Maya Lin, Ghost Forest

0:00:04.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re standing in Madison Square Park, just off Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, looking at an installation by the artist and architect Maya Lin called Ghost Forest.

0:00:15.2 Dr. Beth Harris: What we’re in the midst of, is an installation of trees that are no longer alive. These aren’t very big trees. In fact, these are much more slender than many of the trees that are alive that surround this installation.

0:00:29.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in an urban park. This is one of of the great public spaces in Manhattan. And we’re surrounded by trees that are well over a hundred years old. But these trees in the center, stand as a reminder of the environmental devastation that is taking place.

0:00:44.8 Dr. Beth Harris: These are a kind of tree that are endangered, that grow along the coastline of the northeastern United States.

0:00:51.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: These are white cedars, that is, they’re evergreens. They’re framed by this beautiful foliage. But here, we see the skeletons of trees.

0:01:00.1 Dr. Beth Harris: The lower branches were removed intentionally to create this sense of this forest of columns.

0:01:04.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: These trees stand as a kind of memorial. They are meant to remind us that these trees died in their natural habitat because of increased salinization, the result of rising sea levels.

0:01:17.6 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, when you come across this as you enter the park, it certainly draws your attention. And we immediately ask, what happened here? So, in one way, what Maya Lin is doing, is making us aware of something that we might not know about. We know about climate change, but we may not specifically know about its impact on certain species of trees.

0:01:40.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: And I think there is something very powerful about focusing in on one species.

0:01:44.6 Dr. Beth Harris: We can feel how these were inserted into the earth. The other trees surrounding this installation, we see their roots come up out of the ground. And so we’re aware that these are displaced. These have come from somewhere else.

0:02:00.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: The idea that forests of white cedar covered 500,000 acres, is a reminder of the majesty of the American landscape, and the way that artists, since the 19th century, have focused on representing that grandeur.

0:02:14.0 Dr. Beth Harris: We can go back to the first, environmentally-aware American artist, Thomas Cole. We can think about Cole’s, The Hunter’s Return, where the foreground is filled with felled trees. So the impact of man on the environment at this very early history of the United States.

0:02:31.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: But where Thomas Cole and other painters of the 19th century often represented man’s slight encroachment into the vastness of an imagined, untouched wilderness, here, Maya Lin is reminding us that the industrial footprint of the United States has covered almost the entire continent, and so little has been preserved.

0:02:51.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And if we think about this in the long history of art, there are ways in which it reminds me of Duchamp’s idea of the readymade, of taking something that already exists in the world, re-contextualizing it, and asking us, therefore, to think about the object in a different way.

0:03:07.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: The artist is also drawing on the tradition of earthworks from the 1960s and the 1970s, where artists would go into remote areas, and would create a kind of art that was, in some ways, ephemeral, and that would be transformed by nature over time. But just because this is not a traditional sculpture, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have aesthetic aspects. Maya Lin had to decide the density of the placement of the trees, their relationship of one to another, their height, how deeply they were to be buried.

0:03:36.2 Dr. Beth Harris: The branches, which reach out and up, almost feel as though they’re seeking out the sky. But here, their leafless-ness is very poignant.

0:03:46.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: These trees, after all, were uprooted. They were carefully graded and brought into Manhattan, and then placed upright, buried in the ground.

0:03:53.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And the conservancy has added the sounds of birds and wildlife that would have originally occupied Manhattan. And so we can, in some ways, be transported back in time, before all these skyscrapers were here, and try to imagine what Manhattan was like before man transformed it so.

0:04:13.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: Looking at these trees is a clear reminder of the environmental devastation that the Earth is currently enduring.