Giordano Bruno is a bronze tree
Fawwaz Traboulsi
(for Etel Adnan)
‘That tree, I mistook it for a man. I was not wrong.’
(Yannis Ritsos)
It seemed to me that I saw a tree, as I was looking down the shaft into the staircase of Postadammerplatz Banhoff in Mitte, central Berlin district. My friend the south-African poet had invited me to join her to meet the German sculptor Alexander Polzin around his sculpture.
As we descended the escalator, I realized I was wrong. The bronze tree was human with its head crushed in the ground.
Soon we were joined by Carl Weber, Heiner Muller’s English translator. A pleasant surprise as I had just finished reading his collection of Muller’s plays, The Hamlet Machine. Muller was a great revelation. I had discovered him upon reading his Guerre sans bataille. Vie sous deux dictatures and immediately proceeded to find everything related to the doubly dissident German playwright and poet. Polzin intervened to tell us about his own deep friendship with Muller and admiration for his work.
The bronze tree that was a man kept haunting me as we set in the metro to Polzin’s studio in Pankow. There, our tour of Alexander’s art production was put under the patronage of Muller. Alexander’s studio not only exuded Muller’s presence, it physically illustrated what the painter-sculptor and the playwright shared in common: an irresistible urge to compress, reduce and fuse. Creation for both is more than a dynamic act, it is a process of coercion, one could even say violence.
Polzin’s version of the ‘fallen angel’, in homage to Paul Ceylan, is both brutal and elegant. It seemed to me to be the opposite of Ernst Barlach’s ‘floating angel’, not just because of the contradictory titles. Although Alexander admits being inspired by Barlach, this latter’s work is an attempt to defy the law of gravity and the whole ‘earthy’ tradition of sculpture. In contrast, Polzin’s piece willingly submits itself to the earth’s gravity. It even seeks to amplify its effects. Alexander says his angel looks like a rocket. Rockets are made to fall down. Barlach’s sculpture floats, liberated from gravity. Polzin’s sculpture flies to better fall down and crush what is beneath it.
Empires rise and fall in that studio. Brecht is portrayed as a roman emperor. Yet the tryptic ‘Carthago’ laments the fall of the Carthagean empire, defeated by Rome. A tear shed for the fall of the GDR at the hands of modern ‘Rome’? Not unlikely.
Further away, a figurine shows two lovers united by their own desire, fused together in their very flesh. Similarly, ‘Sysiphus’ is represented with his body compressed into the rock.
Thus, the pieces of the sculpture’s puzzle began to fall into place. Giordano Bruno, whose head is crushed into the ground, has been made to suffer the same punishment as that of the Greek god who stole fire and gave it to the humans. Both had defied the gods. Their guilt has to do with giving light. Bruno defied the gods by claiming that our world is not the only world in the universe, nor is it its center; neither is our sun the only sun in the universe. He wrote: “there is no single world, no single earth, no single sun, there are many worlds as many as the radiant lights we see around us”.
With Bruno, plurality has been made light.
Polzin’s artistic tour de force resides in the way he represents the punishment: it had to do with wood. Bruno was burned on the stake with burning firewood. The scientist’s plight becomes the artist’s raw material as he simply sculpted his character from the same material used to punish and kill him. That explains why the bronze sculpture retains the feel of wood, why Bruno’s head crushed into the ground could be mistaken, from a short distance, for a tree’s roots. If the sculpture’s genitals are absent, it is because a tree is neutral gender. One hand has six fingers. Is it a naughty wink by the artist to the unsuspecting viewer? Some esoteric sign? More likely, and more simply, an additional finger has grown on the sculpture much like a branch would grow from a larger branch.
Giordano Bruno is a bronze tree. Etel Adnan once wrote a poem entitled ‘Pablo Neruda is a Banana Tree’.
Bruno is sending us a message from the past to the present. This 16th century scientist is a contemporary dissident. Against a straitjacketed, militarized, unique, stereotyped ‘global village’, in the image of the West, imposed by imperial power, with its theology of neo-liberalism, the dictatorship of the market, the phantasm of the ‘financial bubble’ (presently hopelessly punctured!), its Islamophobic Inquisition, its Manichean ‘war against terrorism’, and its murderous politics of identity, Bruno is simply saying that there is a place for all in our world and there are enough resources to satisfy all; he is calling for a world that can encompass all the possible worlds inside it.
It is not Bruno who is standing upside down. He so appears because it is our world that is upside down. But trees do not walk and a head cannot be a root. Put Giordano Bruno back on his feet, so that he can walk again.
‘A man/woman who walks opens up an horizon with every step’.
I think this comes from a poem by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.