Building Character

Even though I completed two altarpiece constructions within the past year, it has actually been about eight years since I actually built the structure of one. I had done plenty of work associated with the altarpieces, but I had not been building them. I prefer to use reclaimed lumber from old furniture when I can find it. When I was months away from moving to Massachusetts from Idaho I made a big push to build the structures for five or six of these works from my stockpile of wood, acknowledging that it was better to move half finished artworks across the country than a pile of wood. It then took several years to complete the figure paintings inside the “shells.”

In the intervening years I have worked on the plans for many more altarpiece works. I recently began building the structures for two of these. One is for a benefit for a museum in New York and the other is an older idea that incorporates more assemblage elements, giving a taste of the direction of future works.

I have stated before that I age these works much in the way that Joseph Cornell aged his own box constructions. I have included some photographs of these pieces in progress to show just how much effort goes into this aging process—well before the figurative elements are painted.

One image shows the unpainted state of a smaller construction. The wood is pine, with some additional elements of either aspen of poplar. The surface of the bare wood is usually scrubbed with a wire brush at this point, to bring up the grain. Most of the exposed wood on these pieces was next coated with a solution of vinegar that had a pad of steel wool soaking in it. This rusty solution oxidizes the wood, giving it a weathered, gray appearance.

The exterior sides of the boxes were then coated with a light green colored oil-based enamel paint. After that dried another coat of pink enamel was added. These colors were derived from the countless layers of paint that cover the walls of old American Protestant churches across the continent (although Catholic churches may exhibit the same thing). Growing up, I was often enlisted to help paint rooms in our church whenever some wall color went out of fashion or the use of a particular room changed. I recall many variations of pinks and light greens and yellows. So these colors show up in the altarpieces as a connection to this country’s religious history.

The next step entailed taking a heat gun (used to remove old paint), putty knife, and wire brush to the sides. This actually mixes the two colors a bit, but it also brings up the underlying layers of green paint and gray wood. Another layer of off-white (almond colored) oil enamel was then applied. This was given the same heat gun and scraping treatment. The interior boxes were treated in a similar manner using light yellow and off-white layers of paint.

Trim elements on the boxes are handled in a different way. The bare wood (without coats of the vinegar solution) is covered with a deep red acrylic paint. An adhesive is then carefully applied over the red. This adhesive goes on in a very liquid form—milky white—and dries clear.

The gold leaf—which is really made of brass—is then slowly applied. Large flat areas are easy to cover, but the intricate details and crevices in the decorative mouldings must be filled by pressing bits of the leafing in with a hard bristle brush. A chemical is then brushed over the metal leaf. This turns the copper elements in the brass to green. This may take multiple applications and some areas are still kept as unaltered gold. The final layer of this portion of the boxes is given a polyurethane clear coat that prevents the brass from changing any further.

When all this process is added to the time it takes to construct the boxes themselves, it is no surprise that I say that the painting of the images takes the least amount of time. I am very pleased with the effects in these recent works and will continue to post further updates of their progress.

Arman: The Sum is Greater than the Parts

The imagery of Pop art was based in the banal—the commonplace items of everyday life. Conversely, the esoteric and existentialist compositions of the Abstract Expressionists did not sit well with the average person. There was little within those swirls and splatters of paint that seemed worthy of the traditional, lofty goals and intentions of fine art.

Pop artists in Britain and the U.S. recovered recognizable imagery, but there was something else at work beneath the surface. Pop’s sister movement in France—Nouveau Realisme (New Realism)—was perhaps a better indication of things to come. The performative nature of art making, by Action Painters like Jackson Pollock, had set the stage for Conceptualism. Yet it was the New Realists who proved to be some of the most innovative transitional figures between mid-century abstraction and process oriented conceptual styles of the 1960s and 70s.

The New Realist artist Arman is not known to the masses like Pop’s Andy Warhol. His individual works are not generally recognized outside of the insulated circle of artists, curators, and art historians who compose the art world. His work, however, contains the germ of transition that formed the foundation for much of the significant work of the later twentieth century.

Arman’s work is mainly composed of collections of ordinary objects. They are certainly the next step forward from the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp. However, where Duchamp’s simplicity was found in the single, unadorned object—the urinal or the bottle drying rack—Arman’s simplicity was often located in his singleness of focus. Arman is primarily known for his “accumulations.” This apt title denotes assemblage collections of similar, real life items and objects.

It was not only the Dadaist Readymades of Duchamp that impacted Arman’s aesthetic. Kurt Schwitters, a Dadaist of a different stripe, composed quite formal looking abstract collages out of detritus. These highly structured and meticulously designed works contain intricate patterns and repetitions. Often, similar items are reused within an individual work. Taken out of their original context, they become non-objective visual elements that enhance the overall impact of the work through a “sameness.” It is that very same element that viewers of Arman’s work find most compelling.

Arman’s art, because of its typical three dimensional nature, can also be aligned with the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. In fact, many of Cornell’s boxes employ repetitions of similar objects, creating an analogous effect. However, Arman should not merely be compared to his predecessors since his relation to his contemporaries is what actually determined his place in art history.

Though both Arman and Yves Klein were both reared in Nice, it was not until they were adults, both studying art, that they became friends and influences on one another. Klein’s work always had a more conceptual and performative aspect, but it originated from a comparable place to Arman’s. Each man studied the martial art of judo (Klein was even bestowed the title of master) and the influence of Asian thinking and philosophies came to bear heavily on many characteristics of their artworks.

Both Arman and Klein typically provided viewers with an art object, yet each often arrived at that object through some form of performative activity. Klein’s Anthropometries may have gained more notoriety (if for no other reason than their blatant exploitation of the female nude) but both artists performed some destructive acts that ultimately resulted in art objects. Some of the Anthropometries even employed flammable actions. Arman also utilized fire to manipulate objects for his works, such as musical instruments.


Arman might smash or burn a cello or violin and then reassemble the remnants as a new art object. This destruction or deconstruction has obvious connections to the theories of both Jacques Derrida and John Cage. Yet, with all the artists who utilized destructive techniques, one should avoid a simple reading that their intentions were set on completely dismantling the concepts of Western art. The influence of Eastern philosophy was often at work and it brings to mind the Hindu god Shiva. The attributes of Shiva include his simultaneous roles as creator and destroyer. There is a direct correlation to this particular subset of Arman’s assemblages.
 

Arman’s work also signals the shifts toward Conceptualism through reconsiderations of established cultural boundaries. John Cage’s blending of art forms—music, visual art, dance, and theater—began to permeate the high art culture of the mid-twentieth century. Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine each dabbled in performance art and utilized Duchampian readymade objects in their works, much like Arman. Though mainly recognized as a pioneer in video art, Nam June Paik’s works incorporating violins and cellos are not far afield of Arman’s work with musical instruments.

Often Rauschenberg is seen as an essential bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop because his Combine Paintings retained the gestural paint application of the former, while the real life assemblage objects denoted the latter. Arman kept one foot planted in the recent art historical past, too. Examples of this are found in the accumulations that incorporate actual paint tubes, often imbedded—as if in suspended animation—in clear plastic. The concept is not reminiscent of Rauschenberg as much as his colleague Jasper Johns. And the streaming paint brings to mind the soak-stain paintings of Morris Louis more than the drip paintings of Pollock.

For all the similarities with his contemporaries, Arman remains a distinct figure. His style is unique and recognizable. The accumulations, in particular, possess a presence that one is not always able to articulate. There may be elements of humor, as with 1982’s Long-Term Parking, but at the same time there can be underlying political or sociological messages. The abundance of like items or objects within a limited space focuses the attention of the viewer on intrinsic qualities of those objects.

The accumulations recontextualize the materials by stripping away distracting and extraneous elements. The sum of these works is significantly greater than the individual parts. Separated, the objects are often bypassed; combined, the impact of their essential qualities is inevitable.                                                                       The adoption of installation as the preferred medium of so many contemporary artists shows the debt the art world owes Arman. While there are certainly some artists of a new generation who devise compositions through amassing similar objects in an Armanesque style, the collection of disparate objects within a space is more common. Though this may seem to be a distinct differentiation, the recontextualization of non-art objects finds its genesis in Arman as much as in Duchamp. Arman’s accumulations are thus a hallmark of the postmodern desire to deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning from the remnants of Western history and culture.

Interactivity: The Give and Take of Artwork

My major attraction to the work of Joseph Cornell is the potential for interactivity within the pieces. The book Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay...Eterniday(Hartigan, 2003) includes an interactive DVD that serves as the next best thing to actually handling the works themselves. Video clips show the moveable parts working as the artist intended. Aside from a few major collectors and conservators, most people never get to see this in person.

Once I discovered it, the work of Cornell only reinforced some of my natural tendencies. My childhood was marked by intense creative endeavors that I never acknowledged as "artistic" until I was in college. These creations were not "art" in the traditional sense, so I discounted them until I could comprehend their place within my art making.

As a child I tended to construct devices to enhance play. For instance, there was a period during the time that Lynda Carter starred as TV’s Wonder Woman (as campy as it was) when my two younger female cousins and I would always play Wonder Woman when we got together. My lack of foresight ensured that I would always be the villain and never the hero. I fashioned aluminum foil into star studded Amazon headbands and bracelets for them. We even utilized some of that gold cord used for gift wrapping as the magic lasso. I know, this isn’t overly creative, but this was just the beginning.

This was in the early 1980s and well before every household had its own computer. One of the most memorable items was an ID scanner made from paper and cellophane tape. My maternal grandmother worked at State Farm and she always had an abundance of some oddly sized, perforated paper that evidently had some function within the insurance industry. I usually just drew on it in church. The ID scanner—again, long before we were all accustomed to debit card swipers and PIN codes—was amazingly functional.

It consisted of a small box that was taped next to a bedroom doorframe. There was a slot in the front where our ID cards were inserted to gain access to our top secret offices. This was not just a hole cut in the face of the box; it was a slim interior compartment that only allowed the cards to be inserted a certain distance, so they wouldn’t get stuck inside. On the top surface was a keypad with dimensional keys that could actually be depressed into the main box. All in all, it was fairly advanced for a paper and tape device that mimicked something we, as a general public, had only seen on TV programs with futuristic plotlines.

In the years just after the ID scanner I moved on to bigger and sturdier objects. There was a cardboard computer panel with multiple screens and keyboards. This was colorfully painted in poster paint and could be conveniently folded up for under the bed storage. The computer panel was accompanied by a red convertible sports car. It was just a profile view—kind of like those character screens at amusement parks with holes for people to poke their faces through for photographs. But the door functioned and I think the steering wheel did too, somehow. I know we had fun with the contraptions, though they are now compost.

I wouldn’t want anyone to have saved one of these things to hang on the wall in her home. Once I started to paint in high school I gave away several sad little canvases to family members, and those are things that I also wish would no longer hang on my relatives’ walls. All of these things, spanning about an eight year period, make up my early unconscious strivings to become an artist.

The painting was officially sanctioned art and the odd constructions were the early stages of viewer participation. Just as text and images are two connected sides within my current work, paintings and interactive constructions are another pairing. This came about quite subtly, but it was always there.

The pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg had a famous quote, in his 1961 manifesto, about how he felt art should function:

I am for an art that is political—erotical—mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing that it is art at all…
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

That is part of what I am about, too. If art is simply going to hang on the wall or sit on a pedestal and look "nice" then I don’t have nearly as much use for it. My paintings require the viewer to not only interact with the images but with the underlying text. If the paintings are part of an assemblage/construction then even greater interactivity confronts the viewer. The element of play is once again present.

Part of this may stem from my slight aversion to Modernism’s pure aesthetic aims. There has only been a brief period of time when art for art’s sake was seen as valid. For most of human history what we now term as "art" had a function outside of pure aesthetic contemplation (Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action gives an outstanding analysis of this). I respect and acknowledge the significance of multitude forms of modern and contemporary art. What I desire for my own work is to have viewers physically, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually interacting with it. I want the work to meet the viewer halfway, expecting something in return, but meeting the viewer wherever he or she is at in a given moment in life.

What You See is What You See

I once had work in an exhibition in Salem, MA. It coincided with an exhibition at Salem’s Peabody-Essex Museum that featured the work of Joseph Cornell and was curated by the museum’s chief curator Lynda Roscoe-Hartigan, who is the preeminent scholar on Cornell. The work in this other exhibition was by artists who were influenced by Cornell in one way or another.

I am not overly cautious about the handling of my altarpiece constructions when simply driving them down the road a few miles. Some parts of the works are breakable, but they are quite sturdy in general. What concerns me more is their presentation.

The problem that arose with this exhibition was that work had to be delivered to one location but was to be installed at another. I just don’t trust others with putting all the pieces back together in their proper positions. I was given a special dispensation and a half hour window when I could reorganize the elements of the works displayed. I was glad to have this because the sticky notes I found with sketches on them concerning the placement of the objects mentioned the "bottles with cookies in them." I suspect these were drawn up by the woman with—and I’m not kidding here—lavender hair.

Curious hair color choices aside, I have had several people question me about the glass jars and their contents. The intended purpose of the bottles expanded after the first few pieces were completed. In all of them you will find at least two bottles—one with wine and one with unleavened bread (or cookies, if you’re so inclined). Since the original intent of the work was that pieces seemingly function as portable devotional altarpieces, the portability needed to account for the lack of an actual altar and the need to contain the Eucharistic elements.

The wine and bread will likely continue to be a part of the format of these works. They suggest an element of interactivity, a participatory aspect for the viewer. Their purpose began to expand in works like the Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Joseph. The bottles in this work hold items such as olive oil, scraps of text cut from book pages, and a broken light bulb. Each is a symbolic reference to this St. Joseph.

Past the objects that are held within the bottles themselves, I needed to consider whether or not the bottles were simply an homage to Cornell or if they expresses some greater, and more personal idea. As containers, sealed containers, they can sometimes seem to prevent the viewer from actually participating in the work. You can see the elements of the Eucharist but you cannot ingest them.

Rather than prevention, the sealed bottles can be viewed as a form of preservation. In the same way that an actual reliquary preserves the objects associated with a particular saint, these bottles preserve objects. They are necessary objects, in a sense. They are somewhat sacramental because they suggest a purpose that is greater than mere symbolism.

Related to the bottles are cordial glasses. While there are not yet any completed pieces that incorporate the glasses, there are several underway. These objects were derived from Cornell works, too. For my pieces, I needed to determine their relevance before placing them. To simply borrow the object would have been irresponsible and rather uncreative.

The glasses can contain objects just as the bottles do. They also appear in broken forms. Their brokenness is sometimes a reference to other forms of brokenness conveyed in the larger piece. It can also represent an openness or a release. Materials in these broken glasses are more available to the viewer than those sealed in the bottles. Yet they are also unprotected and more susceptible to decay.

Of course, none of these ideas may be apparent to the viewer. One thing that is apparent, whether viewers consciously consider it or not, is that glass is transparent. The objects in both glasses and bottles can be seen, they are not hidden. The objects become another layer, like paint and text. Each is an equal participant in the full meaning of the works. Viewers may obtain the meaning when considering the interaction of the layers.

The Art of Self-Disclosure

It wasn’t really that long ago that the proper subject matter for great works of art was somewhat narrowly defined. Tales from religions, mythology, and history were the only subjects deemed worthy of our highest regard. Disruptions in this belief became evident with Realist artists like Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet during the nineteenth century. Within one hundred years it seemed that the entire hierarchical structure had crumbled and that the politics of personal identity had displaced the previous themes.

This is a somewhat dramatic oversimplification, but there have been significant shifts. While there may only be a fraction of contemporary artists producing work that fits the traditionally held formats of history and religious painting, many artists continue to reference these same stories of humanity’s past. The purpose may be to scrutinize long-held beliefs the artist finds to be false, or to align the work with some sub-theme from the past. Likewise, not every contemporary artist utilizes his or her artwork to investigate questions concerning gender, race, or sexuality, or to exorcise some specific personal demon.

One thing that is certain, the realm of the personal and intimate has a prominent position among the various and valid themes in the contemporary discourse. From Tracey Emin’s rumpled bed sheets and womb-like tent installation listing every person she has ever slept with, to the sado-masochistic performances of the now deceased Bob Flanagan, who mixed elements of his cystic fibrosis with his art and sexual practices, the highly personal has become highly public. My question as an artist is where do we draw the line?

I am not saying that these particular artists, and others like them, have crossed some moral boundary that marks their work as something other than, or less than, art. All these categories and many others are certainly fair game for the creation of art. If the work takes us no further than the bathroom humor of a fifth grader then I question its artistic merit. If it has a more transcendent presence, even if the medium used to get us to that place is a difficult one, then it is valid as art. My question is more about my boundaries.

The creation of artwork is, by its very nature, personal. Andy Warhol may have worked to destroy some of that notion, but there were still aesthetic choices made in his "machine-like" works. The Duchampian emphasis on the choice of the artist finds contemporary artists inhabiting a different system than our forebears did. If multiple artists were given the same basic task and tools, the results would still differ in regard to style. Even when we try to hide the evidence of individual style it is bound to show through in some way.

Since text is a major component in much of my work I vacillate between the extremes of how much of it I should reveal. The books I read certainly tell viewers something about me. Is it better to spell out why some specific work has impacted me by making certain passages fully readable? Is it better to obscure the passages under paint so that they are still integral to the work but not a road sign pointing out a particular path?

It isn’t just the text—the physical objects and scenes depicted have personal meaning, too. These are often more highly symbolic for me, but that poses another problem. If I, like Joseph Cornell, am employing everyday objects to form a new personal, symbolic vocabulary, do I not risk being misinterpreted?
All of these possibilities are part of the fabric of contemporary art and its interpretation. It can often be a misinterpretation. While the role of the personal in art production has introduced the personal more fully into interpretation of the same works, the artist has to be somewhat comfortable with the misinterpretations that may result. The savvy artist uses the interpretations of others to assess how well his or her goals are being met and to recognize if there are apparent aspects of the work that he or she didn’t even consciously intend during its creation.

I have always employed a somewhat personalized and symbolic form of figurative imagery. Often, it retained a distinct connection to the historical and religious stories or themes mentioned earlier. As my imagery began to veer into directions that were increasingly personal I had a fear that the work would cease to find a connection with a broad audience. I soon learned that even highly personal themes retain enough of our common human truth to be approached as fully human, and therefore something to which any viewer can relate.

The probability of misunderstanding symbols and texts is great. I connect my pantheon of images and resources in my own specific ways. I associate them with things most viewers commonly would, but also with things almost nobody else would. In the end, my work is not meant as full and perfect communication. It is partial communication and partial self-discovery. I don’t mean this as some form of art therapy. It is more like a pathway, subconsciously directed, from one piece to the next.

Repurposing Refuse

It comes as a surprise to some that my formal art education is actually in painting. Many first discover my work in printmaking and assume that I am primarily a printmaker. Those who have viewed my more recent "paintings" are well aware that the painting portion of those pieces is actually only a small element within a much larger construct.

It wasn’t until I was in the final semester of my graduate work that it dawned on me where my natural artistic interests were. My MFA thesis exhibition was actually comprised of paintings that connected with two works from my undergraduate thesis show. All of these employed fairly typical painting technique and realistic imagery, but they were composed of multiple panels that revealed only partial segments of larger pictorial schemes—with gaps in between the smaller panels.

By then, the painting was pretty much second nature. I always improve and shift my style a bit over time, but painting is not overly complex to me; it is just something I do. Yet from a fairly young age, the one thing with which I had often occupied my time was constructing things. I used cardboard, paper, styrofoam—whatever was on hand and free. Long before everyone had a personal computer at home and we were accustomed to typing PIN numbers into keypads after swiping debit cards, I was constructing three dimensional keypads and ID cards from paper for my cousins. These gave us special access as secret agents, as I recall.

There is something about the physical object that is essential to my artwork. Even with printmaking, the tactile quality of the blocks and plates is a part of my satisfaction. But it is not simply the construction of the objects (i.e. the enclosing structure of an altarpiece) that intrigues me. It is the interaction of images and objects within the works that most interests me.

It is only natural, therefore, that I have such a great appreciation for the work of Joseph Cornell (see previous posting). Even though Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp were the innovators who first placed everyday objects into artworks, Cornell became and remains the master of the technique. The key to the success of his assemblage work is in placing unlikely objects in an environment in which their interactions are not obvious but still seem natural. Cornell is often cited as tapping into the elements of childhood and nostalgia. It is, nonetheless, more complicated than that. His choice and placement of objects and images touches on some collectively recognized and seemingly unnamable qualities.

I had started incorporating assemblage-like objects into my early altarpiece works nearly a decade ago. They had a fairly specific and more obvious function at that time. In each of these you will find small glass bottles and jars that contain bread and wine—the elements of the Eucharist. Since the first series was concerned with personal saints—individuals who have influenced my art and thinking in one way or another—the Eucharistic devices made reference to the "great cloud of witnesses" and our connection to them within the Church universal.

I still use these elements in newer altarpieces, but other objects started to make their way into the works, too. Visually and aesthetically, I liked how the pieces were evolving, but often an artist’s work begins a process of transformation before he or she recognizes why. Furthermore, I was beginning the sketches for a new series of altarpieces, starting with objects I had found at flea markets and antique shops, before I discovered how they were driving the work conceptually.

It was about three years ago, while I was taking the train from Boston to New York, that the implications were exposed. While I do artificially age some objects within the altarpieces, I tend to find older objects that seem to reveal a story. They have an inherent beauty to them, based on their worn and battered state. Beauty is not even the proper term. Sublime is a more passable word for what I am getting at. Artists, however, have conflated the two words, using them interchangeably, and that has caused no end to the confusion that confronts those removed from art world conversations. So, when someone talks about the beautiful qualities of something any reasonable person would find to be truly ugly, realize they really mean the sublime. But back to the train.

For those who do not regularly ride the train I need to set the stage. Lining the tracks there is always an accumulation of debris that is both accidental and intentional. In the same way that you might see a lone shoe or a forlorn recliner in the median of a highway, inadvertently ejected by a passing vehicle, some items make their way to the train’s pathway as a pure mishap. Then there are items that were obviously deliberately discarded. Mattresses, for one. A filthy, ragged, full-sized mattress is not blown by the wind over a twelve foot high retaining fence. And the range of the discarded objects is truly astonishing. Their condition is decrepit, at best, since once they end up on the train side of the fence they might be stuck there for decades.

As these soiled and sullied items briskly passed me by, I was drawn to their "beauty." They each had a story and the odd juxtapositions of equally odd objects was as poetic as the best Cornell shadowbox. Abruptly, without warning, I recognized what my great attraction to the articles was. I wanted to pluck them from their despair and disuse and place them within a new context; elevating their status within an artwork. This garbage was a metaphor for the transforming work of Christ on fallen humanity.

Trash. Refuse. The discarded stuff of the world… It can all be made new. Christ came not just to save humanity from the trash heap, but to transform each person (item) into a new creation. God sees something beautiful in the ugliness. The blotches and bruises are not fully erased because they tell the story of grace. I might not always provide my viewers with all the clues as to why I choose specific objects, but the story of grace and transformation is there for any who wish to see it.