The Hedgehog and The Fox

Last December I was contacted out of the blue by someone interested in using a couple of pictures I'd taken of Richard Serra's sculpture "The Hedgehog and The Fox" three years earlier. The pictures came out of one of the projects I'd given myself during while spending a few months with Kyle in New Jersey: to visit and photograph as many of the many public artworks as I could around the Princeton university campus where she worked.

Although I'd devoted quite a bit of time to the project (which I described in a blog post about it back in 2009, complete with map), I hadn't really thought much more about the pictures until my correspondant got in touch via Flickr - his interest was in using them in a couple of Wikipedia articles (one about the fable of The Fox and The Cat, and another subsequently about the sculpture itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox_(sculpture)) - so it was an opportunity to revisit both the pictures and the memories that associated with them (and with my life generally at that time).

In particular I remember one of the things I enjoyed about working on the project was actually taking the time to look more closely and for longer at the artworks than I might have done if I'd just been passing. It was often quite a challenge to take pictures that I felt captured what I was actually seeing - particularly for the large abstract sculptures like "The Hedgehog and The Fox", Upstart 2 and Northwood II - and in trying to find interesting angles for my pictures I felt that I had to engage with them to a greater degree, at least at a physical level. In this regard "The Hedgehog and The Fox" was particularly memorable - at its most basic level it's essentially three huge undulating rusty metal walls, sat between the Lewis library and the football stadium. But if you get up close then it towers over you, and walking between pairs of its walls can feel quite eerie and even a little oppressive (especially if the light's starting to fade at the end of a New Jersey winter afternoon, and you're on your own). To some extent it seemed to be a sculpture that you had to experience first-hand to really appreciate.

Some of the artworks were made more interesting by knowing something of their backstory: two very different examples are George Segal's "Abraham and Issac" (intended as a memorial for the 1970 incident at Kent State University where unarmed students were shot by members of the Ohio National Guard) and Jacques Lipschitz's "Song of the Vowels" (which is based around the idea of the harp). In the case of "The Hedgehog and The Fox" I've now learned that the artist had a very specific message that he wished to communicate: based on the idea that "the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one great thing", he suggested that "There are those who follow on principle in all they do - the hedgehogs - and those who look to different approaches at the same time - the foxes." Basically Princeton students are encouraged to cultivate the flexible, creative and inventive qualities of the fox rather than the more rigid and inflexible thinking of the hedgehog.

(As an aside: the process of allowing Wikipedia to use my pictures turned out out to be quite frustrating for my correspondant but I found it interesting to go through - I learned that Wikipedia actually requires quite a permissive licence before it will accept photos for use - in the end explicitly licensing them under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 and sending a message based on the template in Wikipedia's "Declaration of consent for all enquiries" page did the trick.)

Since then I've had other requests to use pictures, including another from my "Princeton artworks" project (Pevsner's "Construction in the Third and Fourth Dimensions"), and I always enjoy getting these enquiries - just like the original sculptures, the pictures themselves also have a personal significance for me which it's nice to have an excuse to recall, and it gives me a warm feeling to know that other people I've never met find the pictures interesting. Please feel free to visit: "Princeton Artworks" on Flickr.

Artworks of Princeton

Over the last couple of months I've been taking pictures of the public artworks that are scattered around Princeton, both on and off campus. I'd been aware of some of the more obvious pieces from previous visits (such as the "Marching Figures" outside the University Art Museum), however it turns out that the University has an extensive collection of outdoor sculpture which includes some more well-hidden works. So I began a little personal project to find and photograph as many as I could find.

My starting point was the 1995 online article "Strolling Among Sculpture on Campus" by Jennifer Sheppard, which gives a good overview of many of the pieces as well as hints on where they can be found. I also bought a copy of the "Sculpture of Princeton University" guidebook from the Art Museum shop, which cost around $5 and has drawings and more detailed descriptions for 24 of the works on campus. It also has a map which proved invaluable in locating many of the pieces.

As I've gone along, I've been adding the pictures to a set on Flickr called (unsurprisingly) "Princeton Artworks", as well as building an interactive Google map which shows where each of the artworks are, to the best of my abilities. On my wanderings I also came across what I considered to be artworks but which weren't in the book, for example the many tiger statues that are dotted around campus.

You can click on a marker below (or in a larger size map) to go on your own virtual tour:


View Larger Map

I think that the project made me look at the artworks in a different way than I might have just walking past them every day. Looking for interesting angles for my photographs also gave me a reason to spend more time looking at them, and I think that in some cases this made me appreciate them more - particularly the ones that I initially didn't find that interesting. Also, searching them out gave me an excuse to explore the campus and in doing that I stumbled across other things that I wouldn't otherwise have found.

It's hard to pick favourites, however if I really had to choose then Upstart 2 and Mastadon VI are probably the ones that I liked the most from the official collection. I also liked the metallic tiger statues outside the stadium - it was seeing pictures of these elsewhere that got me started. Of the "serendiptiously found" works, I think maybe Clouds Nine is the one that I would pick as my favourite. But really I think that all the artworks have something in them that I like - I didn't take pictures of the ones that didn't.

You could argue that the project isn't really complete: there were a few pieces that I wasn't able to find, such as Eduardo Paolozzi's "Marok-Marok Miosa" (I think it has been relocated or stored for now), and other sculptures or murals that could also be considered artworks. However for now I think it's enough. So I hope that you enjoy looking at the map and the pictures.

Mo' Snow

We've had more snow here in New Jersey over the last couple of days and it looks really pretty, as long as you don't have to get anywhere in a hurry.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, which is a public holiday for many people, including the schools, so I saw quite a few families out playing with small children in the snow. It wasn't enough to give Kyle a "snow day" off from work but at least some students at Princeton were able to build some cute snow-people. (Why is that we assume that the largest figure is the dad, the smallest one is the child, and the one in between is the mum?)

Today isn't a public holiday, but judging from the pictures on the television a lot of people have taken the day off anyway to see the inauguation of Barack Obama in Washington DC today. They don't have any snow but it is pretty cold both here and there, so I'm glad to be inside watching the events on TV this morning - it's like New Year all over again!