Painted welded steel, 42 x 84 x 24, 1999.
“Pine” names a wood, a verb and a bench. The wood is the one the sculpture is painted to resemble, a pale, grained tone. The verb is to long for what isn’t there. The bench is the sports idiom “riding the pine,” which describes a player sitting out the game and waiting to be put in. A bench is where a player waits, and a player on the bench is wishing to be somewhere else, so the two older meanings collapse into one object.
The sculpture is a long low bench with two shallow dished seats set end to end, each shaped for one sitter. Both are empty, and the players are elsewhere. A tall plate stands at the left end as the back. A rail slopes down from its top across the length of the bench to the right end, carried on two thin uprights, like the rail along the front of a team bench. A narrow shelf runs below the seat for the feet. The bench is made as a fitted place for a pair of waiters.
The seats are dished and the sitters are absent, and the dishes show where they would have sat. A bench is a place to wait, and its meaning depends on the absent game. The sculpture shows the bench and none of the play.
