𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒

The forever-life of ephemeral works feat. Luke George

The first time I experienced Luke George’s piece Fell – I didn’t experience it at all.

Can you ever, if you aren’t there?

By the time I heard about it, the moment had passed.

But the story stuck. I could feel it.

…

A man ascends, slowly, suspended from a rope bound to a tree trunk.

The space is vast by comparison, each movement is deliberate.

Slowly he climbs the tree, holds himself in balance, standing precariously, leaning his body back. Extending the tree itself, or falling from it.

The pose is held, for minutes that feel like hours.

More than anything, it’s a single striking image – one that sits right there on the fringe of dance, almost static, a tableau.

This symmetry with the tree is held, simultaneously climbing and falling.

…

Luke George has spent a career honing his craft. And with this piece he harkens back to the felled trees of Tasmania, to our violent usurpation of nature.

I was told about this piece by a friend, who described in great detail its ephemeral beauty.

The rest I read about, watched as video. But it was most of all the story of it, hearing about it for the first time, that compelled me.

There’s a certain magic to the fleeting and invisible, just as the imagination can be more potent than reality. Most of the powerful things we experience can’t be seen or touched. Most of them are gone, eventually.

I’ve been thinking about context in art lately… the way the circumstances of a piece influence your experience of it. I am always interested in ephemeral works because they are so hard to capture, to become easy to access or familiar or commoditised. But what they lack in permanence they gain through a certain magic of transference. In all likelihood you’ll experience them secondhand, something I’d always assumed was an inferior medium. But under the right circumstances, the retelling of a piece of work can be more like – an adaptation, of a sort.

A spellbinding story you’re told, in the way that this one was told to me, and which I pass on.

The ripples of great work radiate, even after they’re gone. They have a mystery, a mythos that’s potent like a ghost story.

And in this way, to me, a piece about nature itself became supernatural.

.

.

.

Go further:

https://www.lukegeorge.net/works/fell