5 minute read
Emily Jablonski 7, 11
by SUNYNCCC
The Past Riley Strader
As the blankets devour my body I get lost in what used to be Too young to even know my own age Intertwined with my youth But it’s now all gone From jumping on my bed Light shining through the curtains Almost blinding to my clueless eyes The raggedy quilt falling over me With a wave of innocence To lying still Remembering the past It’s sinking in Still under these sheets And now older More aware But less free
Odysseus Castor Trevor Ashline
Skeletons in My Closet Emily Jablonski
Looking in the mirror the lies they look so clear. Looking at myself, will I escape this hell? Now I’m cleaning out my closet, found a part of me, can’t believe i lost it. All the bones are lying still from memories I never shared. I’m picking up the glass, stepping on the cracks… Locked it all in the past, closed the door, no looking back. So, I’m packing up myself, looking for better health. This house of glass was never made to last. Now I’m locking all the doors, can’t hurt me anymore. I’m throwing away the keys! Watch them drown in the sea. Looking in the mirror the lies they look so clear. And to the girl in the mirror: Goodbye younger me who was told she was… too small to play sports, fragile to fight back. Too Weak to succeed.
Northern New Yorker
Wilson Tarbox is a contributor to Frieze and author of the opinion piece being discussed in this essay “Understanding ‛L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped”. “Wrapped”, referring to the whole title of the artwork beyond this point, is the dream of the art duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude who have several other “wrapped” pieces in their portfolio. Using over 25,000 square meters of fabric and 3,000 meters of red rope, “Wrapped” takes L’Arc de Triomphe and transforms the highly detailed piece into a celebration of form. Critics to these types of works allude to the obvious; it’s architecture wrapped in fabric. So, can you simply cover a form and hail to the world that what you have done is something novel or worthy of the effort to accomplish it in the first place? My opinion on this divisive conversation is that yes, what Christo and JeanneClaude have done with this national French monument is both transformational enough to be art and novel enough to be celebrated.
In my opinion, the wrapping of L’Arc De Triomphe is transformative and should be considered at the very least art if not”High Art”. Here in lies the critics biggest argument against my previous claim: is simply throwing a sheet over something even worthy of discussion? No, which is why what was done to the L’Arc is not simply throwing a sheet over it like a simple Halloween costume. Firstly, “Wrapped” is constructed with a special synthetic fabric painted to give off a silver sheen. With the angle of the sun and the motion of the wind this sheen makes the ambiguous form warp and dance as the rigid skeleton underneath cannot. This superficial sheen is designed to degrade in real time to the installation itself, revealing a blue subcutaneous layer reflecting the passing of time. The decay and transformation of the piece highlight the beauty in scale also occurring in this installation. A true monolithic piece of architecture, with detailed inlays and allegorical stories carved in its stone surface, juxtaposed by flowing fabric of vibrant sheen devoid of any true shape or form and absent of inscribed definition.
“Wrapped” also sees the use of juxtaposition to tell a larger story. L’Arc, built by Napoleon to celebrate both his army and his ego, stands as a symbol of war and conquest. Solid, unmoving, and cold, the structure stands ominous and unmoving as a reminder of Napoleonic war and victory. By wrapping this structure with forethought, we can see some beautiful concepts start to emerge. The structure almost becomes a specter of itself, a ghost shrouding the structure, putting the true Arc in our memories much like that of a loved one passing. It also serves to conceal the war monument and give new meaning to the shape of the structure itself. “Wrapped” allows us to view L’Arc outside of its inscriptions and literal engraved interpretations and allows us to look at the form and the architecture through a new lens. We can also see connection between life and death in both this installation and the arch itself. With the shroud intended to decay through the life of the installation we can draw direct connection to both our lives and the lives that were taken through the Napoleonic wars. Instead of celebrating victory and war and triumph as the monument intended, we can take a step back and mourn for the loss of lives of conflict and reflect on the punitive damages of war. By making the L’Arc de Triomphe the ghost of the arch, it flips the meaning on its head and allows for a different perspective of a piece that cannot be altered in any other way.
We now can arrive at the question and find ourselves the answer to the title of this response, ‘L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped’: Is it art just because they say it is?” No, it is not art simply because an artist made it and said it was art. It is art because of the bountiful and clever interpretation and intent for the piece. It is not simply shrouding something and saying, “Ta-da!” It is conveying something in a transformative way. Jean-Claude and Christo accomplished something far greater than any critic could; they turned a monolith of stone into a liquid of iridescent fabric. They made true the dreams of alchemists and magicians by turning stone to water and making a mountain disappear. I applaud the work of these two by distilling so much into what is essentially silver fabric.
https://www.frieze.com/article/christo-and-jeanne-claudes-larc-de-triomphe-wrapped written by Wilson Tarbox for Frieze Sep 28, 2021
Photo: Benjamin Loyseau © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
