Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Ubiquitous


White plastic chairs of this ilk are seen everywhere, all over the world. I've seen versions of them used to do good, made into wheelchairs for people in Third World countries. More frequently, I've seen their plastic carcasses polluting the rivers, caught in the limbs of fallen trees coated with silt and brown plastic shopping bags.


They're used everywhere because they're inexpensive cheap and easily stored. When one gets blown off the boat or broken under the weight of an embarrassed guest, it can be easily replaced with a clone at any number of stores for well under $10.


This chair though, sitting beneath the only tree on that stretch of road, did not seem to be abandoned; it just looked as though it were somehow meditating, waiting for someone with whom it could share both the shade and the view.
   


The chair is its own throne, the tree and its shade is the castle. 
Their realm is behind them -- at the trees in the background
and the stream just beyond. 

4 comments:

dive said...

Such a noble tree and a beautiful view deserves a better chair; something romantic in wrought iron from the nineteenth century perhaps.

Speedway said...

I agree, Dive, but a nicer chair would definitely find itself enjoying a different view, courtesy of some thief. Metal would find itself at the junkyard, sold for scrap; several pieces of public art have fallen victim to that (Say, was the Henry Moore sculpture, stolen several years back, ever found? Police thought it was cut up and sold for scrap because it was too big to ever have been taken out of the country)

dive said...

I can't recall the outcome of the Henry Moore thing, Speedway, though my own little city is littered with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Anthony Caro monumental chunks of metal, and hoorah for that. We even have a Caro sculpture in the middle of a roundabout. Very odd.
It's not the public art but the pieces hidden away in private collections that get stolen here. A good reason to donate sculpture to the public.

Speedway said...

That beautiful tree is the only one bordering the entire area of that field, Dive, which I think is about 2-miles around. When the field is used by campers during the races at IMS, a little entrance is set up and the "gatekeeper" sits under the tree to collect fees.

I took a look on-line and the Henry Moore sculpture was never recovered. As of 2009, the police think it was taken from the Henry Moore estate by a group of travellers using a flat-bed truck. They understand it was probably cut up for scrap that same night, sent off to Rotterdam, then China for a grand total of 1500 pounds. It weighed 2 tons, so Henry's bronze was sold off for less than 38 cents per pound.

Bastards. Would have been better off selling it underground.