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.

Cyclopses I Have Known

There have been times when I have wandered into a subject (mythological or otherwise) and found that my first 'take' didn't satisfy.  Cyclops is one of those.  I revisit, literally, each piece I do when I enter my studio or review the series on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/97140136@N08/sets/72157643013508483/.

Here are three takes on the motif.

The center one went abstract on me.  The stone becomes dominant.

The others focused, it seems, on the one eye and the menacing arm clutching the remains of one of Ulysses' men.  In the last version, Cyclops can be said to be in drag (if it is a male) OR alternatively, it is a creature of both sexes.  We never see its mate and unless Cyclops is immortal (even though blinded) we might wonder about the 'species' future.

As to why I have gone to the effort to portray this particular character from Homer's Odyssey, I may reflect that the one-eyedness of this creature calls up a monomaniacal quality that I find disturbingly pervasive today.

You can take it from there.

Dream of Androgyny

I didn't actually have a dream of androgyny.  The title and piece grew from the refrigerator thermometer and the baseball cover (both found objects of course).

Carl Jung, whom I've been reading, proposed that we each have a feminine and masculine aspect (given Greek mythology this wasn't an original statement).

Still, I couldn't resist the impulse to imbue the baseball cover with a bonnet-like appearance.  I tried numerous other uses for it.  Often additions follow that reinforce the recognized form. 

Jung said, “In reality, the work of art grows out of the artist as a child from his mother.  The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths.”

Couldn't have said it better. 

It's Complicated

Many of my sculptures contain simple forms and materials that in association create strong whole images.
BUT... at times, I continue to add material until the piece is rather complicated.  The challenge then becomes viewing these as something closer to an essay than a poem.

The piece shown below is (was) named 'Bad Stork'.  Once I saw the bird's body in the cow jawbone and added a beak (partly real from a great blue heron skeleton) things took a turn for the dark side.

I had the porcelain leg of a 19th century doll on my work table.  (Slight aside here: I don't set out to invoke darkness, but the leg seem to 'fit').
From there is was and would be 'Bad Stork' and as a storyline it made sense to me that not every baby that is carried by a stork got delivered intact.  The stork either got hungry or had a bad disposition.  Either way, both the leg and part of the swaddling cloth were all that remained when I got to portraying the deviant.  Don't shoot the messenger!

On a more prosaic note, the two photos below are of a piece entitled: 'Ghost Town'.
Having spent a few years knocking around the Southwest (one year working in Death Valley), I came to know the detritus that was left behind when a vein of gold ran out.

Those ghost towns were often home to dreamers, thieves, and victims, with an occasional rich scoundrel.  The photos on the Bingo card are tintypes from a found album dated the mid-1800's.  The rest of the material is what lay on the ground near a rail yard in Asheville, NC.

R.I.P.

Up-cycling, Assemblage, and Found Objects

Tire up cycling as Planters

It appears that these terms merge in some artist's work and diverge closer to the present time.
Upcycling appears now to be the use of discarded material to make or manufacture a new product.  A good example is the use of old sweaters to make rugs or to felt into hats or potholders.  Some up cyclers do use materials to make art objects.

Louise Nevelson assemblage

Assemblage brings to mind Louise Nevelson among many others.  In this, objects formerly seen as individually utilitarian parts of a whole construction, such as the legs of chairs, clock faces, hammers, etc, are combined to form works of art.

For me neither of the above entirely describe my found object work.
I have a few guiding 'principles' that keep me within an interesting boundary:

1. The objects must have been discarded carelessly (not in recycle bins).
2. The objects would likely be passed by by most people (seemingly insignificant).
3. The objects in most cases are weather-worn (they've been lying around, washed up, or run over).
4. The objects contain some element of history (although it may be indecipherable or mundane).
5. The objects, collectively, cannot be recycled (they do not fall into any category).

crow head by David Neufeld

Crow 

'Crow', the sculpture and the bird, has a scavenging inclination.  The initial inspiration for the piece came as I drove by shattered truck tires on the margins of the highway.  The steel belting makes these pieces of black rubber fierce looking and fierce to work with.  The lower beak is a vertebrae of a deer, the upper beak is rusted spike.  Then there's the fishing net head form.

I have larger slabs of truck tire remnants that are slated for a 'Raven'.

As I said at the start, this approach to sculpture, although not new, attempts to imbue the collective materials with something unexpected, yet natural.

Why Two Faces?

As the figures I sculpt develop, there appears an opportunity for a second face.  This is either the 'other' side of the piece's intent or in the case of mythical characters, the other half of the partnership.

One of my earliest pieces was 'Returning Soldier'.  The reverse side of this piece portrays a foreign casualty of the war or it can be argued, a 'partnership' that grew out of the war.































Sometime later, I made Neptune with Amphitrite, his wife.
















Just last week I created 'Angel'.  As an abstract (to me) figure, the other side of this sculpture seems to represent some other form of the angelic,  perhaps the animal side.

Kings and Other Lords

Battle King

Caesar

Some motifs reappear in my work.  Given that my previous professions didn't include much figurative work and among the few figures, the 'King' motif was non-existent, it appears to have found an outlet in my found object sculptures.

Carl Jung, father of modern psychoanalysis might say I am exploring the archetype.

As each figure develops, a title emerges, sometimes early, sometimes just before completion.

In these four, it might have been the inherent posture of the figures that led to their regal titles.  We respond to posture, bearing and clothing.

Neptune

Shogun