‘Foolish’ art still helps feed souls

Thinking otherwise misses the forest

They took all the trees

And put them in a tree museum Then they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see ’em.

— Joni Mitchell

Arecent art installation in Austria is drawing some raised eyebrows and a natural connection to eco-aware lyrics in Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit song “Big Yellow Taxi.”

In a stadium normally hosting professional football matches (that’s soccer in American-speak) for the home team in the city of Klagenfurt, a forest has been temporarily planted for viewing day or night through October 27. In a fashion somewhat like that of our noted art museum in a small Bentonville forest, admission to the exhibit is free. The difference is that in Arkansas, you get to see actual framed paintings as well as trees in one venue. In Austria — just trees.

The rather grand project is “For Forest – The Unending Attraction of Nature” by Klaus Littmann, who has transformed the Wörthersee Stadium into Austria’s largest public art installation.

The project was conceived by Littmann based on a pencil drawing, “The Unending Attraction of Nature,” by Max Peintner, that Littmann saw more than 30 years ago. Littman held on to a notion of reinterpreting the drawing into real life one day. And now we have it.

I looked up the Peintner drawing, which was completed not long after the Joni Mitchell song was released, though there’s no indication the two events are related. With a message portrayed in realism, surrealism and a dash of dystopia the graphic work that inspired the live tree planting looks as if Currier and Ives collaborated with Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher. A stadium is filled with participants viewing a grove of trees on the field as a bleak city skyline looms in the background — perfect for those who are fans of TV zombies or who believe Sandra Bullock in the movie Bird Box really can white-water raft blindfolded. Yet there’s a simple message revealed with blindfolds off. As in Mitchell’s song, the world’s ratio of Ready-Mix vs. greenery is out of whack.

The last-century pencil drawing couldn’t be left in its frank obviousness. For the current installation, 300 trees, some weighing more than 6 tons, were sourced by project landscape architect Enzo Enea. He covered the playing surface with a mixed forest characteristic of central Europe. Littmann’s exhibition is partly funded by “tree sponsors,” who have each contributed about $6,000 in U.S. equivalency. They

will receive prints signed by both artists.

Meanwhile, the soccer team will play home games at the adjacent Karawan-kenblick Stadium.

Afterwards, the trees will be uprooted and replanted to “remain in memory as a forest sculpture” per information from the installers.

Is it just me, or does that seem a foolish waste? What net harm to the environment is the result of all that earth-moving and diesel-tractor exhaust? Not to mention the stadium lighting at full lumens for the night visitors. Wouldn’t plantings in a new city park with didactic labels chronologically identifying which trees are on the critical list be demonstrative enough?

Perhaps I’m too practical. After all, each one of us merely getting up in the morning to make breakfast has a “green” toll to pay. If trees in the middle of a soccer field provide a moment of thought and spur reflection, then so be it.

Heaven forbid I become so unbending a critic as Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg who, as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art neared opening years ago, railed at the squandered cost of our local cultural treasure. Per him, the money should have been directed specifically by the Walton Family Foundation to Walmart employees instead, maybe for something like mobile dental clinics. Dental hygiene is important. Otherwise eating becomes difficult. But feeding the soul with music, literature and art is also important. This separates us from the rest of the forest creatures and it’s been that way since that caveperson took a spell from hunter-gathering, set aside the roughhewn club for a charred stick and began drawing on cave walls.

Art, as in life, is best as a balance, from serene oil landscapes to jolting photographs. I hate to admit it, but maybe art is even Yoko Ono wildly shouting into an empty museum gallery, though I’d never venture out of my way for such. But if I’d been in Austria, I may have detoured to see the trees. What the heck, I’d even have been willing to “pay a dollar and a half just to see ’em.”