Phoenix of Wadhams Commentary

ROTATING INSTALLATION of a minimally processed found object

My neighbor’s silo came down all in one weekend. It was pulled down by two tractors and a small crew one morning because it had begun to lean alarmingly and my neighbor wanted to make sure it fell away from the barn and out of traffic. It was brought down across a gully which runs between my backyard and his barn. The two properties were once part of a “brother farm” arrangement where two farm houses belonging to two separate farms owned by two brothers sit side by side among their barns. The farms have been bought and sold more than once and are no longer in operation but the housing arrangement persists. The silo fell so that its silver tip pointed at my house at a distance of maybe fifty yards. Most of it was in the gully and I quickly realized that that was where it was going to stay - out of sight and out of mind. Not out of my sight however - nor my mind. My fascination with junk long preceded my move to the Adirondacks, but I soon discovered that I had fallen among kindred spirits. The legendary rusting Chevy in the front yard is only one indication of a mentality that believes value persists in objects which no longer carry out their original function. Brooklyn, where I lived for thirty years, is a place full of rusting junk, and it is a fact that most of its population is often viewed in the same light, a point of pride. Brooklyn understands itself as a place where discarded human wrecks come to rest and are reassembled, their genius rediscovered and brought to new and greater radiance. My additional  observation is that the same restorative process is also characteristic of wetlands and, on a grander scale, of our galactic neighborhood. Our sun is a Brooklyn among celestial objects assembled as it is from the detritus of earlier exploded stars. In any case, the muse immediately suggested I cut the silo tip free, twist it up in a certain way and mount it on a pylon so it would turn in the wind like an anemometer. The idea was all there in a minute as a I stared out my kitchen window. Later, when I drew the twist, I discovered that there were two contradictory ideas occupying the same space in my head. The anemometer idea gave way and the object now turns fitfully in agonizing jumps accompanied by howls and creaks and groans even in seventy mile an hour winds, offering passers-by different aspects on different days - a slow fire - a large slow joke. One passer-by dubbed it The State of Agriculture in the Twentieth Century and it became known also as The Phoenix of Wadhams, hopefully a marker of the rebirth of farming in our valley. For now however it serves more modestly as a good way of identifying the place when giving directions.