Let’s Go!

Let’s Go!
article for “Socrates Sculpture Park” 2006, a hardbound retrospective published by Yale University Press

 

Openings in the early years of Socrates were always thrilling – a thousand people milling among the art, children finger painting beneath a tarp, volunteers selling hand-painted t-shirts to raise a bit of money – and extremely happy.

On one of those gloriously sunny Sundays, attendees included people with severe physical challenges from a nearby facility gamely navigating the park’s rough terrain in wheelchairs and on crutches.  One broadly smiling young man was on a gurney – not on his back, but stomach, arms stretched out in front of him à la Superman – piloted by Mark di Suvero.  In his typically frisky fashion, Mark practically raced his charge from sculpture to sculpture with the frenetic glee of a contestant on Supermarket Shopping Spree.  From a distance, the young man appeared to be flying.

I’ve often thought of Mark’s sculptures as the earth standing up, not so much as gravity defied as the sky acknowledged — it’s up there, let’s go!   And so it is with Socrates:  Not so much a garbage dump denied as a waterfront embraced, less a pitiless city bureaucracy and more the urban idyll, not a wretched corner of housing projects, rather a community that wanted love and wanted to love, not a man nailed immobile by paralysis but, instead, soaring.