New World

We often find objects that remind us of our cultural/historic origins.

The sculpture, New World, incorporates elements related to memory.

My grandparents came from eastern Europe near the turn of 1900.  All but one of them, my paternal grandfather, passed through Ellis Island.  They all passed the Statue of Liberty.

The Brownie Box camera of that era was the equivalent of the smart phone in revolutionizing the average person's ability to take photographs; an extraordinary leap in technology.

The 16mm home movie camera came later but had the same effect; it began the home movie era and led directly to Youtube.

This sculpture, composed of the camera body, a small Statue of Liberty found broken on the street in front of the Empire State Building in NYC, a glazing pipette found in the defunct pottery studio at Goddard College, one of my molars, and a strip of 16 mm movie film should speak for themselves...

Chiharu Shiota

I was recently in Pittsburgh, PA and saw the installation exhibit at the Mattress Factory, a gallery.
The work by Chiharu Shiota encased existing furniture left in an abandoned building within a web of yarn.  www.mattress.org/

What was most effective to me was the sense that time obscures the things we leave behind.  Played out to its conclusion, these webs might eventually be opaque.  Chiraru Shiota has given us the half-way point.

http://www.chiharu-shiota.com/en/







Installations enable artist to form whole concepts that present work in a non-gallery atmosphere (even when in a gallery).
Here is one of my installations from 2014:

Carl Jung and The Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung, pioneer psychoanalyst and visionary, brought the less tangible aspect of symbol and myth into the realm of the psyche (as if the psyche was ever tangible).

It struck me, as I got farther and farther into his writings, that we are creatures of metaphor.  We see even the most common objects in our environment as symbolic, having greater meaning than the mere physical.

This applies to found objects.  The reason why any artist selects materials and subject matter transcends the physical requirements of the work.  To artists, color, form, texture, sound, light are used to evoke emotion and induce experience.  We work in the physical world and reach out in the ephemeral.

Enough said.

Chandler Center for the Arts

An exhibit entitled, 'Salvage' opened at the Chandler Gallery, in Randolph, Vermont on January 30.  It included three pieces of my work.
http://chandlergallery.weebly.com

Having just completed a MFA degree in Interdisciplinary Arts, I composed a miniature catalog, that although it cannot include many sculptures, gives a sampling and a link to my Flickr account for more extensive viewing.

As a creative exercise in itself, catalog design challenges what image and message we want to convey since we get so little to achieve the effect we want our audience to experience.

Here are the two sides of the folding catalog.  The vertical image of 'Hanged Man' was intentionally laid horizontally as the cover to provoke the holder to turn the catalog to read the text.  The interior images are the four that I feel represent what my work is capable of at this time.  Inexpensive printing allows me to alter the catalog frequently.

If you would like a hard copy of the catalog, send a comment with your email and address.  I'd be glad to send a few out.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/97140136@N08/albums/72157643013508483

Horse Culture

One of my early works was this Paleolithic
Horse shown at left.





Horse Culture evolved slowly beginning with a piece of steel I believe is a catalytic converter heat shield found on the side of a road in New Hampshire.  In combination with the toe section of a woman's white shoe (formerly my wife's), a head emerged.


By itself, this was a suggestion of a head.  In mounting this on the section of a mortised beam from an demolished barn, a figure developed.  The mouth, formed from the heel of the same shoe and wire clippings plus a vertebrae from an unknown animal pushed the figure towards the horse-like shape shown here.

The significant move towards the title came when I added a previously made figure as the rider.  Discovering both the logic of the form and the import of humanity's connection to the horse both in the time when it was transportation, a war machine, and a revered animal with a unique spiritual link to humankind, brought other elements into play as well as the first use of oil paints (from a 50 year-old painting box).

Martyrs and Saints

The appearance of martyrs and saints as figures in my work may seem strange as I am a Jew.  Yet, as Carl Jung observed, we have access to a 'collective unconscious' or ancestral memories that are causal.  If artists stopped to ask the why and where of their every stroke, we wouldn't get past the studio door.

Fukushima

I can attribute these figures to the process that creates them, a balance between intuition and intention; they grow from the found objects and are shaped by my sense of symbolic 'rightness'.

Shackled

Saint Mona

Beowulf

A recent reading of Beowulf inspired this piece.  Grendel is in 'process'.

The sculpture is 20" high, 12" wide, 8" deep.
It is composed of (all found): a shaving brush, the pelvic bones of a porcupine, gold foil from Chanukah gelt, rusted bottle caps, a bowl of roofing nails, door bolt, leather glove, driftwood, an old book, bones. screws, and bark.
This essay accompanies the piece:

Reflection in a Pool of Blood on Beowulf

David Neufeld

Today, Beowulf presents as a story of intolerance.  Substitute any two nations or cultures that cannot get over killing each other.  It all starts with a drunken party.  Grendel can’t sleep.  Grendel kills Geats. Beowulf kills Grendel; Mom gets mad; Beowulf kills mom; a third, unnamed monster (named in the, as yet undiscovered, last-will-and-testament of Grendel’s mom) kills Beowulf.  What was gained? 

It could also be a balance-of-power story.  The Geats (Executive) get too powerful and the Grendel clan (Congress) counterbalances.  A Jungian view might call it a denial of the Shadow.  But who is the shadow? The Geats or the Monsters?  I see a multiplayer video game here.

Beowulf holds its own for sheer graphic detail rivaling modern sci-fi horror.  The scenes of carnage and of burning bodies infuse the senses with ripped tendons, sizzling, popping, barbecue, and Geat sashimi.

What struck me from the start was the Christian hybridization of the Norse world.  The written version appears centuries after the time of events and celebrates an entire lineage.  Shield was an orphan, Moses-like, set adrift as a baby.  The brutal hierarchy in which kings proved themselves in battle and amassed treasure through plunder has been glorified, while Cain’s hoard embodies evil.  The grand mead hall, throne room, becomes their cathedral of excess, is defiled when Grendel repeatedly comes calling and is left vacant until what, the second coming? Was this an early incursion of Christianity into Norse culture?  Was it an attempt to overwrite Norse mythology in the same way that Christianity overwrote, Aztec, Roman, and Greek mythology?  It aligns with the Christian take on good and evil: Good is Us; Evil is Them.   It is so easy to call one, ‘God cursed’, ‘Malignant by nature”.

I also noticed that the story lays out genealogy in a biblical way: Sheild begat, begat, begat, and then there was Beowulf.  The oral tradition of repetitive phrasing confused me the first couple of times I listened to it though I should have been sharp to that.  Old oral tradition is based on multiple tellings in which the audience finds pleasure in knowing the story and is also culturally connected to the story.  I saw Chris O'Donnell as young Beowulf, Russell Crowe as old Beowulf, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Hrothgar.  Andy Serkis, I imagine, would do Grendel justice.

Given their barbarity, I didn’t feel sorry for the Geats.  “Courage and greatness, wrecker of mead-benches, that was one good King?”  Bull!  It was almost as if Grendel, who was bothered by their noisy parties, was within his rights.  This may be me projecting.  I am forced to ask from whom the Geats got their treasures and what bloody hall was left behind when they exited.  I began to wonder whether they were, in a sense, feeding Grendel gold and jewels when they piled the ship of a dead king with riches during the funeral rites, like chumming for monsters. 

The overall plot echoes Tolkien’s writing although, as celebrated as this is, I am tempted to parody this tale.  The telling by Seamus Heaney sounded like the warriors were, ‘Geeks’, their hall, a ‘Meat Hall’, and their neighbors across the water, ‘Bright Dames’.  A bit Monty-Python-esque when Beowulf says, “It’s only fair that I take off all my armor and lay down my sword and fight the bastard (or bitch) bare handed!”  How macho is that?

In the end, it’s just a bloody mess.