In my last post, I wrote about how artists depicted love in their public pieces.
It's not always easy to translate emotions into solid, rooted, pieces of art, especially if they're large scale works.
It's often difficult to make people experience abstract concepts through concrete expressions.
So sculptors have famously toyed with materials, shapes, vignettes, and even text to get their point across- with varying degrees of success.
But there is a component to all public sculpture that really affects its chance of success.
It's called location. As in- location, location, location.
There are places where the viewer expects to be moved emotionally. They come to the works sympathetically. They are more than ready to feel and understand the pieces they see before them.
The obvious site for statues depicting love and loss are, of course, cemeteries.
I've spent a lot of time hunting great memorial sculptures in cemeteries over the past few decades. I'm particularly fascinated with pieces from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They almost always hit the mark. Part of the power, of course, was the language of the time.
No one was afraid of overstating the emotions surrounding death. No one was concerned about going over the top, and so their statues, like their actors, were often melodramatic. And, as sophisticated as I like to think of myself, I've reacted predictably.
The pieces in cemeteries are personal- they are set on their plots by clients (normally) who are devoted to the dead. They aren't meant to sit in traffic circles or impersonal public spots where technique trumps connection or fame surpasses content. They draw you into the love stories that inspired them.
I spent most of the first day I ever spent in Paris in Montparnasse Cemetery- a lovely huge left bank graveyard with a pretty amazing array of statues. I found what is probably my all time favorite statue of grief and love there. It depicted a grieving man and his beloved, who is reaching out to be released from the heavy gravestone that crushes her.
The simple image of a dog stretched out on a grave or sitting alert at the foot of a marker always gets me (as in the pieces in Forest Hills cemetery in Boston) in the heart, as do those of children reaching out for the light.
There are more places to increase the effectiveness of emotional works (such as leafy bowers and hidden corners), but, for me, cemeteries are the best.
