Legs in the Garden
I have a pair of white mannequin legs in my backyard. They stand beneath my cherry tree, facing the fence. I love them. These garden legs give me constant delight. They occupy a specific place for me, between the sacred and profane, that I find particularly invigorating.
These sleek, sculptural legs by Carhartt were standing amid other objects in a yard-sale as we drove by last summer. Michael saw them first and pulled over, knowing I would want them. I did.
I paid 15 bucks and hauled them across the street and into the back of his car.
Something I love about ancient Greek and Roman sculptures is the element of time embodied in the left-over parts. I love seeing them mounted in museum tableaus that attempt to piece them together, the negative spaces left to our imagination. I love the way the marble asserts itself so prominently in these fractured bits, not hiding amid the elegance of a completed form.
I also love that humans made these forms to replicate and perfect our own forms. I love this desire to create an object in our own image and for it to be a vessel, or a stand-in, for the gods. A statue in a temple to be guarded and revered as something sacred and yet solidly made of stone. These statues occupy that liminal space that is the territory of art: the space between what is meaningful and what is mundane, what is spiritual and what is empirical.
What is left to us are physical shapes. Letters in a lost alphabet. Parts of some greater human story we can only imagine but that we know is deeply a part of us. And we see the shards and the evidence of time and we imagine the humans reaching for the gods, their hands covered in marble dust.
The light-weight, plastic legs in my garden speak of manufacturing and commerce. The missing torso is not due to centuries of decay and the legs are not still in-tact due to a careful excavation from the Arno. These legs are fashioned to sell us pants.
And yet… in my backyard, here at Top Hat, these legs are regal. They stand facing the boundary of the fence with great poise. They are funny. They are beautiful. They are complex with poetic meaning and offer rich visual play. At times a visitor from an ancient past. At times a celestial guest announcing spring’s arrival. At times a kind-of St. Francis, lovingly witnessing the natural world.
And at times, too, just some plastic mannequin legs in the garden.