Jaume Plensa
Echo
May 5th -September 11th 2011
Madison Square Park, New York, NY.

Of all the articles, posts, and reviews I have read about Jaume Plensa’s public art work Echo, the one in Paris Review prompted me to write.“A poem is never finished, it is abandoned,” said the sculptor Jaume Plensa, quoting Paul Valéry on a sunny September morning in New York City, as he watched Echo, his forty-four-foot sculpture of a female head, being dismantled piece by piece.” This comes from the Jane and Jonathan Wells writers and residents of the Flat Iron district in New York City. They watched the piece go up cranes and crew rushing about, saw it come down quietly and without fanfare, and visited it often as it lived in the park through out the spring and summer. They saw it as “a child who had taken shape in the statue with the timelessness and serenity of a Buddha.” They wrote about it as if it was a beloved neighbor or friend. 

What makes public works so wonderful in a city like New York is not always the artist, their resume or all the accolades, but the city itself as a stage. No canvas is as great as that of New York. For any artist it must be such a tremendous undertaking to impress upon a city such as New York, a moment where you must stop. You must look, you must stare. This piece works in Madison Square Park because it a park that revels it self slowly to you as you turn and meander around the lushness of the environment. It is small but accomdating. The great lawn is impressive not like Central Park’s but that of a country home. Echo is at home, is at peace, and lends that peace to it’s visitors.


The poem Echo inspired: 

White as x ray bone she rises through
The trees in stone as if she were sublime,
As if she knew what this grace was
And she was only nine, framed
Between her errands and her games.
Her nymph’s body surges underground
Not knowing what this buried love
Is for.

Beneath her neighbors play Frisbee
On the grass and strangers take her
Photograph. The final sun pours
Into her sealed eyes and mouth as though
She were the saint of radiant stillness
Who says this marble flesh is a prison
Stone yet the mind flies with
The confetti of birds, soars into
The beliefs of summer.
Silence succumbs to air and the blossoms
Sail down, the clocktower’s fretted hands
Notched against her ribs.

Questions flood her blood
And darkness, flee and then she’s gone,
Taken from our vanquished arms but
She still speaks in the autumn leaves,
In the furrowed bark, in the singsong
Of the childrens’ swings.

Paris Review:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/09/29/echo-in-madison-square-park/