Spirits, Released (KS)

When we first began working out ideas for this installation, I knew I wanted to make a series of “figures”.  For our previous installation I’d made what I think of as “set pieces”: furniture and large space-defining objects.  This time I wanted not just to define the space but also inhabit it with “actors”.  Exactly who they were and how they looked was still a mystery.  But I knew I wanted my figures to be at once frightening and yet elegantly female. 

I have long been haunted by Goya’s vision of a colossal monk-like figure terrifying soldiers, and What a tailor can do, filled with a tree dressed as an overpowering monk, both from Los Caprichos. Like scarecrows, costumed figures from a Dogon secret society ritual, or much of Alexander McQueen’s later work, each is an image of a figure defined by their clothes. The entire costume ensemble – heads, hands, feet, clothes - creates an experience of a sprit character. 

Goya: Fear

Goya: What a tailor can do

Dogon ceremonial dancers

Alexander McQueen

Surrounded by Laurie’s representational drawings, my three-dimensional figures had to be abstract yet still contain gesture, movement and, technically significant, volume.  I had to figure out how to create an armature that would express all those things without using anything like a realistic mannequin.  After looking a lot at Louise Bourgeois’ installations, I decided to use a combination of wire dress forms and the crossed sticks used to make scarecrows.  Through trial and error, I came up with an aesthetic vocabulary that included their armatures as well as decorative details.  

Laurie made figures frozen in time by the eruption as they go about their daily routines.  They stare out at us from inside the walls.  At the same time, my figures, released from the walls by the eruption, would inhabit the open floor of the atrium space.  If Laurie’s figures were the home’s inhabitants, and mine were the spirit inhabitants, then I needed to understand their specific attributes.  All the time I worked on them I couldn’t get my mind to say exactly who they were.  At first I tried to use attributes of the major Roman female goddesses to guide my designs.  That helped for a while, but the details of their stories and characters never really interested me.   I kept asking the question, who are these spirits?

As we were making the narration for the video of the installation, Laurie had very clear and concrete descriptions of her figures.  Although I had the same kind of specificity about the furniture and the frames, I was much more foggy about my figures.  She pushed me to be explicit about their meaning. 

I realized they come from a more primitive place than the Roman pantheon.  They are like the Furies who emerged, in some accounts, from a union between air and Mother Earth.  Created in a time before rationality, driven by a need to revenge humanity’s disregard and destruction of nature, my spirits were released from the walls of our house by the eruption.  Echoing the disruptions in the mural, where the moon and a black sun shine simultaneously and waves disrupt the sky, these ancient spirits suggest that Nature might, indeed, be seeking vengeance for humanity’s negligence. 

Freud and Pompeii (LK)

LK: In the early days of research for Once There Was a House, I kept coming across references to Freud’s famous essay “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva”. I quickly bypassed this entry every time it came up. I had no idea what the reference was, but it didn’t sound relevant to the angle that we were pursuing for our installation. I have to say, however, I was intrigued and made a mental note to follow up on this reference as soon as I had some time.

In the early years of the 20th century the German author, Wilhelm Jensen, wrote a novella called “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy”. It was about an archaeologist obsessed with an antique sculpture, a bas-relief of a Roman woman walking. This archaeologist falls in love with the sculpture and names the woman Gradiva, Latin for “the girl stepping forward”. The plot, stripped down to pure action, goes something like this: the archaeologist visits Pompeii and meets a real woman he thinks is this Gradiva come to life. She is, in fact, his childhood sweetheart Zoe, but he fails to recognize her, repressing sexual desires and succumbing to fears of women. In a dream the archaeologist sees this living Gradiva turned into a corpse when overcome by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. While wandering the streets of Pompeii he again meets Zoe, who speaks German to him; but he can’t believe she is real and fails once again to recognize her as his childhood friend. Zoe, the real life Gradiva, helps the archaeologist by playing along with his delusions of not recognizing her. Ultimately she cures him through her love.

Phew! A lot to chew on. And granted, such a bare-bones description of what takes place might leave us scratching our heads. It seems that Freud had a collection of antiquities and a fascination with the ancient world. He compared psychoanalysis to archaeology, and Pompeii was the perfect locus for his some of his ideas: “There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell victim…” In fact, Freud’s essay was the first psychoanalytic study of a work of literature. In “Gradiva” Freud found a way to illustrate his ideas of repressed memories, dreams and unconscious thought, delusions, and sexual neurosis, and most importantly, how to resolve these crises through psychoanalysis.  

The Sanctuary (LK)

LK: There’s a part of the installation that I’m particularly partial to, loving it a little more than the rest, like a favorite child. And that is the space in the house I call the “sanctuary”. It’s the part that I feel most satisfied with in terms of the collaborative process. Crafting this section of the house – a high altar table supporting fetishistic offerings that are viewed against a mosaic-like wall of square tiles - produced the richest exchange of ideas between us. Katha and I used each other’s thoughts and words, a constant back and forth of commentary, challenge, provocation, and concord to spur our thinking on how best to create this shrine-like space.

The sanctuary, a back corner of the gallery, was one of the last pieces to come into focus for us thematically. We originally called it the “storage area” in the house and saw it as a place where a surfeit of household goods and stores were held.  Though the more research we did, the more we realized how ubiquitous in-house worship was in the Roman house in the 1st century A.D. Such worship was believed to placate the ancestor spirits and the patron deities that protected the house. This population of house spirits was thought to mediate between man and the more powerful gods of heaven and the underworld such as Jupitor, Minerva, and Juno. In their offerings, prayers, and rituals, the people of the house constantly tried to control the supernatural, the multitude of inexplicable occurrences in the world around them.

When you look at the wall I hope you see cacophony - a jumble of mysterious fragments and recognizable objects, things disappearing into blackness, other things emerging, gold and glittering, as if these objects have been ceremoniously placed onto shelves and cubbyholes generation after generation within the household. The fetishes and offerings on the high, narrow table and the images on the wall share motifs and echo each other in color, shape, and texture. Together they create a spiritually charged space within the domestic dwelling.

Installed!

KS: We finished installing our House on Friday, doing the final final touchups and creating a shot list for a video yesterday.  But ever since I could see the work in its place I’ve been trying to understand what we actually accomplished.  Not sure I can tell yet.  But I’m beginning to understand more about the narrative.  Which usually leads me to better grasp the meaning.

The narrative begins with domestic spaces. White-faced spectral figures look out from behind the wall over cloud-covered furniture.  A periphery of door and window frames separate those confined spaces from what I now think of as an arid courtyard.  Murals extend the space into a moon and sun-filled arena while spectral figures that intertwine natural materials with human forms twirl around.  And tucked into a “storage” corner, intimate offerings hold the connection between the home’s human inhabitants to its spirits. 

Which leads us to pose this question: what will remain of our domestic, cultural and artistic footprint 2000 years from now? 

Peeling the Onion (LK)

I got an email last month from a former student who has lived in places all over the world since leaving school. She was writing from Tasmania where she was attending a workshop. The title and topic of this workshop, she wrote, was “Unsettlement” – a condition experienced by people who are subject to war, forced economic migration, or climate change, as well as Western conditions like divorce, serious illness, unemployment, etc. My first thought was, here’s another word for what we’re expressing in our installation, and a new one to me.

When you choose as we have done, to re-imagine a 2000 year old event - the catastrophic collapse of a community - you need to ask sooner or later, why is this so important now, important to us? What relevancy can it possibly have to our contemporary world? I wrote in an earlier post about the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries being a touchstone for many artists, especially classically trained artists like myself. These reasonably intact paintings are rich in color, drawing, and composition. Thematically they smolder with psychosexual overtones. I also wrote about what aspect of the Villa of the Mysteries we wanted to focus on in our installation. For us the connection was seeing ourselves in the past, seeing the familiar in the foreign. I didn’t know it at the time but those thoughts and words were just the very outer layers of the proverbial onion that got peeled away as we worked for the past year on the installation.

As I painted the murals and Katha built her figures and other structures, we continued our dialogue, parsing all the possible implications of everything we created, and asking ourselves, is this what we want to express, is this getting us closer to what we want to say? Engaging in this constant exchange and dialogue, verbalizing to each other as well as writing about what we were doing proved invaluable. At some point we peeled away enough of the layers to see a truth - Pompeii, a 1st century coastal community, maybe a lot like our own, suffered a cataclysmic collapse, and life stopped in the blink of an eye.

In Tasmania today they may call similar seismic events and their aftermath “unsettlement”. Somewhere else in the world “disruption” and “massive migration” are the words used. Whatever name we give it, we recognize it in our contemporary lives.

Planning and building the sculptures (KS)

Quite a bit of time has gone by since I last posted anything. As I built the model, everything was so easy and simple!  Not elegant or particularly well crafted, just a sketch that suggested wonderful objects whose construction would simply follow the path of the model. 

Boy was I wrong!  Scaling up meant that each little piece of texture in the maquettes would become an added detail, some piece of something, I'd have to choose.  So, before I could even start building, I had to deepen my understanding of the meaning of the sculptures. I began by making somewhat elaborate drawings  They helped me understand the meaning of each figure, which would then guide my choices - large and small.

There are six major female goddesses in the Greek and Roman pantheon.  Some parallel their male counterparts, and some have unique traits.  I used the attributes of each of the six goddesses to guide these figures, translating them into a vocabulary of dress forms, scarecrows, and masked dancers.  Since all that remains of many Roman sculptures is the drapery, I wanted to highlight that aspect in the figures.

After I understood each sculpture's qualities I started to build.  Which brought up the most challenging problem of building large sculpture: gravity!  All those little pieces of copper wire get really heavy when translated into ¼” copper tubing - and a lot harder to manipulate.  

I discovered that each step was complicated and challenging: finding a welding shop and a teacher (hurray for Artisan's Asylum!); learning how to weld; figuring out dress patterns; and finding ways to make each piece come apart for transport. Overwhelming really.  

Now almost completely done with everything.  All that remains on the figures is hemming the skirts and rusting the bases. Though I'm sure I'll find a couple other small details I've forgotten....

Black and white floor tiles (LK)

A word about black and white tile floors. If you look at computer generated images of the Villa of the Mysteries, specifically the triclinium, you often see that the original sharp tonal contrast has been restored to the pattern of alternating black and white floor tiles. When you’re standing in the actual space in Pompeii, the tonal range of the tiles has been dulled, reduced to a few shades of grey, by time, wear, and most notably, the eruption of Vesuvius.

As every student of color learns, a focal point is created when one’s eye perceives a great contrast between light and dark. That contrast can be created by illumination, hue, or tone. The eye goes there, to that place of change, involuntarily, as if you’re in a darkened space and someone flicks on a flashlight. That’s where you look, where the light meets the dark. This is one of the greatest tools in an artist’s kit. By placing focal points strategically in a painting the artist can direct the viewer’s eye and attention spatially and thematically, giving guidance as to what takes precedence over what.

If we skip ahead in time from first century A.D. Pompeii to 17th century Holland, we’ll find Vermeer, a master practitioner of focal points and perhaps the greatest painter of black and white floor tiles ever. Almost a third of his oeuvre displays these beautifully patterned surfaces. In some paintings a wide swath of tile leads you into the space of the room; in others a mere sliver of black and white patterning hugging the edge of the canvas suggests the existence of a room-size tiled floor underneath all the furniture and carpeting.

Patterning, which is nothing more than shapes repeated predictably across a surface, can organize the space of that plane by imposing measure; by implying depth through perspective; and by energizing through color and tonal variations what might otherwise be a rather flat, uninteresting expanse.

A black and white tile floor comprises the central bottom half of my large wall mural. I’ve tweaked and fiddled with the perspective to heighten the narrative I want to create – impending imbalance, dislocation, and chaos as Vesuvius erupts. I’m hoping that the black and white patterning will draw the viewer into that scene and enhance the sensation.

Half way.... (LK)

Katha and I are about at the halfway point in the allotted time we have to make this installation. Speaking for myself, I’ve just completed the murals that will hang on the walls on one side of the gallery, about 40’W x 8’H worth of paper. And Katha has completed one of the 6 “spirit” figures that will fill the space. That first one served as the learning curve and has informed her as to how to proceed in constructing the armatures and bases for the other five of these 9’ tall pieces of sculpture. All of which is to say we’re moving along and making progress.

The picture I’ve posted here shows Katha’s sculpture photo-shopped on top of a sketch of my design for the other side of the gallery. This mural will be approx. 11’H x 30’W, and will hang on a wall that’s over 20’ tall. I haven’t begun the actual large-scale version yet, but I feel as if the sketch is pretty much resolved. I want it to feel as if a cataclysmic event of nature (the eruption of Vesuvius) is about to take place; things are disturbed, ruffled, and roused. The black line, pitched like a roof, serves as the schema for the eponymous house. Black and white floor tiles are reminiscent of the real Villa of the Mysteries; plummeting blackbirds, wavy lines in the sky, and the simultaneous appearance of sun and moon suggest an imbalance, things gone awry. The overlapping patterns- diamonds, checks, stripes – are meant to suggest the porosity of walls, the way the Romans painted false doors in their houses to allow their ancestors and the spirits to freely come and go. Katha’s majestic “spirit” appears in the midst of all of this but could just as easily dissolve into it.

The False Door (KS)

Looking around the web for more information about the Villa of the mysteries, last summer I stumbled on an e-book, “The False - Door: Dissolution and Becoming in Roman Wall-painting” by Maurice Owen. Which turned out to be quite refreshing after all the “isn’t Roman art so decadent!” and “The Romans just copied the Greeks!” I’d been reading - especially when talking about these frescos. 

First he talks about the British Victorian filters we often use to understand Roman art. The Victorians mostly critiqued the frescos at Pompeii by comparing how they compared technically to later painting (badly) or how sexually suggestive they were (quite a bit). And usually, the subjects of the frescos were taken to be depictions of everyday life in Roman society. When Hollywood got hold of the myth of Roman culture, the distortions got even more exaggerated. Obviously, Vesuvius just had to wipe out those nasty Romans! 

Owen takes a different approach when examining the frescos in Pompeii. He looks at the various images and found a great many that depict false tomb doors. Probably copied from Egyptian and Etruscan practices, and used in Roman tombs, these false doors represent the threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead. Ancestors and gods used them to enter and exit daily living. Often painted as the gateway to an enclosed garden (the Elysian Fields), the spirit world was always just the other side of the wall. In a cubiculum (bedroom) in the Villa of the Mysteries, there is a closed false door on one side of the room, and on the other side one that’s open. Separated yet brought closer by the frescos, ancestors and gods hovered nearby, participants in everyone’s daily routine. 

The whole house was a sanctuary that kept the spirit world profoundly close.

http://creadm.solent.ac.uk/cust…/rwpainting/cover/index.html

The Villa of the Mysteries (LK)

Why the Villa of the Mysteries, you might ask? The reference to it kept popping up as we created an earlier installation called “The Enigma of 4 am” in 2014. We were surprised by the pyscho-sexual overtones that surfaced in that work quite inadvertently, and we thought maybe it was its centerpiece, a dining room table and chairs, that had conjured up a hint of the Villa and the association with it’s frescoes. We were intrigued, but we put it on the back burner to examine more closely at some future point.

And when we did, a bigger question turned out to be, not WHY the Villa, but WHAT about that Villa? From what perspective, what aspect, what point of view do we approach it? Would we deal exclusively with the frescoes and their subject matter, presumably a secret ritual where a young bride-to-be is initiated, enabling her to enter into a “mystical” marriage with Dionysus? Or, would we concentrate on the effect and influence the Villa of the Mysteries has had on the individual consciousness and on popular culture since its discovery and excavation over a century ago, including Freud and Hollywood?

The former, we agreed on, was too narrow a focal point for us, and the latter seemed too broad. We were both most interested in viewing the ruins from the perspective of a time and place in the future looking back into a past that had been disrupted - coincidentally a word and concept that is much heard in conversation today. We were interested, it turns out, in examining and creating a mirror in time, a wormhole, a simultaneity of the familiar and the foreign.

Murals (LK)

I have several walls to cover with murals for this installation. I thought I had one side of the gallery figured out in my mind, but hadn’t a clue as to what should go onto the walls on the other side of the gallery which are shorter and set back behind an overhang. Ironically, once I started working on sketches, searching out references, and gathering sources the situation completely reversed! I started seriously rethinking the imagery for the taller wall that I had felt so sure about and suddenly, almost full blown, an idea popped into my head for the shorter murals under the overhang.

The room in the Villa of the Mysteries where the famous murals (that give the villa its name) are located was a dining room, a triclinium. Since it’s excavation, it has been referred to as the “red” room because of the vibrant red color that grounds the figures. I plan on covering the panels of paper I will use with washes of burnt sienna, a strong brick red color on which I will depict figures engaged in daily activity, all gazing out directly at the viewer, as if suspended in time and activity. You will only see their faces and hands though which will be modeled in white, as if covered in ash and preserved for eternity. These sculptural pieces of hands and arms are examples of imagery that got me thinking in this direction.

Gathering materials (KS)

 This kind of rope always places me in gaff-rigged schooners, fishing dories on the Grand Banks, Nantucket sleigh rides, Homer's "All's Well" and Kipplings "Captains Courageous". Rolling over foggy seas, damp and dreamy.

I need to age it in the weather so it softens. There are more direct ways but I'll try this for a month or two then see if I need to take more drastic measures.

Model (KS)

We made a model of the installation. Although it features prominently in the gallery, in the first picture we took off the "overhang" ceiling to get a better sense of layout. 

And of course, we've already changed a lot of things, particularly Laurie's murals and how we use/arrange the frames. But the basic idea of drawings on the walls, six large figurative sculptures, frames that divide the spaces and "furniture" remain constant.