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1000 Wingless Cranes
A group exhibition, “ARTISTS AT THE ROCK”
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA, 1987
The size of the wooden structure is the same as the each cell for a prisoner in Alcatraz prison. The 1,000 Japanese origami cranes were facing outside. Their wings were snipped and pasted on the horizontal bars.
- 5’x 11’x 8’high
- wood and paper
Goto has long been using origami cranes in installations, performing the breathtaking unlikely feat of making the crane a profoundly appropriate emblem for an Alcatraz sculpture. She has built a kind of horizontal-barred cell of lightwood, and in neat rows on the bars are a thousand cranes, each with its wings snipped off and pasted down. Birds symbolize freedom; paper cranes hope and, in Japanese tradition, the number one thousand-fulfilled desire. And so these mutilated ones convey the immense despair of incarceration (the first sight of all those clipped wings is a shock). The piece is as strong visually as symbolically: from a distance the neat rows of birds look like a part of the enclosure-the barbs on barbed wire, perhaps-and close up, recall the regimentation of institutional life-the rows, lines, squares, bars, lists and cells. The tremendous deftness of means and sensitivity to meaning in everything that Goto does never cease to awe me.
