P211.T45:

The Book of Weeds

The sculpture is composed in two parts: 

1. A small, silo-like building on the Clemson University campus, adjacent to Barre Hall, a short walk from the library: The silo is 21 feet high with a 9 foot diameter, made of brick, mortar, concrete, steel and bronze. There are two concrete seats framing a bronze disc in the center of the floor with the call letters ( P211.T45 ) raised on its surface. Two, ten foot by 24” openings serve to orient and align the viewer with Cooper Library (visible in 2001) where the book is housed in the “P” section, (Library of Congress, language and literature). Looking straight up from the bronze disc, the sky will be visible through the oculus.

2. A book housed in Cooper Library: The book is bound in codex fashion. Its text is built from a lexicon of copies of randomly selected, uncultivated plants from abandoned spaces and is printed on cotton paper with Canon toner.

The idea for the sculpture springs from the first few pages of any book surveying the history of western art and culture, (such as Stokstad’s).  Following what always seems a disproportionately short overview of our nomadic lifestyle during the Paleolithic, (its mental image cast on the cave walls), our story turns to the new, settled life that emerged after agriculture was invented.  Granaries, temples, palaces, and civic spaces soon follow: a building is there, a plan surrounded by mud and weeds, the doors flung open to a myriad of specializations, each presiding over its counterpart in nature.  “Only one thing was missing: a script, in other words a coherent, organized system of signs serving to stabilize language and, a fortiori, thought.”  (Parrot, pg. 40, Sumer, The Dawn of Art)

Given the above tidbits of information, and that the sculpture was to be sited on the grounds of a land grant college, the sculptural layout followed:

Silo — sight/movement — (Book) in Cooper Library

Or:

EYE — OPTIC NERVE — BRAIN

An unnamed, third part of the sculpture—the synaptic measure between the building and the book—may be the most important.  Thus, the silo operates as a kind of camera obscura of thought, agri-culture being the new lens through which we oriented ourselves with the natural world, or through which we revealed ourselves as component to our invention of nature, for, our word, “nature,” presumes a separation from it. 

The garden— and—weeds— are at odds, yet inextricably wound, revealing the conflicting, yet inevitable drives of control and abandon: aspects of a continually emerging mind. The present culture is given new form by the grapheme, that is, solidifying sound in a symbol.

The linear attributes of desiccated seed pods and stems of weeds above a mid-winter ground make up the script for the book.  Its language is both direct and universal.  The persistence of weeds, that is to say, their nuisance, is the antagonistic force in “nature” and is often noted in the farmer’s almanac.  Here’s a translation of familiar instructions to farmers on a Babylonian tablet from the 3rd millennium BCE: “When you water the land, make sure that the surface remains even; it should be flat as a board…Then prepare the fields for sowing.  Clear the weeds with a pick and tear out the stubble by hand…Wield your tools with such energy that they sing.” (Baumann, Hans pg. 90, In the Land of Ur, The Discovery of Ancient Mesopotamia)

Having gathered several garbage bags of various weeds from roadsides and crepuscular spaces, I compiled a ream of direct copies of the specimens on plain white paper.  I then used these copies as a kind of syllabary from which to compose the text of the book.*  As the intersections and overlays of copy upon copy grew progressively denser, the original imprint was nearly wiped out.  The aim was to push the text between the obliteration of the subject and its simple mimeses- towards its latent voice.  Here, one may think of the excavation process of an archaeologist revealing layers of habitation down to a layer of virgin soil.

Note: although writing arose independently in at least four locations worldwide (Powell, 2009), I have alluded only to the development of script stemming from ancient Mesopotamia, as it more directly relates to the Latin alphabet, and, sculpto-poetically, it was written on clay (Walker, 1987).  However, these aside facts are only incidental to the meaning of the sculpture.

David Tillinghast, Spring 2022

References and further reading:

1. Baumann, Hans, In the Land of Ur, The Discovery of Ancient Mesopotamia, New York: Random House, Inc. and Oxford University Press, 1969.

2. Parrot, Andre, Sumer, The Dawn of Art, New York, Golden Press, 1961.

3. Powell, B. B, Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.

4. Stokstad, Marilyn, Art, A Brief History, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Educatoin, Inc., 2007.

5. Walker, C.B.F., Reading the Past, Cuneiform, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.