-------- Original Message --------
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 07:59:15 -0700
From: Fred Bookstein <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
April 22, 2012
Dear colleagues,
Anybody who finds themselves anywhere near Vienna during the
next eight weeks should make a side trip to the Ring
to see one of the most remarkable
scientific artifacts of our time: a four-meter-tall (lifesize) cast of
the surface of a living 2000-year-old olive tree.
This remarkable object is not in the Naturhistorische Museum
where it ought to be, but instead finds itself in
the Theseustempel, the little building inside the Volksgarten that
originally housed the statue "Theseus and the Centaur"
before it was moved to the landing of the grand staircase in
the then-new Kunsthistorische Museum in 1891.
Here in the Tempel the cast of the tree is displayed as an art object,
entitled "wisdom? peace? blank? all of this?,"
"by" the contemporary Swiss conceptual artist
Ugo Rondinone, of whom I had never previously heard.
I found some good views of it on Google Image, particularly this one,
which shows the scale (and the ceiling of the Tempel):
http://derstandard.at/1334795666279/Wiener-Volksgarten-Der-Wind-als-Bildhauer
[the German phrase there means "The wind as sculptor"].
Whether a representation of a particular
superannuated organism or instead a work of art,
this object forces us to keep in mind the
immense complexity of organismal form (a trope first treated
in biomathematical terms by Walter Elsasser around 1975) and the likewise
immense difficulty of saying, in any abstract language, what "the"
form of an organism actually is. In this role the Rondinone piece
supplies an
endlessly paradoxical series of challenges to the foundations of
any competent morphometrics, whether zoological or botanical.
I recommend the images to anybody on this
mailing list and the object itself to anyone within a couple
of hundred miles of Vienna anytime from now through June 24, when
the exhibit closes and the object is removed. The exhibit is
free, by the way.
If you like olive trees as symbols of human transience, here's
another photo: http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/mueller/k_0.htm.
The human is the dying ex-chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky. The
tree is 1000 years old, not 2000, but the idea is the same, this
time photographed by Konrad Mueller.
Fred Bookstein
