Don't Look at That Tree
Don't Look At That Tree turns a 100-foot hickory tree in Streator, Illinois, into a blunt public monument to climate-catastrophe denial. By wrapping the tree in yellow crime-scene tape, Williams does not merely signal danger; he indicts the collective refusal to see what is already in front of us. The press release invokes Anna Freud's mechanism of denial, then translates that psychological defense into a public art object whose very title commands the viewer to perform the pathology. Its force lies in the collision between small-town civic space and planetary catastrophe, between a local tree and the global failure of imagination. The appended biography places the work inside Williams's longer line of subversive public gestures, from Reims to the American Midwest.
- DATE:
- June 1, 2019
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Anna Freud; Baron Osuna; Kenneth Baker; Donald Preziosi; Thomas Frangenberg; Dave Hickey; Julia Friedman; Wally Hedrick; Bruce Conner; Jay DeFeo; Joan Brown; Manuel Neri; Wallace Berman; Jim Olmsted; Charlie Brown
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; City Park, Streator, Illinois; The Lodge; Super Window Project; Parc du Domaine les Crayeres; Gloria Maria Gallery; Artforum; Times Literary Supplement; Hammer Museum; SITE Santa Fe; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Contemporary Art Center, Las Vegas
- KEYWORDS:
- denial as public monument; climate catastrophe refusal named; crime-scene tape as indictment; small-town civic space vs planetary catastrophe; Anna Freud mechanism literalized; do-not-look as command; refusal to see what is visible