Welded steel, 47 x 35 x 17, 2019.
The parts sit in a rectangular field like marks on a page, and the work is read from the front as a sheet is read, left to right and top to bottom. Two kinds of sheet suit it: a score and a window.
Read as notation, the horizontal members are staves. The ridged bar and the long rail beneath it carry the weight of the lines. The small disc with its stem at the left of the arch is a note head, and the spiral at the top of the arch hangs from a stem like a second note. The scrolls on the right upright curl like clefs and ornaments, the flourishes a copyist adds at the end of a line. The zigzag at the top is a contour of rising and falling pitch, and the stair below is a scale written as a figure. The performer is the eye, travelling across the field and sounding each mark in turn.
Read as a window, the pleated band at the top is a blind drawn partway down over an opening, and the field below it gives onto a view. The arch is a hill or a rising sun, and the zigzag against the half disc above it is a range of mountains under the sun. The stair is a path descending toward the weighted form at lower right, which sits in the foreground like an object on a sill. The long arc at left bows the edge of the view and keeps the frame from reading as a rectangle.
David Smith is the precedent for both. In Hudson River Landscape, a country seen from a train was recomposed as a drawing in steel, with line doing the work of horizon, hill and water inside a frame. Smith treated landscape as a kind of writing, a sequence of marks laid along horizontals. Love Song takes up the same equivalence from the other side: the score and the view are both read in sequence along the same lines.
The two readings differ in time. A score unfolds as it is performed, and a landscape is taken in at once. The sculpture holds both, so the viewer reads and looks in the same glance. The dedication gives the field its occasion. A window is where a person stands thinking of another, and a score is what gets made so that something can be sung to her.
