropes it was a challenge.

It came to life in stages, too. As I first started pulling at the ropes, it began to rotate. Then, as it got faster and faster, a lurid red light turned on to illuminate the sculpture. Then a bell rang, to announce that it was almost (finally) at optimal speed. And, at last, the strobe light switched on and the full animation effect was in place! This whole thing added drama to the procedure, and made the event feel like a real accomplishment. Even when I wasn't one of the people pulling the ropes, it still felt like I'd really been a part of something when that bell began to ring!

The final part of the sculpture that I adored was the fact that the most efficient way to turn the wheel was with steady, pulling of the rope, maintaining constant tension (and whether this was a mechanical necessity because of the way the motor worked, or an artistic decision, or both I also couldn't say). So when I first got up there, I grabbed a rope and really put my back into it, heaving for all I was worth. Not much happened until someone told me that I needed to make sure that the person on the other end of the rope was keeping up with me. This added a whole new dimension to the piece--not only did you have to physically work to get it to move, but you had to coördinate this work with a stranger, twenty feet away in the dark! Before long it was as if I were talking to my partner through the rope, feeling the tension as they pulled, and the slack and they released. Eventually the crowd understood what was going on, and switched from simply yelling encouragement to singing sea shanties to help us time our efforts! So it wasn't just a bunch of people making a wheel turn, it was a full community effort!

Now that, that is good art!