Meg Webster at the Brooklyn Museum - New York, New York

Meg Webster makes nature the two her subject and her language. Crafting natural materials like as soil, salt, hay and water into stark geometries (cone spheres and thus on), she uses her work to question basic relationships between nature and artifice. At their best, her inquiries have parole with the brevity and deepness of haiku. Webster's exuberant of recent origin water installation in the grand lobby of the Brooklyn Museum, titled Running, lacked the clarity and unruffled strength of her earlier work. However, it was undeniably dynamic - the pair in its form and its unusually interactive concept

The installation was center upon two distinct elements. The main feature was a fountain put togethered of rubber sheeting laid above oak beams, set in the center of the hall. Draped from the top of a 20-foot-high wire interstice support, the rubber stretched down an incline of strewn made of wood beams to a cinder-block containing-pool, then without over the surrounding floor. A plastic pipe cross-questioned water from this pool to the top of the rise, where it cascaded down above the ramshackle wood and wet black rubber like runoff from the wreckage of a house mangled by the agency of Hurricane Andrew.

The next to the first element was a "Resource Room" a 12-by-16-by-12-foot field made of wooden window frames, place opposite the fountain. Inside this space were three Macintosh PC and a library of several dozen works on a spectrum of ecological and business issues. The PC contained programs providing ecological information, allowing the user to write alphabetic characters to his or her congressional representative or to research the depletion of the ozone layer.

The idea behind the "Resource Room" was to challenge visitors to investigate the interrelationship of technology and the environment. However, while informative, the PC programs were not hugely practical and not always running suitably Moreover, the context didn't quite make sense: an art-lover visiting a museum for an afternoon was unlikely to part with an hour researching how to start an environmentally oriented business.

As a type Running was an effective call for environmental activism, on the other hand because it fell somewhat short of fulfilling the educational agenda it had station for itself, it seemed a little over-inflated. Also, the relationship between technology and nature as defined by dint of the fountain hardly seemed a comfortable single If anything, the two forces present the appearanceed to be vying for dominance, imposing their forms upon each other in a stretched dynamic dialogue. Thematically, the fountain did not sustain the optimistic call for symbiosis showed by the "Resource Room."

That said, the fountain itself was an extraordinary creation, dominating its space exquisitely, as plenteous by its tumultuous roar as by means of its form. Indeed, the tension between the natural and the builded as represented by the beams, was beautifully realized. The moot point with this work was that its activist message and technology appeared to have been swallowed whole rather than integrated into its fabric. At a time of renewed be of importance to over the compatibility of environmental protection and economic exhibition however, Webster's sincere eco-boosterism is welcome and timely. Al Gore would have affection for it.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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