Notes
Michael Rees
November 1998

Probably, at the root of most of my endeavor are two things: the attempt to understand things that confuse me and a sense of ecstasy about life and by extension the problems of sculpture. The natures of these things are multifold. It is not a simple matter.

Out of this confusion, out of my own personal experience, themes begin to emerge, areas that are more interesting than others. I develop and rehearse the confusion. I become its connoisseur. It also becomes clearer that one’s relationship to ambiguity is an important factor. A strong belief system can make the most annoying ambiguity pass away. But it seems that not giving into a strong belief system yields more interesting results.

For Example, as one considers death, it is inevitable. After that, there is as little evidence that it is the ultimate end of a person (and all that “person” implies) as there is that we will all live happily in a resurrected or a reincarnated future. Truly, we don’t even need to know, we continue towards the event whether this is in our conscious mind or not. There are so many logical, ethical and psychological traps in any conclusion that one would make about death, that it is hard to know how to proceed with veracity. The stories, no matter how vehemently told never quite resolve the dilemma. We will not be able to verify any of our stories until we are dead. At that point we will have none of our current apparatus to convey them. And our belief in that apparatus makes other evidence dubious. The important thing in this example is that we make up our minds one way or another, we choose.

I don’t want to be so foolish as to ignore natural law. And yet, it is clear to me that natural law is a function of human perception and the conceptual structures it engenders. As these structures change through experiment, scientific revolution, personal epiphany, or some larger collective experience, so do the laws change. Although there seems to be a “real” world out there beyond my senses, a world that seems to operate on a set of natural laws, the laws of which can be exploited by humans towards pragmatic ends, I am not convinced that it is objective. Spirituality is also manipulated towards pragmatic ends, and to its believers, effectively. Both of these poles are created in human perception. But in general, it seems to me that the nature of things is creative, that it is changed in some part by what I think, or some of us think, or all of us think. And it also seems to be true that the human organism is well in advance of what it understands or what machines can do.

It is that creative impulse that I am engaged in. I do not work within the rigors of an objective body of knowledge, such as science, nor offer any of its pragmatic rewards. To be specific, art is also a body of knowledge with testable parameters, but it is significantly less objective. But, more importantly, art doesn’t play in objective surety. Rather we play in confusion, ambiguity. We play in what medieval alchemists called the Albedo state, The silvery mercurial state where one thing can reflect or become another as easily as not. Its a dream state where rocks speak, and mysterious things take place, things that are not easily understood and call out to our sensibilities to try.

Despite my lack of surety in this intuitive environment, this Albedo state, I can’t get over certain feelings, certain perceptions. And I pursue them. This is the stuff of which the work is made. In some sense I try to view them systematically. I go about working on them systematically. In another sense I am aware that every time I go about creating a system, an encapsulation, I can’t make a law from it, a statement that is without exception. Essentially, I live with the fact that these systems are made from my own perceptual structure. This structure is rickety, slippery, and scaleable and that is the nature of my interest in it. More importantly, I can give an image of it, I can give it some form, I can propose it. Epiphany is the feeling of discovering something in the work that is energetic.  It is not an emotional whim. It is the function of art. And that function is ecstatic. I follow epiphany and ecstasy in my work. They are energetic and beget more energy.

My work over the past 4 years has involved computer-aided design (CAD) and rapid prototyping. These processes allow me a new way to realize dense form in my work. This dense form allows more complex content to emerge in the work. I have used this technical opportunity to load the sculptures with content.  I conceive of the work and its content as a palimpsest of sorts. Unlike textual language, the palimpsest has a sculptural quality. In this sense the palimpsest is more of a map, but a dimensional one. There is a point where the map and the phenomena of the territory it wishes to describe are not in perfect registration (isn’t this always so with maps?).

This palimpsest includes multiple sources. They are sculptural, scientific, metaphysical, and whimsical. They include Gerome’s painting of Pygmalion, Berninni’s  “The Ecstasy of St. Therese”, images from palmistry manuals, micro organisms, Shiva Nataraja, Dr. Seuss and the topological construction of the sculptures. And of course each of these has its own palimpsests. The boundaries are slippery and the states of the boundaries are also fluid. “A visual Taxonomy” defines many of these sources and acts as a map for this terrain. At the same time, the sculptures contain the representation of these issues.

To make this clearer, it is perhaps best to start with a detail from “The visual Taxonomy” which is a multi-pointed star. I imagine the work functioning as this kind of star. In the center of the star is the physical work itself while on the periphery are all of the images or locations of the taxonomy. Those images are spheres of influence (more palimpsests) which effect one another and effect the sculpture itself.  Again, I imagine them blending with one another. It is a fluid model, an energetic relational system. Threads, in the form of themes, run through each of the images tying them together. For example, where ecstasy is depicted in several of the images, (The ecstasy of St. Therese, Grey’s Anatomy’s illustration of the division of the cells in conception, Shiva’s dance, etc.,) that ecstasy has been further developed historically within all of the texts, images, and sculptures that surround it.

To give you an example of how this might function within my construction, let me begin with Berninni’s “The ecstasy of St. Therese”, and just what I’m after when I place it within the visual Taxonomy.   As stated, this image is a palimpsest in itself. There are Therese’s original texts, Berninini’s sculpture, Freud’s analyses of Therese’s visions as wish fulfillment, and perhaps a current feminist analyses of Berninini’s “Ecstasy”, in which “The Ecstasy” is a perfect embodiment of the problematic “male gaze”. The content from this particular reference contextualizes a set of issues in the work. For example in several of my sculptures, a uterus has been relocated within the sculptural body to reside in the middle of the forehead. One of the implications of the uterus, particularly in Therese’s own words, is as an apparatus of ecstatic experience. This is where I begin to step back from full disclosure. I’ve set up a certain context, within the field of the visual taxonomy, with images that are fully developed as an historical palimpsest in text, image and form, and suggest that my sculpture contains similar problems.  It would be presumptuous to present this research as a conclusion. At the same time, what a viewer would develop out of the same information might vary. Other qualities might emerge. For sure those images change my work, or how you would see my work. They become its context

At the intellectual center of ecstasy, of Therese’s ecstasy, of Berninni, Freud, of my sculpture is ambiguity. Ultimately, in one way or another one must make up one’s own mind, must choose to relinquish some sense of objectivity either created by science or theology or whatever theory, and choose one’s way out of the ambiguity. Or simply choose not to choose but rather to watch. (Hence, stepping back from full disclosure). Ecstasy in this sense is ambiguous. What one makes of it, or of one’s own ecstatic experience, is a choice of sorts. It can be the strange and wonderful event of the contact of skin upon skin, a genetic seduction to replicate itself, or a great mystery.

At the intuitive center of ecstasy is something else again. In my musings, and this is perhaps the point of the categorical contexts of the sculpture, it is the place where energy becomes form. It is a liminal place, right at the edge of the maintenance or creation of physical structure. It is difficult to describe, for to describe it is to miss it or miss out on it. This liminal arena, where energy becomes form, is so pervasive and enormous, and we use it so deeply within our being, that it is taken for granted. This place is the constant play of sculpture. It is about the gap between our intention for a piece and its realization. It is the ambiguous area fraught with disappointment, expectation, realization, excitement, potential, fear, horror, beauty, and all kinds of other inexplicable things. It is the most energetic moment in the work of art and propels the work into its environment. The strength of this moment will sustain or deny the work of art.

Each one of the 32 images in the taxonomy has, in my imagination, a similar relationship to my work. The territory is expansive and is more along the lines of an essay rather than a treatise. But the root of this crystalline map of mine, the original speck of dust, is ecstasy. The ecstasy of the body as it is in vision, sex, sleep, and death.

Hence we approach with a certain faith, that indeed things can be represented, modeled, or mapped within form. And that an artist has some unusual position in this structure. I have reservations about both of these issues. And yet, this is exactly what I do. It is also my hope that something will emerge in this rehearsal. That something will be seen that was previously forgotten. Or that something will emerge that was perhaps never there. (The debate about emergent qualities considered!) Making sculpture is the process of holding the door open.

All of this is important to me. I wonder and question the veracity of art, its epistemology. It has offered me wonder and awe and epiphany, consistently. And yet I wonder if it is necessary to conduct my concerns, which are metaphysical according to a more scientific model. The embedding space of thoughts about my work is centered in an art historical, metaphysical, and physical presence (the human body). The space is informed by my own experience of these things, an experience that I cannot fully rationalize.