Standing 60 feet tall in a former horse pasture at Levai’s exhibition space, The Ranch, Matt Johnson’s Meditating Figureis impossible to ignore. Built from 12 retired shipping containers that collectively traveled more than 12 million miles before being stacked into the outline of a cross-legged figure, the sculpture turns one of globalization’s least glamorous inventions into something approaching a contemporary colossus.
Now it has become the center of an increasingly public legal fight.
Last week, the East Hampton Town Board voted 4-1 to authorize legal action against The Ranch, arguing that the installation should be treated not simply as a work of art but as an un-permitted steel structure subject to local building regulations. The dispute has produced an unexpectedly philosophical question for a zoning board: At what point does a sculpture become architecture?
The timing is difficult to ignore. Shipping containers have quietly become some of the most politically charged objects in the world. Whether the conversation is tariffs, supply-chain disruptions or renewed tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, those anonymous steel boxes have become shorthand for the machinery of global commerce. Johnson thought up Meditating Figure before the latest headlines, but the sculpture now lands in a world newly conscious of the infrastructure that keeps it running.
Using containers sourced from shipping companies around the world after they had reached the end of their working lives, he stacked them like oversized children’s blocks into the simplified outline of a person seated in meditation. The result is simultaneously playful and monumental.
The sculpture rises above a former horse farm just off Old Montauk Highway, where horses still graze nearby. Seen together, the scene quietly collapses centuries of transportation history: horsepower on one side of the fence, containerized global shipping on the other.
Johnson also deliberately positioned the figure toward Old Montauk Highway so that visitors driving toward Montauk Point could encounter it from the road rather than only after making a reservation to visit The Ranch. From a distance, the sculpture appears like a landmark.
The legal battle has become as much about definitions as engineering.
Town Attorney Jake Turner argued that the issue isn’t an object of artistic merit but a piece of construction, claiming that a structure assembled by welding together massive steel containers should undergo the same safety review as any comparable project. The town has cited alleged violations including failure to obtain a building permit, architectural review approval and a certificate of occupancy.
Not everyone on the Town Board agrees. Councilman Tom Flight cast the lone dissenting vote, warning that government should be cautious about regulating the display of art on private property, even when the work is unusually large. “This is a public work of art,” Flight said at a Town Board meeting last week. “We don’t have a lot of guidance about restricting art being displayed. I appreciate that this is an exceptionally large piece, but to deny people the ability to exhibit art is not something I personally support.”
Levai has taken the opposite view, arguing that the installation is an artwork rather than a regulated structure and noting that “LA Monumental,” the exhibition in which Meditating Figure appears, is scheduled to remain on view only through November 15.
Johnson, for his part, has declined to enter the dispute, saying he prefers to leave the legal questions to others and focus on making the work.
Whether Meditating Figure survives the season may ultimately depend less on aesthetics than municipal code. But regardless of what happens in court, Johnson has managed a rare feat: transforming one of modern life’s most overlooked objects into something people can’t stop looking at.
