When I visited Mount Rushmore a few days ago, I saw signs for Crazy Horse and, Vermont provincial that I am, believed that it was a town, though I gauzily remembered it was a monument, too. There is indeed one there, massive and majestic, unfinished but well advanced and moving forward and fast, about 15 miles southwest from Rushmore.
Usually less is more, but sometimes more is stupendous, unreal, and wild. That’s the Crazy Horse sculpture. If completed as planned, the monument will be 563 feet tall and 641 feet long, the biggest mountain sculpture in human history and dwarfing Rushmore, whose presidential heads are a mere 60 feet tall, with the suite of four stretching a bit over 200 feet. The Crazy Horse monument has been percolating since 1939 and more or less actively in the works since 1948. The thing’s astonishing. Nature is American art’s default theme. In Europe, we see religion, history, and myth, and the doings of aristocrats. Like Rushmore, Crazy Horse springs from nature and is part of it.
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