Peg; monuments

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Peg

This is one of a few wooden items that sits on my desk, ostensibly to perform a function (usually clamping surfaces being glued) but really to play with. 

The agreeable aspects of this peg are:

 The dry texture of the wood.  The way the surface is smooth but almost threatens not to be. The peg is pale, still clean, vulnerable to tarnish.

The way the peg is slightly larger than usual pegs. It is more solid. It declares itself.

The way the spring holds the two parts together. Its asymmetry.

The open and closing action. This uncomplex action is sufficient to keep me occupied, idiotically, for minutes at a time, mainly with testing the pressure of the spring on my thumb. 

Its unfussy, utterly practical, design.

 There is an monumental Claes Oldenburg peg, (Clothespin, 1976) in Philadelphia . But I feel it is in the close physical connection with a clothes peg that understanding of peggishness is better conveyed.

 I have a lot of issues with monuments and monumental sculpture. My main objection being to the way they impose meanings with so little equivocation, so crudely.  

You can respond, saying that Oldenburg is playing with this, attempting to subvert the traditional subject narratives of public monuments., with their grand historical themes and cast of important characters.  Nonetheless, however the argumentation, his work remains is a big object which viewers have no control over, and cannot ignore.

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Drawings for notional murals and sculptures.

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Drawings for notional murals and sculptures. 

Should anyone have a place to do these let me know and I will come and make them.

 Gaint cats on garden walls- one leaping the other seated

 A giant horse on a gable

 Cat`s head and cat leaping

A boy and a girl on a garden wall

These pursue themes of gigantism. I very much enjoy the simple advertising, seen in developing countries. There is a sweetness in those advertisements that I`d like to bring to some walls and I would like to do some in Belfast to replace the hateful murals that proliferate there,

The softness of effect given by a pen cannot be reproduced on a wall, so I would have to find a way of creating a gentle quality through colour.

Suspended faces.

Thes two, above and below, are either balloons, or flat representations of faces, again enormous, to be suspended by ropes from tree branches or, below,  supported by long poles.

Poles with faces.

A giant sculpture of a worthy man, with cyclist for scale.

I think tidying the drawings with correction fluid might make them more comprehensible, but they become a little uglier.

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Friendly people

This is a sketch illustrating a pair of sculptures I one day wish to construct. 

The two larger figures are about 15 feet high, and to be constructed from a flat material such as steel, if it can be made rigid enough (perhaps it will be necessary to coonstruct them as a sort of steel sandwich, so that each sculpture would consist of two steel flats, joined by a struts).

The two smaller figures are there for scale, and represent real people. They will be painted in bright colours. The figures are designed to be friendly and welcoming.

Pendulous

A sketch of a sculpture soon to be completed with wires and an old picture frame.

The sculpture is Calderish, and its format  is one which I shall be translating for paintings increasingly. That is, a composition which consists of two or possible three planes, very closely placed in relation to each other, and a highly rhythmic relationship between elements, clearly distinguished in bright colours.

Bird

Pixies

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Above, three pixies, each face about two centimetres

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Fragments

I'm playing more with the idea of making fragments deliberately, chasing Rodin,(and the whole of modern sculpture I guess). And chasing the idea of work which is non-monumental, intimate small work, whose strength lies in ambiguity, almostness and allusion. I'm making animals but trying to avoid the sweetness that this often seems to necessitate.

At what point does a work of art become so slight, so quiet that it ceases to be a work of art, and remains a dormant affecting no-one? Is there a minimal level of physical intervention?

Birdshead revisited

Returning to an earlier set of pieces: the birds.

 I had worked on them and they had become more and more like very obvious toys. I like toys, but the toys I like have a sense of abstraction about them, which is what lends them their charm (contrast Britains' very realistic animals and soldiers and cars with the far more abstracted tin soldiers and cars of earlier epochs).

I'd forced the pieces, making them far too explicitely "fun" and decorative when I should have let them be, allowing the viewer more space to draw their own interpretations.

Thus, in the guise of Redon, I return.

I also began making some horses: again I haven't found quite the equilibrum between a sort of Giacometti abstraction and realism, and they became too cute: I shall persevere.

Cardboard fish, realised.

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Fish, above, made into cardboard manquettes from the designs of yesterday's doodle

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The figurine is there to show how the pieces might scale as playground sculptures. The clean shapes have something of the quality of tin-plate toys, and the next thing might be to experiment with painting these in the sort of bright patterns that colour such tin-plate toys.

The trick is in treading that line between the mimetic and the fully abstract: if the fish are too realistic, like Britain's toys, then they lack a certain mystery, because they fail to engage the imagination. If they are wholly abstract, they simply become as building blocks, and would inspire only the most imaginative.

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Doodle showing fish block sculpture idea

This is a doodle, again made thanks to the longeurs of teaching beginners' English lessons.

It depicts various fancy fish, which have the forms, I now realise, suggestive of pastry-cutters, and a definate de Chirico-esque quality. I suppose their appeal is to do with the way in which something flexible and fluid becomes something rigid and highly geometric.

They would be carved out of hardwood and left to lie about on a coffee table; or they might be very large, also carved from wood, and suitable for a playground or town square. I shall perhaps make some manquettes later tonight from card.

Wire faces, masks; toys and art; labels

Earlier

Later

It is quite hard work shaping his copper wire to form an armature, which will be the basis of a mask: the wire ends are sharp and can cut your fingers wickedly. I think these armatures need a bit more tweaking, especially around the moth.

It is also quite hard to work the wire in three dimensions to make a good face shape. I think perhaps using wire netting might have been an easier option.

I find with these craft pieces that often in their earlier stages they are more striking, weirder, and as they progress they become less suggestive and more like mere toys. I intend this mask to be quite realistic. I think the more realistic masks are, the creepier.

What is the difference between a toy and a work of art? I suppose a toy is necessarily restricted in intention, while that of an artwork is diffuse, though its purposes are first of all aesthetic.

I love the interactivity of masks; they cross and confuse the boundaries between toy and artwork, between serious and silly like nothing else I can think of.

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Regular visitors will see that there are now labels at the bottom of the page, making it much easier and fun to find things on this blog.

Papier-mâché birds; toys and sculpure

Here's a collection of papier mache birds I've been working on over the last few days.

The thing is to find the right degree of anthropomorphism: the right balance between bird and suggested human characteristics for them to be fun.

They need to dry a little before I can work more into them, making their surfaces more even and improving their tails and beaks. Later they will be painted.

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At what point does a toy become a sculpture? At the point at which it is too precious or serious looking to be played with, I guess.*

Play is regarded with tremendous suspicion in our culture though it lies beneath so many artistic endeavors. I suspect play is regarded with suspicion because it is regarded as the opposite of work, and Western societies are very much in thrall to the Protestant Capitalist ethos, whereby all activities must have a known, profitable end- to the extent that people are encouraged to feel bad about themselves when they aren't working, no matter how unfulfilling the jobs available to them are.

*Alexander Calder is an exception to this. Paul Klee, like Picasso, is playful but you couldn't really play with his works. Perhaps readers have other examples?

In Canada, Collaboration and Wire Sculptures

I've abandoned a collaboration with a Canadian, where she was supposed to provide me with photos, which I'd use as a basis of stories. She wasn't really pulling her weight and her photos weren't really good enough. I'd entertained a sort of fantasy that I might be able show her rapidly how to produce better images, but that notion turned out to be false. Ergo, it was futile to continue.

There are a couple of the stories here- there were supposed to be eight.

This is often the way with collaborations- people enter them without really thinking about whether they are really committed or not, and it turns out to be a waste of time.

I think the appeal of collaborations is that it offers a relief from the fairly lonely business of making things, and you can believe that one person at least- your collaborator- is eager to see what you come up with. There is also the idea that the collaborator brings skills that you don't have to the table.

But in fact it is rarely like that- often one or other party doesn't deliver the goods, or is only really interested in the collaboration as a vanity project. And in my case, I am a much better photographer, so depending on her was a waste of energy,.

In that respect the experience was good, in that it has helped me see that I know an awful lot more than I realised.

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It is great fun making these little desk-top sculptures, balancing the bits of wire and photographing them. The act of balancing things is enormously pleasurable. I wonder why?

Wire world

Working with wire to make simple sculptures, like drawing in air.

Initially I'd intended these wire structures as armatures for mobiles, but having started playing with the wire it seemed more satisfying to keep them clean and simple- the wire itself is so lively and expressive.

Witchery

IN relation to this series of photos two things come to mind- how Charles Manson urged his followers to create "witchy" objects using found items when they went on their killing spree. He is and was totally mad, of course, but it it hard to deny the aesthetic force of his imagery. This, much more than his ideas explains his enduring interest.

The second though that comes to mind is the memory of an afternoon spent twenty years ago at The Glen in Innerleithan, near Peebles, Scotland with Mark Haddon and others making sculptures out of bits and pieces of twig, the idea being that these sculptures should be so subtle that they are almost not discernible as sculptures at all- they lay at the interface between art and nature.

Regarding that memory, isn't it funny how time "telescopes" so some events or conversations are as fresh in the mind as if they happened yesterday, while others, ostensibly more serious fade (my first marriage, for instance, which I never give a moments thought to)?