The Third Bridge by Osman Akan
October 14, 2007 - January 14, 2008
On October 2007, DAC launches Outer Space, a new series of solo commissions in the public realm, independent of the annual festival, one to three months in duration and created by mid-career artists (festival projects cater primarily to emerging artists).
The pilot project of the series is The Third Bridge by Osman Akan. The work will be installed in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, on the waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges from October 14, 2007 - January 14, 2008.
"Life is a bridge," the Eastern proverb goes. "Cross over it, but build no house on its span." An invitation since time immemorial to ramble on, the idea of the bridge has served—literally and metaphorically—to connect where we are right now to where we wish to arrive. Like the romance of the road, it's best considered as a means and not an end; to act otherwise invites arrested development, immaturity, dreams deferred.
Also a powerful metaphor for unity, the desire to build bridges is, by definition, a progressive urge. The driving force behind bridges propels the race toward improvements of both the material and metaphysical kind. Think of the telephone, the railroad and the multistory building, for example. Each of these, in its time, was a piece of cutting edge technology—a bridge linking ambition and achievement. Inventions like these made men dream and, just as importantly, improved the way they got their wares to market.
It comes as no surprise, then, that bridges—in their ideal form and as feats of engineering—have long inspired artists to sing their praises. From Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" to Hart Crane's ecstatic canto to the Brooklyn Bridge to a recent documentary on the Golden Gate Bridge's suicide appeal, bridges—especially the world's more impressive structures—invite the mind to dream big, pushing the limits of the imagination toward new ideas about established ways of living.
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