In an 8 hour durational video performance, artist Julius von Bismarck cuts down a tree with a pocket knife. The work consists of the artists encircling the tree in a slow and relentless unbuilding of the tree’s rings.
The title, Tree Analysis, seems to me to be a take on the sort of intimacy and distancing that such a durational piece might induce. A dismembering that fully implicates the executioner in both body and time. With the knife edge finding each layer of the tree’s growth, its undoing is rewritten in the wrist of the artist.
[Special thanks to the always amazing Amanda Bowles for this reference. Endless respect!]
The One Tree Project 