Sunrise

Sunset

A 30-second online art project:

Peter Burr, Sunshine Monument

Learn more

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

Skip to main content

Tim Hawkinson

Das Tannenboot
1994

Not on view

Date
1994

Classification
Sculpture

Medium
Christmas tree, fabric, elastic, string and metal

Dimensions
Overall: 65 9/16 × 69 3/8 × 44 13/16in. (166.5 × 176.2 × 113.8 cm)

Accession number
96.49

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Eileen and Peter Norton

Rights and reproductions
© Tim Hawkinson, Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York

API
artworks/10292

Das Tannenboot is a visual pun derived by combining the German word for Christmas tree (Tannenbaum) with that for boat (Boot). Das Tannenboot is a Christmas tree, stripped of its needles, turned on its side, and then outfitted with little sails and rigging. The resulting work defies easy description. It is delicate, strangely beautiful, and yet—with its mass of barren branches and sails like dead leaves—somewhat melancholy. Laid out horizontally, the conical symmetry of the fir tree creates a mirror effect above and below the stem that suggests a fantastically inefficient flotilla sailing across a body of water, or a useless structure that is nearly all sail and no boat. Yet despite these illusionistic or metaphorical possibilities, the work is absolutely literal: in the end, Das Tannenboot is exactly what it says it is—a tree-boat.