File Note 33: Anya Gallaccio

Through the imposition of a few simple rules, Gallaccio structures things into a tightly regulated arrangement. The effect of this is a serialism, which recalls the language of minimalist art — an interesting but improbable allusion, given the idiosyncrasy of her strategy, which is distinct from less wayward artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre. The relationship of her work to theirs is all the more resonant for that dissonance.

The rules governing that open space within required that the crown of the tree be separated from its trunk, then the crown be cut into modular components of predetermined length, and transported to the museum — a certain kind of open space within. Steel pins were to be driven at regular intervals into the tree-sections, and climbing ropes threaded through the pins, to return it to its former glory, whole again and upright.

But the conspicuousness of the illusion betrays itself. It’s barely a tree, more of a fragment, of barely held together fragments. Its fragility bears witness to the violence done to it, and to a vulnerability beyond itself. Other losses come to mind. While its support system of steel and rope may compensate for the tree’s structural deficit, that armature can also be read as the instrument of its own downfall.

Perhaps because they can grow so much bigger and live so much longer than us, trees and wisdom are close to each other. The tree of knowledge was a tree, because the incredible intricacy and logic of a tree’s branching patterns were noticed and admired. The taxonomies scientists create, to journey beneath the surface of the world, could not have come into existence without the special shape of trees, on which they are modeled.

Almost anything — animate objects, inanimate objects, places, concepts, events, properties, and relationships — may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme.

Perhaps it’s little wonder then that trees are themselves so hard to classify. Trees are a microcosm of almost anything, except themselves.

At the final stage of her working method, Gallaccio forces a transformation on the primary material, by applying to its arrangement a secondary material, procedure or force. Fire, oxygen, yeast, salt, sunlight, seawater and the processes of distillation and casting are just some of the catalysts Gallaccio has previously employed to accelerate, subvert or apprehend the course of time.

Gravity and pressure from the rope-tension are the main transformative forces operating on that open space within. Between them, they threaten to compromise the structural integrity of the tree — a structure whose integrity has already been compromised by the rules systematically imposed upon it. The tree was cut down and cut up, then reconstructed, and is in decline again. This process parallels and extends an earlier phase in the tree’s history, when year by year, the tree would die back, come back and die back again, in a kind of death-after-life-after-death knot.

The tension between physical and psychic states is an organising principle behind much of Gallaccio’s work. In this respect, that open space within is no different from anything else she has made. The title seems to hint that the tree and the museum space it inhabits may correspond more closely with the worlds of thinking and feeling, than with any surface reality out there.

Trees can change their appearance, spectacularly and slowly, from season to season. They are things to paint or carve. When turned into paper and charcoal, a tree provides us with the means to reproduce it. that open space within contributes to and may comment on the tradition of  trees and reflexivity in art.

People like and value trees, but understand them as something other than benign. No one wants to shelter under a tree in a storm or get lost in a forest at night. A solitary tree, like the one in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, makes for a desolate scene. The leaflessness of that open space within may be understood as dormancy, or decline, or an imitation, if not of death, then of our anticipation of that condition.

Perhaps the biggest difference, between a cut-flower sculpture and a cut-tree sculpture, is the rate of transition. The tree could disintegrate soon or suddenly or slowly or way off in the future; the onset and duration of the flower’s transmogrification is less variable. Time is experienced differently in each case, but both call to our attention the uses of adversity.

Exhilaration may be felt at the recognition that the physical disintegration of the work is an ongoing one, the inevitability of its loss being an integral part of the sculpture’s poignancy and elegance. With the prospect of its physical annihilation increasingly felt, as its material end becomes reality, the sculpture turns into something truly real in our imagination — whole again, open and final.