Sunday, July 21, 2013

invention, decay, reinvention

I recently finished reading Out of the Fiery Furnace: the Impact of Metals on the History of Mankind, by Robert Raymond. The book was published in 1984 as a kind of companion to a documentary television series of the same name, which was also written and produced by Raymond, I believe for an Australian public television network.

The book is about as big as a textbook or a coffee-table book, and it’s 260 pages long. It pretty much succeeds at its ambitious plan of giving a brief history of metallurgy and its impact on human civilization, from the Chalcolithic Age, which started around 6000 BC, up to the time of the book’s publishing. While being – at least for a naïve person such as myself, a rather comprehensive book, the book is very accessible.

The writing style is very much like the narration style for a documentary TV series. But the structure of the book is also like that of a TV show. There is a definite through line, at least within each chapter, which does read like a TV episode. But the through line might often hop from subject to subject, time period to time period, or location to location, all with the blithe easiness of the short-attention-span format of a TV show.

The main plan of the book follows the movement of civilization out of the Stone Age and into the Chalcolithic, or Copper-Stone Age, into the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages. The book then follows civilization into the Dark Ages, then traces its beginning movements out of the Dark Ages, into the Renaissance and into the Industrial Revolution. The book finishes with some discussion regarding man’s apparent movement into the Nuclear Age, which is treated, it seems to me, with a little bit of suspicion.

The first theme that interested and surprised me was the length of time during which Asia and Europe, or at least Asia and the Mediterranean, have been in contact with each other. It seems to me like nowadays, with all our talk of emerging markets, especially our talk of countries like China being emerging markets, we as Americans have an almost romantic perception of our contact with Asia, South America, and Africa as being something new. But the different civilizations of the world have been in touch with each other for a long time.

If anything, what’s interesting is the notion that this might not have been very well known, at least by European and American nations, until the archaeologists began, in the 1960s and 1970s, finding clues of old trade routes with Asian civilizations and Mediterranean societies. From what I understand, Raymond even seems to argue that the birth of the Bronze Age occurred in the Mediterranean (then spreading into Western Europe) because of the contact the Mediterranean civilizations had with the Mediterranean civilizations through the trade routes which came by boat from Asia to Persia and then spread westward on land from Persia.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. But Raymond argues that in the Mediterranean there wasn’t an abundant enough supply of tin for the civilizations to create bronze on the scale in which it has been found in Bronze Age archaeological sites. Raymond believes that the abundant tin also had to be easily recoverable, i.e. to come from alluvial, or river, deposits. But Raymond does not believe there is any evidence for alluvial bronze in the Mediterranean areas which were the seat of the Bronze Age.

Raymond instead argues, based on archaeological discoveries that were new at the time of his writing (and which may, for all I know, now be either old hat or completely disproven – or still new in a sense!), that there was plenty of tin in China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Raymond proposes that the archaeological evidence indicates that as early as 3000 BC, the alloy of bronze was being made from copper and tin in Northern Thailand. It also indicates that in China, an area known as Ban Chiang became a rather developed center of a Bronze Age civilization in 2000 BC. It is argued that the Asian techniques of creating bronze were passed along, through trade routes, to Cyprus, which was, in the West, the seat of Bronze Age civilization.

A theme of Out of the Fiery Furnace that seems similar to this one points out the fact that the Asian civilizations not only were in contact with at least the Mediterranean civilizations, but that they also were leading innovators and technicians in their own right. When it came to the making of metals, the Asian civilizations were, Raymond argues, in possession of incredible alloying technologies. Not only did they, seemingly, invent the alloy of bronze, but they also routinely performed alloying of various metals, including metals the alloying of which was not common practice in the Western world until relatively recent times.

The Asian civilizations also introduced certain innovations in the processes of smelting metals, or heating the metals in order to separate them in their purity from the ores. These innovations included the invention of the horizontal bellows and the double-acting box bellows.

The bellows are what blow air over fire, to increase the amount of air which is fueling the fire, thus increasing the heat of the fire. Bellows were often impeded in the past by gravity. People working the bellows would have to push the bellows up and down to work them. But the Chinese metal-makers came up with the idea of horizontal bellows, hung from a rod, so that the bellows were works by a back-and-forth motion, free of gravity, rather than an up-and-down motion.

To this innovation was added the concept of the double-acting box bellows, which, instead of providing air to the fire on one of the directions of pushing and pulling the bellows, provided air on both the push and the pull. This continuous provision of air to the fire made it much easier to raise the fire to a certain temperature and keep it there.

Raymond also notes the Chinese for their skill in casting iron. In particular, the bronze works from Xi’an during the Shang dynasty are noted. Some of these works weigh almost a ton, but they were cast in one piece. Raymond notes that the technology for this kind of casting required an almost industrial-scale technology. And, indeed, Raymond points out, traces of this industrial technology were found in recent times by archaeologists.

In addition to casting, however, the Asian civilizations developed a skill in assembly of cast parts, often creating interlocking iron pieces for weapons, such as arrows. The casting and interlocking of parts was different from the techniques of the Near East civilizations of the Bronze and Iron Ages, which often conducted their metal-smithing through hammering, like the ancient flint-knappers of the Stone Age.

The first part of this book also seems to be largely concerned with the decay, decline, and disappearance of civilizations. As a person who used to work in the Park Service, I know that the mystery of a disappearance of a civilization is one of the biggest and most popular mysteries of history. And Raymond speculates over the decline and disappearance of many civilizations in the first part of his book. It’s not really a wonder. The book is 260 pages long. In the first 100 pages, Raymond covers roughly 7,500 years of history. In the last 160 pages, he covers roughly 500 years. There is obviously going to be a decent amount of discussion of decaying civilization packed into a 100-page discussion of 7,500 years of society.

Some of the stories are pretty straightforward. The discussion of the vanished society of Catal Huyuk, which seemed to usher in the Chalcolithic Age in about 6000 BC, is a standard mystery story like the other mystery stories of the vanished societies of time. I don’t remember much discussion of the Anatolian civilization, that of the Timna Valley in the Sinai Peninsula.

The Cypriot, Hittite, and Western European Civilizations were said to have been invaded by what the archaeologists of Raymond’s time called the “sea peoples,” which were assumed to have been peoples from the Balkan regions, in about 1200 BC. This invasion disrupted the supply of tin from Asia and, from what I can tell, dispersed the Hittite civilization, destroyed the Cypriot civilization, and set the newly sprouting Bronze Age of Western Europe back into the Stone Age. But it also ushered in the Iron Age.

The Greek civilization, the first paragon of the Iron Age, was at least partly said to have declined as a result of the tapping out of its mines. The Greeks had many mines in Attica, most famously the Laurion mine. But the mines eventually became unproductive, and as they did, the Greek civilization decayed.

Raymond also connects the story of the Roman empire to mining, most notably the Tartessian or Rio Tinto mine in Spain. Though the fate of Rome wasn’t tied to the fate of this mine, Raymond notes how, as Roman society decayed, the Romans were forced to abandone the mine.

Raymond traces the decline of Roman civilization to an “implosion of mediocrity” in what was really the first technological empire of the world. As Roman civilization decayed, the empire saw increased inflation and decreased economic fortune. As a result, Roman currency declined and Roman society became fragmented. Due to this fragmentation, other forces, such as the Visigoths, were able to invade the Roman empire and take power over its territories. The Visigoths took over Spain, thus cutting Rome off from its valuable Rio Tinto mine. But, as Roman civilization declined, the invading forces did not take up mining on the scale of the Romans. Mines such as the Rio Tinto were abandoned for centuries.

The “decline” of China, if there was one, seems to have been concurrent with the decline of Roman civilization – during the Han dynasty, around 200 AD. Raymond again cites complacency as a cause for the decline of China’s civilization. But, instead of showing China to be a fragmented civilization, he seems to show it as an overly centralized and isolated civilization that saw itself as its own little universe, sort of complete and perfect as it was, with no room for growth or change. Raymond seems to argue that this complacency led to a stagnation of and decline of civilization.

Another interesting theme of the book is how the discovery of metal-making techniques came about. I see four different factors for discovery: accident, non-productive curiosity, distribution of information, and necessity. The birth of the Copper Age seems to have come as a result of both accident and non-productive curiosity.

The recovery of metals, or their separation from ores into a more pure and workable form, is usually achieved through smelting. Smelting is a process which requires three things: the ore, a sufficient amount of heat to melt and separate the metal from the rest of the ore, and a “reductive” atmosphere, which allows the metal to form back into a body separate from the rest of the ore. Copper, in fact, requires a heat of 1084 degrees Celsius. The reductive atmosphere would be an atmosphere of combined oxygen and carbon.

Copper may previously have been worked in its “native,” or found, state, i.e. when there were open deposits of copper big enough to have been worked, for purposes of adornment, such as jewelry. However, there was no way to get enough copper to make it more practical to use for everyday purposes, such as tools, than stone already was. Yet, because of its beauty as an adornment, Raymond argues, copper became highly value to pre-Copper Age civilizations.

Raymond says that toward the end of the Chalcolithic Age, when pottery had developed into a process using kilns, there was finally a vessel and process capable of creating enough heat – as well as a reductive atmosphere (of air and wood-smoke, or carbon) – to allow for the smelting of copper. Copper ores were used as pigments on Chalcolithic pottery, and so they would occasionally, instead of sticking to the vase, turn into splotches, the copper of which would separate and drip onto the floor of the kiln.

The Chalcolithic potters, Raymond says, became curious as to this effect and eventually learned how to duplicate it. They eventually produced copper in enough supply, Raymond seems to argue, that copper became preferred over stone for the making of some daily objects. And thus the Copper Age was born.

The birth of the Bronze Age seems to have been largely a result of the distribution of information, at least in the Western World. As far as I can tell, the birth of the Bronze Age in the East wasn’t discussed to deeply by Raymond.

The birth of the Iron Age was also partly due to the distribution of information – from the Hittites, who held their power over the civilizations they invaded as a result of their iron-making techniques, and who would not share their iron-making techniques until the “sea peoples” invaded them and everybody else in the Near East, causing both their civilization and their technical knowledge to be distributed throughout the Mediterranean.

But the Iron Age also came about as a result of necessity. When the “sea peoples” invaded the Near East in 1200 BC, they cut off trade routes with Persia (I think) and thus with Asia. The tin supply which was necessary for the creation of Bronze was cut off. Bronze was cheaper to make, stronger, and more flexible than iron, or at least iron made by non-Hittite techniques. But Bronze was no longer in supply. So iron had to be used.

So the Mediterranean civlizations began to improve their iron-making processes. The original process of making iron consisted of heating the ore to 1573 degrees Celsius. This created a sort of slag known as bloom iron. Bloom iron was then hammered, or “wrought,” into a shape.

Iron-making technique developed when people began to hammer the iron at a certain temperature. The iron was first heated to 1200 degrees Celsius. It was then hammered, while never being allowed to drop below 800 degrees Celsius, and while also keeping the iron in contact with white-hot charcoal. The charcoal added carbon to the iron, which “steeled” the iron. This high-temperature hammering created iron that was twice as strong as cold-wrought bronze.

The iron was then subjected to a third technique, called “tempering.” In this phase, the iron was quenched in cold water, which added strength, but caused the iron to lose some of its flexibility. The iron was then, however, reheated to 700 degrees Celsius. This made some of the carbon, which caused the loss of flexibility, to evaporate from the surface of the iron. The pure iron of the surface created a kind of jacket of flexibility around the iron. This created a form of iron that was superior to bronze in both strength and flexibility, and allowed the growth of the Iron Age.

As far as I can tell, no further developments seemed necessary in the production of iron until about 1550 AD, when parts of Europe, in particular Britain, underwent what can be thought of as an energy crisis. As populations grew, agriculture increased, and the industries of iron production, ship-making, and glass-making burgeoned, Europe’s forests were decimated. In 1588,  Britain imposed a duty against anybody who would use timber as fuel for the production of iron. Not only was fuel becoming scarce, it was also being taxed, making the production of iron more and more expensive all the time.

The fuel for the production of iron was charcoal, or charred wood. The wood was charred until most of the carbon had left it. This made a fuel that could burn efficiently, creating a very hot flame, as well as not tainting iron too much with carbon and sulfur. But now charcoal had to be abandoned, for cost reasons, by iron-makers. Iron-makers began substituting coal for charcoal. But coal had a high carbon content and was therefore impractical to use, even though it was much cheaper than charcoal.

However, a man named Abraham Darby, who had chiefly been involved in the brass business, took a cue from the beer brewing business. The beer brewers, who had learned long ago that the impurities of coal, both carbon and sulfur, destroyed the taste of their beer, but could not use wood for their malting process, began to burn the impurities out of coal, the same way they had been burnt out of wood. This charred coal created by the brewers was called coke. In 1709, Darby began to use coke to make his iron, and he created such good iron so cheaply that iron mining was greatly increased.

In 1856, Henry Bessemer improved one type of iron-making process to make it the foremost of all iron-making processes. This process was called “puddling,” and it created a very pure form of iron known as steel. Since ancient time, steel had been used, first in India, and then in other parts of the world, to create a kind of steel known as “wootz steel,” which made fearsomely sharp swords. However, the puddling process was extremely time- and energy-intensive, and it created only a modest amount of steel.

Bessemer’s innovation was to use the improved bellows technologies of his day to add massive amounts of air to the puddling process. By doing so, Bessemer was able greatly to increase the temperature of the puddles. This made the purification of the iron into steel much quicker and easier than it ever had been. The steel-making puddles were scaled up to previously unheard-of sizes, and steel became a very cheap material. Its strength and flexibility surpassed that of iron. And the use of steel enabled the creation of modern machinery and buildings, such as those we see today.

Another metal was discovered through two different processes. Aluminum had been known of for a long time – some argue since the days of the Romans. But it had such a strong affinity with oxygen that no amount of carbon could cause it to be reduced from its ores. Eventually, in 1809, Humphry Davy posited that the reduction could be achieved through electrolysis, or the usage of electricity. But the use of electricity was only in its infancy, and electrolysis was an impractical way of smelting aluminum.

In 1845, Friederich Wollen created a chemical process for recovering aluminum. He used aluminum chlorate and phosphorous to create a chemical reaction that separated aluminum from its ores. This process was then improved upon by Henri Etienne Saint-Clair Deville in 1854. In 1858 a large supply of ore was noted in the Le Baux area of France. This mass supply of aluminum ore allowed for the commercial production, and perfected chemical techniques, for the production of aluminum.

However, in the 1870s, electrical technologies had developed to the point where the process of electrolysis, first proposed by Sir Humphry Davy in 1809, now became more practical for the recovery of aluminum than the chemical process. The electrical process was perfected by Charles Hall of the United States and Paul Heroult of France.

As well as the production of metals, there were plenty of technologies developed around mining for metals and their ores. Raymond lists three different kinds of difficulties posed for mining: holding up the roofs of mines, keeping the mines lit, and keeping water out of the mines. Despite what I’d assume would be Raymond’s obvious knowledge of the modern travesties of both mine collapses as well as landslides due to strip-mining, Raymond lists the most important historical issue of mines to be water seepage.

The Romans, with their Rio Tinto mine, came up with the first innovation for keeping water out of mines. This was the “noria,” or water-wheel. The norias were actually a kind of relay system of water wheels. These wheels were hand-cranked. A ditched would be formed in one level of the mine. Buckets on the end of the wheel would scoop up water out of the ditch. These buckets would be cranked up the wheel, to a ditch on a higher level of the mine. Another bucket on another wheel would scoop up the water and carry it up higher, until the water was finally dumped outside of the mine.

As the Western world headed into the Dark Ages, mining was neglected, and so the Roman noria technology was not improved upon. But, in the year 800 AD, Charlemagne was crowned the emperor of the Western world by Pope Leo III. Charlemagne, in order to improve the material condition of his empire, re-opened mines.

One major mine was the Rammelsburg mine in the Herz mountaints. This mine was opened in 938. The mine continued production and went deeper and deeper, until the year 1250, when there was so much difficulty with water seepage that the mine had to be shut. The mine reopened, however, in 1370, when the hand-cranked water wheel was improved upon. A treadmill was added to the water-wheel. The wheel was no longer hand-cranked, but powered by the continued walking and pushing motion of men. This allowed for more, and more continuous power.

In 1486, the water-wheel technology was again improved upon when dams, tunnels and waterways were used to create a source of power more powerful and continuous than that of living muscle to power the waterwheels. As a result of this, mines went deeper and deeper.

However, as a result of increased demand for coal after Abraham Darby’s innovation of coking iron in 1709, mines were now being driven so deep that even the water-powered water-wheels were no longer effective enough.

This inspired Thomas Newcome in 1712 to create his pumping engine. The engine was based on the idea that steam, when condensed, creates a partial vacuum, which allows the much heavier air outside this vacuum, to exert a considerable pushing force on the vacuum. Newcome translated these ideas to a piston-and-pump system, which allowed for the pumping of water out of mines to occur with even greater force.

James Watt noted the inefficiencies in Thomas Newcome’s system and created a more efficient engine based on the idea of steam and the partial vacuum. This idea developed into the steam engine. In 1797 Richard Trevithick developed the steam engine which he would then use on his steam-carriage, the predecessor to the locomotive, in 1801.

Raymond discusses other mining technologies, including technologies from Australia, which, after the American gold rush of 1849, had a gold rush of its own, and soon became the developer of the greatest mining technologies in the world. Raymond also discusses some of the modern technologies for mining, which include the usage of immense machinery.

The last theme which really strikes me is the usage of metals. For much of man’s history in the Ages of Metals, it seems to me, man has seen the metals as being of use in four ways: adornment, currency, implements, and containers. Raymond points out that the development of man into a metal-worker would possibly not have occurred, or would not have occurred as quickly as it had, had it not been for the beauty of metals as adornments. Even to this day, the precious metals are sought after by man for jewelry.

The history of man also illustrates how man has used metals – mostly, it seems to me, from my understanding of Raymond, silver – as currency. The ancient Greek mines were largely silver mines. The Romans mined for silver in the Rio Tinto mines, until Roman currency was so debased that the Romans could no longer purchase copper from other places and also had to begin exploiting the Rio Tinto mine for copper as well as silver. The Rio Tinto mine was re-opened by Spain in the 16th century by Phillip the II in order to harvest more silver, to fund the nation’s expansion. And the gold rush was what it was, in both the United States and Australia, because gold was currency. Gold then funded the growth of America into the industrial giant it is today.

The use of metals in a practical sense is, I think, divisible into two types: implements (tools, utensils, etc.) and containers. I think the same could be said of stone and pottery. While weaving could also be thought of as of use for implements and containers, I think it also has the character of being an insulator.

Contrasted, however, with insulation, metal can also be seen as a conductor. But – I think – it was not until the discovery of electricity that metal was seen as being a conductor. When metal began to be seen as a conductor, man obviously entered a new age. Metal has likely always been seen as a conductor of heat, but probably mostly by accident, and its character as a conductor in cooking was likely only seen as an accident or something ancillary to its character as a container for objects being cooked.

However, with the advent of electricity, metal took on a different character. As an implement or container, metal was an object which acted only as man provided the motive force for its action. But now, as a conductor, metal itself carried, and then provided that motive force. To be sure, that motive force was at first provided by another object – namely a power generator. But the metal itself, not man as a carrier, moved that motive force to its end point, which may have been another agent of motive force, or which may have been an expender of that force, such as a light bulb.

The final development of the metals, I would assume, has come from the Nuclear Age. The metals have abstracted their character as implement into what it really is – namely an agent of motive force, activated. But the metals have gone, as implement, into being motive force itself. And, once this happened, I believe, it became much easier for man to see that motive force, even conduction, was not required to have something we would generally think of as “material” to carry it. Thus we have developed the usage of radio waves and so forth.

As I said before, Out of the Fiery Furnace seems to hover at this end point, the Nuclear Age, with a certain amount of caution. Partly, no doubt, that is because of the massive destruction of which nuclear power is capable. But partly, it may also be because the Nuclear Age has managed to usher in an age in which man is dependent, for the development of his civilization, on something that is not a metal – something which may not even be considered to be very material at all.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

passing through walls

Today I went down to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver for the exhibitions there that are part of the Biennial of the Americas. The Biennial displays the works of artists from countries all across North and South America. The art, which includes works in galleries as well as site-specific installations, is on display all over Denver through September 2nd. There are a number of festivals and events concurrent with the Biennial, including some big parties in Civic Center Park on Thursday and Friday night. I won't be going to the parties. I'm kind of allergic to parties -- i.e. I'm a wimp.

But today the MCA Denver had a special afternoon of tours put on by the artists whose work was on exhibition. There are actually four exhibits put on for the Biennial, but three of the artists were present to give talks: Tatiana Blass, John McEnroe, and Gaspar Libedinsky.

The talks were all co-hosted by Nora Abrams, the Associate Curator for MCA Denver. Abrams is kind of worth mentioning up front. She's a really insightful person, able to explain and clarify the artists' processes and ideas as she saw them while she was working to help get the exhibitions underway. She also has a very warm, friendly style of presentation.

The first talk was by Tatiana Blass, whose exhibit is called Electrical Room. Apparently Blass had been chosen last year to do an installation for this exhibit. She visited the MCA and the room where her installation was going to be. She was amused, however, by a sign on a door that said "Electrical Room." I'm kind of kicking myself right now for not having sought out the door and the sign.

Blass' imagination worked with the fantasy of what was behind the door of the "Electrical Room." When she came back to Denver, she and the people at the MCA Denver went to an electronics recycling place near the museum. There they found all kinds of old televisions, computers, and other electronic devices. Blass built all these electronic devices up into a mound in the promenade-hallway outside the large exhibit space which would be the main room of the installation.

Blass then strung electric cord back from this mound and into the wall. The cord then gave the appearance of running through the wall and into the large exhibiton room. The large exhibition room is filled with the masses of cord -- 14,000 feet of electric cord, in fact. The cord slumps down from the wall and down toward the floor, only to slope and swoop back upward toward the walls and ceiling. The cord connects into electrical outlets -- 500 of them -- along the floor, walls, and ceiling. So this entire large exhibition space is filled with lines, loops, nets, and coils of elerectric cord.

Blass also created a 10-track video of people whose faces would appear on some of the screens in the piles of electronics. The people all speak in Portugese except for one woman who acts as a translator and speaks in English. All the characters have their own personalities. It was actually very charming to watch Blass describe some of these personae: the pragmatic man, the philosopher, and so forth.

Blass' idea seemed to be that our culture has kind of come to inhabit the electronic devices through which we communicate. But there also seems to be an element of miscommunication and confusion in her work. The issue of miscommunication, it seems, is age-old. And it doesn't go away, even when we as people interactiing with other people characterize ourselves through electronic devices.

But the work also gave me a couple other feelings. First, I saw the pile of TVs not only as being inspired, obviously, by Nam June Paik, but also by David Cronenberg's Brian O'Blivion character from Videodrome -- the character you mostly see only in a head-shot on a television screen.

What also struck me was that the room full of cords implied what comes from the back of the electronic device: the cord. This could also be the cable-TV or Internet cord. But I, for some region, also imagined a whole other set of cords expanding from the front of the screen: the TV waves, which would be invisible, impalpable, to a degree, but still there.

The cords in the cord room also reminded me -- surprise, surprise -- of sperm. But the strange thing about these sperm would be that they came out of a womb, the mound of electronics. Instead of many sperm going toward a womb but only one sperm getting in, we have a lot of sperm going out from a womb, each sperm finding its own personal fulfillment in an electrical outlet.

The next person to speak was John McEnroe, whose exhibit was called Beauty Does. McEnroe seemed to be a little unconfident in the title of his exhibit. At one point he said he thought he should have named the exhibit after a compliment a friend had once given him: John McEnroe Thinks with His Hands. At another point he said that he didn't really believe in beauty, that the closest he got to believing in beauty was believing that occasionally human beings can be lucky enough to catch very honest moments in their lives.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a huge, mobile-like sculpture made out of two different kinds of plastics and some various found materials. One kind of plastic is a plastic that is molded through melting: polyvinyl acetate. The other is a kind of resin called, I think, heat-set resin.

The melted plastic had found objects, like rope, plastic construction netting, steel mesh, steel wire, shovel heads, flashlights, and other items, dipped into it. These objects were then hung from the four-story-high ceilings of the atrium, allowing the plastic to drip, usually in long strips or strings, down to the floor. The objects are mostly orange, and the plastic is also orange. The heat-set resin is a neon-yellow, and it was dripped down along polyester strings in such a way that beads of the resin gathered along the strings, giving an appearance of bead-curtain strings. Occasionally there are also some Super Balls, which I imagine having been caught by the melting plastic in mid-bounce.

Another set of works involving resin and rope were two works called White Tie and Black Tie. These works are basically long lengths of rope tangled up and frozen inside of massy rectangles of semi-opaque, milky-yellowish resin. The rectangles of resin provide the sense of a portrait or painting, a conventional work of art. But the tangled up rope spills out from the resin, flopping down and spilling all over the floor.

McEnroe said he kind of had a fixation on the idea of freezing rope. It seemed, he said, like rope is such a symbol of mutability. A rope fulfils a purpose when its linearity is distorted by a knot. The knot makes the rope into something different. But after the rope's task was finished, the rope was straightened back out. It just became linear, just line. I thought this was kind of interesting -- a rope is when it is knot.

It's kind of interesting to note that McEnroe said that his idea of melting plastic also came from this idea of freezing rope. He had dipped some rope in the polyvinyl acetate in order to freeze it. He then hung it up in his studio overnight. He came back to his studio the next day with a friend of his. The friend saw the dripping plastic object and thought it was fantastic. This inspired McEnroe to make more melted plastic sculptures.

What's also interesting to me is that McEnroe had stories about the rope in Black Tie and White Tie. The Black Tie rope came from the backstage area of the old stage at the old Elitch's amusement park. This was fascinating to me. The old Elitch's has so many childhood memories for me. And it symbloizes the old Denver for me. I prefer the new, and changing, Denver. But I'll always love the old Denver.

The final artist to speak was Gaspar Libedinsky, whose exhibit was called Productos Caseros, or Household Products. The exhibit is of two videos, both based on the Caseros prison in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The prison was originally intended to be an interim prison, for prisoners caught for minor offences or awaiting trial. Prisoners weren't meant to stay there for more than a few months. And it was built only a couple kilometers from the center of town, so the prisoners could be close to their families and the courthouse.

But, for some reason, the prison started holding prisoners for more serious offences and for longer periods of time. The prison reached a critical mass of prisoners. These prisoners all decided to riot. They took the fire extinguishers and began to pound away at the thin, brittle walls of the prisons, busting holes in the prison walls. They would use these holes to travel between floors, even to escape the prison -- though they would always return to the prison -- often after having committed fresh crimes. This was all happening close to the center of the city. But, strangely, the people in the city weren't talking about it.

Eventually a crime ended in the deaths of two "escaped" prisoners, and the government decided to shut down the Caseros prison. In 2006, about 20 years after the prison was closed, it was demolished. But before the prison was demolished, Libedinsky went to the prison and filmed a sort of reenactment of the making of a hole in the wall. He then used footage of the hole in the wall as part of short video vignettes.

One of the videos in the exhibit is the video of the hole in the wall being created. The video is in split screen, showing the view from inside the building and the view from outside the building. The video is projected low to the floor. This emphasizes the fact that the holes in the prison walls were made close to the floors. It gives the sense of this view being a part of our own reality.

The strange thing, though, is that the split screen also shows the outside view, which is, if I remember Libedinsky correctly, from six stories up in the air. Compound that with the fact that this video is being projected in the basement of the MCA Denver, below ground, and it creates a strange sense of vertigo.

The other video is one of the vignettes. It's called Cuckoo. It is projected onto a foot-tall, wooden structure in the shape of a birdhouse or cuckoo clock. The story begins with the hole in the wall being created. Then a woman, a wife in a family, dumps some "garbage" (really, Styrofoam peanuts) out the window. The husband of the family then steps up and jumps out the window, like he is planning to jump to his death. But he hangs onto the window ledge for a moment, then pulls himself back up in through the window. The wife comes back out, beats the dust off a carpet, then pulls the blinds on the window.

The fourth exhibit was also really terrific -- Diarios, by Guillermo Kuitca. But I am all out of steam tonight. I'm definitely planning to head back to see the exhibit again sometime. So after I do, perhaps I'll spend some time discussing it.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

moody maps of textural disruption

Today I went to the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, one of the biggest art festivals in Colorado, with artists from all over the United States showing their work. Cherry Creek is a nice, fashionable neighborhood just outside of Downtown Denver, and the festival is something of a yearly tradition for families, as well as buyers. The show is a few blocks long, and there are hundreds of artists at the show, so it's not really possible to see everything. I take the approach of walking along the middle of the street, browsing through the booths from a distance, then heading into a booth that I think is interesting.

The first booth I stopped into displayed the works of Brianna Martray, a sculptor who works in Colorado. Her works are made of cast bronze and resin clay. All of her works have an undersea feeling; in fact, what caught my eye was a lovely set of resin clay, mobile-like sculptures of jellyfish. The cast bronze sculptures are generally spindly, with a patina of blue caked all over them. They do have an undersea appearance, but they also look a bit like the dry stalks of dormant vegetation in the fall.

The resin clay works are totally different. They're much thicker, and often the clay is folded or looped, then stacked in piles. These piles can often be quite dense. The centerpiece of the works was a huge stalk, from which emerged a thick, pointy flower. Other than some dangly threads reminiscent of the jellyfish stingers, the flower was unique among the works. It was solid, figurative, rather than being like dangly stalks or stacks of loops and folds.

I then took a look at the work of Marie Gruber. The work was mostly black and white photographs set against metallic plates. Some of the plates were brushed a bit, to give swashes of black shadow against the silvery sheen. This often evoked a sense of the framing of the plates continuing the atmosphere of the subjects photographed. If the scene was of trees, the black brushings seemed like tree bark. If the scene was of desert rock, the black brushings felt like rock striations. If the scene was of a bridge in the fog, the brushings were like shadows in the fog.

Near Marie Gruber's works were the works of another interesting artist. I didn't get his name, unfortunately. But he had works with luminous sikver backgrounds, against which were painted, in some works, orange and blue koi, and in other works, herds of deer. Some of the works were done on circular canvases, others on more standard rectangular canvases. The glittering paintings of the koi were all very beautiful. But for some reason, I really loved the paintings of the deer.

Another kind of interesting body of work was done by a man named Michael Schwegman. Most of Schwegman's works were works of ceramic made to look like metallic machinery, tools, chains, and so forth. It looks just as heavy and sturdy as the real thing. But it's obviously delicate: there were caution signs all over the place.

But what I liked a bit more than these works were the works that had a little something more involved artistically. For instance, one piece looked like a piece of machinery with three tubes sticking out of the top. But toward the base, the glaze becomes thick and red. Then, from within the red glaze, the image of a tan silhouette of a tree emerges. That's very nice.

I spent a bit of time at the booth of Barbara Bouman Jay, a painter who works in California. Her works are kind of minimalist, with one color often dominating an entire field of canvas, spread over with wisps of another color. My favorite work of hers was called "Celebration." It was twelve separate canvases, three rows of four. Some of the canvases were pink; others were black. Across the canvases ran black squiggles of paint. Then, at the edges of the canvas, there were tan blocks that looked like book pages with scientific diagrams on them. These diagrams seemed to be the nexus points for the squiggles running across the canvases.

Another set of works by Bouman Jay that were interesting were called the "Road Map Series." These were generally fields of color painted over maps, with printed letters stuck or painted over the fields of color. Two very big paintings in the series were very interesting. The fields of color were a thick tan, almost like old vellum pages. But they had deep, diagonal slashes running across them.

Bouman Jay said she liked using the maps because the letters and lines on the maps added something very interesting texturally. But she had to be careful not to let the letters and lines guide her literally or figuratively in her painting.

I told Bouman Jay I thought that was interesting, as her "Celebration" painting had those nexus points that almost looked like coordinate fields straight out of a page of a science book. Bouman Jay said that that kind of made sense. She said that her last set of works was called "Throwing Stars," and was based on some images of black holes she'd seen in a science book of her son's. She said, "My son had lost the book, then we paid for it, then we found it again, but we couldn't give it back. So I figured I'd at least make some use out of it. So I took it to my studio with me. I don't know anything about science or stars. But the images really inspired me."

I told Bouman Jay that that side of her work really reminded me of the work of Dorothy Dehner I'd recently seen at the Denver Art Museum. Bouman Jay told me she'd really wanted to go see that exhibit while she was in town, but that she'd missed it to do something else. She then told me about the Rothko chapel in Houston, which sounds like a really incredible place. She also told me about the Cy Twombly Museum, which is either in Fort Worth or Houston. A Cy Twombly museum seems like an awesome concept.

I then took a look at the works of a couple named Signe and Genna Grushovenko. These works have an interesting style I don't think I've ever seen before. The canvas first seems to be painted with swirls, stripes, or splotches of bright color. Then, in front of the color, there are figures painted. But the figures aren't painted whole. Sections of their bodies, often where one might expect to see areas of contrast, maybe shadow, maybe light, there are holes, nothing, negative space, where the bright swirls of color pour through.

This seems to be a variation on the idea of distorted imagery, kind of along the reverse lines of Eduardo Sarabia, whose recent paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver were of clean, sharp, photo-style paintings disrupted by clean, sharp, photo-style images of Liechtenstein-thick daubs and blobs of paint. In Sarabia, the figurative image is disrupted. In the Grushovenkos' work, the figurative image seems to be disrupted. Or maybe the figurative and non-figurative are cooperatively disrupting each other.

Mental masturbation!

The images themselves are lovely: many in a 1950s style, of pretty girls showing off their bikini bottoms, or of guys standing with girls before nice cars. There are also neat images of carnival rides, and one grid of faces, like a page of yearbook photos -- except that the faces are hardly there! It's mostly just the swirls of color.

I listened to Genna tell a prospective buyer that she and Signe kind of tag team their paintings. Signe paints the swirls of color. Then Genna draws a pastel outline of a scene onto the background. She then paints in the various fragments of the scene with oil paints.

Just down the way from the Grushovenkos was a booth of paintings by Michel Delgado, a Senegalese painter who now lives in Key West, Florida. His paintings mix thick layers of paint, often very dark, with scratchy, scrawly figures and nets of spilled or spattered paint. The paintings often have main subjects in the foreground: hyenas or wolves, clown-like devils, human men and women, and skeletons. But the backgrounds show phantoms of scrawly people, demons, buildings, and mathematical figures. A lot of times the scenes are also interrupted by pink and white polka dots, or orange, yellow, and black tongues of flame, like a rain of fire. There are also occasionally patches of other things affixed to the paintings, such as trays of papier-mâché skeletons, or old bottlecaps.

I stopped in the booth of pottery by Michigan artist Brian Beam. Beam's pottery is really interesting. It has a tan-yellow-green and deep green color scheme glazing red clay. But the yellow-green and green run over each other in a really lovely and organic, mottled fashion. And there are little stipples of red running up the sides of some of the vases and pots. There are also some vases that are done in a really unique style, bent in toward their centers and curled around toward their edges, so that, even while their color scheme resembles a plant's stalk, their shape resembles something like a calla lily. There are also some neat plates with bases coated in a cracked, white glaze that looks vaguely like spirals formed by the cracks in mud on a dry river bed.

Brian Beam wasn't there, but a friend of his who had come from Fulton, Michigan, with him was. I asked her hkw Beam had managed to get the red stippling effect in the yellow and green pottery. The woman told me that Beam uses a specific kind of wood ash as a glaze. The wood ash has a tendency to separate away from the clay during firing, like oil separates from water. That creates openings in the glaze, where the clay becomes visible. Hence the effect of the red stippling.

I told the woman that I'd never heard of that before. The woman said that not a lot of people were familiar with that effect. I asked the woman if people were still learning about the effects of certain glazes. She said, "Oh, yeah. A lot of people don't use wood ash glazes, anyway, just because of the fact that they're unpredictable. They're kind of finicky."

I walked a little farther and saw an image on the side of a booth I really liked. It was a pink stove. The pink obviously seemed to be painted onto the image of the stove. But the overall image was under glass, it seemed, like a photograph. The image was done by Dana Shavin, a woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Shavin's images seem to combine photos, painting, squares of acetate color, text, and other elements, often in a superimposed and collage-like style. The superimposed style reminds me of some of the works I saw by Sabin Aell at the McNichols Civic Center Building a few months ago.

Some of the works use very artificial settings, like the painted stoves, some pink, some yellow and blue; or old-fashioned, plastic dolls; or old typewriters. But some of the other scenes are more rustic, like scenes of dogs on a lawn or white horses, or houses in a rural area, or an old, decaying swimming pool. I particularly liked the image if the plastic doll, over which are superimposed images of a knife, fork, and spoon. Shavin leeringly told me this image was called "Solid Food." Double entendre, tongue in cheek, you are what you eat.

I told Shavin that her work made me want to go to Tennessee. It seems like there is such an interesting art and music scene. Shavin agreed, and said that Chattanooga was doing a lot to promote the arts, as one way of keeping the young people in town, as well as drawing more young people into the town. Shavin said that, as well as her, three other artist from Chattanooga were present at the festival, including her husband, who, by some strange twist of fate, was set on the opposite side of the festival from Dana!

I pointed out one work I really liked, of a photo of a house splotched over with deep red paint and with deep blue paint in the background. The house is surrounded by tangled canopies of dead trees, making the deep blue of the sky look even deeper. Shavin said this painting was a favorite of hers because she really loved the house. It was in some quiet, rural part of Georgia. Shavin said she wanted to live in the house when she saw it. But the house was way too run-down for anybody to live in.

I kind of tried to express to Shavin what I thought of her style. But I stuttered and fell silent. Shavin told me she saw her style as being moody. She said that if she had one kind of mood in her overall style it was probably pensive. But, she said, some of her work, like the work with the typewriters, was more cerebral.

There was a booth of interesting quilts by Taos artist Terrie Hancock Mangat. A lot of the quilts are done in a strip-like fashion that kind of reminded me, I think, of the work of Lucas Samaras. Some of the quilts then employ flower or tree imagery in their foreground, sometimes with an emphasis on the roots of the vegetation, other times with an emphasis on the flowering of the vegetation, and other times with an emphasis on the rain that falls on the vegetation -- this rain often signified by tiny, shiny, cylindrical beads.

One interesting thing to me was that entangled in the roots of the vegetation are often little, circular patches of imagery. Sometimes the imagery is abstract, sometimes mundane, and sometimes religious. It seemed to me like these patches were like the destiny of the world, lying dormant in the soil, tangled in the roots of the vegetation, which, it seems, carry the destiny of the vegetation.

The religious imagery struck me because there are some other quilts devoted to Buddha and the Virgin Mary. There are also some small quilts with stacks of these little circular patches called "Cairns," named after the stone trail markers one often finds in the woods.

I asked Mangat about the circular patches. She said she thought of them as stones. She said that she had found a lot of her previous work had used sticks and twigs as imagery. She soon realized that this was because, as a Taoseño, she did a lot of hiking and saw a lot of twigs on the trails. Now she was noticing stones, and even cairns, and now those things are becoming a part of her work. Mangat said that the cairn quilts were made especially for the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, since she knew Denverites were avid hikers like she was.

I told Mangat it struck me that the stones in the roots seemed to have a mystical meaning, or an indication of destiny. I said that the cairns, using that imagery, and compounding it with the quilts of the Buddha, seemed to be like a map of the chakras. Mangat liked that idea a lot. She said that, after all, cairns themselves did seem to be mystical things. She asked me if I couldn't feel that as I saw them while out hiking. I agreed that I could.

Another booth I liked was by Virginian artist Benjamin Frey. He also paints over pages of text, what he calles "found pages," I believe. He paints backgrounds of blue and tan, usually to denote land or sea and sky. Then, I think, in charcoal, he sketches out little vignettes. The vignettes are often carnivalesque. Locomotives, elephants, jugglers, acrobats, unicyclists, carousels, and twirling swing rides. The texts are often about geometry or physics or engineering, and they kind of match the motion or the overall subject of the vignette in the foreground.

Another artist that uses pages of texts is Denver artist Stacey Schultz. She uses the maps motif, like Barbara Bouman Jay. But her maps are almost gelled over with this sweet-sour-looking glass in vivid blues, oranges, and yellows. The glass has concentric circle designs spotting it. Usually in the centers of these concentric designs are clear circles giving a plain view of the maps beneath.

I was interested to listen to a conversation Schultz was having with an engineer about the similarities between art and engineering. The more I learn about engineering, the more I think of it as a very creative pursuit. I think it's kind of sad, though. People hear about engineering in school, and they just think it's something really boring. But you can be really creative as an engineer. I think if more American kids got a better picture of what being an engineer was all about, they'd want to be engineers. And America is going to need a lot of engineers if we are going to bring industry back to America and forward into a twenty-first century of environmental ethics.

There were a few other interesting booths I visited. And I still wanted to talk about all the great outfits I saw all the people wearing! But, like I always seem to do, I've gobbled up all my time already.