Upside Down Trees

This is is a shot of Gustav Metzger's Flailing Trees first commissioned as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2010 for the Peace Garden, and since purchased by the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. It now forms part of their permanent collection and sits outside the main frontage on Oxford Road. I spotted it first on Sunday.

It comprises 21 inverted willows, and listed references describe a subversion in the natural order. The work speaks (I have also read), "about a world turned on it's head and the violence humanity inflicts upon nature". There is no doubting Metzger's artistic integrity and global message here, but I am afraid I just don't get it when set in concrete in this gentrified art world setting.

Compare this more sombre work if you will to the more light-hearted Upside Pines by Giles Kent, that it instantly reminded me of. Installed in the River Lune Millennium Park in Lancaster around 2000, this work has been here ever since, and has been left to slowly go back to nature via it's neglect and rot. Wild Art you might call it.

The impressive Flikr entry of the above link talks of this work as looking creepily like a "wierd cult temple for sacrificing virgins. Not an improbable idea in these parts, except for the difficulty in finding virgins".

That wit made me recall the artist Michael Trainor writing about discovering the same piece for the first time on a walk along the Lune. He talked of a "pleasingly simple and subtle inversion that takes root in the mind for quite some time and (one that) is, no doubt quite perplexing for worms".