Roxy Paine: Bluff

If a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tree falls in Central Park, will anybody believe it? Sited among the park's famous American elms, Roxy Paine's Bluff, a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tree, stood last spring as a gleaming, perennial fake surrounded by a man-made natural setting that changed with the seasons. For Paine, the process of constructing the tree is most significant--the difficulty of painstakingly creating an object that closely resembles an organic one, and the impossibility of quantifying nature by breaking it down into component parts. Through photographic chapters and schematic diagrams that individually illustrate the tree's large branches, small branch systems, fungus, assembly and installation, this volume acts as a how-to manual, illustrating the process Paine undertook to make Bluff. A Public Art Fund project, Bluff was on view from March through May of last year as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.