Journal of a Sabbatical

February 28, 1999

the sphere

Mark and I went to the DeCordova to check out the exhibition on the sphere in contemporary sculpture. An appropriate way to spend a gray rainy afternoon.

Sphere is a very funny word. Every time I look at it on the screen I think I must have spelled it wrong. It just doesn't look like the word for a round ball. It should be a rounder word. Or something.

It's amazing what you can make a sphere out of: bricks, machine tools, gears, Spartina, Phragmites, seaweed, hay, concrete, plastic, glass, lint ... the only thing missing was snowballs. Of course they would have melted indoors, although I once stored a snowman in Kevin's freezer for about a month before it sublimed (sublimated? - what's the past tense of the verb "to sublime"?).

My favorite piece was a collection of found balls the author had picked up on his walks: tennis balls, golf balls, whiffle balls, footballs, soccer balls, rubber balls, basketballs. Hundreds of them displayed on a wall two stories high in a kind of 3-D collage (I guess artists call that an assemblage). It had a sound installation with it triggered when you passed a sensor going up the stairs into the exhibit hall: bouncing balls ... thump thump thump thwack thwack thwack. All I could think of was the guy who lived next door to us when we were kids. Every time a ball of ours went over the hedge into his yard he kept it. He stored them all in his garage. With six of us into ball related sports, he amassed quite a collection. He never gave back a single one. His garage could have been an art installation...

To us a stack of balls projecting out of the wall and sagging slightly downward looked like the obligatory penis. Every art exhibition has to have one. I said as much to Mark and we had a laugh about it. A few minutes later a family group came into the gallery and the first thing the kid said was "look, the snowman is melting". A sideways snowman I guess. Ah, to be a child again and have a fresh eye for artistic expression free of cliché.

Then there were the lint balls. Personal lint and public lint. With zippers. Conceptually funny but not much to look at. And how can you tell the difference between personal and public lint? Do I want to know the difference?

Concrete balls on a silver platter, cheese balls on a silver tray (not real cheese, simulated cheese), big balls, little balls, bowling balls. What this exhibit needed was some inclined planes. I desperately wanted to roll those balls down a slope, especially the big brick one outdoors in the sculpture garden. It was a representation of the DeCordova building transformed into a sphere. As far as I could tell it was held in place by a thin berm of dirt. The rain was softening the slope under it. How much force would it take to roll it down the hill? Where's a giant croquet mallet when you need one?

The big ball of hay was in a room all by itself. It was big. It towered over me. It smelled like hay. Naturally. It made you want to touch it. It made you wonder why anyone would make a spherical haystack. Was this personal hay or public hay? Would it unravel if I rolled it down an inclined plane? Will they arrest me if I touch it?

In either an incredible coincidence or a cleverly planned ironic statement, the museum is also hosting an exhibition called Fabrications by Niki Ketchman, a major component of which is a room full of phallic symbols crafted in various stereotypically feminine materials such as lace doilies and the like. I kid you not. The total hilariousness of the juxtaposition of spheres and phallic symbols didn't dawn on me until I was on the way home and suddenly burst out laughing.