ENDLESS COLUMN, VERSION I
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, 1918
One shape. A wooden bead, fat in the middle, pinched at both ends. Stack it. Then stack it again. That's the whole sculpture. Oak, carved in 1918, with the chisel marks still in it. Half totem pole, half stack of diamonds. Now look at the top. The last shape gets cut off halfway through. Same at the bottom. That's not damage. That's the whole idea. It doesn't end. It just stops. And your eye keeps stacking the pieces right past the ceiling. Try not to do it. You can't. He figured out how to make you build the rest. And there's no pedestal. Sculptures usually stand on something. This one just stands. Or maybe it is the pedestal. Just with nothing on top. Brancusi had used this shape underneath other sculptures. Then, at some point, he realized he didn't need the sculpture anymore. The repeating could be the whole thing. Then the shape waits twenty years. In 1935, the Women's League of Gorj asks Brancusi to make a war memorial. Gorj is his county. He was born there. In 1916, German forces had come for the bridge at Targu Jiu. The town held it. Not just the garrison. Old men, boys and women picked up whatever they had and kept them off the crossing until the army arrived. Most war memorials give you a general on a horse. Brancusi gives them this. The same shape, now cast in iron, almost a hundred feet tall. The pieces climb until the iron runs out, and then your eye takes over. A column with no end, for people who ended. Before it became that, it was this. Six feet eight inches of carved oak. The moment Brancusi realized a pedestal could keep going forever.