NARRATOR:

We are standing at Mark di Suvero’s Che farò senza Eurydice from 1959. This sculpture, made of wood, ropes, nails, and metal bolts, is big — six-feet-eight-inches high, nine-feet wide, and a little more than seven-and-a-half-feet deep. Seventeen thick wooden planks of various lengths are nailed into a spacious, angular, asymmetrical composition. The wood is salvaged timber of an earthy brown color. There is no clear “front” or “back,” and the work can be viewed from anywhere around it. For the purposes of this description, we will stand looking at it, perpendicular to its widest point. The sculpture meets the floor in two places, approximately six feet apart: at the left side, a single plank angles up about forty-five degrees. It supports a smaller piece of wood with a rectangular hole cut from it at its highest upward end. The upward pointing plank is crossed at its midpoint by a horizontally oriented plank, which angles gently down to the right, meeting a juncture where a cluster of planks comes together. At the base of this juncture, a lengthwise plank meets the floor. Here, at the right side of the sculpture, pieces of wood rise up in a V-shape. One arm of the V has a two-foot-long nail anchored into it. At their highest points, each of these two arms has a thin rope attached to it. Each rope connects to the other highest peaks of the sculpture. There are three ropes in all, pulled taut, creating a sense of tension or strain between the wooden arms.