Carl Johann Tegelstein
Circular Table (top view, with details)
circa 1844
(glass, gilt bronze and natural hardstones)
The harsh but elegant meandros bordering this table mingles with the central spurt of flowers in such a way that it acts as both the flowers’ instructor and friend, which in some cases may be one in the same. As an instructor, its rigid, repetitive pattern seems to be quite stern and unforgiving as it encircles the youthful, rallying bouquet, almost as if to prevent it from venturing too close to the precipice or from moving at all within its claustrophobic bubble. The meandros speaks a language according to an aesthetic, ‘pretty’ set of rules: it winds along a path that is never-ending and continuous, keeping a steady pace and a resolute, unblinking eye that lives only to shun the temptation of straying off course, however slightly. It bears down on the flowers like a hunter on the hunted: in this case not with malice, but with a drunken sense of confidence in its big size and in its great possession of power that it labels its ‘intelligence’. In a way, this is arrogance; and this is what makes the meandros serve as an unknowing friend to the flowers. Its level of arrogance, its assumed authority over what it blindly considers young and stupid, is so great that it overflows the boundaries of tolerance, and it inevitably bequeaths to the bouquet, its ‘pupil’, the very lesson that will teach it exactly how to avoid becoming such an autocrat itself. For the bouquet it is a lesson learnt early through the pain of subordination, but with a result that it is stronger in resistance to that which tried to imprison it in the first place; that it fights back with such a turbulent and colourful joie de vivre that it ends up balancing a discord - one that, in this case, is the table’s visual harmony.
So which, in fact, is truly trapped: the bouquet of flowers, so obviously enveloped in a rotating prison of embellished trickery? Or the rotating meandros itself, so dull in its dumb repetition of two-dimensional fact that it manages to encase only itself in a prison of self-importance?
