Not the End of the World

Yesterday was 12/12/12, but it was not the end of the world. It is, however, the end of the semester, and time to take a break. By the time I return, the twelve days of Christmas will have run their course, and we shall see new things in the light of Epiphany.

 Before I go, however, I’d like to share one more artwork that I saw in Chicago last month. Our hotel was just opposite Grant Park, and every time the shuttle bus brought us back from McCormick Place, I would notice a group of tall, headless figures walking around in the grass. They looked familiar, like an acquaintance from some other part of my life that I couldn’t quite place. Finally, I decided to go find out who they were and what they were doing there.

 

From a distance, the figures seemed to be identical to one another, a literally faceless mass of near-humanity. As I approached, I began to realize that each one was a little different from the others—some taller, some shorter; some in groups and some alone; each facing in a different direction, aimlessly or intentionally following some secret intention. Missing both heads and hands, the eerie giants were stopped in mid-stride, as if held in an unseen force field. All were hollow when seen from the back, mere false fronts rather than solidly planted.

By the time I was among them, I was pretty sure that I knew who had made them. A glance at the plaque on a nearby stone confirmed my guess that it was Magdalena Abakanowicz, and told me that the name of the group of 106 rusty, iron folk was Agora, the word for gathering place or town square in ancient Greece. Although I had never even seen a photograph of this installation, it seemed familiar because I have been aware of Abakanowicz for many years. She began her career as a textile artist who was well known when I was a weaver in the 1970s. In those days, I admired her courage to break free from the technique-driven constraints of craft, instead  making the ugly, ungainly, yet oddly affecting installations of burlap and sisal that she called Abakans.

The walking simulacra populating the Agora seemed familiar because they were! No longer soft and unstable, relying on suspension lines hanging from the ceiling to remain upright, these hard, durable figures stand on their own two feet. However, like their ancestors the Abakans, they loom over their puny visitors, ignoring the intrusion into a realm that is at once mystical and menacing. And, like the Abakans, the inhabitants of Agora will also decay, albeit more slowly. Already covered in rust, one day they, like their textile forebears, will fall to the earth, unable to stand up to the ravages of time. For them, it will be the end of the world.

Designing Architecture for Art

Last week, I was privileged to participate in the end-of-semester critique for an undergraduate class on sacred space in the Catholic University’s School of Architecture. I had already met the students and most of the other jurors earlier in the semester, when, along with Julio Bermudez’s graduate students, they showed their concepts for a hypothetical, twelve-person monastery situated between the C&O canal and the Potomac River, near what is actually the popular site for picnickers, cyclists, and kayakers known as Fletcher’s Boathouse,. Some reflections and pictures from that experience are in my October 3 posting, Sacred Space. 

Catholic University School of Architecture
students preparing for a jury

In planning the undergraduate project for the remainder of the semester, Luis Boza, was intrigued with the idea that the monks might create a Center for the Arts and Religion nearby. Using our actual mission statement as a starting place, Professor Boza assigned a brief to design a 25,000 square foot building that would be just up the river from the monastery, to house a gallery, an art library, a café, and studio spaces. In assigning the project, he wrote

Architecture is a communicative medium; a language in which meaning is transmitted through the physicality of objects in space. Our physical and sensory experiences are translated through acute interpretations of scale, proximity, perspective, materials, and form. Light, however, is the medium that reveals what is hidden and ultimately, illuminates our visual experience. As such, Light, with its ethereal variation can orchestrate the intensity of the architectural experience. The perceptual essence and metaphysical strength of architecture is driven by qualities of light and shadow as shaped by solids and voids, by opacities, transparencies and translucencies.

Light is particularly important in exhibition and studio spaces. Painters, particularly, are sensitive to not only the direction of the light, but also to its color. The appearance of pigments, and therefore the color harmonies within a painting, can be dramatically different when seen by unfiltered daylight than when illuminated by yellow incandescent bulbs. Even the color of walls will affect perception, as light is reflected and refracted from every surface. Sculptures often need strong side lighting to bring out their contours, accentuating the difference between heights and depths. In a gallery, an exhibition that may be seem drab and unexciting will come to life when fully lit. 

The ten talented and dedicated third-year students had clearly grown in their ability to think about the relationship between light and space. One created a complex of layered boxes around a central courtyard, a modernist interpretation of the Gothic cathedral as the multi-roomed City of God. Another included a dark-walled interior space for the exhibition of digital art, featuring an intriguing system of ceiling perforations that could be adjusted to admit light in pixellated patterns. A third designed a screen to cover the entire glass-walled building, controlling the amount of light that entered each space through small, round openings that differed in density, just as ben-day dots control the amount of pigment on a half-toned page. 

The other jurors were especially interested in the poetics of the spaces the students presented, asking questions about the relationship of building and river, the processional movement of people as they approach entries and vistas, the changing aspect of spaces and voids in the annual cycle of seasons. I found myself more grounded in practical matters, like the need for freight elevators for moving artworks up to top-floor galleries; flexible, directional lighting in all exhibition spaces; and pinnable walls and convenient sources of water in workshops and studios, to name just a few. The faculty members reassured me that next semester the students would be brought down to earth, learning to grapple with such things as building code compliance, accessibility for people with disabilities, and similar constraints. In the meanwhile, these intelligent, thoughtful, committed young people give me hope for a future in which light is both metaphor and physical property, giving shape to their own boxes of miracles.

"Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time" Revisited

This past Saturday was the opening reception and artist’s talk for Beneath the Old Masters: Evolution & Process, Woodcuts by Trudi Y. Ludwig, at the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’ve been watching Trudi’s masterful image, The Exposure of Luxury, emerge from the wood for most of the year. Indeed, right before I left for Chicago, I saw the finished plate. Even so, I was unprepared for the breathtaking sight that greeted me as I came up the entry stairs into the gallery. There, filling the entire visual space, not one, but four versions of intertwined skeletal forms danced and floated before my eyes, daring me to choose which one spoke most strongly.

Four Versions of The Exposure of Luxury

I leave it to the printmakers to talk about the technical specifications of papers and ink. For me, it was simply a delight to contemplate the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between a print made on stark, white paper; one made on the soft, fibrous side of another paper with a yellower, more bone-like cast; a third pulled on the harder, less porous side of that same, cream-colored substrate, and embellished with gold leaf; and, in mirror image, the inky black of the actual plywood plate. On each of the hand-printed sheets, the marks of the baren evoked clouds and memories, as if the bones had emerged from dreams rather than from the tedious, hard physical labor of carving into plywood for hundreds of hours.

It was also a delight to hear Trudi talk about her process, revealing her ideas about art and life just as her astonishing, life-sized prints reveal the underlying structures of works of art by those we often refer to as “old masters.” Other works in the show included a reprinting of a block originally cut in 2000, Prima Veritas, showing the bones under Botticelli’s three Primavera Graces; the skeletal underpinnings of Rodin’s Thinker, titled Nosce Te Ipsum (Know Thyself) from 2005; and That Mystic Smile (Mona Revisited) from 2002. As she spoke in multi-layered puns and double entendres, the works became ever more resonant, exposing the essential truth that bones support every one of our living bodies, no matter how luxurious our outer trappings. These exquisite networks of shape and form are a testament to luxury of a different kind than that depicted in the Bronzino work that inspired Trudi’s newest prints. They neither exploit nor bemoan the decadent, transient pleasures of the flesh. Rather, they revel in the luxury of time to work in the studio, time to think and to pray, time to remember that we are more than just our skin and bones, we are also spirit, dancing eternally with the God before whom all are equal, and all are beautiful.

A Thanksgiving Feast

Last week, after the AAR/SBL extravaganza of meetings, papers, and conversations with friends, I found myself with an extra day in Chicago all to myself. Naturally, I spent a good portion of it at the Art Institute, which was only a few blocks away from my hotel. 

I often find going to museums overwhelming. There is so much to see, so much to take in, that I am tempted to rush from one thing to another rather than to allow things to speak to me. As I wandered through the Modern wing of the Art Institute, I thought about James Elkins’ book, Pictures and Tears: A History of People who have Cried Before Paintings. While I wasn’t exactly weeping, several works did stop me in my tracks, as they called forth a certain aching in my heart that I associate with the experience of beauty. 

I was particularly surprised to feel this way in front of four paintings by German artist Gerhard Richter. Done in 1989, each has the title Ice, followed by numbers 1 through 4 in parentheses. All of them are 80 inches high by 64 inches wide, hung side by side along a wall immediately across from the entry into the room. Beautiful is not usually a word I associate with Richter’s work, which generally challenges notions of identity, meaning, and reality. Many of his works reference documentary photographs or prints or paintings by other artists, altering them in ways that make them almost – but not quite – unrecognizable. These Ice paintings, though, were completely abstract, reveling in the materiality of paint just as much as any mid-20^th century abstract expressionist. And I was captivated, close to tears.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/146994?search_no=1&index=1

Some indeterminate amount of time later, after looking at a lot of art that left me intellectually curious but emotionally cold, I came around a corner to see what looked like the root of an immense tree. This was a familiar sight, as it was only a few days after the passage of Hurricane Sandy, which pulled many trees in my neighborhood out of the ground.

But this was no ordinary uprooted tree. It was a dream of a tree, an artificial construction that reproduced the gnarled branches and knots, the rough bark and smooth planes, but also revealed the trace of human hands. The artist, Charles Ray, called it Hinoki, which is the name of a particular kind of cypress tree that grows only in Japan. In his statement, Ray described a fallen tree that he had seen in a meadow off the California coast. The tree haunted his imagination, until he finally decided to make a life-sized sculpture of it. He writes,

Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki). I was drawn to the woodworkers because of their tradition of copying work that is beyond restoration. In Japan, when an old temple or Buddha can no longer be maintained, it is remade.[http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/189207]

Thus, the old, dead tree was remade out of new wood, and released into the world. All alone in its shrine-like room, softly lit by an entire wall of windows, it smelled of hewn cypress and sandalwood.  Like the paintings called Ice I had seen earlier, this art melted my heart and filled my eyes. And for this feast of sight and smell, I give thanks.

A Monotype Workshop

Cyndi Wish talking about making stencils

Early this morning, printmakers Cyndi Wish and Cecilia Rossey led a workshop in our studio for Trudi’s students and anyone else that wanted to show up. The first thing that I learned is that printmakers distinguish between a monotype, which has some repeatable elements in the form of stencils, plates, linoleum blocks, or other matrices; and a monoprint, which is completely free-form and unrepeatable.
 

The next thing I learned is that a matrix can be made from just about anything. The pages of illustrated children’s books are particularly good, since they often are fairly stiff and the commercial printing process gives them a coating that allows them to stand up to repeated runs through the press. Plastic and Mylar are good too, but they are harder on blades.

As Cyndi laid out inks and began to work, the conversation shifted—as it often does in the studio—between technical information about printmaking and more general observations about life and art. Here are a few scraps that I was able to jot down.

Cyndi Wish, Cis Rossey, and Trudi Ludwig

Cyndi:  “I am not a goal oriented person. I am a process artist, a community artist. I enjoy working in the studio and having a chance to talk with people about it.”

 Cis: “If God gave you a voice it is your responsibility to use it. In art it is also sharing with community.” 

Cyndi: “Behind every piece of art or music or writing is a person who once felt shy about it.

Cis: “There is no really right way once you become a developed artist. you need to learn technique but can choose how to use it.”

Early prints in the series

Cyndi: “Stencils or matrices are words in a visual language that can be reworked into a series. You start to develop a cohesive body of work, a series, without even trying. I could do this all day.” 

Meanwhile, Cyndi worked steadily, layering images of whirling lines, words like “but” and “and,” and butterfly shapes cut into linoleum blocks. Soon, a table was filled with prints, all related to one another, yet no two the same.