Los Angeles. 4th July 2017. A warm Californian night crackles with anticipation. Yet this is no ordinary Independence Day celebration. A part of Santa Monica Boulevard is closed for the first time in history. The famous landmark now packed with 50,000 people. A sense of hope ripples from body to body. Countless fluorescent screens puncturing the darkness, fixed on one point, attempting to catch the first glimpse of Freedom: A Shared Dream - the United States’ largest publicly funded artwork. It is a new Statue of Liberty for the West Coast, gifted by the Farhang Foundation and the wider Iranian-American community to the city of Los Angeles.
A countdown ensues. In an explosion of fireworks the sculpture is revealed. The crowd goes crazy. Two cylinders of silver and gold stand proud. One inside the other. Geometry, light and materiality penetrate the consciousness.
The atmosphere is more pop concert than art unveiling. Yet, this is only part of the picture. Beyond the social media hype, VIPs and televised interviews, lies a deeper story. A narrative of multiple threads embedded in the many facets of the sculpture itself. It is a story with many protagonists, and a Sri Lankan artist at its heart, Cecil Balmond OBE.
Balmond was selected as the winning artist from over 300 proposals in May 2015 by a panel of jurors .The fact that Sri Lankan born Balmond was the artistic nucleus of the project is not serendipitous. An artistic statement of this importance needed a creative mind of the highest calibre. Balmond fits the requirement. Artist, architect, designer, author, professor, engineer, Balmond defies traditional classification.
To understand his art, one must first understand the artist. Balmond exists in a unique design space, he calls it the ‘Crossover’. This is a realm where science, mathematics, geometry, art, design and quantum theory fuse. A radical world ripe with possibility. Balmond elaborates ‘Trans-disciplinary thinking bridges areas of knowledge: it implies innovation, questioning conventional solutions and relations, anticipating possible futures, negotiating new forms and contexts by experiment and application.’
To inhabit such a dynamic environment Balmond has to look at reality with fresh eyes, adopting a new creative methodology. He believes reality can be mathematical and organisational in nature: all is number, therefore, all things can be reduced to numerical relationships. So life is essentially information. Balmond states, ‘The real has no compartmentalization but is a few facts underpinned by a much larger virtual. The physical gets loosely held by its stronger interior mechanisms, which inject spirit, animation, all that we chase in the creative act, into the body we perceive.’
Balmond is but one piece of an intricate puzzle - a part of a complex equation. To comprehend the symbolic form of the sculpture, we must first look back 2,500 years to ancient Persia.
In this time of conquest, one leader emerged out of the turbulence to transform the region. He was called Cyrus the Great. Cyrus was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Over time, his territory grew into the largest empire the world had ever seen. However, Cyrus the Great was no oppressor. He believed that the metaphorical ‘iron fist’ wasn’t necessary to pacify and rule the people. Instead, he championed a strategy of inclusivity and acceptance of diversity, allowing the conquered populations to continue their respective customs and religions. It was effective and became his model for centralized administrative control, creating a government that profited ruler and subject.
Cyrus had these values forever immortalized on the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay scroll inscribed with words in cuneiform script, one of the earliest forms of writing. It is arguably the first recorded declaration of human rights, religious diversity and personal freedom. The significance of these concepts cannot be underestimated.
Fast-forward two and a half thousand years to the smartphone-clutching, Instagram-posting, celebrity-worshipping times of today. How can one bring this message to a contemporary audience? After all, communications of the values is key. This was at the forefront of Balmond’s thinking as he reflects “The Cyrus Cylinder is talismanic of a great vision for all peoples. I hope my design is an artwork which projects the cylinder’s deep values, not only to L.A. but also to the world.’
For Balmond, the values are like rare treasure, metaphorically speaking. We are given more insight ‘The values of Cyrus the Great is a message for all time. The declaration of human rights is a precious jewel for humanity, and I conceived the sculpture as such, a golden treasure [the inner cylinder] buried within the surface silver, the appearance of our lives. The sculpture is made of two cylinders, one within the other. The interior cylinder is gold coloured, and the outer cylinder is silver. In the daytime, the silver will sparkle, and at night, the gold will be illuminated.’
When one looks at the Freedom Sculpture, it definitely isn’t a static object. It feels alive in some way, constantly moving and shifting. This is what Balmond calls ‘Animate geometry’. The numerical system at the foundation level of the sculpture can repeat ad infinitum, this potential growth ripples through the form.
Balmond gives us more insight, ‘My process is to imagine I’m a passerby looking at the artwork, and then I sketch what I see. I elaborate on the sketches extending the idea, testing contrary ones, before coming back to the original instinctive idea - in this case, for L.A., a set of traveling lines. Then I go to the computer, draw and visualize, and then refine.
It’s clear that, in Balmond’s mind, Art does not exist in a vacuum as an independent entity. Rather, it is inextricably linked to the consciousness. For, it is the latter that gives meaning to the former. Consequently, experience of art is everything.
What is clear is that the artist is very much in tune with the workings of the world. He is plugged into the Matrix, engaging with the mysterious processes that shape everything around us. Consequently, for a man like Balmond, the concept of multiplicity is paramount. Or, as he calls it ‘irreducible complexity’. Essentially, what Balmond means is that life isn’t simply linear or chronological, one story that starts and ends.
Rather, it is cyclical, a multiplex of stories evolving simultaneously, constantly feeding back into each other going on forever. He passionately indicates ‘Art and design is about the relationship between us and the world, so as an artist I must confront life in its totality. I can’t reduce and simplify picking only one element to fit an artistic plan or motivation. Art derived from this approach would be superficial, denying the true nature of things’.
Now we see the Freedom Sculpture from a fresh perspective. Yes, it is a symbol of diversity, human rights and religious tolerance. However. if one looks further, the concept of freedom lives within every detail of the design itself. The freedom of the creative mind. The freedom to reinterpret the world. The freedom of artistic expression.
