On Libra, Beauty and Justice
Everyday at two o’clock, people gather at the Bowes Museum to observe the winding up and subsequent performance of the 250 year old Silver Swan. Three clocks—one for the glass water, one for the music box and one for the swan—activate the performance where 30 pounds of silver move within a bed of twirling glass rods, wherein flickering silver and gold fish swim. Crafted to be an “exact replica” of a female mute swan, every detail of the swan, from each carefully made feather to the shimmering glass water it swims in, is a work of art. The feathers, resembling silver leaves, mirror the bed of delicate silver folds which are placed around the base of the artwork like a horizontal frame. These flecks of silver hide a series of complex mechanisms which drive the movement of the swan, water and generate atmosphere through music. Yet, as we watch, the mechanics seem to disappear, leaving us in awe of a spectacle that breathes life into metal.
The renowned American writer Mark Twain documented his observation of the swan in a section of The Innocents Abroad, where he described the swan as having “had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes."
What we are seeing as an observer of the Silver Swan is not the concept of what a generic swan is, but rather the Silver Swan captures the essence of a very particular moment of a particular swan, immortalized in silver and glass. You could think of the human who winds up the swan, then, as not winding up, but rather winding back time for everyone to observe that particular moment replicated ad infinitum.
As J.F Martel describes in his book Art in the Age of Artifice, beauty always concerns the particular. Something is always beautiful in this moment or time— always in the singular. The swan is beautiful not because it is a “perfect replica” of a generic swan, but rather because it is THE Silver Swan—a singular being. At its core, the creators, John Joseph Merlin and James Cox, were driven by a desire to emulate the natural spectacle where water and sky, sea and bird, glass and silver, intertwine in a graceful dance. This creation is not just of the physical swan, but the replication of movements which are too immortalized as mechanical clockwork. This clockwork breathes life into that immortalized experience of the sky and water merging, as the swan sits peacefully on the glass rods and dips it’s neck into the glass substance to retrieve a fish. This act of replication goes beyond