The mysterious statues on the Main Green have surprisingly deep meanings.
Have you ever looked at one of the statues on the Main Green and wondered, “what the hell is that?” If so, you are not alone. Join me as I dive into the words and worlds of the artists that created them.
While walking across the Main Green a few weeks ago, I passed by one of the infamous Providence ghost tours where a young woman holding a lantern leads a group of middle-aged tourists across Brown’s “haunted campus.” The tour guide was joking about the giant fake tree that they were walking by. “I thought it was a real tree for the longest time, and that a hurricane or something had dropped a boulder in it!”
The sculpture in question was Idee Di Pietra, a cast bronze tree with a 5,000 pound boulder suspended in its branches. It was constructed by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, who has specialized in similar tree sculptures for over 50 years and came to Brown’s campus through an anonymous loan in 2016. Penone envisioned Idee Di Pietra as a meditation on the relationship between river stones and thoughts.
Penone reflected that river stones are shaped, polished, compacted and cracked by the motion of the vast body of water which encompasses them, akin to how one’s thoughts are shaped by past experiences, polished with the passage of time, compacted by the weight of memories, and cracked by doubts and uncertainties. These thoughts find “fulfillment” when they are removed from their flow, like stones caught by branches. The boulder in Idee Di Pietra represents this human thought - molded by experiences, time, memories, doubts and uncertainties - finally becoming realized and acknowledged.
Student Commentary:
“I already went through an existential crisis this summer. I feel like looking at this tree is going to plunge me into another one.” - Yenee 25’
“It's not a real tree?” - Wendy 25’
“I wish they would stop making stuff up.” - Sinclair 27’
Our second sculpture is Bridge Pop, located directly outside of the Campus Center. It was made by British artist Henry Moore as an exploration of the human form “both in and of landscape.” It represents a reclining human figure, whose body is bifurcated into three pieces. Drawing inspiration from the Waterloo bridge in London, Moore attempted to imitate its interdependent structure, where “one part of the bridge rests against the other.” Moore wanted Bridge Pop to evoke “a force, a strength, a life, a vitality from inside it,” and hoped to conjure a sense that “the form was pressing from inside trying to burst or trying to give strength from inside itself.”
Student Commentary:
“Where is the bod- what? What is he talking about? I feel like these artists just take shrooms and then start speaking.” - Anonymous
“It looks like an abstract buffalo in the wild.” - Sinclair 27’
“I don’t see a body, but I see… Chairs. You just need to open your mind.” -Wendy 27’
“I took AP art history, so I know all art is about bodies or sex. I still f*ck with it.” - Chloe 27’
The third sculpture on the Main Green is this ant-looking thing opposite the John Carter Brown Library. The Large Concretised Monument to the Twentieth Century (LCMTC), constructed by British artist Rebecca Warren in 2007, was created as a commentary on womens’ struggles and their sexualization in the twentieth century. The lumpy, knobby, and cartoonish structure supposedly represents a grotesque, hyper-voluptuous female body.
Warren drew inspiration from the controversial comics of famous cartoonist R. Crumb, who, overwhelmed by an “obsession with sexual desire,” exclusively drew women as hyper-sexualized and scantily clad for most of his career. (Now seventy-five years old, Crumb has stopped drawing women because in his old age he is no longer a “slave to raging libido.” He also said that he doesn’t want to offend people any more.)
Such themes of hyper femininity and the male gaze inspired most of Warren’s sculptural work; “I wanted [the pieces] to look like they’d been made by a sort of pervy, middle aged provincial art teacher who’d taken me over.” A sensual flair permeates Warren’s art, accompanied by a sense of “messy vitality” that punctuates the “vigor of being alive.”
Are Brown students ultimately able to decipher and indulge in the deep, multi-layered meanings of LCMTC? A student I interviewed thought the LCMTC looked like “an ostrich whose feet got really big.” Other responses thought it looked like planets, the milky way, and even the spread of cancer. Nevertheless, not a single person I spoke to construed the sculpture as an expression of womens’ struggles.
Despite the widespread confusion about LCMTC among students, it has received high praise from some Brown faculty, and, foreseeably, the Public Art Working Group that had chosen it to be displayed. Dietrich Neumann, a professor of the history of art and architecture, described LCMTC as a “visceral and boisterous comment” on the roles of gender and the male gaze in the 20th century. The Public Art Working Group brought LCMTC to campus as part of an initiative to enrich the “cultural, intellectual, and scholarly life of the University.”
Student Commentary:
“What part of THAT is appealing to the male gaze?” - Yenee 25’
“That’s a human? Alrighty then. If you say so.” - Maya 27’
“I assumed it was a memorial to some rich guy that died and loved abstract art.” - Anonymous
(Cover Image: One of the statues on the Main Green, via the Brown Alumni Magazine)
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