Kevin Harman: Skip 7

Kevin Harman. Skip 7. 2007 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

Kevin Harman, Scottish sculptor, has a series of reorganised skips full mostly of construction debris. This is Skip 7, before and finished.

At once performance, community project, statement about density, found materials, deconstruction of the already deconstructed, reconstruction leading to a complete absence of inner space.  Rachel Whitread filled a small house full of plaster, then removed the mould – the structure of the house itself, leaving solid blocks of 'space'.  Kevin Harman takes the materials of a house and squeezes all the space out, leaving a small block of airless density.

The process is public and good natured. Here is an 11 minute 2009 film from Harman's website:  www.kevinharman.co.uk/skip11video.html

Below, Skip 11, a strangely romantic reorganisation.

Kevin Harman. Skip 11, 2011 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

Frank Stella

Frank Stella. The Pequod meets the Bachelor (B-11, 2X)

I used to quite like Frank Stella's work because he used the tools of our trade: protractors, compasses and by the mid-1980s, french curves and something all the notes about Stella call railway curves.  When I was teaching in Halifax in the mid 1980s I bought a set of ship curves, it being a ship-building sort of place. One was about three feet long.  I was working on an architecture that would result if one did all the drawings using these curves: flat, gentle sweeps where even the intersections gave a slightly odd, open angle.

I saw Stella's Pequod series in New York, somewhere; all the pieces of a drawing that normally indicate some sort of coded ground plane, as in a site plan, were lifted off the ground and floated in a complex set of layers. These layers, which had shapes recognisably from french curves, were painted over with gaudy pattern.  These pieces cast wonderful shadows: another kind of drawing.  They were enchanting.

Thinking about these works and the legacy of the abstract expressionists of New York given that Frankenthaler and Chamberlain both died last week, and looking up the Pequod series (I had forgotten all the Moby-Dick chapter heading names: Pequod meets the Bachelor, Pequod meets the Virgin, and so on), I found this description: 'In this and other ways, they tackle the issue of narrative, visual metaphor and subject matter more directly than before.'  This was written in 1989, and god knows I was keen on narrative and textual matters then too, but looking at the work now, seeing everything as narrative and metaphor does the physicality of this work a disservice.  Pequod meets the Bachelor is a nice reference to an American classic about obsession and is perhaps a metaphor for the artist in an obvious sort of way, but it isn't inherent in the work. The work has a physical presence quite independent of the haze of words around it.  

Here he is in 1972, very articulate and 34 years old.  At one point he says he became interested in aluminum paint as it was fairly repellant, all the action is on the surface.  Surface was the issue, not metaphor.

John Chamberlain, 1927-2011

John Chamberlain. Chili Terlingua, 1972-1974, from a group of ten sculptures constructed on a ranch near Amarillo, Texas, between 1972 and 1975 and loosely named after towns and counties throughout the state. The works were purchased by the Dia Art Foundation and given to the Chinati Foundation in 1986.

Art - regardless of when it was made - is one of the few things in the world that is never boring, and, it costs nothing. You don't have to own it, you just have to perceive it; art is free. As an artist I give away more than I would if I ran a beauty shop.
                                  John Chamberlain, 1982

What an odd thing to choose as an alternative to being an artist – a beauty shop.  Chamberlain started working with car bodies in the late 1950s: new world collages of the built-in-obsolescent auto industry rather than in the tradition of European collagists whose work was, by the 1960s, inevitably browned and archival looking: the tram tickets of Schwitters, the futurist fascination with machine parts drafted by Duchamp.  When the  crash of car hoods and crushed doors appeared with Chamberlain, it all looked new and very American.  The earliest pieces are often rusted – cars found in fields, but later in the 60s and 70s when cars were beautifully enamelled in candy colours, these crushed car assemblages took on a painterly quality.

At the Chinati Foundation, the collection of old buildings and workshops in Marfa, Texas founded by Donald Judd in the mid -1980s to exhibit his own work and that of Dan Flavin and Chamberlain, there is a permanent building of Chamberlain's sculptures.  They tilt, they lean, they surge like Rodin's Burghers of Calais. They are noisy with parts and colours.  Chili Terlingua, above, lives there.

Katie Holten: drawing trees

Katie Holten. Paths of Desire.  Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2007.  mixed media, dimensions variable 

Katie Holten, Irish artist, currently in THE MODERNS, an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  Writing it up for the Irish Times, Aidan Dunne explains her thus: her work is generally informal and slightly alternative, looking to patterns and connections outside the mainstream. It is, in other words, rhizomatic – in the words of cultural theorists Deleuze and Guattari. Holten’s piece spreads and grows in the manner of a plant species finding a niche and expanding exponentially in a new slice of terrain – as tidy an encapsulation of a rhizomatic practice as ever read.  As with plants, some terrains are congenial, some hostile, some roots are hardy, some tender.  To be an artist is almost by definition to be hardy.

This video shows something of how and why Paths of Desire, above, was constructed.

curtain walls and liberty

Assemblage of the Statue of Liberty in Paris. NYPL Digital Gallery, image 1161037Dan Cruikshank danced around Mexican pyramids and an 1851 Colt 6-shooter last night in his Round the World in 80 Very Very Special Places and Things, ending with the Statue of Liberty, which was unfortunately closed to both visitors and potential terrorists.    It reminded me of several of the peripheral features of the statue often forgotten in the glare of its iconograpy.  The broken chain at her foot, the Emma Lazarus poem inviting the poor huddled masses to leave their countries of birth and oppression and come to America, where all are free.   Just before Liberty, Dan went to Monticello, the dark side of which is that Jefferson had 5,000 slaves while writing the constitution that said that all men shall be free.  Dan's taxi-driver was very explicit about what he thought about that.

In Yasmin Khan's book about the Statue of Liberty she describes the skin as a curtain wall in theory, attached to an iron structure which has, built within it, a certain flexibility between structure and skin that protects the skin from stress.  Eiffel and Koechlin designed the structure, rigid enough, and a system of straps that connect the copper skin to the iron armature.  It is this system that allowed the statue to be built in France, disassembled and sent to New York and then reassembled there. 

There is an element of the fairground and the exposition about the making of this statue, a kind of political hucksterism between France and the US that involves the building of the Panama Canal, the revolutionary identification between France and the US, the potential for the US to be a military ally of France in its war with Prussia.  Perhaps it is always this way, but what remains, with this particular project, is a reminder of the deep contradictions at the heart of the USA.

Nike of Samothrace

Nike of Samothrace. 288 BC. Louvre, Paris

Friedrich to Gropius: winter tragedies

Caspar David Friedrich. background detail of das Eismeer, 1921

C D Friedrich's das Eismeer is explained at length in an entry on de.wikipedia.  The English wikipedia entry is about 3 paragraphs, the German one is a great long essay that links the tragedies of Arctic exploration with the tragic failed hopes of the German state, plus a lot of painting analysis, studies, influences, parallel works, modern reinvestigations.  The google English translation of this long entry is anarchic in the extreme, sometimes giving up and leaving whole chunks in the original German.  It says something about the metaphoric habit of critical writing on art that a word for word translation is so hilarious. 

The proportions of Friedrich's das Eismeer are very familiar: a great pile of rock or ice leaning to the left, seemingly aspirational but looking backwards.  The focus is at the right hand base of this great pile.  It is a diagrammatic lens that painters still use for the Rockies, especially Mt Rundle which from the Trans-Canada highway lookout, leans steeply to the left and could be neatly mapped onto das Eismeer.

The entry includes Gropius' 1922 Monument to the March Dead in Weimar, memorialising the victims of the Kapp Putsch – again, failure, conflict and defeat.  The vantage point of the photograph take at the time shows the same left-leaning precipice. 

It is the Werther at the heart of the German soul.

Walter Gropius. Monument to the March Dead, 1921-22. Weimar, Germany

distressed fabric

  Joseph Beuys. Felt Suit, 1970. Felt, 1700 x 600 mm sculpture Tate Collection T07441Shelley Fox and scorching fabric reminded me of Beuys's use of felt: distressed fibres for one reason or another, aesthetic or metaphoric.  The material of construction is changed in some way, not just the form. 

As architects we tend to use material as it comes to us, at most the colour changes.  A long time ago , so I don't even know if it was recorded but the idea was a powerful one and so persists, Wally Mays, a Calgary sculptor, built a wall out of warped 2 x 4 studs.  It curved, it leant, its form was entirely dependent on the natural tendency that thin pieces of wood have to bend.  It was a lovely thing.

Joseph Beuys told the story often of his winter rescue in the Crimea during WWII by nomadic Tatars who covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt: felt was protection, life-giving, dense and felted with meaning. 
Shelley Fox found the qualities of fabric burned in machinery, something that could normally cause the operator his job, gratuitously more interesting than perfect production.  Somehow the materials are given a history of making, a history of use, a social and cultural history that, if one wanted to deconstruct them, simply add more layers of meaning to the form such fabrics make.

There appears to be an interest in both abraded material and form – Oikos  and Jellyfish, the theatres made of scraps and pallettes as examples.  I wonder if this is a harbinger of an architecture interested in material processes and a collaborative understanding of materials which might lead to a different understanding of a building's deep context.

Nicole Dextras 2

Nicole Dextras. Nylon-arm-dress-light, 2010

Some new work from Nicole Dextras.  On her website she talks about this winter ephemera series, garments frozen in ice, as an investigation into 'nature’s capacity for stability and its capacity for flux: ice is imbued with this sense of duality, the work questions whether such pairings ultimately exist in symbiosis or in contradiction'.

All garments exist in both symbiosis and contradiction with the body, climate, weather, time.  Symbiosis in that we support garments, we are their armature.  Contradiction in that garments have all the immanence that has long preoccupied Peter Eisenman.  That immanence is autonomous, auto-directed. 

Nicole Dextras's deconstructed pieces of clothing never lose their identity, no matter how dispersed they become.  Caught in ice, they appear fugitive, but they really aren't.  They are surprisingly vivid, even durable.  

Nicole Dextras's frozen ephermera

Nicole Dextras. Iceworks.An appropriate image for today.  The other side of ice and snow, here, in Nicole Dextras's work, garments frozen in ice and photographed.  They acquire both an extreme romanticism – the sense of abandoned movement in the garments themselves, and also a kind of forensic tragedy. 

Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas

Cristovao Canhavato (Kester). Throne of Weapons, 2001Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) is a project initiated by Bishop Dinis Sengulane in Mozambique in 1992 to exchange the weapons accumulated during the 1976-1992 civil war for tools such as sewing machines, bicycles, hoes and shovels.  One village exchanged all their arms for a tractor.  The weapons are decommissioned, cut up into scrap metal which is then used by artists. 

The resulting sculptures are powerful anti-war statements, diagrammatic in their political import:  the first image on the TAE website is of a saxophone made from an AK-47 and a bazooka. The caption reads: 'It is the antithesis of the weapons used to construct it. It regroups people rather than separating them. It's an instrument of peace rather than an instrument of death.'

In 2005, in conjunction with Christian Aid which supports TAE, Bishop Sengulane gave an enormous Tree of Life to the British Museum.  It is as one would expect, a large metal baobab tree trunk made of gun barrels. 

A more subtle piece is Throne of Weapons, 2001, by Cristovao Canhavato (Kester) who studied at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo in 1998, becoming involved in the TAE project.  This is a generation of artists, many of whom were child soldiers, who grew up knowing only civil war and the tools of civil war.  Art here is instrumental in turning those tools – chunks of metal, plastic and wood – into things that war cannot appropriate. 

The Throne of Weapons which featured recently on BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects turns the weapons of war back into politics: thrones, chairs, seats – these are the euphemisms for power, especially during war when it is those who sit in chairs that conduct the war, not the children with the AK-47s.  

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread. Parts 1-4 of House Study (Grove Road) 1992. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian, London © Rachel Whiteread. Correction fluid, pencil and water-colour on colour photocopy, 29.5x42cmThere is an absolutely wonderful interview/discussion between Rachel Whiteread and Bice Curiger, the co-founder and editor of Parkeet.  Rachel Whiteread has an exhibition of drawings at Tate Britain until mid January 2011.  The discussion looks at the things in her studio that she has collected, including a plaster cast of Peter Sellers' nose, it talks about what her drawings do, it revisits the Grove Road project.  It is delightful. 

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007. Imperial War Museum, London.

Originally Jeremy Deller had proposed a bombed car from Iraq (called The Spoils of War (Memorial for an Unknown Civilian)) for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, an ongoing rotating sculpture competition. Unfortunately, it wasn't chosen.  Unfortunate, because for the countries responsible for the war in Iraq, collateral damage is very abstract.  Four thousand American troops were killed in Iraq; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Iraq.  That abstraction alone is near meaningless: numbers as synecdoche.

What Deller did do was to take a car from Iraq that had been completely crushed by the bomb in in the Mutanabbi Street book market in 2007 which killed 38 people. He installed it at the New Museum in NY (called It Is What It Is) and then towed it through the red states of the US showing what a bombed Iraqi car looks like.  It is now installed at the Imperial War Museum in London (called Baghdad, 5 March 2007) in a hall full of the official hardware of war. 

It isn't art, but Deller said on the Strand last night, I am an artist, so I can propose things.  And in this case, the Imperial War Museum took it – a statement they clearly felt they had to make.

Jeremy Deller. It Is What It Is, 2008. On view in the United States.

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

Bill Burns

Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals. Respirator, 10 x 11 x 6 cm, 1994/1999Bill Burns is originally from Saskatchewan, studied at Goldsmiths, now lives in Toronto, has work in major collections here and abroad.  He is best known for his series Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1996-2000, a collection of tiny helmets, gas masks, life jackets, hazmat suits and goggles for rats and gophers and other tiny neighbours.
 
Curiously the effect does not anthropomorphise the animals, the little life jackets simply remind us that we don't look after animals at all.  If not actively trying to exterminate them, we ignore them, so busy are we looking after ourselves as we elbow our way into the lifeboat, first leaving everyone else to go down with the ship. 

Safety Gear for Small Animals led to the more recent project, Boiler Suits for Primates, 2006 which is a suitcase of miniature versions of all the things given to people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay: orange jumpsuits, rubber thongs, towels, a bucket, toothpaste.  These are considered the bleak essentials of life it seems, and by putting them into the context of Safety Gear for Small Animals, the parallel to zoos is undeniable.  Detainees are stripped of their humanity, but still given toothpaste.

The ambiguity between mankind and animalkind is the subject of Burns' work.  It is a similar project to that of Yann Martel who uses animals as eloquent voices of the blindly fumbling human condition.  George Orwell was another.  Somehow when the rather selfish ambitions of human beings are made to come out clear and pure from the mouths of animals who, if we think about them at all, we consider innocents, we are shocked.

Lou Lynn: retro-active

Lou Lynn. Tools as Artifacts. 2009. glass, bronze

There used to be a junk store in Inglewood that just sold tools.  Most of the stuff I have came from it, a few pieces were bought new when I first moved to Calgary – my hammer and saw, and when the old CPR fellow across the alley died his son came to clear out the house and told me to take what I wanted from his father's workroom.  Which I did, except for the 4' piece of steel rail bolted to the bench.  

What I love about these old wrenches and planes, rakes and shovels, saws and chisels is the excellent steel of which they were made and the beautiful handles, satiny with long use under pressure. Compared to new tools with their bright dayglo colours and plastic handles, these old pieces are quiet and still, dark and graceful.

Lou Lynn, a sculptor living in the Slocan Valley, has had an exhibition, Retro-Active, travelling around the province this past year.  She works in bronze and glass, using the heft and monumentalism of basic tool shapes.  Some of the pieces are very large: cast glass adze heads, so large one's hand is Lilliputian.  Tools as Artifacts, 38 bronze and glass pieces pinned in a long line on the wall, are hand-scaled and like many old artifacts, each piece looks like a tool, but the function is unclear.  A piece with a bronze handle and a frosted glass prong is both humorous and mysterious.

In the Nanaimo Museum & Gallery installation Helen Sibelius, the curator of the retrospective, has paired Lynn's work with mining and forestry tools from the museum's collection.  These are no less mysterious: a half-inch thick iron spike like a 6-foot long knitting needle with a small wood handle at the top.
 
In all of this it is the small details that are so poignant.  A plain turned wood handle has a tiny line inscribed half an inch from where it joins the steel: a small, non-functional reference to a ferrule.  Lynn's sculptures makes much of these small details: she isn't making tools, but she is very aware of the hands that made tools, once, and all the small vanities they added to them.

Lou Lynn. Ladle. 2009 bronze, glass, 56 x 46 x 26cm.

Bill Woodrow

 Bill Woodrow. Car Door, Boot and Wing With Roman Helmet, 1982. Car door, boot and wing 

Thinking more about sheet material cut into pieces to make 3-d form, Bill Woodrow came to mind – specifically his work from the mid-80s, the middle years of Thatcher who was overturning a generations-long habit of thrift in favour of American-style economics: buy and throw away.

For a sculptor this provided a mine of material as consumer durables (cars, fridges, stoves) were discarded in a new spirit of excess.  Woodrow took these heavy metal surfaces and cut out the flat shapes that could make new objects – one complicated shape, left attached to the original car hood or whatever it was, carefully folded up to make a camera, or a gun, or a helmet.  The source material itself was ideologically marked; the sculptures equally so.

Looking through the work on his extensive website, one is struck by the carefully controlled violence of the pieces.  A lot refer to war.  It looks like Britannia's helmet above.  1982 had been Mrs Thatcher's Falklands War, guaranteed to boost her political profile, Britain's economy and a revival of valorious military sacrifice. Many of Woodrow's objects anticipate surveillance society with cameras and microphones peeled out of the shiny enamel of a car door: Diana's death predicted from the early days of her celebrity.

The early 1980s changed British society radically, culminating in the economic meltdown of last year, the 'special relationship' that took Britain to war several times alongside the US, and the overwhelming conspicuous consumption that was promoted as a British 'right'.  It was a revolution as radical as the breaking of the Berlin Wall a few years later, and all through it British artists were commenting, critiquing, calling attention to changes made for the sake of politics.

Bill Woodrow. Teapot, Medal and Bullet, 1982. Teapot, acrylic and enamel paintAs I write this, I'm listening to BBC Radio 4: Birds and the Battlefield. 'Security correspondent Frank Gardner, examines the links between soldiers and birds and the comfort troops can find in times of stress', from poems, letters and journal entries from WWI to the Falklands to Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.  Watching birds, hearing birdsong, rescuing birds, protecting nests, washing oil-drenched birds, befriending birds.

Some British preoccupations survive.

Nicole Dextras

Nicole Dextras. Yucca Prom Dress.

Nicole Dextras is a Vancouver artist who works with ephemeral materials: plants, water, ice, names, myths, clothing destined to last and yet never to be worn again.  It is her work, Toronto Island 2007, on the cover of On Site 20: museums and archives.  It shows a delicate organza skirt and a black velvet jacket caught, frozen in the ice, all the immanent life in clothing pinned the way that iridescent beetles are pinned in natural history museum specimen trays. 

Dextras has contributed several articles to On Site, beginning with 'Belonging.  Sous le pont', an extended series of installations under Burrard Bridge that crossed First Nations narratives with blackberry vines, willow branches, Mountain Ash berries woven and tied into fragile, but flexible structures (On Site 18: culture).

On Site 21: weather showed work she'd done in Dawson City in the Yukon, constructing moulds for large free-standing ice letters.  What does one write with 10'-high letters in ice?  Dextras wrote L E G A C Y .  She wrote names: Cléophase, Elphese, Gédéon – noms a coucher dehors.  The past  is the subject, the medium is the weather, the tools are un-constructed materials at hand.

If Dextras' winter material at hand is ice, her summer material is plants. Still ephemeral, still delineating the structures of other, past lives.  I just find this work so beautiful, the antithesis of the world of war On Site has been engaged with now for months and months.  War does grind one down.  Nicole Dextras's work does lift one up. 

Nicole Dextras. Sunday Bestwww.nicoledextras.com