Objects d'art
We should have known better. Less than a week after chuckling over the Tate Gallery's purchase of a pile of bricks ("Or Is It Art?" wondered The New YorkTimes) we learned that the two pieces of wood we skip over on the way from the Hopkins Center snack bar to hockey games are also art.
They look so innocent there - two 34-foot-long Georgia oak beams the telephone company might have left between the Hop and Wilson Hall. True, the 45-degree bevel cuts at the ends should have tipped us off, but the mind works slowly when the temperature drops below the —20 mark.
They really are pieces of art, and we're really supposed to think they were left by the phone company - at least that's what Jan van der Marck says. Van der Marck, director of the college galleries and collections, says that Richard Nonas' "Telemark Shortline" is art because the beams "suspiciously look like they have a utilitarian purpose and they do not."
He's right when he says "you only become aware of them after you pass them by." An alert passerby will realize, van der Marck says, that the phone company wouldn't bevel the ends that way, wouldn't place the two pieces in a straight line, and probably wouldn't think to leave a convenient seven-foot space between them to line up with the path to the parking lot behind New Hampshire Hall.
"Telemark Shortline," we learned, is minimalist art using basic building materials. "Nonas doesn't want to clobber us but to prod our curiosity," van der Marck explains. "It's a subtle dialogue. He isn't shouting." We found that even our skeptical eyes and feet were forced to take the path Nonas mapped out for us. And besides, as van der Marck adds, "It's a beautiful piece of oak by itself."
Nonas was commissioned to design the sculpture for the Dartmouth campus and was in Hanover early this winter to install "Telemark Shortline." The new sculpture was a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Horace Solomon of New York and was installed while an exhibition of Nonas's works in wood was featured in the Beaumont-May Gallery.
