»In the sculpture garden of the philosophers

"Garden of the Philosophers" is the phrase I should use to describe Socrates Sculpture Park, a City Park, at an attractive corner of Long Island City, Queens. Walking into the park felt akin to a stroll in a junkyard, complete with a Beware of the Dog sign (and actual frothing-at-the-mouth dog, protecting its rusting iron heaps. Was this also art?). The park area had several fresh-looking pieces as part of the Emerging Artists Fund 2007 annual exhibition, but several had begun to age unnervingly from the weather, and others looked too confusing to be outdoors (an oversized Christmas decoration might be kitsch, but art?).

I took some photographs, now that I am back in the habit of carrying my pocket camera. The sculpture I enjoyed the most was a series of steel posts about five meters tall, with a rotating arm that swung with the wind and periodically hit a bell with a weight. I have never liked wind chimes, but this shining sculpture captured my attention.

The cups on the East River side of the sculpture catch the breeze, turning an axle connected to a short tube with a weight at one end. The weighted side of the apparatus completes its revolution independently of the cups, and the weight itself is on a hinge, so that it only occasionally hits the hollow tube mounted above the stationary triangular fin. The sound is quite lovely.

Thanks in part to the proximity of the Museum of the Moving Image, the Garden hosts annual outdoor film screenings. Where does the name "Socrates" come from? The Park Department's web site is strangely quiet on this. The park's web site notes that sculptor Mark di Suvero led its creation in the mid Eighties, around the same time that the City of Pittsburgh was agonizing over the installation of one of his monumental outdoor sculptures on a traffic island downtown.