Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Tumblr

Eden 2.0: Alexi Antoniadis at Fruitlands Museum

0

A panorama opens as you approach the crest of Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts. The vastness in graduated shades of distant blues and greens, immediately loosens one’s hold on time and space. A 180-degree view encompasses noteworthy peaks, from left to right, Wachusetts, Watatic, Monadnock, Pack Monadnock, North Pack Monadnock, and Uncanoonuc. Reciting aloud, the indigenous dialect becomes a timeless incantation, a chorus in common with other wayfarers. I am a traveller on the road to Fruitlands, the self-named nineteenth-century Utopian endeavor of Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane.

The Fruitlands Farmhouse, home to the Alcott family, Charles Lane, and members of the experimental utopian community in 1843. Courtesy of Cathleen Daley.

The Fruitlands homestead is preserved within a 450-acre museum complex of historical houses. The museum is the life work of Clara Endicott Sears, who opened the site to the public in 1912. This year, in commemoration of the 175th anniversary of Alcott and Lane’s Utopian Commune, the Fruitlands Museum commissioned Boston artist Alexi Antoniadis to create a site-specific outdoor sculpture responding to the transcendental experiment of 1843.

Antoniadis’s Eden 2.0 is installed in a grassy meadow laced with clover, buttercups, bluets, wild geranium, creeping vetch, and ever-ubiquitous poison ivy. The polychromatic sculpture of polyurethane paint on steel is both architectural and lyrical, hovering above the field like an untethered candy-colored glyph, the interpretation of which is open to each viewer. A story of transience unfolds in segments bending and broken, evoking memory and the ambitious but short-lived efforts of the early transcendentalists.

Alexi Antoniadis, Eden 2.0. Polyurethane paint on steel, 2018.

Eden 2.0 is a meditation. The sculpture is a labyrinth for the eyes, and a portal that reframes the landscape and retools awareness at every glance. Eden 2.0 is as innocent as a jungle gym with perception at play, as the abstracted form yields a loose narrative of symbols and suggestion. An arc of steel becomes a cradle for a cloud, a billowed form embraces a tree beyond, there’s a broken crescent, and curves torquing this way and that, a circle, a shelter, and six verticals rooted to the ground. Eden’s orchard reimagined. Step through it, crawl under it, change orientation and the story refreshes. Compared to traditional commemorative sculpture, such as the Lincoln Memorial by Daniel Chester French (a student of May Alcott), Eden 2.0 is far less commanding, almost invisible as object, yet it compels as an interactive experience. And transcendentally speaking, Eden 2.0 is more about union, communion, than self.

Color serves as a beacon, catching the eye with slight dissonance amidst the verdant land. Hues repeat rhythmically in phrases: aqua, blue, violet, magenta, the gestural fragments become a visual chant. Close inspection reveals a hand in the paint application, subtly recording the process and the presence of the maker and humanizing the steel. As material, the choice of steel seems antithetical to the celibate flax-wearing vegans it celebrates, but as for meaning and metaphor, it cogently aligns with the moral fortitude and requisite conviction of Fruitlands’ pioneers in their attempt to forge a reformation of nineteenth century societal norms.

Alexi Antoniadis, Eden 2.0. Polyurethane paint on steel, 2018. Detail.

Loosely echoing the proportions of the Fruitland’s farmhouse, Eden 2.0 references 20th century modernist work of utopian bent, and brings to mind Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized, Monument to the Third International (1920). Never brought to fruition architecturally as the home to Russian government and administrative offices, Tatlin’s model of wood and wire embodies a union of artistic form and utility. Like Eden 2.0, it is a dynamic gesture, a compound of straight, curvilinear, and diagonal line, conveying hope and positivity. Also relative to the nineteenth century community at Fruitlands, Tatlin’s tower was conceived of aspirations for an optimistic and reformed future. Contrastingly, and with possible intent, Antoniadis’s sculpture is dimensionally compressed, a scaffold reading as the bare-bones remains of an ideal, the trace of a failed enterprise. Modest in scale against the hill behind and sky above, Eden 2.0 is humble in situ; even its east to west orientation denies an extended play of cast shadow throughout the day. Its footprint is constrained and without projection as was the brief trajectory of days of the historical community, numbering no more than a dozen members and lasting but seven months.

On view through November 2018, Alexi Antoniadis’s Eden 2.0 is a ghostly folly saluting in the words of “Fruitlands” author Richard Francis, “histories most unsuccessful – but most significant – utopian experiment.” Does Antoniadis’s silent jangle of colorful steel, represent a pipe dream out to pasture, or the buoyant script of a bygone dream? Eden 2.0 stands patiently at ease with this ambiguity, but overall seems to evoke the high notes of the Fruitland endeavor verses the hardship, deprivation, and defeat. Each viewer decides, departing with a new awareness of earth, sky, ambition, hope, and the ephemeral prospect of a New Eden yet to be realized.

About Author

Avatar

Cathleen Daley is a Boston-based artist and co-founder/director of Room 83 Spring in Watertown, MA, an artist-run curatorial project established in 2014. A site for experimentation and process, Room hosts a mix of creative disciplines, provocative installations, and engaging exchange. Open Thursdays and Saturdays 1 – 4, and always by appointment. www.room83spring.com

Comments are closed.