MONUMENTAL
Last week, I saw the world’s largest cupcake. Don’t hear that often, do you? However, it was deeply — perhaps even profoundly – disappointing. I imagined (and granted, I may have a far too-rich interior life) a towering monstrosity of a cupcake, so high in the sky that the pink scalloped frosting blotted out the sun. But no. It was about four feet high. Yes, it was over twelve hundred pounds and made from 800 eggs and 200 pounds of sugar and took twelve hours to bake, but…four feet tall? Really?
It’s not that the cupcake wasn’t impressive. But for all the eggs and sugar, butter and frosting, it lacked a certain essential element, namely, grandeur. I expected to be overwhelmed, overawed, overcome and instead, couldn’t help but think that the World’s Largest Cupcake looked like a particularly tacky ottoman. 
What I wanted to experience with the World’s Largest Cupcake, however, was what I found over every rolling hill at the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. Monumental steel sculptures, placid in their enormity, rise up from the landscaped fields and lawns of the museum’s 500 acres. Storm King is entirely open-air – it’s walls are light and air, it’s ceiling, the curving blue bowl of the sky and the landscape is shaped like a frozen sea, with crests and valleys of green rolling underneath your feet. The swelling beauty of the museum (both natural and constructed) dispels any notion of museum-fatigue. The space, the light, the fresh breeze cooling your face, Storm King is a museum where you never get tired.
The first sculpture you see on entering the museum is titled Adonai, a massive and ponderous rust-red collection of huge and hollow rods laid atop one another, looking like a giant’s forgotten pick-up sticks set. For me, Adonai embodies so much of what is essential in monumental sculpture. In its enormity, Adonai cannot be compassed, cannot be understood through any rational process. It’s bigger than you, bigger than anything you know or have already experienced. All you can do is feel it.
And Adonai is just the first piece in a vast, unfolding of artwork across the museum grounds. Dozens of sculptures are installed throughout Storm King, but two pieces — Ursula von Rydingsvard’s For Paul and Nam June Paik’s Waiting for UFO – stuck with me in particular.
For Paul is a comparatively small piece, about fourteen feet tall, and appears, at first, to be shaped of stacked slate. It’s a heavy, dark sculpture, made all the darker by the bright sunlight washing over the open field. Opposing the light and spaciousness of the surrounding space, For Paul resonates with the sorrow of the grave, as immutable and heavy as the mournful timbre of an oboe’s voice. Approaching, however, you realize that For Paul is shaped not of stone, but of wood and the craggy face of the sculpture, looking so much like a foreboding mountainside, creates a dynamic and whimsical lightscape of sun and shadow. The closer you come to For Paul, the more radical is its transformation. Beginning as ponderous weight, the sculpture becomes an easement of darkness and, ultimately, of loss and even death.
Close by, but easily missed (as it must be the museum’s smallest piece), is Nam June Paik’s Waiting for UFO. The sculpture is both disturbing and comforting, eerie and familiar, lucid and obtuse. A Buddha and a roughhewn figure are seated in front of a busted early-model television, stuffed with flowers. Around them, buried in the ground are the stone faces of sleeping men, grown over with the green. The discordant union of the sacred and the profane, mixed with the hidden faces of the unknown creates – simply, perfectly and unexplainably — a sense of strange and long-lasting wonder. Which, in the end, of course, is exactly the point.
~cpd
Storm King Art Center is an hour away from New York City, with a $7 admission fee for students. Visit www.stormking.org for directions.
