Putto 2x2x4, notes

kemper museum

Kansas City, Missouri

 

Putt 2x2x4 continues my investigation into aberrant life forms, their animation, and their subsequent reification as a sculptural object from a single animation frame.

 

These animation sculptures function on several levels, i believe simultaneously. Although they have a seamless, almost classical feel they are an amalgam of thoughts and ideas.

 

After years of working, it became clear there were few people who had access to my work. It was difficult to explain, my ambitions for projects long and tortuous, my descriptions difficult to follow. So I decided it was necessary to experiment with forms that were more accessible. Something that could be swallowed without a doubt and only after that could cause indigestion. Its a way of tricking the casual viewer into involvement. Its a primal lure of sorts.

 

Sometimes I consider these pieces as if they are the chi of a single person.(the flow of energy in each of us)  It is as if the chi (that energy could be captured and used to touch one another in ways that are personal) could be manifest as a separate entity and that entity express in mood and movement the complex contradictions of that amalgam.  This is the energy that fills each of our days, the connection between us. the connections to our selves. And it does so without head, rather in a sort of kinesthetic state, by touch. According to the architect Louis Kahn, touch was the first sense.

 

In this sense, these pieces regress. They head back to a moment in recapitulation creating the possibility of another route in evolution. the acephalous one, the one where the brain is not allowed to become the pathological organ.  These works regress bakc to a place where our emotions are in contol, without head. This is about feelings emotions and dreams. This is the world of our innner psychic lives, the place from which we care about things.

 

They are scratched up out of nothing, bits of on and off, light and switch with some algorithm in between. They are nothing they purport to be, just light projected in patterns, noise, that our minds make into pictures.  And yet it is an incredibly disciplined form of energy. It takes months, up to a year,  to make them, to coax them into form and movement. In the case of 2x2x4, almost two years.

 

The use of animation is particularly important to this process. Through the movement of the sculpture the work is able to capture the your imagination. It becomes a kind of primal lure, triggering our old hunting eyes, keen ones that can spot tiny movements at the periphery of our vision, focus on that movement, aim and shoot.  In this sense the animation taps into older parts of the brain, a brain stem stimulator.

 

The use of baby legs within the sculpture captures another kind of primal impulse within each of us. It is loaded up with care and nurture issues, with innocence, and the way we might watch a child struggle with his or her first steps. We are drawn in, even if immediately repulsed, into caring for this aberration; or at least being interested; or at worst, like passing a car wreck on the highway, we cannot help but watch.

 

Using baby legs and naming the series "Putto" triggers a higher brain function, an intellectual, art historical reference. It harkens back to baroque sculpture and to its complex layering. In these works the layering is intellectual rather than physical and yet the profusion of similar appendages sometimes lends itself to a formal perception; vision that needs to be interpreted and weeded out by higher parts of the brain.

 

This piece embodies a powerful attraction repulsion scenario. They are hard to love and difficult to hate. They draw you in and yet you think "yuck".  In this sense they are about the moral ambiguity of synthetic life. They investigate the feeling that something so awful could exist through the manipulation of genetic code and the whimsy of the military scientific complex.  Yet as it exists, you follow its every dodge and weave its duck and wiggle. You are placed into the role of the empiricist, watching detached as the creature begins its feelings and flaiings about. You arer fascinated. what next? How will it move? Its funny, no its serious. You may want to have one, or to make one for yourself, your headless pet, imbued with your constructs and contradictions.

 

And how could I not engage Hollywood? After the BitStreams exhibit at the Whitney one of the critics wrote that artists should leave technology and by extension its subjects to hollywood. I do not agree. I wanted to investigate this territory after a lifetime of watching hollywood trigger our id. I wanted to make my monster, my id, my golem. A protector, a destroyer, something made of pure will: something acephalous. I have always been fascinated by that which could have no head.

 

The golem, my golem. That's always a good one. Along with Frankenstein, and artificial life. There's no mad scientist here, they're all working on real projects, just an observation, a kind of dark warning about creating and recreating life. Remember Kudzu!

 

There is also something spiritual about these pieces. i've mentioned the chi scratched up from nothing, a kind of ritualized energy abstracted from me and made external. But its also about a multiple consciousness, a place in our own minds where we are not sure who's talking and to whom. A place where multiple energies occupy the same spatial environment, struggling with and against one another. Entities pulled up from other entities, fingers acting like legs not hands. Mistaken identities, but forward progress none the less. This place is not insanity, maybe as simple as disorganized thoughts and then clear voices, gifts sometimes.

 

And surely they are psychological, monster from the id, or externalization of some bureaucratic state. (I've had stockbrockers tell me "Thats my life, thats my day!" ) But its a physical psychology, all hands and feet, no mind to complicate it. We add the head, we make the judgement.

 

And yet its light. flickering on and off, organized into complex patterns. noise to some, highly charged subjective psychological event to others. culture, nature, ambiguity. Nature's over, or its just beginning. Man the author of himself, Her own creator. Aberrant nature, the observation that the world is lacking, we desperately need to complete it. Add to it change it. charge it with our own presence, kilroy was here. for love money or attention.