Opus 40 is a place I wanted to go see from the first time I heard about it. I think it was my brother Peter Dixon who first told me about it. My brother told me that there's a place in upstate New York you might want to check out. Opus 40.
I wanted to go there when I lived very far away from where Opus 40 is. I wanted to go there when I heard it was a 40 year project. The idea that an artist would claim that 40 years is what it takes to make something intrigued me. Naturally I pictured it to be vast, filling in my brain's several horizons, something huge, perhaps something nearly omnipresent.
I didn't know who made it. I was living in Alabama then. Opus 40 seemed a long way off.
And then I forgot about it.
I moved around the country, I lived in many places. I'd remember Opus 40 now and then and think I would like to see Opus 40. (who wouldn't want to see something someone thinks it takes 40 years to make………) (and might be the biggest thing someone's ever seen)
Then one day Jim and I were driving in upstate New York on some kind of mission and suddenly there we saw a makeshift sign, maybe spray-painted or hand painted (I don't recall) leaning on the edge of the road: OPUS 40 —-with an arrow pointing down a little road.
I was so excited. We were so close to it, there was no way we'd not follow the arrow and go there. (the sign was in red paint)
So we did. I didn't know the story of Opus 40.
Harvey Fite made sculpture, at the time he worked it was sculpture known as "modern sculpture" and he made it.
And he decided to make a place in which to place his pieces, so he started building a place, I think it's near Woodstock, NY, but don't trust me, in which he would display his art.
Well, as the story goes, eventually he came to believe that the stone structure he was making to show off his sculpture turned out to be much greater to him than any of the works he'd originally intended to show there.
I don't know if he had an epiphany or if after many years (one, nine, ten, 20) he slowly realized that what he'd been doing to show off his sculptures was oh so much better more wonderful and fine and true than what he'd intended from the get go. That it was original, that its materials and source and eventual purpose, his labor, his design, grew to be one and the same must have been a true dawning, a feeling that condenses over time, an awakening. It must have been an amazing thing to come to realize that one has finally come upon something that surpasses one's intentions.
But I didn't know this story when I first heard of Opus 40.
All I could think is that if someone decides to take 40 years to do something I want to see what that is.
What I learned when we visited there changed everything.
When I learned when we visited that he died when he fell into one of the stone construtions he was building, I had to wonder.
It felt like a mechanical fairtytale.
It feels like a fable.