We All Fall Down

When Aeneas Wilder’s exhibit started, I was supposed to write some opinions on the opening launch of the piece. However, I could not think of anything to say that Laura Bird in her article (or indeed the many other fans of the work) had to say; I tried and tried, but all I could say was how much I loved the way it tackled issues of frailty, tactility and unity both in society and in art. I could only discuss the way it created nausea, fear, hatred, love, optical illusions. It had only been with me a few days in a gallery that needed no curation as it was only a single piece. What more was there to say?

Then time passed. Day after day the wooden temple in the white room became a part of the Warwick consciousness. It peered out over the bus stop, it stood by the sofas me and my friends have lunch on every day, it was illuminated and open to look at before we went to see plays in the arts centre. People began to write poems about it for my creative writing seminar. Everyone talked about it. It was theatre to some, a job to others. The reams of friends who stewarded had stronger feelings about the sculpture than about the American elections. I had nothing more to say yet, but that was because it was sinking into the soil, taking its time.

It was when I went along to the kick down today that I finally realised something powerful about the sculpture; the kick down was not just a gimmick to fill the gallery, or some pretentious way of getting it out of the room. It was a crucial part of understanding the work itself.

Stood around its outside we all waited with baited breath. I had my phone ready to record it, I was ready for a preluding speech or something else. But there was nothing. Aeneas Wilder was introduced and within seconds walked over to the carefully constructed body of wood and kicked a strategic corner.

Instantly there was a sound as loud and unbearable as vuvuzelas at the 2010 World Cup. Slats of wood flew at us, colliding with our bags, spilling from the sky and falling in a perfect outline of the sculpture itself. It took about a minute, and as the noise ended there was a pause.

And then cheers.

Every person in the room clapped and roared with approval. Art had been destroyed, and we all loved it. There was the strange feeling of New Years Day arriving; a bunch of strangers joyed at the end of something and the arrival of the new and the exciting. People began to pick up each individual wooden slat, which everybody had longed to touch and prod, and were amazed at how identical they all were.

It was then that I realised that, in this joy at the collapse of the sculpture, there was a note of powerful optimism. Something that had touched us day in and day out, or maybe only once or twice but nonetheless been there phantasmagoric in the corner, was destroyed. No more. We could see exactly what it was, and that it was to become something else somewhere we did not know. But we liked that, and we liked the potential of what was to come for Wilder and for the gallery and for us. We as people are not always desperate to remain stagnant and stock still, but actually we relish change and a challenge. We all applauded the man who threw wood at us in the noisiest minute of our gallery going lives. Where the structure had stood for the unity and the delicacy of the constructed, the kick down stood for the joy of the old collapsing and the arrival of a new day and a new idea. We as an audience had shown we wanted things to change, that not only have we just had our desire to reach out and touch delicate art works satisfied vicariously, but also our desire for revolution against anything all-encompassing.

I felt uplifted but a bit sad that it had happened so quickly, but this quickly ended: in a corner, picking up chunks of wood from the floor, a small child was making a new structure of his own, all by himself. Everything that ends gives way to new beginnings, and even without realising it, Wilder’s artwork gave me faith in the changes that come with time.

[Watch the kick down here.](http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXoELuWJ8fM&feature=youtu.be)