Well, the assessments are over and eventually we will discover what our grades are for the past semester. Next semester we concentrate solely on our Degree Show or whatever option we choose to take to qualify for our degrees. Aside from the obvious choice of a degree show, we also have the opportunity to write a thesis, something I expect many of the Theory students will do, or to stage an event, which could be anything form curating a show to some variety of performance art. I plan to go the Degree Show route, which seems the best fit for me. This will not only mean coordinating my own self to display my work, but will also include working with the others in my class to organise the entire show, from layout to construction to advertising to programs to maps and so on. But, for the moment, we have a break so I will not let that worry me yet.
In the meantime since my last post, I have made more progress on my sculpture and my Material Cultures lecture group has published a collection of essays entitled, Unruly Objects. This is will eventually be available on the ECA website somewhere, but in the meantime you can read it here. Feel free to download it to read at your leisure…nothing like a little artwriting to pile on the holiday cheer!
I have also been spending some time working on my sculpture, which is looking less like a block of wood and more like a man. Last week, Douglas, the woodworking technician, was able to use the chainsaw on it for me and take off some of the excess timber. Since then, I have been using an ArborTech woodcarving blade on an angle grinder to take off more of the excess, before I actually start working with hand tools.
As you can see in the photos below, I have blocked out the legs,the chest and stomach, and a bit of the head and arms on the front and a bit less on the back. When I get back from break, I can finish the blocking out and get on with the hand tooling.
This will be my final post of 2013, since I am going to visit family for the holidays. Warm wishes for all my friends, family and other readers. Happy holidays and have a joyous and safe New Year. I will see you all again in 2014!
With assessments coming next week and the end of the semester the week following, I thought I would post a little about what I’ve been up to. Oddly, after working all semester, I feel like I don’t have much to show for it, but I think that is mainly because I don’t have many completed pieces. I have been doing a lot of preparatory work and experimentation this semester which will (hopefully) come to fruition in my degree show next semester.
The Mead of Poetry
As mentioned previously in my blog, my maternal great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Norway. I have been interested in Norway for some time, fascinated with the traditional design elements which spread, blended, influenced and were influenced by the Celtic styles. This past summer, I spent a little time in Oslo, visiting museums and familiarising myself with the culture (blog posts here and here). From this trip, I brought home a number of books of Norse myths and folktales.
Amongst these stories, I found one that left me with a compelling image which could be interpreted in any number of ways, gets still be true to the source. In brief, the story of the Mead of Poetry begins like this:
At the conclusion of the Aesir-Vanir War, the Aesir and Vanir gods and goddesses sealed their truce by spitting into a great vat. From their spittle they formed a man whom they named Kvasir (“Fermented Juice”[1]). Kvasir was the wisest human that had ever lived; none were able to present him with a question for which he didn’t have a satisfying answer. He became famous and traveled throughout the world giving counsel.
Kvasir was invited to the home of two dwarves, Fjalar (“Deceiver”[2]) and Galar (“Screamer”[3]). Upon his arrival, the dwarves slew Kvasir and brewed mead with his blood. This mead contained Kvasir’s ability to dispense wisdom, and was appropriately named Óðrœrir (“Stirrer of Inspiration”). Any who drank of it would become a poet or a scholar.
When the gods questioned them about Kvasir’s disappearance, Fjalar and Galar told them that Kvasir had choked on his wisdom.
Now granted, I am extrapolating on things a bit here, but I envision the murder of Kvasir to be a ritualistic and gruesome act, much like the slaughter of an animal. I picture Kvasir bound and strung up by his feet, inverted and ready for his blood to be drained, in preparation for the brewing of the mead.
To this end, I am working on a wooden sculpture of a man, which will ideally hang inverted from the ceiling of my studio. Work so far has involved getting a 6ft block of limewood to carve, and the basic roughing out of the form. I anticipate working first with power tools (an ArborTech Wood Carver) to working with traditional chisels and gouges once the rough shape is completed.
When finished, I hope to hang the figure by the ankles from the ceiling of my studio. This will, of course, depend on a number of issues, not the least of which is Health and Safety. If the piece is not too heavy (the block began life at approx. 200 kilos) and a beam can be found to support it, and I can get the appropriate assistance from the technicians, then it will hang, approximately 3 feet off the ground in the centre of my studio space for the degree show. If this plan fails, then I will need to build a scaffold of some sort and hang it from that, within my studio, probably much lower.
The sculpture of Kvasir as he is today.
Monoprinting
This semester, I also joined the Print Portfolio project, which was originally to be a group of us who would each provide an edition of prints (probably one per person, with an edition of 20-30) to be collected into a boxed set and (hopefully) sold and displayed. We would each get a set of prints for ourselves, to eventually be sold for a fortune when we all make it big. Unfortunately, the parameters of the project have recently changed and I’m not certain what the status is.
Anyway, in addition to the print portfolio, I wanted to utilise the prints in my degree show, as a sort of adjunct to the hanging body of Kvasir. I have toyed with the idea of creating illustrative, narrative prints which will tell the story, as well as simply some more abstracted images which might explore the idea of the Mead of Poetry, which I am thinking of as being similar to a mind-expanding drug.
So I began experimenting with Mono-printing. a method of creating essentially one-off prints. There are several different methods and I tried a few before settling on one which works and gives me the effects I want. What I do is essentially finger paint on glass with limo-ink, then lay the paper on the glass and run a roller over it lightly. This method gives me the possibility for 3 to 4 prints, each of which are significantly different.
I am also experimenting with images in the computer. The idea is that if I get an image I like, either mono-printed or in the computer, I can try (another experiment) using the CNC Router to create a woodcut of it and print multiple images from that. This method would be similar to the one I used in my piece for the Project Space, the Contemporary Stave Church Portal.
For my degree show, I am considering having prints hanging on the walls, but I am also considering printing on the floor of the space, perhaps in a spiral around the hanging figure. Either way, I would like to utilise mono-printing as the starting point for these images.
An example of four different images from the same print. Each time the paper is removed, the image is altered.
Assessment
The physical pieces I have for assessment at the end of the first semester seem scant to me. I have my Portal, which leads into my studio space. I have a rough hewn block of wood which seems to have taken me most of the semester to acquire — locating sawmills and tree surgeons who deal in pieces that size; finding one who had one that was in a wood that I wanted to work in; and finally rationalising the cost and getting it delivered— took me nearly two months. The last thing I have are the mono prints. These currently number around 100, but there are probably only 20 that i consider successful and maybe 10 that I want to show. Very few of these are on archival paper, since I considered this both an experimental and a learning process. Newsprint is cheap and plentiful, so although I tried a few different paper types, the bulk of these prints are on newsprint.
I feel like what I am putting on display are simply stepping stones to my degree show, which hopefully is what the tutors see them as. Although there is a lack of truly finished work, I think the pieces speak to the path I am currently taking.
This past Monday Emma and I had our Project Space in C02, which we entitled “En•trance”. Coincidentally, Emma was also offered a opportunity to teach in Barnsley this week, so in order to allow her to accept it, we shuffled things about a bit, schedule wise.
The concept we came up with in one of our early chats on this project was “doors or portals”. We decided that we would not collaborate on a single piece but would rather each respond to the theme in our own way. We both work strongly with narrative and we hoped that this would tie the whole show together. There was always the risk that we would each create something that had no reason to be in the same room as the other’s piece, but we kept abreast of each others progress and in the end it all seems to have worked out.
My concept went through several phases before I came up with a final plan. I had been wanting to do something that hearkened back to my Norwegian heritage ever since I visited Oslo this past summer. I considered painting or drawing on door panels, telling a tale from Norse Myth, but decided to save that for another time. I began thinking of things I had seen while in Norway and it suddenly came to me.
Scandinavian countries like Norway have a tradition of building stave churches. These early church structures were made entirely of wood and constructed in the same manner that they use in boat building. They began to fall out of favour in the Middle Ages and came to be considered obsolete in some countries as newer construction methods became popular.
When I was in Oslo, at the Museum of Cultural History, they have several portals from vanished stave churches. I got to thinking about them and how their removal had completely changed their meaning.
The portals of a stave church are weighted with symbolism. They represent the threshold, the barrier between the real world and the spiritual world. These doorways are introductions to the space within and the carvings on the door posts speak in a language that was culturally understood. They prepared the faithful for their transformation from secular to sacred and helped to impart the message of the church.
By removing these portals from their churches and placing them against a white wall in a museum, the symbolism changes dramatically. The functionality of the portal is completely negated since you can no longer pass through it. Their purpose as sacred art is also altered, becoming simply secular objects of art. The love, devotion and care that went into their creation is still apparent, but the reason for it becomes obscured.
Many of these doors took imagery from Norse myth, perhaps to promote an association between the Christian faith and the old gods, during a period of transition. A popular theme is the tree of life, something the Norse might easily interpret as Yggdrasil, the world tree.
So I decided that I wanted to construct a stave church portal, but also to highlight these conflicts that I saw with their transformation from sacred to secular art. I decided that I would create a tree of life design based on Yggdrasil as the foundation of my portal. I decided to use the CNC Milling Machine, a computer controlled router, to do the carving for me, so I chose to simplify my design since I was not certain of the limits of the machine. Both for monetary and for aesthetic reasons I decided to use blue foam, a form of polystyrene insulation, as the material to be milled.
The first step was to create the design, which I did by hand in pen and ink. This was then scanned into Photoshop, preparatory to taking it into the 3d software. Since I am not that familiar with using 3d software, I chose to use a method that works fine for relief items but not for in the round sculpture, converting a greyscale image to a heightfield.
Simply, the process is thus: in Photoshop or similar software, you create your image, keeping in mind that it will be converted to 3d based on the values of grey in the image. White will be the highest point and black the lowest. If your piece of polystyrene is 50mm thick, like mine, then a 50% grey will be 25mm deep; 10% grey is 5mm, a 30% grey is 15mm and so on.
Once the greyscale image was complete, I cut it up into portions based on the size the CNC router could handle, each one approximately 1100mm x 350mm. These I saved as TIF files which I loaded into Rhinoceros, the 3D software I was using, and used the Heightfield from Image command. After some trial and error and minor manipulation, I had the STL files I needed to input into the CNC controller.
I considered painting the surface to resemble wood, but opted to go with the bare polystyrene in order to emphasise the distance from the original portals. After assembling the pieces together and reinforcing the seams, I constructed a wooden prop to allow it to safely stand up. This would allow me to place the portal into the room rather than up against a wall, allowing people to travel through and around it, seeing both the facade and the reality of the backside.
All the construction was done in C02, prior to our show opening on Monday. I spent most of Thursday assembling it and on Saturday, Emma and I spent some time deciding on the best location to stand it, so it would create a nice counterpoint to both her door and the main door to the room.
So, with both pieces installed, we had the opening on Monday, which was fairly well attended, and then the critique in the afternoon. Unfortunately, I have been getting over a cold and was not feeling up to par, so I have difficulty recalling exactly what was said during the crit. From my notes, it seems that most people got the idea that it was a portal into a fantasy realm, but that the material and support structure in back detracted from that, so that rather than passing through and being uplifted, they were let down. This is not far off from what I intended, so I’m calling that a positive comment. Though I did not expect the connection to be made with Norwegian stave churches, I was hoping that I would have the opportunity to explain it.
Unfortunately, we were trying a new crit format this week. Normally, the group makes comments one after another, and the artist says nothing until the end, when they can comment on their own work. This time the format was changed to one where each person in the group made their comment and then asked a question. The artist then responds only to the question asked and the next person comments and questions, etc. At the end, it was simply over without the artist being able to comment upon their work.
I feel that this format didn’t work well for me, for two reasons. First was the fact that I was not able to explain the origins of my work, which I think might have clarified some of the decisions I made; and second, I felt like I was not getting a “pure” response from the people further in the group. By hearing the questions and answers earlier, they had the opportunity to change their view of the work based on what was said. It seemed to make the latter comments a little less like gut reactions and more homogenised.
If I had this piece to do again, I think there is very little I would change. Now that I know more about the CNC router, I might approach that differently, maybe making the design more complex and cleaning it up a bit more. I might try to make the design more Norse and less Celtic looking, but the roots of the imagery are similar and their art was severely cross-pollenated, so that could be a losing battle. Overall I think I would create the same basic piece.
As I mentioned previously, when I visited the Biennale I saw tonnes of art. Here is another sampling, presented in all their uncaptioned and unprocessed glory, of the many photos I took while there. The artists’ names will go unmentioned simply because to label each one would take far more time than I can allocate for this post. If you are interested in a piece, I can probably supply more information, so contact me or leave a comment.
This past week I spent with classmates in Venice for the Biennale. In order to try and organise my thoughts, I will divide this post up into three sections, the first of which will be my thoughts about the trip in general and Venice, the city, in particular; next I will concentrate on the Biennale and finally on some of the works which I viewed and enjoyed.
VENEZIA
I awoke at 4.00 AM in order to make final preparations and to consume enough coffee to get to the bus stop and catch the 35 to the Airport at 4.45. I had packed the night before, so was able to simply take care of my morning ablutions, dress, and imbibe caffeine with a few minutes to spare. The trip through the airport was smooth and uneventful and I had made it into the plane with the rest of the MFAs on the trip. We settled in and flew away.
We arrived at Marco Polo Airport where we caught the bus to Venice. Being an island, Venice does not have room for an airport, so there are two nearby, Marco Polo and Treviso. The bus dropped us at the train/bus station, Venezia Santa Lucia, in the middle of the western edge of Venice. From here we divided because our lodgings were in different locations; one group in a flat called Academia II, another to one called Castello and a third in the Santa Margherita Guesthouse. My group, Jake, Tim, Tam, Emma and me, were headed for the Academia II which ended up being on the Calle Dei Tedeschi. We walked in a slow semi-circle south and east, crossing canals and wending our way through the narrow alleyways of Venice until we arrived at the dock near our flat. Here we met our key bearer who showed us who to get to the flat itself and inside. The flat itself was smaller than I was expecting and smelled of mould, but was serviceable. We had our own kitchen and bath and although it was cozy, we were able to sleep five without any complaints.
We spent our first day settling in and wandering about. I did a bit of exploring on my own, with my camera, and managed to get some interesting shots of Venice. Venice is a city that seems suspended in a state of glamorous decay. Nothing appears new, but so much is breathtakingly beautiful. There are no cars and I saw only one bicycle while I was there. The canals provide a transportation network on the water – water taxis, gondolas and barges – that allows for an alternative to walking. Most people walk because that’s the most practical way of getting around. The bridges over the canals are stairs rather than ramps, and the spaces between buildings which make up the streets would get termed as alleys in another city. Many of the streets are only wide enough to walk two abreast, while others you could drive a care down if you could get it there. Every neighbourhood seems to have a piazza or two and every piazza has a well. These wells connect to a cistern where rainwater is collected and stored, and though they do not seem to be used at all today, they were once the main source of fresh water in Venice.
LA BIENNALE
Each evening we would meet up as a group (all 13 of us) and get dinner and/or drinks, but during the day, we tended to stay in our housing groups or split up while we were at the Biennale, meeting for lunch or other prearranged times. The Biennale was open until 6pm, with two main sites, the Arsenale and the Giardini. The Gardens were created during Napoleonic times and in 1894 the main pavilion was built. The Biennale webpage explains that the national pavilions were added later.
The pavilions were built over the years, in the following chronological order (name of the architect in brackets): 1907 Belgium (Léon Sneyens); 1909 Hungary (Géza Rintel Maróti); 1909 Germany (Daniele Donghi), demolished and rebuilt in 1938 (Ernst Haiger); 1909 Great Britain (Edwin Alfred Rickards); 1912 France (Umberto Bellotto); 1912 Netherlands (Gustav Ferdinand Boberg), demolished and rebuilt in 1953 (Gerrit Thomas Rietveld); 1914 Russia (Aleksej V. Scusev); 1922 Spain (Javier De Luque) façade renovated in 1952 by Joaquin Vaquero Palacios; 1926 Czech Republic and Slovak Republic (Otakar Novotny); 1930 United States of America (Chester Holmes Aldrich and William Adams Delano); 1932 Denmark (Carl Brummer) enlarged in 1958 by Peter Koch; 1932 Padiglione Venezia (Brenno Del Giudice), enlarged in 1938; 1934 Austria (Josef Hoffmann); 1934 Greece (M. Papandréou – B. Del Giudice); 1952 Israel (Zeev Rechter); 1952 Switzerland (Bruno Giacometti); 1954Venezuela (Carlo Scarpa); 1956 Japan (Takamasa Yoshizaka); 1956 Finland (Alvar Aalto Pavilion); 1958 Canada (Gruppo BBPR, Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers); 1960 Uruguay; 1962 Nordic Countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland (Sverre Fehn); 1964 Brazil (Amerigo Marchesin); 1987 Australia (Philip Cox); 1995 Korea (Seok Chul Kim and Franco Mancuso).
Each pavilion is a marvel in and of itself. The architecture varies from Neo-classical to more contemporary forms, but they all seem to fit well into the setting. The Main pavilion was used to house the Encyclopaedic Palace, a show based on a concept by Marino Auriti who designed a museum to house all the world’s knowledge together in one place. Although the majority of artists represented are still living, the show does seem to collect a wide variety of pieces and styles from the past century.
Thetitle chosen by curator Massimiliano Gioni for the 55th International Art Exhibition is Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace. Massimiliano Gioniintroduced the choice of theme evoking the Italo-American self-taught artist Marino Auriti who “on November 16, 1955 filed a design with the US Patent office depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), an imaginary museum that was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite. Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried – often in vain – to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.”
The National Pavilions are just that. Each one houses an artist or artists that represent that nation. For me, the National Pavilions worked better than the Palace, since you were rarely bombarded by more than a handful of ideas at a time and you had the chance to digest what you had seem while you walked from one pavilion to the next. The Palace was like a never-ending art gallery with hundreds or possibly thousands of different artists, themes, styles, concepts and ideas constantly vying for attention. Although I saw a lot of wonderful artworks in there, without my camera I would have forgotten so many simply because of the sheer, overwhelming spectacle of it all.
The Arsenale is located in another area of Venice, and housed even more art. As the world has grown smaller, more and more nations want to exhibit at the Biennale and there is simply not enough room at the Giardini. The Arsenale is a complex of buildings which were used for manufacturing, ship=building. storage and so forth. The first buildings were built in the 13th century with others being added over the centuries after.
The Arsenale is the largest pre-industrial production centre of the world. Its surface occupied forty-six hectars, and it would host up to 2000 workers a day in full swing. It is an important place for Venice, not only because the Serenissima fleet was built there, but also because these shipyards, depots and workshops were the symbol of the military, economical and political power Venice had back in time.
Although it was not completely filled, the majority of buildings housed either national or groups of artists. Because of the size of the spaces, few of them were filled completely which made the pieces easier to digest before going on to the next.
SOME OF MY FAVOURITES
Over the two days exploring the Biennale I saw a lot of great art and though some of it was overwhelming in scope, I definitely did come away with some I liked and some I remembered.
Pawel Althamer, Venetians. The unconventional use of materials in these sculptures really intrigued me. Althamer had life masks made from volunteers here in Venice, then attached them to metal armatures in various positions. These were draped with different types of thermo-plastics which were shaped and melted on the body to suggest muscle, ligament, tendon and skin, as well as clothing and hats. They remind me in some ways of Gunther van Hagen’s plastinated figures.
Shary Boyle, Music for Silence. This piece interested me in a number of ways. I found myself fascinated by the way that lighting can transform a piece. To me, the way she used lighting on the main piece transformed it into three separate pieces. The piece as a porcelain sculpture, in white with lighting that described its shape was interesting to me as a sculpture. The shadowed piece appeared to be formed of separate two dimensional pieces, like a collage, while the piece with the projected colour images on it became a nearly solid two dimensional piece. Her other sculptures on display were interesting, but didn’t affect me as much.
Yiqing Yin, In Between. Something about this spoke to me and I am not sure I can articulate it yet. This piece was in the Padiglione Venezia, a pavilion dedicated to textile works, along with other textile artists. The sketchy quality of the figure, the ethereal way the fabric move in the breeze, the excess thread which collected below and anchored the figure to the ground all seem to contribute to an otherworldly quality that appealed to me.
Patrick Van Caekenbergh, Drawings of Old Trees. As a naturalist artist, I really liked the devotion to detail of form and texture that are conveyed in these pieces.
R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis Illustrated. I was surprised and pleased to find R. Crumb represented at the Biennale. In the past, I have known fine art aficionados to dismiss his work as purely illustrative, after all, he’s only a comic book artist!But he is also a creative genius and, like Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, has given the U.S. many iconic images from Mr. Natural to Fritz the Cat and the Keep on Truckin’ slogan of the 1970’s. It seems only fitting that his 207 page black and white illustrated Story of Genesis be represented here. Each panel reflecting the biblical text in a way that has not been seen previously.
In addition to R. Crumb, there were a number of other American artists included in the Encyclopaedic Palace– Richard Serra, Robert Nagel, John DeAndrea, Charles Ray, Duane Hanson, Paul McCarthy, Eliot Porter, among many others. I find that my US-centric education has made them more familiar to me than their non-American counterparts, and although I am trying desperately to catch up, it is always reassuring to know that those artists that I studied in school and recognise are also recognised in a global context.
Other pieces I saw, felt compelled to photograph, and liked enough to include are:
On this trip, I took 538 photos, the majority of them at the Biennale. I will try to post some more of them later, possibly without comment. I think this post has gone on long enough as it is and I need to do something other than blog this weekend.
Below are some videos from the Biennale’s YouTube channel which go into greater detail about some of the pieces.
Pawel Althamer, Venetians
CANADA: Shary Boyle, Music for Silence
GREAT BRITAIN: Jeremy Deller, English Magic
FINLAND: Antti Laitinen, Falling Trees
BELGIUM: Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kreupelhout – Cripplewood
On 15 October, Leave the Capitol: An Exploration of Contemporary Identity by the Masters Programme, Edinburgh College of Art, opened at the Fleming Collection in London. One of my pieces was selected to be in the show, so I took the train from Edinburgh to London and spent the better part of the week in London. My parents also chose to come to the opening, and flew from Arizona to London for a visit.
The opening went quite well as far as I could tell. There were a number of new faces as well as many that I already knew. Most of the Masters who were in the show attended, although some were unable to either because they were out of the country having already graduated or because they were unable to afford the trip in the middle of the semester. I was very pleased with the way the show had been curated and especially how my piece was displayed.