George Rickey’s Two Lines Oblique Down

George Rickey, Two Lines Oblique Down, 1970, stainless steel, 17 x 14 ft., Mead Art Museum.

Description of the Sculpture

Two Lines Oblique Down is an outdoor kinetic sculpture at Amherst College. Located in the corner of a grassy courtyard framed by red-brick buildings, the sculpture rises from the ground, a story-tall skinny reflective metal pole topped with two long fixed arms extending diagonally outward in opposite directions, forming a wide “V” in the air. Attached via pivot points to the ends of the fixed arms, thin needle-like pieces of metal hang, waiting to be blown about by the wind. The entire sculpture is made of brush-finished weather-resistant stainless steel and dotted with green lichen, giving it a silvery scale-like appearance that reflects a muted version of the environment around it. 

The two needles, carefully weighted and attached via nearly frictionless bearings, swing freely with even a slight force. These elements rotate, dip, and dance in slow, graceful arcs and circles as the wind shifts. The movement is quiet and almost balletic in its slow, deliberate nature. The whole sculpture plays with balance, motion, and lightness despite its steel construction; it feels airy and meditative, responding subtly to its environment.

George Rickey, Two Lines Oblique Down, 1970, stainless steel, 17 x 14 ft., Mead Art Museum.

Interaction with Weather

Two Lines Oblique Down is fundamentally wind-driven, reflecting its speed and direction at any given moment. The variability of the wind means the sculpture never moves the same way twice, instead performing an endlessly unique, wind-driven dance. One moment, the statue could stand still and suspenseful, the next, moving and alive. Range of motion is limited, and the needles are weighted so that the movement remains measured, separated, and gracefully slow even in a strong breeze.¹

Wind is not the only weather that interacts with the sculpture. On a sunny day, the steel shimmers, and the moving arms flash glints of sunlight. On a cloudy day, the frame blends with the grey sky, and its presence is muted. On a rainy day, the arms move slowly, and water droplets that cling to the metal roll off. On a snowy day, the white backdrop contrasts the steel, and snow accumulates on the static sections. The weather makes it so that Two Lines Oblique Down is not a sculpture you view once; instead, it offers a unique viewing experience with every interaction.

Viewer’s Experience

When viewing Two Lines Oblique Down, the experience is not simply visual; the statue also evokes an elevated sense of time and place. Time slows, shifts away from the conceptual, and becomes that of a tangible force due to the needle’s movements. This slowness encourages the viewer to slow their pace and become grounded in place with the sculpture, drawing your attention to the day’s weather swirling around the square. The same breeze moving the needles is blowing your hair, the same light reflecting off the surface is penetrating your skin, and the same precipitation bouncing off the base is soaking into your clothes. Through the shared medium of time and weather, these direct sensory connections between you and the sculpture anchor the viewer in the present moment. 

George Rickey, Two Lines Oblique Down, 1970, stainless steel, 17 x 14 ft., Mead Art Museum. Image via Amherst Downtown.

Art Historical Context

George Rickey was a pioneer of kinetic sculpture in the 20th century, blending his background in engineering, mechanics, and physics into a singular practice. His kinetic works, including Two Lines Oblique Down, are weighted precisely and engineered to react to the slightest breeze.² These works are often called “useless machines,” a somewhat comical term emphasizing that these mechanisms exist solely to create poetic motion.

Rickey’s work is perhaps best contextualized within the constructivism movement. Emerging from the Russian avant-garde in the early 20th century, constructivist art rejects symbolism, instead focusing on the construction of the art itself, to provide the meaning.³ In addition to writing his own book on the movement, Rickey embraced constructivism in his sculptural works by pursuing the sole goal of capturing movement.⁴ Additionally, his sculptures’ characteristic long lines, sharp angles, and raw surfaces hark back to the constructivist emphasis on rational design.

In terms of where Two Lines Oblique Down and Rickey’s larger sculptural catalog fall in the sculptural dialogue, there are many ways to contextualize the works. Jerrold Levinson, an American philosopher of art at the University of Maryland, places Rickey’s amongst other hybrid art forms. The sculptures are hybrid works not just for their combination of sculpture and movement but also for the artist and the environment as co-creators.⁵ Erik Koed, an art historian specializing in contemporary sculptures, looks at Rickey’s work based on the distinction between sculpture and the sculptural. Koed argues that sculpture is just a static object created by the artist, and the sculptural is the temporal, spatial, and time-related experience between the viewer and the art.⁶ The ability of Rickey’s sculptures, through their slow, dynamic movement, to ground the viewer in time and place firmly plants his work in the sculptural.

Axel Vervoordt, George Rickey, Axel Vervoordt Gallery

Video Journaling

Taking inspiration from the journalistic practice of Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings series, over a two-week period, I captured ten-second snippets of video of Two Lines Oblique Down every time I passed the sculpture.⁷ I set out on this mission with the sole intent of adding a visual representation of the sculpture in different variations of weather and wind for my project, but the experience became more than that. At the start of this series, I was in and out in a flash, just there to get my clip and go, but by the end, I found myself standing in my designated video spot, just watching and waiting. Staring at the sculpture in the pouring rain, the rest of the campus trying to dash to shelter, I knew I probably looked a bit crazy, but it did not matter. I wanted to understand how the sculpture was feeling that day, and I wanted to understand how I was feeling that day. I was experiencing firsthand what Erik Koed describes as the shift from “sculpture” to the “sculptural,” where Two Lines Oblique Down was no longer a static object but a temporal and spatial experience shaped by my interaction with it.⁸ Through this process, I have developed a closer connection with Two Lines Oblique Down than with any other art piece I have ever seen. I would even go as far as to consider it a friend or, at the very least, someone I want to check in with when I get the chance.

Data Numbered to Match Video:

1. The wind is currently 10 mph from the south. Today, wind speeds are 0 to 11 mph, with gusts up to 23 mph.
2. The wind is currently 11 mph from the south. Today, wind speeds are 2 to 11 mph, with gusts up to 27 mph.
3. The wind is currently 13 mph from the northwest. Today, wind speeds are 2 to 16 mph, with gusts up to 36 mph.
4. The wind is currently 7 mph from the north-northwest. Today, wind speeds are O to 8 mph, with gusts up to 18 mph.
5. The wind is currently 5 mph from the southwest. Today, wind speeds are O to 9 mph, with gusts up to 20 mph.
6. The wind is currently 8 mph from the east-southeast. Today, wind speeds are 1 to 9 mph, with gusts up to 22 mph.

George Rickey, Two Lines Oblique Down, 1970, stainless steel, 17 x 14 ft., Mead Art Museum. Video by the author.

A minute-long video of Two Lines Oblique Down comprises ten six-second videos of the sculpture moving in different wind and weather conditions. 

Conclusion

Two Lines Oblique Down encourages the viewer to engage with seldom considered elements of our world by amplifying the subtleties of the human sensory relationship with weather. By representing the slow melodic movement of time, the sculpture draws our attention to the present, grounds us in the moment, and heightens our sense of the weather. In the fast-paced world we live in today, to be put so forcibly and distinctly into the moment is a rare and almost spiritual experience.

Footnotes

1. George Rickey, “A Technology of Kinetic Art,” Scientific American 268, no. 2 (1993): 74–79. ↩︎
2. Rickey, “Technology.” ↩︎
3. Patricia Railing, “The Idea of Construction as the Creative Principle in Russian Avant-Garde Art,” Leonardo 28, no. 3 (1995): 193–202. ↩︎
4. George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (G. Braziller, 1967). ↩︎
5. Jerrold Levinson, “Hybrid Art Forms,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 18, no. 4 (1984): 5–13. ↩︎
6.  Erik Koed, “Sculpture and the Sculptural,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 2 (2005): 147–54. ↩︎
7. Vinson Cunningham, “A Painting of the Sky Every Sunday, and the Art of Careful Attention,” The New York, January 24, 2018. ↩︎
8.  Koed. Sculpture and the Sculptural. 147–54. ↩︎