Roxy Paine's Maelstrom on the roof of the Met

Roxy Paine's Maelstrom is a seven ton web of stainless steel currently on view on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There it fills the rooftop space with an airy tangle of welded stainless steel tubes, drawing the eye back and forth between its shiny, hand-polished lines and the turbulent spaces they frame . Gargantuan yet fragile, industrial yet oddly organic, Maelstrom suggests some kind of mammoth, post-nuclear tumbleweed high on ozone.

Paine is well-known for counterposing natural and industrial forms and materials. Maelstrom is a descendent of Paine's Dendrite series, a series of stainless steel tree-forms inserted into the natural environment. Paine describes the Dendrite project simply: "I'm translating the trees into the specific language of industrial pipelines." (Bomb Magazine, 2009). Like the Dendrites, Maelstrom uses the specific language of pipelines to create something more akin to an experience of an industrialized tree -- and a fallen one at that -- than an isolated object found in the galleries below. Maelstrom reaches into nearly every rooftop space in some manner or other, and visitors must negotiate its presence at every turn.

And yet there is something childlike and innocent about this giant wayward form. With its horizontal orientation filling the rooftop space in a rather charming and playful manner, visitors are easily drawn in and under and over its branches, watching how the piece frames the sky and the tree tops of Central Park or turning, up close, to the welds that connect every piece of tubing. As an "interactive" sculpture, Maelstrom is enormously successful. Unlike Maya Lin's new work at Pace Wildenstein, which is beautiful, profound work hampered by the claustrophobic and unyielding manner of its presentation, Paine's piece is perfect where it is.

A visitor was overheard wishing he could see Maelstrom downstairs, in the landscape, from afar, and yet so much would be lost if one is not forced to grapple with it at close hand and the reflections the piece may give rise to. Alissa Davis of WHITEHOT Magazine put it beautifully: "Maelstrom questions what we as a culture have made, what we have destroyed, what we can repair, and what we might be able to learn if we consider our habits of creation." Questions like these must be grappled with and not placed at "arm's length" in an ever-diminishing landscape.