For all his scathingness, and despite his unremitting intellect, Mr. Joyce was a romantic when it came to women.
This year the installation is made up of two stainless-steel tree sculptures — “Conjoined” and “Defunct” — and a glacierlike boulder, “Erratic,” by Roxy Paine, a conceptual artist who often juxtaposes nature and modern industrialization.
Animals without wings share in the storytelling, too, which may depart from myth and take other forms. There is, for example, Gorilla gorilla, named not once but twice for a tribe of hairy women, the Gorillai, reported to live on the west coast of Africa; this rumor reaches the present day through a very old Greek version of a geographical account first written in Phoenician by one Hanno, a Carthaginian navigator who supposedly conducted his explorations around 500 b.c.
For here the palms hold court; nowhere else on the broad earth is their glory unveiled as we see it: soft, plumy Jupatis dropping over the water, and fairy-light assaiso and bussús with their light-green vase-like forms, and great noble fan-leaved miritis looking down from their eighty-feet high columns, and others that we hardly notice at first, though they are nobles in their race.
