Sugar Rats Disco · The Transfigured Pedestrian · Dada Contrivance
Printmakers tend to be inventors, always tinkering with techniques. I think of my studio as a laboratory and design my art projects like experiments. My experiments for Sugar Rats Disco investigate the border between representation and the physical presence of objects. An assemblage is created when wet screen-printed ink is dusted with a powdery material. This flocking technique creates bas relief-prints.
Andy Warhol questioned the taste of high/low culture. I appreciate his innovative, anti-art, use of aluminum foil, silver Mylar and “diamond dust.” These sparkling eye-candy prints were inspired by the glitzy kitsch of urban taste (nocturnal fountains, sugar donuts, Waikiki, Warhol).
Some prints were produced in collaboration with urban wildlife. Rats manipulate these images as they devour/deconstruct some of the printed layers (like helper elves who visit in the night). This interaction with repulsive rodents continues a favorite theme of transfiguration, or the elevation of everyday nuisance to the sanctity of high art.
I was recently asked to change the title/description I submitted to make the labels of a recent exhibit. The precise language of science is poetic. Frank art/language describes empirical reality while also generating an emotional response. That’s why it is important to describe The Trojan Horse as a screen-print flocked with rat poison. “2[P-CHLOROPHENYL) PHENYLACTYL]-1,3-INDANDIONE” does not have the same emotional response as “poison.” Substituting “bone dust” for “cremains of Maile” denies the inclusion of a literal essence of the dead dog Maile. Marcel Duchamp was asked to rename his painting “Nude descending a Staircase #2.” Duchamp believed a compromise in language would undermine the concepts of his art. He refused to change the title and took his painting home. I choose to exhibit my work with the censored text. I hope the work can speak for itself.
Transfiguration 1a: a change in form or appearance: METAMORPHOSIS b: an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change.
Pedestrian 1: a person who goes or travels on foot… 4…commonplace; prosaic.
Natural history museums epitomize kitsch and collecting. I am fascinated with taxidermy in dioramas, biological specimens preserved in jars of formaldehyde, tribal artifacts, and insects on pins carefully identified and arranged. Celeste Olalquiaga said “Kitsch is nothing if not a suspended memory whose elusiveness is made ever more keen by its extreme iconicity.” I strive to create extremely keen icons.
My art is informed by the anti-artist’s taste for humor and chance. Duchamp made a plaster cast reproduction of his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek. This literal presentation is emulated in the iconic selections of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. I often use this strategy to create ironic realism.
Striving never to repeat myself, I create primary objects through mechanical reproduction.
Jimmie Durham describes the post-modern aesthetic as romantically representational and naively sophisticated, using cleanliness, purity and simplicity as signs of sophistication. I often use this aesthetic of purity, or mock-Modernism, to elevate (or recontextualize) the mundane to the sanctity of high art.
Man Ray’s Dadaist strategy was to make useful objects unusable (Gift, 1921). In relation to Modernism, this is a type of subversive destruction (that is creation). With an opposing constructive goal, I hope to transform the disdained and the ordinary into the desirable. As learning to draw changed my perception of the world, this art making approach changed my conception of the world. This philosophical theory, I describe as transfiguration, elevates the quality of my life.
I create symbolic collage preoccupied with natural history.
I strive to make art that is informed by the principles of Modernism, but at the same time undermines the necessity for uniqueness or distinguishing style. My work involves continual invention of technique to create a style less art for an age of mechanical reproduction. “Styles die only kitsch survives.”
Before Duchamp adopted the term “Readymade” it referred to clothing that was not sewn together at home. Therefore, I make Homemades, art objects easily replicated from readily available household materials and tools. I prefer not to make my work in an art studio so as not to separate how and where I live from how and where I make art.
Duchamp’s Ready-mades demonstrated how a shift of context is all that is necessary for ordinary objects to become meaningful. Duchamp was careful never to call his Ready-mades art and they are often considered to be icons of the anti-art movement. Duchamp tore down the structure of Modernism. When the dust settled, and was glued in place, we were shown that art is everywhere, in everything and of every state of mind.
I see the dust of Duchamp’s Large Glass as an example of a pandemic approach and a symbol of patience and waiting for epiphany.
Jimmie Durham describes the post-modern aesthetic as romantically representational and naively sophisticated, using cleanliness, purity and simplicity as signs of sophistication. I’ve adopted this aesthetic to shift the context of filth (dog hair, muddy paw prints, spoiled food in my refrigerator,) pests (millers, lice, fleas, ticks, spiders, mice, yellow jackets, junk mail) or mundane nuisance (picking stickers from my socks) into objects of meaning. This concept elevates the quality of my life.
Manray made useful objects unuseful (Gift), a type of deconstruction. “Destruction is creation,” but I think of my elevations/transformations as reconstructions of the unuseful into the useful in the spirit of Suprematism's constructive optimism. I use an apparent investment of labor as a strategy for reconstruction/elevation.
Duchamp made a plaster cast reproduction of his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek. This literal presentation, a concept without illusion, is emulated in the work of Jasper Johns and Warhol. I also use this strategy of ironic realism.
The lidded jars function like the glass contained environment of aquaria or the glass in a picture frame. In my mind the glass is ignored (until it shatters) but not the shape of the contents. Now, as in my boyhood, the inside of a jar is the arena of contained experiment
I make art with tweezers, surgical gloves, drumsticks and an interaction with dogs and spiders. This is very much like “a chance encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissection table.” From an early age until I left home my mother gave me my own shelf in the freezer. I could put anything I wanted on my shelf. I still store significant perishable artifacts in my freezer.
What follows is a compilation of anecdotes that may function as a gallery guide for my artwork on view in the 2002 Faculty Exhibit. I hope that my art can be understood without explanation, and I’ve tried to be brief, but my involvement with these art projects is extensive and complicated. I have boldfaced the titles of individual works so that relative information surrounding a particular piece may be easily found within the text of this statement. This statement does not explicate all the ideas, concepts and references for the art I have chosen to include in the exhibit. Art can be defined by context and needs no justification or defense but I hope that this statement will provide an academic context; I am a teacher as well as an artist.
For me, the choice of subject matter is a convoluted process that mixes intuition and rational thought. The process relies heavily upon past experiences and the direct observation of my environment. For example my interest in using a bird held by a human hand, as in Trinity and Bird in Hand, is a direct result of the momentary capture of a living Pine Siskin. As I held the fragile creature in my hand I began to think of it as a symbol for the fragility of metaphysical faith; destroyed if embraced too tightly and lost to flight if held too loosely. After photographs were made the bird was released unharmed. With this choice in subject matter I was also aware of traditional myths involving birds as spiritual beings; the Christian symbols of Holy Spirit as dove or the self-sacrifice of Pelicans, the eternal rebirth of the Phoenix, and ancient Egyptian psychopomps-transporters of souls in the form of human headed sparrows. I also appreciate the association with the colloquial phrase “a bird in hand is worth more than a dozen in the bush.” In addition, my choice of birds as subject matter was influenced by my personal experiences raising canaries and pigeons, and a life long love of bird watching and ornithology.
These prints of birds and Pollen, are examples of research into the techniques of combining relief printing from linoleum cut blocks and screen-printing with phytochromes (naturally occurring pigments extracted primarily from plant sources). Many technical advances were made when perfecting these prints, such as an improved registration system suitable for combining both printmaking processes. Much care is taken in designing the print. The 19th Century Japanese Ukiyo-e masters, especially Hokasai and Hirosheige, have had a heavy influence on me when translating observed details into graphic representation. Study of these printmaking experts has lead to a refinement in the descriptive quality of my line and composition.
A major theme of my Master of Fine Arts thesis was the development of a very personal pseudo-scientific system of classification by which order and mathematical purity symbolize the divine in nature. Part of my thesis was the development, through personal lines of reasoning, without empirical foundations, of a system to classify images and objects along a linear continuum from the organic qualities of randomness and imperfection to hard-edged geometrical perfection I designated as “divine”. Within this system of classification, the symmetry of many biological organizations or the mathematical fractals of nature are reflections of divine perfection. For example, this may explain an almost universal fascination with crystals and the human inclination across cultures to associate snakes, with their intricate imbrication of scales, with super-natural beings. In this manner my observations of the microscopic details of insects is equivalent to religious experience.
The pattern in my art, as exemplified in the grids and nets of Trinity and Bird in Hand, reflects my interest in the mysteries of the metaphysical. With this in mind it is an important goal to strive for exact precision when cutting these patterns into the linoleum blocks, always striving for what I have designated as divine. However, the perfection of the patterns when cut by hand is an impossibility, but the beauty and significance of the grids is derived not from godly precision but from the flaws and irregularities, the human element of randomness and variety that is unique to hand crafted objects. This tedious time consuming process is also an important method of giving an art object value in the eyes of the viewer; this strategy is an important element in the Dog Hair Pictures, Hairball, and ThumbPrint. ThumbPrint is an exploration into the replication of naturally occurring pattern, or a search for divine perfection in human anatomy.
An important element of my recent printmaking research, and the major theme of all the work on exhibit, is an exploration into the significance of natural materials. I wish to discover whether or not natural materials inherently carry more symbolic or metaphorical power. Trinity, Bird in Hand, and Pollen are the most recent prints in a series to use phytochromes, or extracted pigments from plants and the scale insect cochineal. While conducting this research, funded by the Research Institute of Chadron State College, I discovered much about the techniques of screen-printing and the manipulation of a color palette made entirely of phytochromes. Although there are technical advantages to pytochrome inks, (I also like the idea of using renewable sources of pigment in place of pigments derived from petroleum sources) phytochromes are labor intensive to produce and although they may provide some unique tones of color there are no visual clues as to the pigments’ source. I purposefully made the half-tone frequency of my photo-emulsion positives similar to the thread count of my printing screens to bring out the moiré patterns which I believe link the application of the phytochromes with the geometry of the patterned linoleum cuts. My assessment is that Phytochromography has ‘imbued’ the prints with more significance but this is secret knowledge that must be provided in addition to the presentation of the art. Thus my artistic research moved toward an exploration of other sources of natural colors/materials that would not be so secretive.
During a period of time when Noctuid moths invaded my home at a rate of 20-30 a day, I began looking for a way to use the iridescent dust as an art material. I thought perhaps it could add some iridescence to a phytochrome pigments. The moths were everywhere and I began to notice moths that were washed with the laundry. They had clear wings resembling Hymenoptera. This discovery lead to a series of experiments with detergent that refined a technique that yielded a few grams of fluffy iridescent powder from a packed gallon of moth carcasses collected with a shop-vacuum from the walls and curtains of my home over a month long period. The powder consisted of approximately 95% moth scales but contained a small percentage of tarsi, reproductive organs, and other undeterminable bits of moth exoskeleton. To create Dust, glue was screen-printed in a descriptive pattern of lines and half-tone dots resembling the moths from which the dust had been acquired. Before the glue could dry the moth wing dust was sprinkled over the glue in a process called flocking. The dust adhered to the paper in the form of the moth. It became apparent with this print that there is additional significance in the use of recognizably real materials. This became a strategy for making art that I see containing an important element of dadaesque wit.
My search for new phytochromes led to some experiments using pollen collected from sunflowers, but the yellow of pollen is not water soluble and thus not suitable for a screen printing ink. Competing with bees while collecting pollen led to a print that combines linoleum cut relief, screen printed phytochromes, and flocked Pollen. I enjoyed this type of visual pun, where the means of represented is the represented, and I decided to use the beard stubble collected from my electric razor as flocking for the graphic beard stubble of a self-portrait. I chose to only use a descriptive linoleum cut without a palette of phytochromes as to not overpower the subtle coloration of my fine blond Beard. Similar representational punning was employed in Wasp-Paper Wasp and ThumbPrint.
After using facial hair as an art material I thought about the white hair that seems to cover everything in my home due to sharing it with a yellow lab. I thought about how the problem with moths was transformed into an object of beauty and I set about to make art from dog hair and hide glue. I choose hide glue as yet another representational pun. What could be better than glue made from hide to hold hairs that were once held by hide? Collected hairs from the house, like those found between couch cushions, proved to be unusable so an arrangement was made with the yellow lab, affection exchanged for a endless supply of pristine guard hairs, white with yellow tips. A series of art works were then completed using tweezers to glue individual hairs into organized patterns of various complexities. Some of these Dog Hair Pictures were previously shown in conjunction with a body of other dadaesque dog-human collaborations. Dog-hair Diptych compares a randomly generated mat of dog hair to a carefully arranged nautilus shaped spiral of ascending hair lengths from a sampling of loose hairs plucked from each inch of the yellow lab, beginning at the nose and proceeding to the longest of hairs located in the tail. Gaps in the spiraling hairs reflect the absence of a particular length of hair when the samples were sorted. I was very pleased with the divine math hidden in the coat of my dog. Gracie is a portrait made of dog hair and hide glue sensitive enough to capture the personality of the yellow lab from which grew the dog-hairs used for art (again a representational pun). The careful copying of the computer generated half tone dots that create the subtle values of this image became an important new avenue for the exploration of mathematical pattern as previously described. The black or white nature of computer-generated half tones is based in mathematical formula; I consider computers another means for imitating divine perfection. When thinking about the significance of materials it is important to me that paint and other traditional art materials are foreign to my immediate environment, dog hair is not and so it is pleasing to me how this art made from dog hair better reflects real life than the illusions I’ve created in paintings.
Hairball is a spin-off of the Dog Hair Pictures as another transformation of refuse with an element of humor. The human hairs plucked from my hairbrush were used in a deliberate duchampian strategy of combining autobiographical elements with an exploration of the absurd while appearing completely serious. The precise gluing of hairs to form the lines of a three-dimensional perspective ball underscores the seriousness of this artwork's appearance.
When a small black gnat became trapped in a spot of glue, I was struck by how much it resembled the fossil insects I have observed in amber. One hundred twenty one and Minimalism are artworks inspired by this observation.
The Jar Sculptures are an extension of my assemblage with natural materials research. I first exhibited examples of this work at my undergraduate thesis exhibit. This blending of scientific and metaphysical thinking to make art about natural history and myself has been the major theme of my artistic life. Although I favor an extensive rational for each artistic decision, irrational artistic impulse dominates my work. However I believe my artistic intuition is an educated intuition. So, why would I have strong impulses to make art from the dead bodies of animals? To suggest that this work is on exhibit for shock value implies my audience is naive and I am an uneducated brut who has forgotten that there is not an original way left to be discovered that would shock an educated audience with art. Besides, this work is not art about the nature of art, its art about nature and my accumulated experience and education. The following personal recollections may provide some context for my impulse to use dead animals as art material:
My adolescence was spent in Casper Wyoming where my father, like so many Western men, decorated the walls of our home with expensive taxadermic animal heads, trophies of successful hunts. I went on school trips to the Warner Wildlife Museum to look at the three-room collection of animals where a taxidermist had prepared their entire bodies. This trophy collection of a wealthy safari hunter was not as impressive as the taxidermic animal collection I discovered at Chicago’s Museum of Natural History. Each family group was artfully arranged in dioramas backed by impressive landscape paintings. When I was a child I would request and receive fetal pigs, giant frogs, and other specimens commercially prepared for dissection, along with instructional manuals and dissecting tools, for Christmas presents. In biology departments I have seen: closets for jars with two headed cows and human hearts, drawers and drawers of stuffed birds and rodents, rooms and rooms of dried insects stuck to pins logically arranged by family and genus. I have continuously added to my own collection of insects since 1979. For years I have made trout lures from bits of animal parts tied to hooks with thread. I have photographed mummified humans in a museum of curiosities on the American side of Niagara Falls. I have marveled at the human cross sections, running head to toe on display in a back stairwell of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Thus, I understood why Damion Hurst would exhibit cross-sectioned farm animals as sculptures. I appreciate the art of Joseph Beuys, which I have seen at the Art Institute. I have admired, for example his drawing of a hare with hare’s blood or a recording of his performance where he was painted in gold and told stories for hours to a dead rabbit he held in his arms. I have seen on exhibit a large collection of 3000-year-old mummified cats from Egyptian tombs. One day at work as a biology lab assistant I was required to stick a needle into the skulls of thirty frogs and stir up their brains so each biology lab student could humanely vivisect them. I think Beuys would have seen the repetition of this procedure, called “pithing,” as performance art. I have gained permission to visit the basements of medical schools where I made drawings and photographs of dissected cadavers in the tradition of the Renaissance artists. I have heard of a life size equestrian sculpture made from the skinless cadavers of a real horse and rider. Audubon shot and stuffed all the birds he used as still life in his paintings. Because I do not want rodents freely roaming my home, I have set spring traps and left poison grain so that the vermin would die of internal hemorrhaging. I have participated in branding and the slaughter of bottle-fed sheep. My mother allowed me my own shelf in the freezer in which to store insects and other perishable treasures. My amateur paleontologist uncle instilled an early love in me for bones, fossils, rocks, and other treasures to be “collected” from nature. These collections have become my art materials.
I was breeding mice in an aquarium to provide a food source for the Argentina Horned Frogs I keep as pets. These are fast growing carnivorous amphibians requiring small “pinkie” mice when young and adult mice when mature. Tracking the development of featureless newborns as they grow into “fuzzies“ was fascinating. To choose just the right size mouse for optimum frog growth I learned to predict the size of the mouse by its age in days; the growth rate of the mice was very regular. I tried to document these changes in appearance in photographs and drawings but felt dissatisfied with the results. I then began to think about other ways to document these stages of development and remembered a display located at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. This museum display illustrated the development of the unborn human with real fetuses kept in containers of preservative. Although I was not interested, at this time, in animal fetuses, I thought preserving mice in alcohol might be the best strategy for an art piece about regular intervals of time and the development of young mice.
When keeping mice I learned the lesson first hand that rodents reproduce rapidly and I was constantly confronted with a surplus of livestock. To solve this problem I relied upon my training as a biologist and I followed the humane procedure used to euthanize unwanted rodents with ether, as was the practice in my undergraduate biology department. Often when breeding animals individuals are culled to ensure the health of a population; this overpopulation and the need to dispose of culls was also a problem I experience breeding tropical fish and pigeons. I have used this culling event as the subject matter of art in the past but in this case the intended focus was on time and growth. I did not intend this work to be emotionally expressive; I see this art with the neutrality of science. Thus to create Calendar, individual mice were taken from a nest and euthanized on day one of life and every three days following. These mice were then preserved in alcohol until the most effective composition and presentation was conceived. When these mice were combined with a serpent within an antique jar uniquely sealed, the assemblage transformed science into an art with metaphorical power. (As an interesting side note, I forgot a principle of biology and made an error when predicting the size of the mice that were intended for use in the composition of Calendar. With the loss of each littermate the remaining mice were provided with additional resources which accelerated their growth exponentially).
In Chicago’s Museum of Natural History, one may gaze upon necklaces made from human finger bones or the brightly colored heads of tropical birds. I have seen earrings made from beetles and broaches to tether living anoles as adornment. Thus it was a logical connection for me to see the opalescent translucence of newborn mice as gem stone like and suitable for human decoration. My original concept was to create a string of pearly mice to be displayed upon a mannequin neck, as found in display windows of jewelry stores. Wearing latex gloves the previously euthanized pinkies were strung like beads and spaced apart with snake vertebra to enhance the decorative effect of the necklace. However my own revulsion with the process placed the emphasis upon the string and the upholstery needle that passed through each bead. When contemplating the glass of the jar as picture plane, it became important to bring the string from the environment of the alcohol preservative to the environment of the viewer, or to connect the art world within the jar with the real. A similar impulse to blend art with life motivated many Dadaists and the great modernist George Braque. Braque conceived of collage or gluing as a method to include bits of his everyday environment in his paintings. Picasso pushed collage into assemblage, arranging pieces of chosen junk that had a previous life or purpose before becoming art. Including the bee’s wax sealant of the wine bottle, String is easily described as an assemblage that transforms objects with previous lives chosen from my immediate environment into art. I have recently wondered if the uterus shape of the wine bottle has contributed to viewers mistaking the full term mice with fetal dogs.
I have concluded that Marcel Duchamp included a type of confessional element in his artwork, and I often use a similar strategy of uniquely personal metaphors for events or relationships in my private life. Both Poem of the Wet Spider and Tandem contain confessional elements (as does Hairball).
The relief assemblages of found and crafted objects, Mercury Poison for Isaac Newton, Epitaph for Icarus: Bird Bone Bed, Ikebana with Bird Killed in Window, Ode to Vincent with Found Calf Ear, were under construction continuously over a four year period. Assigning titles to these pieces marked their completion. These pieces are primarily an intuitive response to materials, but major themes of birds and ladders inspired this series of surrealist poems. The importance of the bird theme may be found in the previous discussion of Trinity and Bird in Hand and the ladders are an adaptation of the grids and geometrical patterning found in Paleolithic cave paintings. I accept the theory of interpretation that associates these grid-like patterns with stage one hallucinations of shamanistic trances and I see my own impulse to use them as inherited memory or instinct.
In conclusion, my exploration into the use of real materials in art has yielded significant results. Natural materials can inherently carry more symbolic or metaphorical power than traditional art materials. The strong reactions to my art, both positive and negative, assure me that my research is valid, meaningful, and progressing in a worthwhile direction.
Sugar Rats Disco · The Transfigured Pedestrian · Dada Contrivance