Fallen Sky

By Tamar Avishai, published by Out There Podcast

Released on Jan. 12, 2023

Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke Audio Collective.

WILLOW BELDEN: Happy New Year, everyone! I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

We are hard at work producing our next season, which is set to launch this spring. Until then, we’re bringing you bonus episodes from time to time. And today is one of those times.

This story is about art. One specific sculpture, to be precise. And it’s about how that sculpture helps us pay attention — how it helps us see the earth around us in a new way.

The story is a guest episode from The Lonely Palette, a podcast that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time. Host Tamar Avishai has the story.

Oh, and - make sure you stick around at the end of the episode. I have some exciting news!

TAMAR AVISHAI: So even just to to start at our our most basic, you know, Panofskyan descriptions of what we're looking at - and I never actually get the chance to do this, so I'm going to take a crack at it...

NORA LAWRENCE: Do it!

TAMAR: So it's a large circle. It has a kind of surface-of-the-moon sense to it, where it's very organically a relief from the earth of stone that is covered in a reflective surface, kind of at the top of the stone, like where you would sit, like if it's.. if you could.  You know, but it's flat and and it looks almost like a stamp that didn't get quite enough ink, or that got pushed down on one side more so that you pick it up and it, it...yeah, it has that kind of semi-relief look to it, but it's still very natural looking. It doesn't like... Even though it's not entirely filled-in with the polished surface, it's, it doesn't look like it's missing anything. It looks like it's just adding some shade and some volume.

NORA: I apologize if I say...this was a little mistake that I actually love, was that you called the size of its stone when they're steel also.

TAMAR: Oh, really?

NORA: Yeah. And what's great about that is that it looks like stone and, you know, it looks like a ruin from the very moment it went in. Is this a meteor that hit the Earth? You know, is this, um, something that is from the future or the past? But, um, we really want it to feel like something that's completely integrated, and I think that idea of it possibly being stone gets to that, right? That it's, it's part of the landscape.

TAMAR: A man just walked by and said that it looked like an amphitheater.

NORA: Love it.

TAMAR: Something else that you don't notice from a distance, and that you only notice when you get closer, is that the entire thing isn't flat. And I think that that kind of lends itself to the amphitheater feel, is that the sides are a little higher and that the entire thing kind of comes in a little bit in the center and raises on the sides, which you notice more when the clouds are not reflecting in it. So, I mean, like any reflection of nature, it's constantly changing.  The reflective material also looks watery like it has, it has a surface of the water, kind of blurry fluidity to it.

NORA: I was here once, we had an evening event and so it seemed like it was dark out, but Fallen Sky was still quite bright. And I realized, you know, it is dark out, but when you actually look up at the sky, it's still really light. And it made me think of looking at a lake or an ocean at that kind of, you know, post sundown, but not quite fully, fully dark. And that body of water is lighter than everything else around it. And it's because of that. And it was kind of this interesting way of me kind of rethinking what I knew about nature through an artwork, which was fun as a Storm King curator to be able to do.

Anyone who has known me since I was 12 can tell you that my favorite all-time movie was, and still is, Apollo 13.  Maybe that will surprise you – I’m obviously pretty artsy fartsy and had terrible grades in math and science in school – but maybe you just haven’t seen the movie.  It’s got everything: adventure, historical accuracy, potent cinematic suspense even though everyone watching knows how it ends, and, of course, mid-90s Kevin Bacon in a towel.  And it also taps into something very real, and very primal, that lives in the heart of every kid: a morbid fascination with space, its unimaginable size and age and elusive materiality, a land before time, before dinosaurs roamed the earth: moon rocks, craters, desolation, nothingness, and no matter how many times I see it, and for all of the film’s drama, the most heartbreaking scene to me is when the astronauts have realized they won’t be landing on the moon after all, but still need to circle it to come back home.  And as they come as close to the moon as any of them ever will, these usually stoic right-stuffers with haircuts you could set your watch to are clamoring for window space, excited as little boys to be so close to those mountains and craters and bright putty-colored moon dirt, hanging in an endless black sky of stars.  There’s nothing on the moon, literally nothing, and yet it’s sublime.  Buzz Aldrin’s second man on the moon words will always live in the shadow of Neil’s steps and leaps, but they were so much more authentic to the romance of the moment, when he dreamily remarked on the moon’s “magnificent desolation.”  There’s a such a sincere romance for that pre-time nothingness, the contradiction inherent in something as tangible as moon rocks yet always just beyond our grasp.  Because really, how many of us will ever walk on the moon?  Even those of us who were supposed to couldn’t.  And so, because we can’t experience it, the world that existed before us, its ruins and romance, all craters, clouds, and sky, we have to dream it.  And some of us attempt to recreate it.

Sarah Sze’s “Fallen Sky,” the first permanent artwork installed at Storm King Art Center in twelve years, is this attempt.  It’s sublime nothingness in steel.  It simultaneously evokes the imprint of an asteroid that’s cratered into the earth and the remains of something that has been long abandoned, eroded by time and the elements.  It’s 36 feet in diameter, an enormous circular weathered bowl, like a map of the moon, comprised of 132 steel pillars polished to a mirror shine; it’s like pools of molten silver on top of what looks like old stone boulders.  It should feel ancient and inert, except for the fact that each steel mirror looks as though it’s craning its neck, reflecting the sky, which, you begin to realize, is incredibly alive and present and uncapturable, clouds and sunbeams moving at a frantic clip. You can almost imagine how much time it would have saved Monet in episode 7, trying as he was to paint the atmospheric course of the sun through the day and over countless canvases, to just install this sculpture.  And the overall result is an installation that is steeped in exhilarating contradictions.  It is always, in Sze’s words, teetering between two extremes, wonderous and futile, where the negative space is just as important as the positive space.  It’s an artwork about destruction, an active smash and imprint into the earth, that then slowly and intentionally evolves with it.  It’s about the presence of absence, remnants of something whole that is now half gone, but reflecting the living world, feeling both permanent and ephemeral, inanimate and alive, abandoned old ruins that are still disrupting their space, and yours.

Disruption is everywhere at Storm King.  Storm King is essentially an enormous sculpture park, a 500-acre outdoor museum in New York’s Hudson Valley, an area already indebted to its mountainous vistas and endless sky.  And the artworks are meant to interrupt this, what would otherwise be acres upon acres of open, cultivated land.  And when you walk around Storm King, you realize that there are a lot of different ways to be interrupted.  Sometimes it’s by altering the expected landscape beneath your feet, like in Maya Lin’s “Wave Field,” which undulates the ground like ocean waves, fluid and disorienting, like the Berlin Holocaust Memorial we looked at in episode 56.  But more often, your experience at Storm King is disrupted by a thing, that is, a giant, site-specific sculpture.  Some are rust-colored and weathered with patina, they echo natural forms, they’re spindly as spiders, they’re completely, organically at home in the landscape.  Others are freshly painted, brightly colored, like an enormous distracted toddler has dropped their toy from above.  But what these artworks all share the fact that they’re always unexpected.  They surprise you.  And not just because their forms are unexpected, but because their context is.  We’re used to seeing sculptures in a very specific context: a museum, surrounded by white walls and those little text boxes and the implied expectation that the goal is to understand what we’re looking at, or at least try to.  But when we’re outside, in the elements, out on a walk, on our own time, we don’t expect to be confronted with…expectation.  It’s just not the headspace we’re in.  We’re not as worried that we’re doing it wrong; we have more agency to walk around a sculpture, to experience it from all sides, to breath the same air as it.  And with every lungful, we realize that nature itself has been folded into the experience of appreciating this art.  We look up at the industrial pillars hammered into organic shapes, the studs and rebar that seem so out of place on a breezy hillside, and we begin to notice the environment itself, the way our bodies move in it, the way the sunlight streams through the clouds onto the metal, which is different than onto tree trunks, and then the gentle smell of sweat on a heavy hot summer day and the fresh cut grass and the buzzing of insects flying in plumes around clover.  And, you start to realize, this is the magic of environmental art, and land art, and art that’s just outside, really: when you’re interrupted by a sculpture in the middle of a landscape, it’s not really the sculpture you notice but the landscape itself.  And suddenly you find yourself seeing it again as though for the first time.

And this is what Fallen Sky, and any artwork by Sarah Sze, is really about: paying attention.  It’s an installation that is both of its environment and observing it, just like you are.  The polished surfaces themselves noticing a different piece of sky or tree branch or fast-moving cloud from moment to moment.  And just like Storm King shows us how many ways there are to be disrupted, Fallen Sky shows us how many ways there are to pay attention.  It asks us to pay attention to the otherwise unremarkable patch of land where it’s located, an area chosen specifically by Sze because it had been neglected, the basin of a large tree that had died and was removed, leaving an armpit-like crater on the path from one artwork to another; without Fallen Sky, it would just be some more twiggy, leafy land, although, to be fair, so would anywhere at Storm King.  But then, the ruins and reflections take our attention one layer deeper, drawing our awareness to the nature beyond the elements we can feel to the ones we can’t, to something far more primal: the slow machinery of the natural world that undergirds everything, the speed of the earth spinning, the movement of tectonic plates beneath our feet.  We know these things exist, we know they affect us, but we can’t feel them with our bodies, or truly grasp them with our minds.

This depth, these layers, this sense of slow, subtle environmental awareness, is what distinguishes Fallen Sky from so many other sculptures at Storm King.  From Fallen Sky, you can look out at the colorful amalgamations of Mark Di Suvero, that rise up from the land, visible from every vista.  You can see the Richard Serra, whose entire goal, as we discussed in episode 8, is to get all up in your space, to manspread, to compress you.  It’s the job of these sculptures to get in your way of your gentle nature walk.  But Fallen Sky is different.  Because it’s not about disrupting nature.  It is nature.  From the moment of its installation, Fallen Sky feels like it’s always been there, eroding, deteriorating, which is even reflected in the landscaping around it – Sze wanted grass planted to look scruffy and scrubby, like it grew up around something abandoned, always threatening to overgrow it.  And it calls to mind other works that attempt to do this, to defer to nature, to speak the language of their natural surroundings: for example, the Yucatan Mirror Displacements from 1969 by Land Artist Robert Smithson, who chose sites on the Yucatan Peninsula to simply place mirrors that reflect the sky.  Or Yoko Ono’s Sky TV from 1966, a live video feed of the sky above as transmitted into the gallery.  Fallen Sky almost feels like the child of these two artworks, and their logical next step.  Because while both Smithson and Ono’s works were created to be temporary, Fallen Sky is meant to be permanent, to appear perpetually eroding – not marking or reflecting or harmonizing with the landscape, but instead, becoming it.

This effect, both so gentle and so monumental, wouldn’t have been possible without two fundamental elements of Sarah Sze’s art, and process: materials and time.  Her work has always been an exploration of these ideas, the way they intertwine with and disrupt one another, and ultimately encourage us to again, pay attention, to make meaning of our world.  She was born in Boston in 1969, the daughter of an American school teacher mother and a Chinese architect father, and grew up surrounded by blueprints and models, erector sets and tinker toys.  She was originally trained as a painter – and she describes how learning to paint a figure quickly as though it wasn’t art but an athletic skill – she talks about how difficult it became to draw the distinction between painting, sculpture, and installation, especially as it relates to how the viewer experiences the work; none of these terms matter, she argues, when you’re out there in the real world, interacting with them.  Her art lies in always making things, paintings that become sculpture, sculpture that becomes installation, installations comprised of wholly unexpected materials.  And she is always, always exploring materials: how they can be manipulated, and how they can be stretched beyond their universal, utilitarian functions into something more profound.  She loves changing our perceptions of what materials are, or should be used for – she makes sculpture with the rubbery squish of dried paint, she processes stainless steel to appear as something else entirely: rock, stone, the mirror of Fallen Sky.  But then she takes it further, making us again pay attention to ourselves, to how we respond to these subverted expectations of what materials are supposed to do, to the way we use materials to make meaning of the world.  I mean, as we explored with Anselm Kiefer in episode 48, we infuse inanimate objects with life all the time.  The shirt I’m currently wearing could be worn, even as I speak, by a million other people.  What makes it special?  What makes it mine?

And this is where she introduces the element of time in her work.  Time is in a few different places: it takes time to walk around her installations, which can be carefully arranged, immersive jumbles of mass-produced objects that have no intrinsic aesthetic value, toothpicks and toilet paper and birthday candles and thumbtacks and aspirin tablets.  And it takes time to recognize this or that bit of bric-a-brac that evokes something in you, either because you appreciate it for its aesthetics – I mean, stare at a Q tip long enough and you can begin to notice and kind of like its clean white symmetry, its distinctive textures – and for what it might make you like of: I for one discovered Q tips when I was ten, rifling through the medicine cabinet, my bare feet on the cool patterned tile of my bathroom floor, looking at how my eyes seemed distorted in the silver fixtures on the sink, and whoa, suddenly I’m time traveling, I’m swimming in memory.  All because of a Q tip.  Picked out of a mess of stuff, it becomes my Q tip.  This is exactly what Sze hopes to evoke in us when we walk around her large, chaotic, extraordinary installations, which also feel like the natural next generation of Duchamp from episode 17, of Oldenburg from episode 49.  This is sculpture that has leapt off its pedestal, painting that’s poured out of its frame, into our space, blurring art and life, fine art and everyday crap, and give us the opportunity to stand with it and discover its value, with all the breeziness of a nature walk, in our own time.

And I’ll be the first to admit, this process isn’t easy, or obvious.  Granted, I’m the kind of person who watches Sleeping with the Enemy and secretly doesn’t think that the kitchen organizational styles of the abusive husband were all that bad, but even so, Sze’s installations to the average person can feel incredibly cluttered and unruly, like a giant’s junk drawer has finally exploded.  I walked around The Fifth Season, an installation in the interior museum at Storm King that temporarily accompanied the installation of Fallen Sky, and tried to find some purchase.  And I ended up finding it in the video projection of a bird flapping its wings over a photograph of a bird.  It was so simple, and so lovely, and in the midst of the mess, I was so gently disarmed, thinking about flapping wings in wide open sky and looking up from a beach and the wet sand between my toes.  All of this, Sze says, these installations, these materials, are in the service of experiences like that, of memory, and I’ll even concede that our brains, and our memories, don’t ever line up like cans of peas with the label facing out.  They are, quite literally, a junk drawer, a muddle of associations and triggers, colors and objects, scraps and emotions.  It’s wild what our brains do: we look at images and we recognize how our memories are compressed into single, photographic moments, what Sze calls “interior images,” that then expand to fill the space again, to fill whole years of our lives – in other words, all of being ten years old becomes just a handful of memories, triggered by a Q tip, or single frozen photograph, which is supposed to stand in for our memory.  But of course, the photograph itself is never enough.  It could never capture everything it evokes. 

And this is why Sze is so compelled to smear the boundaries between the inanimate and the alive, the past and present, and does this, specifically, by breaking down the relationship between the real and the represented in her own materials.    

What do I mean by this?  It’s conceptual, but bear with me.  Remember when we looked at Magritte’s impish pipe in episode 22 and we first confronted the idea that there’s a difference between a thing, an object, and the representation of a thing, a painting of an object.  Like a pipe isn’t the same thing as a painting of a pipe.  But we kind of ignore this in terms of our understanding of the world; I mean, even my toddler knows an apple in a picture book is the same as his crunchy snack.  And Sze, like Magritte, wants to break this relationship apart, point out that there is a difference, and make us pay attention to how readily we allow them to be one and the same, especially in the 21st century, bombarded as we are with images.  And while Magritte was admittedly trying to mess with us, Sze is genuinely trying to understand how we think, how we process a world of materials, of photographs, to evoke entire universes of memory and associations inside our heads. 

And so in her work, we always have real, and we have represented.  In the Fifth Season, for example, she used her iPhone to record a video of the rays of light that enter into the space and then projected that video onto the real light itself as it moves across the room, phasing the two, like a visual example of how the Edge plays off of his own guitar’s delay to create the melodic rhythm in U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name.  The real and the represented, in productive conversation.  The exhilarating contradiction of a frozen moment that once existed, and the perpetual dynamic present.  Like the ruins of the past, come alive in this moment, reflecting the clouds.

Which brings us back to Fallen Sky.  Blurring the boundaries between image and object, mirroring the clouds while itself so inert.  And standing at its base, you almost feel like you’re watching the earth think, imagine, remember, make associations.  You see it conversing with the sunlight as it moves across the sky, with the magnificent desolation of the moon, reflecting a landscape forever in flux, teetering between extremes, tangible as moon rocks and always beyond our grasp.  It’s a fragile pursuit, Sze says, paying attention to the world like this, to the world paying attention to itself.  And it’s also what makes living under this sky, with the ground beneath our feet, so wondrous, so futile, so utterly sublime.

WILLOW: That was Tamar Avishai, host of The Lonely Palette. This story was produced FOR the Lonely Palette, back in 2021. A big thank you to Tamar for letting us share it with all of you.

If you liked what you heard, check out all of the other episodes on the Lonely Palette. You can find it at thelonelypalette.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now for some very exciting news. For over two years now, I’ve been working on developing a new podcast for kids. And it’s going to launch very soon. So I wanted to give you a sneak peek. Here goes…

Once upon a time, there lived a community who shared a meadow, with a stream running through it. There was Bear…

BEAR: Grrrrr!

WILLOW: Crow…

CROW: Caw, caw!

WILLOW: Honey Bee

HONEY BEE: Zzzzzz…

WILLOW: And many, many others.

The critters in this meadow were friends. And most of the time, they lived together happily. But sometimes there were problems.

SQUIRREL: People leave behind their trash, and I’m not very good at resisting their discarded food.

BEAVER: Everyone goes down into the stream to drink in the morning, and then pees into the water!

RABBIT: Yuck! (spitting sounds)

WILLOW: We all know how hard it can be to solve problems. Especially when you’re upset. But the plants and animals in this meadow always find a way to work together.

BEAVER: I gathered these saplings from along the stream. Now, I’m going to plant them where I cut down too many aspens and willows.

TURTLE: I will work with you.

RABBIT: Me too!

ANIMALS (singing): 

Plant, plant, plant your tree

Gently by the pond

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Nature will respond

WILLOW: The new podcast is called Once Upon a Meadow. It’s designed for kids ages four to nine, and it’s set to launch next month. You can find out more at onceuponameadow.com, and I have a link to that in the episode description as well.

A big thank you to everyone who is providing financial support to Out There, including Laurie Richardson, Diane Pinkers, Tom Reynolds, Doug Frick, Eric Biederman, Tara Joslin, Phil Timm, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. 

In 2022, listener support made up two-thirds of Out There’s revenue. Two thirds! So I mean it when we say we couldn’t produce this show without you all. 

If you’re not yet a supporter but you’d like to get in on the fun and help pay for our next season, go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors. It lets you make monthly contributions to projects you care about. Like this podcast. Again, that’s patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Or you can click the link in the episode description.

The story you heard today is from The Lonely Palette, and was produced by Tamar Avishai.

Out There and The Lonely Palette are both members of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. Check it out at hubspokeaudio.com.

Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold. 

Happy New Year, and we’ll see you soon!