Art - David Barr

Just outside the main entrance of Michigan Legacy Art Park founder and artistic director, David Barr, has sculpted a work that provides a benchmark for time and place and serves as a keystone for your tour of the Park.  Barr created Solar Month for this exact location.  Here, very close to the 45th parallel, the passage of time can easily be measured each month as the sun passes from the Summer to Winter solstice.

In addition to providing a calendar, the relationship of Earth and Sun allows us to fix our location on the planet.  Consider that if you were to travel the 45th parallel from this point, you would pass through Bordeaux, France; Turin, Italy; Belgrade; Bucharest; Bole, China; and Heronobe, Japan.
Utility is not the only function of Solar Month.  As a work of art, it has the ability to move us beyond the physical “here and now” to a place where there is time for consideration and reflection.  Through the merging of utility and spirit the mission of Michigan Legacy Art Park can be realized. 

The mission of Michigan Legacy Art Park “...to establish and maintain a unique environment that harmoniously integrates nature, art, history and education” is evident in the work of the Park’s founder and artistic director, David Barr.  The works in Barr’s Sawpath Series, for example, go far beyond a mere commemoration of Michigan lumbering.  For in the Sawpath Series, as in nature, investigation of even the simplest form can lead to ever-expanding knowledge and understanding.

Upon first viewing Sawpath II, III and IV may appear as interestingly stacked wood reminiscent of the days when huge piles of pine logs, harvested throughout winter, awaited the thawing of the rivers and streams that would take them to the mills of Saginaw and Muskegon.
Further study, however, will reveal the numbers of nature, the “Golden Mean” first articulated by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.  The numbers form an infinite series or spiral in which each number after one is the sum of the two preceding numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.... 
This progression seen throughout nature is present in the growth pattern of pine needles and cones, and the branching of trees themselves.  It is reflected in patterns Barr has chosen for his work.

Sawpath, with its 16-foot sculpted blade, seems to part the curtain of time as well as clear a path in the forest.  Through the opening, one might imagine lumbermen working first with the hand-driven whipsaw, then the steam-driven buzz saw and finally the band saw.  Lumber mills often used color on the stub end of the log to categorize the species or quality of the wood.
Michigan Legacy Art Park is now free of the sounds from a turbulent lumber camp, yet here we can imagine a time that was at once heroic, traumatic and dramatic.

“You must live life forwards but you can only understand it backwards.”  These words from Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkergaard, are central to David Barr’s Stockade Labyrinth.  From the first encounter, as viewed from the path, the work provokes a wealth of emotion and thought.  Each seems independent at the moment of experience but becomes related when the journey through the work is completed.

There is the forbidding stockade, like those built by advancing Europeans to separate the worlds of immigrant and indigenous people.  The words within the walls are French, the language of Marquette, Cadillac, Jolliet and LaSalle.  The images, such as the hand, a horse pulling a plow and a soaring eagle, each reflect on the impact, both physical and spiritual, of human kind on nature’s abundance.  The viewer can pause at “dead-end stations” pondering war, trapping, mining, farming and spiritual quests on the way to the overlook platform.  Here is another maze, one that, when followed to its center, brings us to the exact spot of Michigan Legacy Art Park on the globe.  Finally, the view... forests, not as they were but as we have made them, DNR managed plantations for renewal and production of lumber.

When asked, “What is Michigan?,” David Barr once responded, “Michigan is a place where people make things; but it is also rooted in nature.”  These two functions, manufacture and nature, are often seen in opposition through filters of political bias.  For Barr, though, Michigan Legacy Art Park is a place for harmony “... telling the story and what we learn from it rather than simply pointing fingers.”

The piece, Nurture/Nature, was originally commissioned by the late Mr. Maurice Cohen in 1996.  Named Dreampool, David Barr’s creation consisted of a large granite egg that reflected beautifully on its large stainless steel “pool”.  Since Cohen, a philanthropist and avid art collector, passed away, his impressive collection has been donated to various people and organizations; Dreampool was given to Mr. David V. Johnson of the development firm Victor International.

However, during this transitional period, the piece had been dismantled and the “pool” misplaced.  With only part of a sculpture in his possession, Johnson donated the “egg” to the Art Park.  With a new home for the “egg,” Barr was inspired to redesign the piece and give it a new life and a new name.  Barr transformed the piece into a set of stone mysteries about life cycles.  “To preserve the bird, we must preserve the egg.”  Thus, this sculpture’s history is also a metaphor.