Carpe Diem #1241 Exposure (Antony Gormley)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Welcome at a new episode of CDHK. We are exploring "modern art" this month and try to create art ourselves with haiku, tanka or another Japanese poetry form. Today I love to invite you to virtual visiting the harbor of my hometown, Lelystad The Netherlands, were we will find a wonderful and somewhat strange piece of "modern art" created by Antony Gormley ... Exposure ....

Exposure (Antony Gormley) 

This is what Antony Gormley tells us about "Exposure":

[...] "My concept of how sculpture works in the landscape is that it is a still point in a moving world. The whole idea of EXPOSURE is that this work, made at a particular time, rooted to ground, reacts over time to the changing environment. One of the known environmental changes that is happening is the rising of the sea level through global warming. It is critical to me that at the time of its making this work reacts with the viewer, the walking viewer, on the top of the polder and that the surface that the viewer stands on is the surface that the work stands on. The work cannot have a plinth. Over time, should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, this means that there should be a progressive burying of the work."[...] (Source: Antony Gormley)

Exposure as seen from the dike (photo by Chèvrefeuille)

I am a big fan of this sculpture, but there are a lot of people who don't like it.

My hometown has several harbors, but at the most important one you can observe this statue called 'exposure'. It's a great steel structure and it shows a squatting man that looks over the IJsselmeer (a large lake, a former sea called Zuiderzee) the result of the Dutch reclaim of land from the waters. In my hometown 'exposure' is sometimes called 'the shitting man', because it looks like someone who's shitting in free nature.

Batavia Harbor, in the background (to the left) you can see Exposure too (photo by Chèvrefeuille)

"Exposure" is guarding our harbor and it's a wonderful piece of art. You can say that "exposure" is the business card of our town.

guardian angel
looks out over the harbor
a shitting man
constructed out of steel
exposed to the weather

© Chèvrefeuille

Of course I had to try to create a new poem inspired on this beautiful piece of Modern Art, but I couldn't come up with something, so I decided to "re-do" an "oldie" as you have read above.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until August 28th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our next episode later on, but I don't know yet which piece of modern art I am going to use, ... for now have fun!