“The Wreck of Time,” a COVID-19 pop-up sculpture exhibit by John Books with figures in bronze and wood. John displayed these fascinating sculptures earlier this month in the back yard of the Leng house across the street from the Grand Marais Art Colony. Staff photo/Brian Larsen
1) There are 47 blades of grass in a square inch, which means a football field contains 8,294,400 blades of grass. David Leng’s lawn is about one-third the size of a football field. Anchoring the yard is a maple tree beloved by many in the town of Grand Marais. Its’ sun-kissed leaves flag in the wind like colorful postcards sent from friends traveling the world over every fall. The vibrant oranges in those maple leaves are the color of the young fox that run nightly through the Leng’s yard. Just a short time ago they were wee pups born early spring in a small woods located behind the Congregational Church kitty-corner to the Leng house. The youngsters are growing, barking wildly at night in their hunt for food. Summer is fleeting. A coat of leaves will soon blanket the grass, which will sleep through the fallow winter. But before that transpires, for now, every morning, a little boy darts from the Leng’s house and covers those blades of grass with his small footprints, standing on a pile of boards and searching the backyard of his neighbor. He is looking for John, who most morning sits comfortably with a cup of coffee and his thoughts. Mist steams from his cup, curling and rising like prayers into the new day.
Each day, 50 people came and toured the exhibit of the “The Wreck of Time” created by John Books. The show was made possible through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and was hosted by Dave, Jennifer and Graham Leng. Greg Mueller of Mueller Studios and Yellow Bird Gallery, also loaned some pieces for the show. Staff photo/Brian Larsen
2) As the little boy calls to John, John gets up and goes to meet him. Their conversation glows like the morning sun, peeling away the tears from the grass; morning dew dissipates as John’s coffee cools during the warm conversation. It’s a great day to be alive. But John has work to do. He is setting up his art on the Leng’s yard, and his young friend helps him, as do others in the community. But let’s step back. Retrace our early ancestors’ steps, the ones who captured John’s heart and propelled him to create “The Wreck of Time,” a response caught in wood and bronze.
3) Annie Dillard’s essay, “The Wreck of Time,” was one of those reads that John Books could not shake.
Above are three of the of 16 (or so) pieces displayed on the Leng’s lawn. The exhibit started with three sets of footprints on two pieces of canvas laid on the ground. Those footprints represented the ones found in Tanzania called the Laetoli Trackway.
Earlier this month the former Earl and Ethel Leng lawn, now owned by grandson David Leng, served as the canvas for a significant work of art created by John.
Dillard, who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for her 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, writes, “By moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living.”
4) John spent 15 years on his sculptures. “I worked a lot of lonely nights,” he said.
His art is mostly sculptures made of bronze mounted on wood.
The sculptures in the show were posted on long pieces of finished wood, arranged (mostly) in a circle around the yard’s perimeter. It started, however, with two canvases laid flat on the ground depicting footprints almost lost to time.
In the 1970s, a couple of young archeologists who had been playing Frisbee with dried elephant dung discovered the footprints and reported them to their boss, famed archeologist Mary Leakey.
Dillard writes, “On a rainy day on the Laetoli Plain, approximately 3.6 million years ago is a 90-foot long trail of three hominoid footprints, possibly a short man and woman and child, who walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash.”
At 90 feet, the tracks cover almost one-third of a football field.
“Those footprints are referred to as the Laetoli Trackway,” said John, “Which I first learned of in Annie Dillard’s essay, The Wreck of Time, which is a mediation on death, time and progress. Since then, I have not been able to shake the image of those three individuals nor the impression the essay left in my heart.”
Dillard runs through a dizzying array of interesting facts and statistics on everything from how much foam from waves covers the planet at any given time (the landmass of North America) to how many people daily (1,000) commit suicide. Two million kids die annually from diarrhea, 800,000 from measles, to how many galaxies there are. An estimated two billion galaxies were found in 2012 when she wrote the essay, but in 2020 that number had been revised to two trillion.
5) John never went to school for art. He wrote poetry in high school and joined a theater group that toured Ontario. He wrote plays and acted for six years. It was a going concern, he said of the theater group. “National playwrights wrote plays for us,” he said.
To make a living he painted houses, but during his free time he attended seminars and classes to learn how to sculpt. He creates many of his sculptures from brass, an alloy of copper and zinc.
Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica say the earliest brass, called calamine brass, dates to Neolithic times.
Depending on the zinc content, there is white brass, which has little industrial purpose; malleable brass, which can be worked cold or hot; alpha brass, widely used in the manufacture of pins, bolts, screws, and ammunition cartridges cases; beta brass, which is suitable for manufacturing faucet handles, sprinkler heads, window and door fittings.
Ancient Romans used brass for vessels, dress armor, jewelry, brooches, or clasps.
In Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries, monumental brasses were used to commemorate the dead. Engraved brass plates were set into a tombs’ surface, embellished with inscriptions, heraldic devices, and other designs.
Silver and gold from the Americas supplanted brass in Europe, but brass was used to manufacture candlesticks, sundials, and clocks.
It was also used for scientific pursuits in the design instruments for navigation, surveying, and astronomy; especially astronomy so that we can count all of those universes that are swirling and seemingly growing tenfold around us.
5) On the Leng’s lawn, neighbors gathered on Saturday and Sunday, August 15 and 16, to gaze and wonder and discuss John’s display and listen as John described the pieces. One is called Fate, a bronze sculpture with three heads looking in different directions. All of the 16 pieces have a story behind them, he said. “Each piece has it’s own story, but I don’t always know what the story is until after it is made,” he said.
One piece speaks to the worries of mining copper and nickel, one to the COVID-19 pandemic. The list goes on.
A big storm threatened on Friday night, the baby brother of the derecho that ravaged Illinois and Iowa, but it only left the grass damp and the hint of a shallow wind. No big blow came that could have destroyed the sculptures, not enough even to scare the hunting fox from the neighborhood. The show went on, 50 people came each day.
“I counted,” said John, adding, “I was very happy to put this show on for the people of Grand Marais, especially during this crazy pandemic. I’m very grateful to the people that came.”
6) Working with bronze is labor intensive. From start to finish there are almost two-dozen steps, some are quite delicate, “And the piece can fall apart in your hands,” said John. But then, “I can take a hammer and just pound and pound on some of the steps. It’s a lot of trial and error.”
It took John ten years to complete one piece. “It kept evolving until it was finally done,” he said. That bronze is in the Thunder Bay Museum’s permanent art gallery, safe from the ravages of weather, and for now, from the wreck of time.
7) Jennifer Cayer filmed the show. Jennifer is the wife of David and mother of Graham, John’s six-yearold sidekick. “I hope the show conveyed that we as a people have always had to deal with chaos, but we always find a way through somehow. There are always new ideas in science, in politics, art, that must be fused together and bring us through. I hope the show gave people hope.”
8) In The Wreck of Time Annie says, “Living things from hyena to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling between scenes. To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blowing sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.”
On the lawn that held the art show, small tracks lead across it to the neighbors yard. Little tracks are joined by big tracks. There is no volcano or fire burning in the sky. Nothing to run from, no volcanic ash to record the tracks, just a future to step into, one with a lot of hope, a lot of joy, pandemic or no pandemic.
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