Hogpen Hill Farms artworks

“North America’s best sculpture park: Edward Tufte’s Hogpen Hill Farms” Philip Greenspun

Triptych, steel series #5, 2013, about 5 x 10 x 1.5 feet

Ken Carbone, CarboneSmolanAgency and a co-star in our documentary film Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See, visits Hogpen’s Stone Mountain in the presence of 2 stone tablet artworks.

Ken Carbone + ET at my Little Steel Horse, mocking the long history of bilaterally symmetric sculptures of Dear-Leader-on-a-Big-Pedestalized-Horse. Little Steel Horse, made from an anvil and the jaw of a vise, sits atop a 30-ton stone pedestal and watches over all of Stone Mountain. 20th-century sculpture happily escaped bilateral symmetry and often sat, now depedestalized, directly on the earth. Near the end of my Beautiful Evidence, there’s more in the chapter “Sculptural Pedestals: Meaning, Practice, Depedestatlization.”

Images above were taken by Andrei Severny at my 234-acre tree and sculpture farm in northwest Connecticut.

Designs for Walking Maps

Here’s a visual map guide to Hogpen made in a few hours right before the 3rd open house.
It started out (wrongly) with a plot plan (like the floor plan of a house), which is a lousy model for people walking around.

So instead, navigation between the 7 sculpture fields that form Hogpen Hill Farms was conducted by means of what visitors actually see: sculptures, hills, trees.

The North direction is strongly enforced on the image map and also on the ground as visitors drive in: the security staff, after greeting our guests with a show catalog, then point to the north and to a sign that says, of all things “NORTH.” This visual guide is unrefined, but worked and was produced very quickly, in fact just-in-time.

Such designs might serve sculpture parks and museums. I once critiqued a sculpture park map in which the basic navigation was conducted through codings derived directly from a damn Acoustiguide that in turn were printed of the map. I suggested that the sculpture itself should be used as visual guide posts, not double-codings results from an interface (Acoustiguide) for an interface (map). Rather let the amazing art provide its own guide. No one has ever come to an art exhibit to see an interface to an interface.

Another way to think about this: use visual solutions for visual problems.

Not interface solutions, not flatland map solutions, but rather imaging the scene to be seen.

Photographs below are by Fredrick K.Orkin.

Continuous silent megalith, a structure of unknown significance.
2012-2013, native stone and air, 300 x 30 x height 16 feet, or 90 x 9 x height 5 meters, flows along on top of a local ridge.

The entire artwork is devoted to contemplative seeing beyond words, and visitors are requested to remain silent when within sight of the stones. It is constructed entirely of stones found on the farm. Many of the found stones are split to reveal fresh fractured cubist arrangement. Airspaces are constructed and worked by adjusting the stones as the local configurations are created and revised.

Three infrared images of the Airstream Trailer Interplanetary Explorer.

The infrared image lightens the darkness of the cool (in temperature) tree leaves, and creates an especially eerie quality to the image immediately below.

Airstream Trailer Interplanetary Explorer, with a big stainless steel Feynman diagram and a really big Tong Bird of Paradise, off toward a distant horizon.

Airspace, 14 feet height, aluminum petals, luscious reflections in pond.

Saturated-color/infrared images adjacent, then rotated upside down:

Fred Orkin’s infrared photograph combines the textures of the Millstone 8 and the tree leaves (lightened by their cool temperature by infrared imaging), best picture I’ve seen of the Millstone series:

Hogpen Hill #1, first piece installed at Hogpen Hill Farms 6 years ago, stainless steel with matte (double-action grinding) finish intensely responsive to light, 24 feet tall, installation area recently revised.

Tong Bird of Paradise, on a hill against the horizon, largest version 30 feet wide x 20 feet tall, silhouette can be seen from far away.

Magritte’s Smile resting on the deck of a studio.

Black swan boat at pond.