CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The cabin by the water looks just like the one that Henry David Thoreau built and lived in.
Visitors can peer inside through a door that is slightly ajar but they are unable to enter the cabin, which is actually a carved and painted wood sculpture. The cabin sculpture is located on the shore of Lac Nord along the Basque coast in southwestern France, rather than at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
University of Illinois art professor Conrad Bakker created the sculpture “Untitled Project: Cabin [Thoreau]” for an art exhibition, Biennale Internationale D’Art Contemporain Anglet-Côte Basque, in France.
Visitors can’t enter the cabin, but they can see a wood sculpture of “Walden” through the door.
The cabin at Walden Pond is an official replica of the one Thoreau built, the original having deteriorated long ago. Bakker said his cabin sculpture is “a copy of a copy.”
“I was interested in it as a symbolic object, as a destination,” Bakker said of the cabin at Walden Pond. “I’m also interested in how a fake thing can hold the place of a real thing.”
He said the sculpture “provides a critical commentary on the theatricality of experience and the commodification of authenticity.”
It is one of the largest pieces Bakker has done. He assembled it on site in 10 days, building the cabin and carving the exterior to look like aged shingles, bricks and wooden beams. The door opens just enough to reveal a carved wood sculpture of Thoreau’s book, “Walden,” lying on the floor.
“I am interested in the cabin as a thing one wants to inhabit, but the only way inside is through the viewer’s imagination,” Bakker said.
The items he creates never function like the real things they are portraying. He is interested in the artificiality of objects and the moment when viewers realize what they are seeing is not the real thing, and “how it reveals our desires, our interests and our disappointments.”
Conrad Bakker carved the exterior of the cabin to look like shingles, bricks and beams. Bakker assembled the cabin on site in 10 days.
“Even in simulated environments, one can have real and meaningful experiences,” Bakker said. “Part of this project involves a critique of artificiality in order to better understand the world we’ve made for ourselves.”
Bakker has been interested in Thoreau and his cabin at Walden Pond for some time, as a symbol of self-reliance and individualism that was part of the American Romantic literary period. He is also intrigued by the contradictions inherent in these ideals that endeavors toward self-reliance are often connected to a position of privilege.
Bakker has another project currently on display, this one at Illinois’ Ricker Library of Architecture and Art. For “Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club,” he has been recreating the library of the late Robert Smithson, an artist of earthworks or land art best known for Spiral Jetty, created in the Great Salt Lake. Bakker is making sculptural copies of every book in Smithson’s extensive library.
Smithson’s library – currently stored in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution – reveals the breadth of his interests, including art, architecture, geology, poetry and science fiction. Bakker said a library is a representation of its owner, and looking at Smithson’s collection of books is a way of thinking about his work and also about a period of time (the 1960s) when the world was rapidly changing. Some of the books that Bakker has recreated are on display at the library through Dec. 19.
Editor’s note: To reach Conrad Bakker, email cbakker@illinois.edu@illinois.edu.
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