A small crowd gathered in the field across from the Fitchburg Art Museum this afternoon to launch Otto Piene’s “Sky Art” inflatable sculpture “Paris Star” into the air.
“It’s always different every time,” says Elizabeth Goldring Piene, the widow of Piene, who died in 2014. “It’s an environmental piece. It has to do with the weather and the day.”
The happening was the culminating event of the Fitchburg Art Museum’s exhibition “Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983–2014,” which closed today. They’d tried to launch the sculpture twice before this spring, but had had to postpone because of wind and rain. A thunderstorm was forecast for today, but the afternoon turned out to be sunny.
When inflated by a blower, the sculpture “Paris Star” turned into large, soft spiky white flower or mace-like form on the end of a long tube-stalk that stretched across the grassy field. “It’s somewhere between a star and a flower and a hand that’s turning,” Goldring Piene tells me. “It’s about peace and optimism.”
The volunteer crew emptied six tanks of helium into five long plastic tubes that they tied to the sculpture to lift it into the air. The tubes made rubbery bumping noise as they jostled in the gusty breeze. They got “Paris Star” briefly aloft, perhaps 30 feet up, before it settled back onto the grass, and they called it a day. About an hour later a downpour drenched the city.
“The ripping of the materials by the winds, the natural forces at work, is part of the total experience. Sometimes the elements are supportive, and sometimes, like today, they are not,” Piene told The Boston Globe in March 1971, when he was struggling to get an inflatable aloft over the Charles River in strong winds. “The risk involved makes the project all the more interesting because the elements, the natural forces they represent, are never completely foreseeable. Sometimes you are strong, and sometimes they are strong.”
Previously: During WWII, Otto Piene’s Job Was To Kill Planes, Afterward He Imagined A ‘Sky Art’ Of Peace
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