The Joy Of Falling Fruit

Words and Images by Blake Gillespie of Sacred.

There was no hesitation. My first shot was aimed at the top branch of the tree-like metal structure where every branch ends with a regulation basketball rim and net that defy regulation heights. The ball never got close to the highest goal and fell from the sky like a misfired cannonball. I was at Art Omi, an architecture park in upstate New York, where Cuban sculptor Alexandre Arrechea’s Orange Functional is one of the first pieces encountered in the park. The basketball tree and the reproductions he’s made are delivering Arrechea viral fame, but Orange Functional wasn’t always functional. Arrechea was originally misguided in his intent. 

Originally placed in museums where interaction would be forbidden, he thought the frustration would translate to an anti-democracy message. But seeing that frustration manifest as people longed to play with the tree changed his outlook. When I speak to Arrechea on the phone, it’s clear he’s a sensitive and joyful artist. The challenges he presents in his work are designed to guide the viewer toward empowerment and discovery, not disillusionment. His decision to make the sculpture functional came from seeing video footage of a girl walking by the tree, going through the motions of shooting, and pretending to make a basket. It was time to rethink the basketball tree.

“For me it is a work in progress,” Arrechea says. “The sculpture is obviously finished, but to work with the piece, the ways you can create engagement, is something that is in progress.”

I felt that progress as I played with the tree. On a bucolic hillside of untamed tall grass is a crop circle of a radiating sun, each ray acting as a manicured path to the structure at its center, a basketball tree, where we will give worship. The tree’s branches, reaching high like a mighty oak, provide a network of opportunities and challenges to get a bucket. My first shot was a miss. Second shot: another miss. Third shot rattled in. Renewed confidence; real shooters never miss three in a row, even on a non-regulation matrix of hoops.

When Arrechea says the word “engagement,” he’s not speaking in social media metrics. He’s interested in the original definition of experiential, not the way brand managers use it to sell pop-up stores. It is art that confronts your mind and body—it asks ‘are you alive?’, and if so, ‘how alive?’ Do you know, and, even more so, accept the limitations of your physical abilities? Do you seek beyond them? And so, I selected another target on the tree. This time a rim that’s higher up. It doesn’t make it high enough, leading to an air ball that then careens off the branches as it tumbles down like fallen fruit. After my interview with Arrechea, I see more in my failures against his tree.

“A tree gives you fruit,” he says. “That fruit come back to you and you throw it again. That particular process of fertility, the program never ending. It’s to be aware, to be conscious, of what you do in your daily basis.”

Arrechea’s Orange Functional joins a canon of artists inspired by the basketball goal who freely imagine beyond regulation height. Basketball’s founder James A. Naismith set the hoop height at ten feet in 1891 as a matter of environmental practicality. The railing of the running track above the gym floor in his YMCA was ten feet high and the best place to mount the goal. And so it remained, even as the rules shifted significantly. However, artists train their minds to step across boundaries and posit worlds beyond the prescribed understanding. In 1967 the sculptor Claes Oldenburg sketched an idea for a basketball hoop skyscraper; that is, a massive building with a giant backboard and rim affixed at the top floor. In 1983, at a smaller, but still outrageous level, the artist David Hammons—who has so much to express through basketball—mounted a hoop atop four stacked telephone poles towering up to thirty feet high in an abandoned lot in Harlem. In his explanation of the sculpture Hammons said “not everyone will make it, but even if they don’t at least they tried.” Which is one of his more romantic statements surrounding the game. Hammons also referred to his thirty foot hoop as the money tree and an “anti-basketball sculpture,” intending its out of reach heights to be a statement on the illusion of opportunity the game presents to the black community in replacement of education and equity. In 2012, the artist David Tully hiked to the top of a mountain in Bray Head, Ireland where a cement cross protects the village below. He drilled a basketball rim with a chain net into the center of the cross.

Each of these artists proved that by building basketball higher and higher they could express multitudes. 

“Outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol,” Hammons once said. Such is Arrechea’s basketball tree. It turns Llobet & Pons concept of the “Multibasket,” a 2013 installation in Japan that looks like six hoops placed as location points across a cut out of a province, into a tower of tentacles that replaces statehood and borders with nature and chaos. If he were still alive, James A. Naismith might look at the tree and declare that it is not basketball. Therein lies the fun of messing around with symbols. For Arrechea, Orange Functional being understood as basketball is of lesser concern. He admires basketball as a democratizing unifier, a place of community and organizing. Once people were able to play with the sculpture, Arrechea, much like Hammons, began thinking about the implications of our limitations. One of Arrechea’s basketball trees being exhibited at MOLA in Long Beach, California sits atop a rigged white surface that resembles a plowed field, or worse, the hostile architecture used to discourage homeless rest. In this exhibit, Arrechea feels critically aligned with Hammons by placing basketball in conversation with the “earliest architectonic creations of humankind,” giving it both connotations of growth and possibility, and human enslavement. But, Arrechea maintains a sense of optimistic possibility with Orange Functional, a Buckminster Fullerian regard for human potential.

“That’s how it works,” he says. “You select the level of difficulty of your pursuit. You start reading the progression of the work by playing with it.”

Orange Functional began as a vision in watercolor first titled “Orange Tree” in 2003. The concept called for an orange pillar of a trunk that leads up to branches that bear fruit in the form of basketball rims and nets. Arrechea’s first tree sculpture for an exhibit at the Icebox in Philadelphia in 2010 was intentionally unfunctional. He was making a statement about the off-limitsness of art museums. When he built an Orange Tree for the Bronx Museum, the museum struck a partnership with Pepsi to produce a photoshoot with basketball players using the sculpture, but it mostly broke the rims on the ends of the branches.

Back at Art Omi, I tried that height where I barely missed again, and it missed…again, but as it fell the ball made a swish through a net on a lower branch. My partner let out a surprised whoop and I gave her a look that said “I meant to do that.” Her look back eroded the lie on my face. Orange Functional is chaotic by design. Initially Arrechea saw the chaos represented in the inability to engage in play. A sculpture that beckons play, and yet it is forbidden.

The durability of Orange Functional had to be improved because Orange Tree was a hazard. Once, a drunk woman in Columbus, OH nearly tumbled down the branches when she broke into the outdoor garden of the Pizzuti Collection gallery at night and climbed the basketball tree, presumably trying to hang on a rim. Security footage shows her ascending the tree, and then two rims come crashing down, but no woman. Eventually, a man also enters the ground—maybe he was filming her for the ‘gram—and helps her down. The police report and nightly news note that she bled on the structure.

When the tree was redesigned as functional, the chaos became a psychological opponent to anyone who plays with it. Where do I begin? Can I even reach these heights? The network of branches is overwhelming and is intentionally breaking the rules of basketball. The surrounding grounds have no game lines. The tree comes with no instructions. Like I said earlier, Orange Functional asks: who are you? From there, each person must answer that question to the tree. Arrechea has noticed a common trait. People want to organize the chaos. He has made a sculpture that says “the rules have changed… there is no order” and the response is often to organize, to invent new rules.

My partner and I kept shooting at Art Omi. She couldn’t get it to the lowest rim without a deep bend of the knees, the ball grazing the earth, and a granny shot launch. My well-trained shooting form can’t get the ball to the highest rim, but it never stopped me from trying. I tried and I tried. Eventually, I tried her granny shot technique to send it up there. No luck. But, Orange Functional is fun and unlocks that kid feeling of pure play. I wished that someone more skilled would walk up the path so that we could play H-O-R-S-E or even invent a game at the foot of this giving tree. We’d make it up as we go, perhaps points for degree of difficulty, bonus points if it goes into two or more goals before landing on the ground, and this new game would begin and end that afternoon in a field outside of Ghent.

When basketball influencer and pro trainer Lethal Shooter visited Art Omi to confront the basketball tree—and this man specializes in proving his assassin-level abilities to make any shot in any place no matter the interference—he was unperturbed by the chaos. Known for his “stay locked in” mantra, Lethal Shooter aimed for two of the lower hoops and proved his salt, staring down the camera after each made bucket to state: just shoot the ball! Lethal Shooter brought a rigor to the tree. He was there to do battle, but within limitation. Orange Functional has a dozen branches, but he remained laser focused on making consecutive buckets on one goal. It reminded me of the old saying I often butcher about digging holes. Some people dig many shallow holes, while others dig deeper singular holes. (Once again, butchered.) Again, the tree asks: who are you? He took one final shot to the top goal—so the haters in the comments can’t say it was beyond him— and walked away toward an off-camera Arrechea waiting with a high five. Lethal Shooters’ interaction with the tree inspired Arrechea.

“From there I started to envision this idea of creating events,” he says. “Inviting people. Specific people that might bring a lot of attention to the work and create a socializing moment. The idea of creating this connectivity through the work is something that is the next step for me.”

Creating movements, particularly socializing, people-powered movements has always been a part of Arrechea’s practice. As a Cuban-born artist where collectivism is survival, Arrechea began his artistic life in Havana as a member of the Los Carpinteros collective formed alongside Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes and Dagoberto Rodriguez Sanchez in 1992. He understood the value of a team. He called it his first practice as an art student at the University of Cuba; “do work in collaboration.” When resources are scarce he says, “the idea of working collaboratively is the smartest thing you can do.”

My partner and the dog lost interest and kept walking, as this was the first of 120 acres of art and architecture on the Art Omi grounds. I needed to end on a made bucket. Always end on a make. That’s been the rule since I was a kid. Alone with the tree, I felt an absence. My desire to play sustained, but the joy tapered. Basketball is better with others. Orange Functional is better experienced with others, even a partner who can only shoot granny style with all their might. Working together, playing together is better—the smartest thing you can do.

Arrechea keeps building more trees. Most live in museums, personal collections, and bespoke hotels (Shaq once encountered it there). But, he wants to see them in more places where they activate the public with no barriers of access, much like Art Omi which is free to enter. In 2023, the San Antonio Spurs installed one at their new practice facility. Soon Arrechea might learn how Victor Wembanyana interacts with his tree. It’s an encounter that could once again alter Arrechea’s understanding of his sculpture. Maybe seeing a 7’6” superhuman athlete play with the tree means building even higher? For me, as someone who has found tremendous peace of mind shooting hoops alone, and made it my meditation practice, the tree reminds me that basketball is better with community. I envision upstate road trips with basketball friends to invent a game at the tree. There is immense value in doing quiet work alone, and an equally immense value in playing together. Orange Functional would not let me forget that.

“I’m giving a platform to people,” Arrechea says. “I’m exhibiting my sculpture, but my sculpture is an opportunity for people to be themselves. To really do whatever you want to do.”