at a time, so that he became intimately acquainted with the building’s atmosphere and dimensions, its many interior vantage points, the uses it presented to him.
During the daylight hours, cold light would stream down into the expanses of the building through the enormous dirt-spattered slates of frosted glass that were fixed into its high, vaulted ceilings. Black weeds poked through the thick cracks that had formed in the walls, withering and drooping amongst a canvas of scratches and stains. Certain windows had been broken, leaving glass fangs protruding, as well as gouges that invited the entrance of cold drifts of air. Pipes emerged from the walls tentatively, decided on a definite course, curved for some distance in a new direction, and finally disappeared into other walls. Oily-feathered pigeons nested at the top of flaking iron columns, spraying down patterns of white shit that accrued and hardened over time. In one room the floors were coated with a thin layer of orange dust. Traces of the old factory workers were present in the form of short trails of footprints, mysterious tracks which faded away almost as soon as they commenced.
Finally Maximilian decided that he would dedicate these new premises to sculpture. To a single, giant sculpture, in fact. Commencing at floor-level, he would work on the project for many years, gradually building layer after layer, working his way up in a growing sprawl of forms, multiplying and sprouting strange protrusions, utilizing a vast array of different materials, until he had finally reached the ceiling. Each layer would be roughly the same height, representing the duration of a given year, with materials and objects discovered and purchased only during that period. Ladders would extend far into the air, reaching into the midst of the sculpture, leading towards a number of walking platforms that any potential visitors would be able to use. By the time that the sculpture was completed, the earliest parts would look worn and frayed, would be relics from the past already capable of provoking forgotten memories, vanished moments of life. It would not be long before the piece became an exercise in belaboured nostalgia.
Tending to be a slow worker, he spent many months away from the warehouse whenever he lost interest in the project, before returning to it with great energy. Once he had again become absorbed in the process, he would spend up to ten hours a day working on tiny details, attempting strange new juxtapositions, tinkering with small matters of form, attaching a miscellany of random objects to the central frame. In winter he could often see his breath appearing and dissolving in front of him as he worked. Shivering, he would rub his hands together or jump up and down on the spot until he felt certain of a vague modicum of warmth returning to his extremities. Despite the many difficulties involved, he came to feel a strange joy in the hard labour that such conditions required from him. Lost in the rhythms of his work, he would frequently return home late at night with weary limbs and a genuine sense of achievement, having forgotten all his other ambitions in the meantime.
He’d soon gathered together a vast collection of tools for this project. They were laid out on a large cotton sheet in a series of carefully ordered rows. Every imaginable object that he could potentially need lay there waiting for its moment of use. Saws, chisels, drills, mallets, brushes, clamps, ladders, boxes of nails, scaffolding poles, pairs of overalls, as well as hundreds of tins and bottles filled with every imaginable liquid, gel, powder. As time went on he became eager to add to his supplies at any given opportunity, purchasing any likely objects with the enthusiasm of a child collecting toys. There was a particular pleasure to be felt at reaching for the correct tool at a given moment out of instinct alone, and Maximilian often found himself grasping it in his hands before he had even decided what its precise purpose would be.
At first the sculpture seemed very small and insubstantial to him. For a number of years it had hardly gained any altitude whatever, seeming almost pathetic, a grand folly, waiting to collapse on him at any given moment. On many occasions he wondered if he was actually capable of achieving what he had set out to accomplish here, becoming frustrated by his lack of technical skill, and by the enormous lengths of time it took him to complete anything of even the slightest complexity. However, when he found himself assailed with doubts he would somehow still discover the strength necessary to continue his work, and finally, whenever he reasoned with himself, he could find no other purpose for continuing to live his life other than to proceed with his acts of creation. So he persevered.
Whilst he was working he would always leave a gramophone playing in a corner of the room. For many years he favoured selections of jazz whilst sculpting, a form of music new enough to him that it caused a riot of different sensations, even desires, to rear up inside, until, running out of space, they fought with each other in the pit of his stomach, as Maximilian followed the jagged rhythms with the movements of his hands, often stopping altogether and getting down from his ladder before a song had ended, so that he wouldn’t have to face even a moment of silence. It was always of great importance to maintain the momentum that he had established. As the work progressed, he would look back at what he had completed from time to time and find that certain fragments of melody, nearly forgotten, would return to him with extraordinary force, along with other memories of the period when the music had first struck him.
After many years, he began to detect patterns in his thinking, objects and symbols that repeated. He eventually realized that he had a predilection for circles, spirals, vertical lines, particular shades of blue, and objects that were in some way related to the sky. He began to place his symbols more consciously and commenced composition of a voluminous series of notes, describing in great detail his own interpretations of the sculpture, recording where each separate component had been obtained, what he knew of its origins and why he felt he had chosen it. All of these notes were kept in a single heavy ledger bound in red leather. Adding to its pages on a regular basis, it soon became an obsession for Maximilian to give his entries as much detail as possible, so that if the piece should ever have an audience they would be able to have access to some of its possible meanings, as well as what the sculptor had felt to be his essential motivations. Despite this general attention to specifics, the piece never did acquire a name. Maximilian felt that a title might limit the scope of what it could potentially say.
Once he had reached the end of each day’s work he would usually sit slumped against the wall at the far end of the warehouse, listening to a record, a bottle of water in his hand, staring at the sculpture and trying to gauge the progress he had made. When he was in one of his productive periods, he was eager each morning to return to the warehouse and look over how much he had managed to accumulate, to guess where the work would be leading him in the future. Once engaged with the work, he never allowed himself to stop until nightfall; then he would watch as the sculpture threw shadows across the floor at odd angles, a dark maze of contortions, alien shapes of irregular size, jarring lines liable to extend or break in any given direction.
Tall, snaking tubes writhed upwards, tangling with each other, stretching to infinity; a trellis of steel antennae threw dark scratchy webs across the vast concrete floors; the rotting husks of several cars were piled on top of each other, rust-brown and flaking; clay sculptures of white tortoises ascended for many metres before gradually diminishing into air; broken leather bus seats were pocked with holes that revealed the coils of horsehair within; aeroplane propellers were fixed to gargantuan machines of purely ornamental value, formed from random fragments of scrap metal; hundreds of glass pipes channelled a continuous stream of water from the warehouse’s mains, collecting it into a series of porcelain receptacles arrayed across the floor; directionless staircases hurried towards the horizon with no sense of decorum; pairs of giant, tattered wings were attached to the grotesque forms of unknown creatures; straggling tubular foam tentacles grasped for invisible treasures; orifices gaped at random intervals, inspiring hopes of never emergent eggs; a leather aviator’s helmet was placed upon the head of a naked mannequin wearing a blonde wig, its lips red with lipstick; looping pathways led towards pinnacles of spiky protrusions; paraphernalia associated with a variety of airlines had been strewn across the entirety of the piece, hanging precariously from one or another pole or hook; numbers were inscribed in blue chalk on a wooden doorway that was dangling from a length of rope; small birds of many varieties, carefully worked upon by taxidermists, were mounted on a series of plinths; antique telephones bore intimations of forgotten conversations; price tags were attached to wisps of air; monocles, ear trumpets, and gloves made fleeting appearances; toothbrushes once belonging to sailors were glued to a variety of surfaces; reels of celluloid stored in a series of canisters could be taken down and projected;