Columns and Totems
Tall, upright sculptures and monuments that rise as single vertical forms, from obelisks and carved poles to modern stacked sculpture.
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The vertical marker is among the oldest monumental forms. Ancient Egyptians cut obelisks from single blocks of granite, and Rome wrapped a spiralling band of narrative relief around Trajan's Column, completed in AD 113. On the Northwest Coast of North America, Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw and other nations carve cedar poles with stacked crest figures that record lineage, histories and rights; the poles known as totem poles serve many purposes, from house frontal poles to memorials.
Modern sculptors adopted the upright stack for new ends. Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938) at Târgu Jiu repeats a rhomboid module almost 30 metres into the air, Louise Bourgeois's Personages of the late 1940s stand like slim, grouped figures, and Thaddeus Mosley has carved tall, balanced forms from salvaged logs for decades. Look for the tension between one upright silhouette and the separate parts stacked within it.
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