Apparition Scaffold
A MONA Moment |
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Like cathedral reliquary, its gleaming, aluminum columns sweep our eyes upward. Stripped of ornament, severe in form, it insistently radiates the monolithic gravity of Stonehenge. Capped by a pyramid, associations of a temple, of the sacred emerge--a miniaturized temple, but tall enough to hover over us, to insist on our smaller, human scale, and, to encourage our contemplation.
Titled Apparation Scaffold/Robert Milton, it is the work of Holdrege, Nebraska native Jon Swindell. Cool and streamlined, fabricated in a 20th century material, in full view it distances us from emotion. But with one bold feature, it kindles contemplation. For balanced precariously at the top of the pyramid, in a 180 degree diagonal profile, stripped of detail, an aluminum model of a World War II B-17 bomber hovers. Delicate, balletic and anonymous, is it the focal point of this secular totem?
It is, at a minimum, an artifact of remembrance. Our associations are not yet personalized. The bomber appears wayward, wartime newsreel clips of bombers hit by flack and spiralling helplessly to earth come to mind. Yet, the danger is balanced by our admiration for the simple perfection of the design, the shape of the plane, its singular beauty harbored safely now in this contemplative space in the gallery.
This concentration of simple, elemental forms draws upon the work of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the vast spaces of the plains where Swindell was born and raised. Swindell states, " Brancusi's work draws you, it rises and leads you to upper space, the space above the work. I have no doubt that I am compelled by it because I grew up where the space over head is so endless."
But our contemplation of this tower, this scaffold as he calls it, draws us further into the particular, the personal. There is an opening on the side of the pyramid, where the vertical line of the bomber's wings leads our eyes: a rust colored fissure in the temple pyramid, flanked dramatically by two Corinthian columns. Look closer, on tiptoes if you have to. We are in the heart of the temple now, and an ancestral remembrance hovers spectrally before us. It is an image of Swindell's mother and father; his father who as a young World War II soldier stationed in England serviced the B-17s for their missions over Europe; who met an Englishwoman from Northamptonshire whom he would marry and bring back to Nebraska to live and raise a family.
The mystical center of the temple, this ancestral scaffold reveals an apparition, this artifact of remembrance. The impersonal distance between thought and emotion is reduced. This family story is not ours specifically, and yet it is. In our reflection on it we rekindle ancestral reverence and our search for the sacred in the shadow of memory.
