MikeAdamsArtist.com Blog

I think this post will have to mark the end of the Voyages and Vessels Tour 2010, since I am now back in Pocatello. Not to worry, though, as a new expedition will begin shortly. . .

One of my criticisms of Postmodernism is that it tends to refer to one’s interactions with media (either high or low art), and not one’s truly personal, unmediated experiences, such as actually talking to someone in person, or being out in nature. Postmodernism seems to have a smug wittiness as in Johnson’s AT&T Building (“Ha! Look, I’ve put a Chippendale top on a skyscraper!), or a kind of vacant irony, as in Cindy Sherman’s photographs (“Please indulge my self-indulgent malaise.”) As I see it, much of Postmodernism creates an intentional gap between genuine experience and the viewer with a wall of mocking insincerity: “I’ll admit that my work is pretentious, if you, wine-swilling art viewer, will wink in affirmation.”

I don’t actually go around thinking about Postmodernism, but, because I want to use video projections in my thesis exhibition, and I want to allow the viewer to have an experience of his or her own, I’ve been questioning my right, so to speak, of creating something, then expecting the viewer to have a meaningful response, especially since I’m conscious of the ephemerality of my intended work. I’m the first to admit that some of the greatest works of art (oh, let’s drop some big names) such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde are ephemeral. They are meant to be experienced and remembered. They don’t lean against the wall gathering dust. I don’t think the art my exhibition will rival the brilliance of Mr. S or Herr W., but it does represent a shift in my thinking, in that I can create a fleeting, yet important experience. Granted, I will have physical objects, in this case vessel-forms, upon which to project images, yet the objects by themselves are not the work of art without the video projected upon them. Oh. I’ll have sound, too. Maybe the video projections represent experiences, or the mind itself, and the vessels represent our own bodies, or the physical world in which we have experiences?

Here are some of my test-boats.

The silver boat I made to see how the reflections would look when a projector is aimed at the boat. I used a slide projector, and it worked just fine, although the image that shows up on the wall is very distorted, yet pleasantly watery. The silver material is Mira-Plastic or some such thing, a kind of metalized Mylar, which I attached with spray adhesive to poster-board. A full scale version would have the plastic on top of Masonite or thin plywood. Under normal studio conditions it’s going to be hard to maintain the “clean room” conditions that would be necessary for a perfect mirror finish, but I can’t get fixated on that. . .

The gold boat is made out of metallic-gold poster-board. I don’t think I’ll coat it with the plastic because it’s a bit too intricate, and I think I’ll scale it up before attempting to do so. This vessel-form is an homage to the Hjortsprings boat, which I’ve written about in a couple of posts below. My version here has an absurdly forked stem and stern, but I like the shape.

The pointy ends of the gold boat remind me of images of ancient Egyptian boats, like from this petroglyph at the National Gallery in Copenhagen (shown in the above image gallery). This would have been a reed boat, not wood like the Hjorsprings boat.

[You can click on an image, let it load, then click again to get an even larger version. The images are cropped in these thumbnails, but not in the other versions.]

It’s hot here in the ‘burbs north of Seattle. Perhaps that’s why I can’t form any coherent thoughts. . .I thought I’d try writing some notes (or even an outline!) of my thesis statement for my graduate exhibition, yet I’m befuddled. . .I suppose that’s the great thing about being a visual artist: one’s ideas don’t need to be expressed in words, except in artificial constructions like artist’s statements and so forth. Some artists are good at saying plenty of nothing. I guess I should be glad that when I talk about my work I end up staring off into space. I take that to mean that there are no words to express the ideas that I’m working on. . .On the other hand, intellectualizing the process of art-making in grad school has been beneficial. I haven’t found that thinking about the meaning of my work, or of art in general, has had any negative effect on my studio work. The creative process, otherwise known as having-fun-in-the-studio, is separate from an intellectual process because it is not based on reason. . .

What I have come up with is this: Object and Experience, which I discussed in a post dated August 4th, 2010. Now I’m at something of a dead-end (at least thought-wise), and it will take some time in the studio making something to make progress. As I see it, it will take time for the intellect to catch up with creativity.

So. . .I’m thinking. . .or trying to think, in my jet-lagged stupor, about how to work through some ideas I have about using video projections with sculpture. Seemingly suddenly in Oslo I had the inspiration to incorporate video projections in my sculpture. One of the inspirations was meeting Zambian sculptor Victor Mutelekesha who uses video in his work. Victor is in the process of moving into a new studio, so we could only discuss his use of video. I did see some of his static pieces, and feel that we have a similar sensibility. I don’t want the sculptural element of a potential sculpture-with-video to be an afterthought, as I believe it tends to be in video installations wherein the sculpture is merely something to enclose or hold up video monitors. Plus, I hate TV, so that colors my opinion of anything that looks like a TV. (Remember that I have jet lag, and I am extra ornery today). Upon hearing some of Victor’s ideas about what video art could be, and his agreement that video art didn’t need to have a narrative, thoughts began to swirl inside my noggin. . .

Victor and I first met in late June, but it took me a few weeks to come to the realization that I could record some video with my little camera in Oslo. I began with water images in Oslo, taken from the bow of the boat as went from downtown to Bøgdøy, where the various ship museums are. The short trip, a little voyage, across the harbor, that I took many times, serves as metaphor for the long passages of the ancient Vikings. What I have in mind is to point the projector at a hull-form that has a reflective surface (aluminum? Plexiglas?), and this will in turn project the image on the walls of the gallery. The viewer will in most instances cast a shadow on the wall, but I think that “negative” space will be filled in with a dimmer image from the other projector. In this way, the viewer will become part of the piece, and the whole piece (do I need to call it an installation?) will never be exactly the same; it will be like a stage performance which will at least vary slightly each time. I took some video from the bus on the Icelandic highlands, and also on the plane from Norway to Iceland, and this could represent that voyage that was so significant during the Viking era. However, before I took the aforementioned plane-and-bus-videos, but after the Oslo harbor videos, I had the idea of recording images of grain fields near me in Idaho. (This will have to wait since I’m in Seattle at the moment.) Grain fields in the wind look like a body of water, and this linking of land and sea might be very interesting. The Vikings, after all, were interested in settling Iceland, not pillaging, for there was virtually nothing there; the bold seafarer became a farmer.

I’m interested in your comments, especially since this project is in a preliminary phase. I need ideas!

More later! Too tired. Can’t think!

I went to the Vigeland Museum this morning. What an awesome place. There are plaster “working copies’ of the sculptures that were eventually completed in granite in the park next door. Here’s the link to the set of photos that I took.
I think what is amazing is the sensuality that comes through in his work. He was a younger contemporary of Rodin, but where Rodin emphasized eroticism, Vigeland suppressed it. Vigeland’s work is angrier, and can be a bit creepy.

I was just making this papirskulptur (as we say in norsk), and realized that a rather ambiguous form starts looking like a boat just by tapering the ends. “That’s obvious!” you say, and it is! But I was also thinking how a series of events become “a story” with the addition of a beginning and an end. Overlaying a framework appears to have a profound effect. Or is it that a beginning and an end – a bow and a stern – cause our minds to create something coherent? Does a vessel then become a kind of narrative? Or is it just an object?
Hmm. Anyway, here is the Loop from an earlier post, chopped-up and reassembled. What was a ring now has a beginning and an end. Ring to boat. Start and stop.

I can admit that sometimes work looks better in photographs than in person. I think this is one of those cases. Perhaps this can be analyzed in some constructive way, though, as in “does it look better in the photo because the photo unifies the elements in the piece, or homogenizes the texture?” Wait, that doesn’t sound like a rhetorical question does it? Okay, go back. I’ve answered my question with my question.
I wanted to take an interim photograph of this piece because I’ll now cut it up and reassemble it. I was sure this loop would look good, but it doesn’t (in person). Perhaps it looks bad only in Oslo?
What I think would be really interesting is to have a very large version of this piece, made out of plywood, and perhaps tilted so that one could walk underneath one side of it, and stand inside of the halo. (What just sprung to mind as I typed “halo” is that the Summer sun at a very northerly latitude like this one traverses sky, tracing a kind of invisible halo. I thought I was putting boat hulls together, and yet I seem to have created something else. . .

Okay, I figured it out! If you click on an image, let the medium sized one load up, then click again, you can see a big one! Neat!

Perhaps it is because I have been out of the studio for two months; perhaps it is because I have seen ships here in Scandinavia that are of a historical and cultural importance that goes beyond their physical existence; whatever the reason, I am seeing the object differently. I was sitting on the deck of the Fram a couple of days ago. I had done a sketch inside, but as I sat on deck, I decided not to do any drawings. It was enough to commune with the ship; to feel it through my feet. How could this experience be conveyed in a drawing? I think the word experience is the clincher. I don’t want my sculptures to be a document solely of my own experience, but as a way for the viewer to have new experiences.
When Philip Glass’ Satyagraha was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I heard a radio interview in which (an orchestra member, I believe) asked Glass how a particular passage should be played, and Glass responded that the work was no longer his, it was now the orchestra’s. He had turned it over to those willing to create new experiences. He had given it away.

I hate to have a post without a picture, so I’m adding this photo of the inside of the Fram. It was heavily built, and braced, to withstand the crushing force of sea-ice. This is the deck below the officers’ (and crew’s?) deck, more-or-less in the cargo hold. It’s quite an experience being inside, but does that stem only from knowing that the ship was involved in amazing adventures, or is it also something else? I suppose it’s the known and the “unfathomable” that is so fulfilling. I believe that one can understand an object like the Fram without knowing much about it. I felt that upon first seeing it – being in it – that it exuded a sense of adventure, as if it were ready to go on one again.

and the bartender says, ‘What’ll you fellas have?’
Jesus and Hegel answer in unison: ‘I will have a dry Martini by not having it; I will not have a dry Martini by having it.’
The bartender, assumes, of course, that the two are graduate students, and brings them each a dry Martini, for which they are grateful. Hegel gives Jesus his olive, but keeps his plastic sword.

My light Summer reading is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I don’t understand some of it, but it is quite interesting, and has so far been worth plodding through while sitting on Norwegian trains and Scandinavian planes, because of the kernels of insight that pop off the page. What interests me particularly is that Hegel writes of the dialectical relationship of the subject and object. Understanding the relationship of the subject and object is of great importance in art, i.e., the viewer or the artist’s relationship with the object that is the work of art. Hegel describes a kind of master-and-slave relationship of the subject and object; yet this relationship has a sort of mirror image, where the slave is the master, and the master is the slave. I believe Hegel’s point is that something can be understood only by also understanding its opposite. To be alive and to be conscious only have meaning when contrasted with what they are not.
Where does Jesus come into this tale? It is because Sunday, at St. Edmund’s Anglican Church here in Oslo the Gospel reading was from the Book of Matthew, chapter 20, verses 20-28. My ears pricked up when I heard “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave,” since I had just read similar sentiments by Hegel. You must be one thing to be the other. This is a real mind-bender. Hegel would not have written what he did, unaware of this Bible passage. I would imagine that he was actually influenced by Jesus’ words. Jesus was talking about humility, Hegel more about what he would call “self-consciousness,” but in the end, it comes down to understanding.

I went to the Botanical Garden and the the Geological Museum here in Oslo yesterday. I went without any preconceptions, or rather, without any intention of finding anything. However, I was struck by the clusters of crystals and of seeds that I saw. The calcite, particularly, reminded me of one of Nancy Rubins’ boat-cluster sculptures. It’s ironic that the seeds of grain look so orderly, almost inorganic, in spite of being alive, while the calcite seems to be bursting forth.
When I got back to my room, I used some index cards to make a little sculpture. I think it ends up being a cross between calcite and barley: an interesting hybrid.