Painted welded steel, 216 x 192 x 108, 2004.
“Outlook” is the view from a window and also the weather forecast, and the sculpture gives both in one structure: a view under the lintel and a forecast above it. The form is a triumphal arch, a heavy lintel carried on two posts, eighteen feet high and sixteen across, and large enough to walk through. A Roman arch carries its inscription on the attic above the opening, and this one carries weather there. A short round tube set in the face of the upper mass reads as a sun, a cone narrows downward beside it like a tornado, and flat slabs lie over both like cloud.
The work was made for the grounds of a window and door manufacturer, and it is a window and a door at once: a frame a visitor walks through and looks through. Those two products have the same job, which is admitting light and keeping weather out. The sculpture hangs a sun and a tornado over the opening where that job is done. No building stands behind the frame, and the visitor passes from open ground to open ground under both.
The composition is the inversion of Idiot Box (2000).
