Critical Texts

I Think Therefore It Is Artbyte, April-May 1998, vol., no. 1

interview with Bill Jones, editor Artbyte

Michael Rees, like his Yale classmates Michael Grey and Matthew Barney, is an artist who
came quickly to prominence. Yet, after acclaimed gallery exhibitions at 303 Gallery and
Basilico Fine Arts, and an appearance in the 1995 Biennial, Rees returned to his native
Kansas City to teach and concentrate on his work, away from the ego and career battles
in New York. The change of place offered new technological horizons that allowed Rees
to develop ideas into forms he had only imagined. His most recent exhibiton was at the
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City, November 22-January
25, 1998. Later this year he will exhibit new work at Central Fine Arts in New York.

BJ Give me a little background on your use of 3D print technologies.

MR On the technical level about 3 1/2 years ago I had an opportunity to teach
at The Kansas City Art Institute, and they said "Do you want to learn about computers?"
I was hesitant at first, and then I thought what the hell it'll take two weeks out of my life.
Immediately I started to gravitate toward the 3D program. I had heard about
Stereolithography in 1987, but I always assumed it was beyond my resources. Using 3D was
really an eye opener, because I realized that what you see is what you get(wysiwig).
If you can imagine it and describe it in the CAD program, you've got an
object. I think maybe 15 years ago this would have been called conceptual, but
in some sense it's not that either. It's as close to a thought as I've ever
been. My work has an intuitive and vaguely surrealist edge. So it's very close to
out of one’s head.

BJ I understand that you've been working with a new technology called 3D
printing at Z Corp in Sommerville, MA.

MR What's interesting to me about all of the rp (rapid prototyping) technologies is that they
fabricate additively. That's what's really important. Until 1986 the automatic processes were subtractive.
You take a block and you chuck it in. Now you're building in a topological manner, layer on top of layer.
So the Z corp is cool because it's so much like a printer. It's relatively small and inexpensive, about $60,000
for the machine, but it also lacks the precision of the ½ million dollar machines. It's basically an ink jet printer that
prints with glue into a powder bed. Once the piece is formed it still needs to be post processed
by coating it in wax or epoxy. I've used 5 of the major additive processes along with some experimental ones. For different ends, you choose different tools.

BJ Can you speak a little about the imagery if you can call it imagery?

MR I think you can, but that's a large issue. I'll have to think about that.

BJ It starts as an image but it changes into an object.

MR In these sculptures, You have two levels of types of images. One would be
imaginary or abstract and the others more literal or representational. These levels
fit within each other so that there is a progressive serial quality.
The literal images are the cows head, the skull, the uterus. The more abstract
images are the blobs which emerge above the uterus (which I like to think of as
thought bubbles), and a series of support structures which contribute to the
presence of the uterus. In the latter, the supports evolve and push the form up,
they present it. These pieces rest against the backdrop of the print, “Visual
Taxonomy” in which each of the images have a certain contextuality about them.
For example, Gerome's painting of Pygmalian offers a critical set of thoughts
which represent the sculptor who wishes to make models of the world and
who confuses the representation with reality and the generative aspect of
these kinds of endeavors. This painting, and Gerome's work in general,
is particularly problematic in terms of transgressive masculine sexuality.
My earlier work, exhibitions at 303 and at Basilico Fine Arts, dealt with
these issues, but the Kemper exhibition goes further. Visual Taxonomy tries
to locate this and other issues in the sculptures.

BJ Can you tell me about specific work?

MR “DoBeDoBeDo” which is a bunch of wires with a penis on one end and a
finger on the other is based on a joke; Sarte says "To do is to be." Camus
says "To be is to do." And Sinatra says "DoBeDoBeDo." So the work was
based on a split, a confusion between doing and being. The work has evolved
from that. So we have an imaginary, spiritual, or metaphysical anatomy placed
against the backdrop of a medical anatomy. The skull in my most recent work is
scanned from a human head. I purchased it as a 3D model. It's based on CAT
scans.

BJ How did this go beyond the earlier works?

MR First of all, the order of complexity is much greater. And that's due to my use of the

additive technology. What happened to me was that I saw it immediately. When I saw

the 3D program and how accessible it was, because all the metaphors are

building metaphors, I realized that I was in a brave new world. In the earlier works

I had conceptualized structures within structures and frankly was sitting around

scratching my head, trying to figure out how to do it. If I had done it by hand, so to speak, molding

each part, it would have taken years. So I had conceptualized all these

works, had drawings for them, and then came this process on the computer.

BJ One form inside another as a metaphor for both physiology and thought was
facilitated by the CAD programs?

MR Yeah, I'd say so. This mode has been around for a long time,
but now its linked to sight and touch. At the same time,
the Cad program gave me a lot of freedom. I could have forms
that collide with each other, and I still see them. If I'm spending a little
time making something with my hands, and I've got two forms, I can't put one
inside the other. I can't shrink one down to 1/10th size and drop in into the
other. Now, these things may not yet be realized as objects, but I'm able to
visualize without having to be tied to any real world parameters. That's also
part of the problem, because these designs can become awfully stilted.
In a way I didn't answer your question, but the point is that I'm able to
build anything I can imagine. It was like falling into a pit (the computer)
that happened to have a bunch of gold in it. You've fallen, but in some
sense you're richer for it.

BJ You were saying that you were involved in this work in a more physical,
personal way?

MR In one sense I'm more removed, but in another sense I'm closer to my
thoughts and closer to the images they produce. I can create
libraries of forms that work together and use them in syntactical ways.
The presence of the hand is interesting, because there is still the hand in
here in a literal way. First of all, I know how to build things, so these
works are informed by the knowledge of hand construction. It's as immediate as
plaster. “Somo Noeticus” was the first computer image of any significance for me.
(shown in the 1995 Whitney Biennial) In the backdrop of the palm of my hand I had one
of my creatures in there and I'd taken the skin of my hand and wrapped it
around the object. At that point I realized, “oh my God!”, I can skin these
things with my own skin. Having made this assumption I found that it wasn't
technically possible. The technical community had not thought it important to
have a textural aspect, and this inspired my own research, and I eventually
tracked it all down, and got them to implement this technology. So now you can
scan any texture (2D)and apply it. But, of course, my interest was the hand. In all
these pieces there is some presence of my hand, and the scan is from the
central part of my hand, it’s a palm print. Then I bring it into
the CAD program, and whatever is white in the image becomes high
and whatever is black becomes low, with all the greys in between.
For example, where the skull touches the uterus there
is my palm print. This is particularly clear in “Ajna 5”.

BJ Your hand literally is on the surface of these works. What does that mean?

MR It's important for a number of reasons. I'm not trying to be coy or opaque,
but each of the aspects of the work is here for a reason. I'm using the
fingerprint for various reasons. If this were a seal and you put your thumb
print into it, that would authenticate it. There's a set of authorship issues
that for a person coming out of the 80s, I'm aware of. The fingerprint
blossoms into these issues. I don't necessarily solve them, just bring them
in. Another is the problem of copyright. My fingerprint is stored in the file, so
anytime the piece is made it will have the fingerprint in it. There is a
virtual impression which serves as an actual impression, because of the issue
of authorship and copyright. There's also the issue of the hand of the artist
being removed by digital media.

I have had a continuing interest in Hindu sculpture, -but also in the vedic structure
of the body—that the finger pieces at Basilico Fine Arts tried to engage. For example,
each finger is associated with a value, with a metaphor, etc.,. So if the sculptures
rested upon two of four fingers, it rested on those values. The length of the sculptures
also pointed to their location in the body, etc.,. it was very Nauman. But what really
interested me was a system of multiple relational values. This becomes more piqued
in the Vedic body structure. There are so many levels and they are observed with
such rigor. The rigor defines the anatomy, the cakra, the word within the cakra, the
sound within the cakra, and on. All these things fit within the lotus which has a certain
number of petals, a color, and a diety which also has many qualities. Each of the
qualities of the diety within this chakra is associated to myths that in turn inform the
abilites or operations of that chakra. And, of course, each chakra rules over various
physical parts of the body, as well as intellectual, emotional, and psychological aspects.
All these wonderful things are woven together. But, the weave is slippery: at one point
it is anatomical, at another point energetic, and another point linguistic, etc.,. Within the
palm is another minor cakra. It just keeps going in hinduism. Of course a sculptor would
be interested because the scales are always shifting.

BJ You mentioned the issue of male sexuality and obviously that runs through your work.
Could you be more explicit?

MR Ok, well, the Pygmalion thing--let me briefly retell the story. There's a
sculptor who begins to sculpt a woman, who he finds so much more beautiful
than any living woman, so he prays to the gods and they grant him his wish
and bring her to life. First of all, there's the fact that he's a sculptor is
significant, because he finds the world wanting. There's this lack of faith
which points to his feeling that the world's just not enough. Then there's the
construction of erotic desire. And to do that he must have the other that is projected
upon from his own psyche. This model making thing, this
step backward away from reality into a mythology is part of the problematic
aspect of this the masculine construction. I think that it gets more
complicated, because the women is an object to begin with. Then she's imbued
with these qualities and is in some sense invented by him. I hope this is understood as problematic.
Other manifestations of that mythology are Frankenstein and
cybernetic creatures, like in Blade Runner, where you have the replicant
Harrison Ford's character falls in love with. We
also have the invention of woman as other, that is a way that men use to
create desire. In this way sexuality, or perhaps the libido, is not so difficult to negotiate.
There is a kind of hubris in me as a man at this particular time in history with all of the
thinking about feminism to take the uterus and put it inside a skull. I do not mean it this
way, but it could be perceived as a slight to feminist thinking. This is why I felt compelled
to develop the territory further. One would hope that the “taxonomy” goes a long way
to locating the polemic. Each of those subjects I've just mentioned can be reconfigured
and analyzed in great depth. I want to offer the territory, and I want that territory to
be experienced as problematic.

BJ Can you describe how this relates to your current work?

MR All the works in the Kemper show have a uterus placed inside a skull. The
skull is neither masculine nor feminine, but there is something Pygmalian-like
about what I'm doing. On one level there is a dark quality. On another level
it begins to shift into my interest in the baroque relationships in Hinduism
and the subtle body. So that the function is not just of the polemic of
male desire, but ventures into areas which are indescribable. I have said that
these sculptures come from places I can't fully rationalize.

BJ Does the development of this problematic justify your use of these
evocative images?

MR That depends on how much you believe my intent. If you look at
my earlier work such as “Stud Study”, I was wrestling with the same issues. I
did it very consciously. I purposely stayed away from any female physiognomy.
I felt that all I could speak about was myself--my own masculinity. I don't
believe that there is an apologetic aspect to the signaling of these issues. Representing
the uterus seems to be the logical next step in dealing with the problem of male sexuality as I've
described it.

BJ I know you purchased the digital files that created the skull. Where did
the uterus come from.

MR I actually built it in the CAD program from anatomical photographs. I
brought photographs into the background of the CAD space and then traced the
outlines and did different things to produce a three-dimensional uterus. It's
a rather masculine uterus too. It's very muscular in a way actual uteruses
probably aren't.

BJ In colliding these objects, putting one inside the other, do you consider,
meaning of the skull enclosing the uterus.

MR Yes. Very much. The exact placement of the uterus inside the skull is in
direct relationship to aspects of the subtle body. Thus the series is called
“Ajna”, which is a reference to the sixth chakra which is between the eyes.
This has a lot to do with what I call the body of sex, sleep, and death. I'm
attempting to make a window for the many associations these two images bring
up. The uterus has symbolic, literal, and aesthetic qualities which the work
engages. Also the skull brings up associations of death and science. It's an
image that occurs in the iconography of St. Jerome. In Jerome’s iconography there is
always a skull, and two animals—one wild, the lion and one domestic, the dog.
A Durer woodcut of St. Jerome is included in the “Visual Taxonomy”. Those
images begin to be the map for the various meanings of the work.

BJ Could you comment on the idea of imagery as it is complicated by the fluid
movement from two to three dimensions availed by digital technology?

MR One reason I'm so fascinated with this technology is its fluid rendering of
the text/image/object discourse. It is correct to say that from a drawing you make
an object. The drawing is in the computer. It is essentially perspectival. In
other words it's a three-dimensional drawing, and you can rotate around it
etc. Mathematically it's considered so. But of course we don't have the benefit of the tactile. In this
sense image and object or image and form in my mind are completely fluid. But
the physical realization of the object does something mysterious. I think all
of us as makers are interested in this. Even when you go from a sketch to a
painting or even from your head to the world, it's a tremendously interesting
movement, because you have expectations of what the thing will be, and of
course the expectations are disappointed, but some qualities emerge which are
unexpected and wonderful things take place.
There are whole bodies of thought with which I'm not conversant, which speak
about the primacy of language over image, that everything is known through
language. The CAD and the computer are quite interesting in this respect,
because there are places where object, image, and the text converge. What you see in a
CAD program is completely a code, and of course a code is a language. It's
back there, and you can go and look at it. On one level this would support
that language is primary over image. Though I can not rationalize or justify
it clearly, I experience image thinking or object thinking as primary. I don't
want to say pre-linguistic, but it is another kind of thought pattern. So in a
certain sense we have now this interesting place where text and image and
form are almost interchangeable. They're completely of the same quality. Not
only can you go from language to image through the CAD to object, but you can reverse this
and go from object to image back to language. It's cyclical and fluid. It's both horizontal and
vertical in its organization. So there are times when the image is preeminent,
and times when the object is preeminent and times when the text is preeminent.
Somebody smarter than I has to sort these issues out. I'm trying to explore
them literally in terms of this sculpture CAD, rapid prototyping area. "What
you see is what you get" is a formula developed for type fonts. But it comes
back to the possibility that reality is what you speak it to be. Seeing itself
becomes this primary creative activity.

BJ You've now crossed over into territory where the logic we operate under no
longer holds true. There is little discourse or even a functional language to
bridge the worlds of mathematical logic and mystical thought. Is that why you
reference things such as the subtle body and other mystical terms in your
work.

MR For sure. Some important parts are being left out of the conversation. If you look
at the Rig Veda, which is the Hindu text that lays out the subtle body, it is certainly not
scientific by current standards. In other words, it's not testable, verifiable,
or empirical. But indeed, as a body of thought it has been developed rigorously,
and logically as well. It's not a mathematical logic, it's not equational, but the
real issue is that it's not verifiable. In science things are proven so that they
are repeatable either in experiment or discourse. But what interested me
about Hinduism was that it was developed in a similarly rigorous manner,
similar to science’s discourse, but about experience that is difficult to rationalize.
Despite the rigor of the logic, its still ambiguous. It isn’t the same for me as for you.
Nor could I convince you that cakras are there when you are sure they are not.
I want to make it clear that the work doesn’t hinge on belief or non-belief.
If we go back the other way and we see science as a belief system, it starts to
evolve its own ambiquities. In one of the taxonomy images, there’s a computer
image of the visible man (from the criminal who was sliced up and recreated digitally)
against images from Leonardo’s Codex Madrid. It’s a beautiful image with rich
historical associations. But whats more interesting is that in the Codex notebooks,
Leonardo drew all the reproductive organs incorrectly. He drew them according
to the beliefs of the day, not against what he saw.

The title of my next show at Grand Arts is "The Ecstatic Body." In medicine there are many
things that are unknown about the body, but there is the expectation that things
will be understood. If we look at the ecstatic body in terms of our common experience,
say in dreams, we find no agreement on what they mean, even though a great
deal of serious intellectual energy is spent trying to determine what they are,
not to mention why they exist. Anything in a dream can be more than itself.
An object in a dream has the potential to be symbol which contains within it
the code that will allow it to assume other meanings for the viewer.
When I think of the ecstatic body--and I include any dream state in the
definition of the ecstatic body--I'm grateful for the fact that it is
ambiguous. That there isn't an objective relationship between what you see in
a dream and its meaning. That's what interests me most about this ecstatic
experience. At best efforts there's no testable relationship between what is
in the dream and its meaning, but there is a rigor to the language of dreams
that's beautiful.

BJ By bringing in mysticism are you attempting to contextualize or find a way
to describe these strange illogical spaces that digital technology conjures
up, such as "what you see is what you get?"

MR If you're asking if I'm using these symbols in place of another experience or
my own experience, no indeed. The relationships I'm creating are quite different.
There's no uterus in the ajna chakra in classical Hinduism. Hinduism isn't standing
in for my inability to speak about these things. Rather it is a reference for the
construction of multiple relational values.

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Essay from "The Ecstatic Body", Grand Arts, Kansas City, Mo.

By Dominique Nahas

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One can always, although it is never
indispensable, turn the reference like a
glove Pretending to describe this or
that, the veils or sails, for example, of
saliva, the t ext veils itself in unveiling
itself by itself, describing, with the same
exhibitionistic modesty its own texture.
-Jacques Derrida

There is a mind in the flesh.
- Antonin Artaud

Michael Rees’s stereolithographic’ Ajna
Spine sculptures are situated within what the
artist has described as “an imaginary or
metaphysical anatomy placed against the
backdrop of medical anatomy” Using and
exploring new technology to generate com-plex
bi-organic forms has allowed Rees to
pointedly raise some of the most poignant
humanistic issues that face mankind in a
post-technological, information-driven world.
Computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs
give Rees the capacity to move forms around
in space, offer variations in form and struc-ture,
and intimately explore his materials
using precise codes that are transferred
immediately to object-making without actual-ly
touching or physically constructing the
objects. He has described this sensation as
being removed, yet “in another sense I’m
closer to my thoughts and to the images I
produce. There are other forces at play in
which I participate.”

The greatest artworks don’t try to answer
anything, nor do they propose solutions; they
ask direct, powerful, and troubling questions.
Michael Rees’s sculptures elicit many such
questions, including these: Upon how many
levels does information operate? How is it
generated, received, used, and validated?
What is the nature of generative creativity?
What separates man from animal? What are
the limits of rationality and empirical knowl-edge?
Can a metaphysical body of experi-ence
ever be scientifically validated? What is
the nature of (visual) language? How do we
experience truth and the relativity of truth?
Can scientific analysis quantify the distinc-tions
among the known, the unknown, and
the not-known?

On one level, the AJna Spine sculptures
are hard to categorize. Their displacements
and macabre edginess give them a surreal
presence. Filled with a tension that is palpable,
hovering between fragility and supple
grace, their mystery is heightened by embed-ded
coloration, unusual materials, and other-worldly
precision. Through their identification
with cutting-edge (hands-off!) fabrication
techniques, Rees’s sculptures raise the level
of speculative inquiry to a new pitch. How
should we re-characterize our experience of
the past and of what we call “nature” in order
to construct adequate concepts for scientific
practice and social transformation? Their
capacity to stimulate such queries alone
would make them revolutionary objects.
What is equally striking, however, is that
these innovative sculptures seem somehow
classically modern in their orientation. Their
formal substructure and visual conceits follow
a direct line of influence from Auguste
Rodin. Rees’s works are thus truly revolu-
tionary because they are poised in the eternal
present --looking equally backward and
forward in time.

In AJNA Spine 13 for example, we see
that Rees evinces almost limitless capacities
for modeling, montage, and seriality through
an emphasis on the fragment that was pioneered
by Rodin's study of the body moving
through space. Rees does this while simultaneously
attending to his own concerns to
make manifest the contours of the ecstatic
body He places the organs of hearing on
either end of the spine while lacing sets of
floret-like forms (what the artist refers to as
“energetic structures”) along its length. The
spine is then bracketed at the left and right by
the shapes of human ears. In this work the
flowering bud motif creates a systematized
visual articulation of membrane-organs that
are poised to send or receive psychic and
auditory energy Equally significant is the
eroticized energy contained in Rees’s works,
similar to that expressed by Rodin (“He
understood . . . that life, and that which life
springs from, [is] a kind of motor for the
perennial cycles of desire that spin across
and thereby propagate, the natural universe
. . "). The somatic energy left on Rodin's sur- .
faces through his touch is also referred to in
all of Rees’s sculptures, demonstrating his
intention to create an aura that infiltrates into,
on, and around the body of each work at a
level that equals its projected biotechnical
dynamism.

Before he began to use stereolithography
three and a half years ago, Rees had already
gained respect for his unconventional
abstract floor, wall, and table sculptures, trac-
ing the patterns of atavistic atavistic flight-or-flight
movements A well-trained sculptor who
IS comfortable with mixed media Rees incor-porates
his knowledge of materials into the
construction of his computer imagery. He
uses the computer screen to produce topo-logical
surveys of his complex forms and
restlessly explores each part of their recess-es.
At the same time the touch of the artist i s
implicated and asserted in more tangible
ways flees has made a point of imprinting a
reduced Imqage of his croix occulte (a location
on the palm of the left hand, designated by
palmistry onto several of his works. They are
thus encoded with his biological essence, his
identifying "t ouch," assuredly as any Rodin
sculpture. Similarly the additive aspect of
stereolithography places Rees squarely with-in
the modernist legacy of Rodin, who
believed that the future of modern sculpture
lay in modeling not carving (that IS, not i n
subtractive work, such as that of
Michelangelo). It may be noted that Rodin's
well-publicized positron was a sore point with
Brancusi, who countered with this published
assertion i n 1925: "Direct carving is the true
path in sculpture.”

There are other immediately recogniz-able
Rodinesque aspects in Rees’s work
apart from the use of the fragment, the
impulse towards e r o t i za t ion and the si gnof
the hand. These include the non-fin/to, the
slightly off-balance look, and the generative
appeal. As did Rodin Rees believes that
logic loses its efficacy when confronted with
a visionary response to the world. He would
be in accord with Rodin's thoughts: “To judge
a work of art with the logical precision of a
philosophical premise or through the analy-ses
of experimental science is a fundamen-tal
error. It is even difficult to talk about it. Art
contains some expression which could not
be exactly demonstrated by reason. The
artist’s sensibility shows him beauties in
nature which go beyond what his intelligence
alone could have conceived. The artist
makes tangible that which was invisible."
While Rees uses high technology to point
to technology’s limitations, within his work
are countercurrents that make it contradicto-ry
and lend it greater complexity. The com-puter’s
capacity to reproduce the three prin-ciples
of rhythm (rotation, reflection, and
translation) is used by the artist to generate
an interlacing of forms and patterns that cre-ate
a weaving, plaiting, and knotting move-ment
In three dimensions this suggests
grotesque traceries that add decorative
aspects to the work.

In these strange, dream-like works, what
is being sought by Rees are the essentials of
various bioenergetic life forms. As all revolu-tionary
work, Rees’s Ajna Spine sculptures
are straightforward, despite their complicated
fabrication techniques. What we see are
spinal columns that extend upward (with
three exceptions). Attached in various config-urations
to the central stem of the vertebrae
are body organs or elements gleaned from
the artist’s first three-dimensional computer
sculpture, the Aqualine Creature. Overall,
Rees’s hybrid forms reside somewhere
among the animal, human, and plant worlds
- their dispositions resisting both normal logic
and reason, yet flourishing under an insistent
biological imperative.

Rodin's work has been considered to
bridge the concerns of 19th and 20th centu-ry
sculpture. Similarly, Rees’s work may link
the concerns of modernity regarding the
fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the cont i n
gent to those projected for the next century:
seriality the hyperreality of the simulacram,
sexual anthropology, medical hrmeneutics
hybridity and what Donna Haraway has
termed “biotic systems.” Rodin and Rees are
both self-critical and adventurous; and both,
of course, are profoundly humanistic. At its
most basic level, Rees’s work asks that we
go beyond the world of ideas and words,
beyond scientific rationality, to penetrate the
realm of being that existed before Logos and
Mythos were cleaved in two. It wants us to
reach beyond the limitations of language In
essence, Rees’s sculpture IS a method that
allows us to consider, as Heidegger states
succinctly in “What Calls for Thinking”.
What makes a call upon us that we
should think, and by thinking, be who we
are?

Dominique Nahas, 1998

Dominique Nahas is a cultural critic and
independent curator working in New York.

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Michael Rees: Digital Psyche,

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Dana Self

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Everyone can dream,

and must have dreamed his whole

life, of a perfect duplication or

multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power

of dreams, and are destroyed when one attempts to force the

dream into the real.

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1994

Throughout history, artists, writers, scientists, humanists, and others have reinvented the human body as a slippery surface on which to map out social, political, economic, sexual, technological, and other cultural changes. Through our corporeal meanderings we have learned that the physical and metaphysical body is mutable and clonable as views of the body shift with social disruption and transformations. Michael Rees's work, realized through a CAD (computer-aided design) modeling program, trades on anxiety over our historically fragmented body and psyche. He works within a new visual language for social exchange that is rooted in rapid-prototyping industries, metaphysics, and the language of medical-imaging technology--x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and other seemingly non-invasive views of the body.

Rees's fascination with exploring the corporeal and sensational body originates from diverse and separate impulses that he collapses together in the corpus of his sculptures and images. According to Rees, the "work emerges from places I cannot fully rationalize," and becomes the "center of a multipointed star" of influences. 1 However, he does identify four main impetuses for the work: the myth of Pygmalion--a masculine impulse to create; the system of chakras from yoga practice; the ecstatic body, which for Rees includes sex, sleep, and death; and finally, computer-generated scientific and medical images of the body. Rees's sculptures and computer-generated images settle themselves into a space between dreams and the physical world. In the realm of art making, our multiple reincarnations or dreams of the body are not always destroyed when they are made real, as Baudrillard suggests, but instead may sustain their dreamlike currency.

Rees produces his work on the computer. Working in a CAD program, which allows the artist to work in a 3-dimensional space, Rees creates fictionalized body fragments, often combining "real" body organs with bony structures--works that may seem both vaguely familiar and vaguely horrifying. For instance, in Ajña 5, Rees nests a uterus within a skull--a reference to the Pygmalion myth of man as creator of image and subsequent life--and, in Rees's opinion, "uterine envy" made physical. In Greek mythology Pygmalion was the King of Cyprus who carved and then fell in love with a statue of a woman which the goddess Aphrodite brought to life as Galatea. Hence Pygmalion ultimately "created" a life. For Rees, this male desire to create life constitutes the "uterine envy" to which he refers both in Pygmalion and in his own work.

By using the CAD program Rees is able to not only "sculpt" the exterior of the objects, but also perform detailed work on the interior surfaces of the sculptures, traveling around the inside of his fictional bodies. Rees then produces his sculptures through rapid prototyping, an additive manufacturing process wherein stored electronic files are transferred to a machine that creates a 3-dimensional sculpture by laser forming, particle by particle, layer by layer, sculptures out of whatever material the artist chooses. The sculpture is built up in layers that are 2,000th of an inch thick, allowing for detail as intimate as Rees's fingerprint to be replicated into a sculpture's surface, thus merging the individualized body with the machine and the sculpture. Rees has designed sculptures with such diverse materials as toner-bonded paper, photopolymer resin, epoxy-filled cornstarch, and thermoplastic.

The bizarre configurations that Rees can build on the computer are sculpturally replicated through rapid prototyping in a way that he could not have achieved as successfully through traditional sculpture methods. Industrial applications of rapid prototyping can be found in the prototyping phase of automotive parts manufacture. Ironically, Rees co-opts an industrial manufacturing process to make his delicate, humanoid sculptures. And while Rees's sculptures defy anatomical logic and traditional practice, he is able to nest organs within bony structures in the same way, if not in the same place, that they are nested within a human body, lending the works an ambiguous and uncomfortable sense of seeming to be actual internal structures. Using high-tech industrial design methods, Rees's works presage physical and metaphysical bodily potential for alteration, substitution, prosthesis (cyborgs), and cloning--all of which, we have come to realize, are startlingly possible.

Michael Rees's explorations of the fictionalized body resonate in 18th-century Enlightenment explorations of the corporeal. According to Barbara Maria Stafford in Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine,

               "The eighteenth century, that
               second 'age of discovery,' might well be termed the 'era of
               uncovering.' That germinal period forecast our current
               information-rich and collaborative computer epoch."2 She continues,
               Prophetically, the eighteenth century viewer's struggle to pierce to the
               bottom of all the blurred visual signals . . . seems to be fulfilled in
               twentieth-century transparent medical visualizations. Computed
               tomography x-ray imaging (CT), positron emission tomography
               (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound now
               probe noninvasively, but publicly, formerly private regions and
               occluded and secluded recesses.3

Michael Rees's fantastic voyage into a fictional body space traffics on these modern technologies and Enlightenment ideologies. Eighteenth-century microscopic inquiry into new and unseen worlds focused on making the invisible visible, the unseen accessible. Visual art was influenced by these scientific inquiries into the body and the natural world, especially in what Stafford calls bizarreries, artists' small drawings of the world newly revealed through scientific and technological inquiry. Bizarreries illustrate how scientific and aesthetic interests merged into artistic images for popular culture. Similarly, Rees's sculptures and images trade on the mass popularization of a digitalized world. Yet Rees also recognizes that loss of boundaries--from the loss of control we may feel over the private portions of our bodies now easily accessed through technology--results in destabilized images of the human body. His fragmented and alien-like human remnants are both familiar and unfamiliar. They may reassure through their reference to our bodies, or destabilize for the very same reason. They may seem both rational and irrational, real and unreal. Through his digitalization of experience, Rees redefines our bodies in terms of anxiety, comfort, industrial design and metaphysical ideas.

Rees's use of the metaphysical Ajña, a reference to the sixth master chakra, may equalize the fears of technology and bodily invasion that his work may also induce. Derived from the Sanskrit word for wheel or circle, chakras are the seven centers of spiritual energy in the body, according to yoga philosophy. Some authors refer to the chakras as the subtle body--our psychic selves housed within our physical bodies. Rees chooses the sixth chakra because of its location in the forehead and its association with clairvoyance, intuition, and imagination. According to some yoga practitioners, if the highest level within the Ajña chakra is reached, it is the point of no return--complete peace. To Rees, the sixth chakra also refers to the dreaming state, where beauty and terror often collide. Rees's Ajña, then, becomes a bridge between the opposing qualities of Rees's sculptural works themselves, which instill in us both fear of technology and its effects on our bodies, and the simultaneous seduction of technology and the knowledge it reveals to us. Like the multilimbed Hindu god Shiva, Rees's multiorganed, mythological bodies both repel and seduce, pronouncing that both anxiety and comfort may exist within the same realm.

The body has been and continues to be a locus for contesting physical and psychic boundaries and for exploring a technological age in flux. What do Rees's hybrid forms say to us? How do they communicate with us in their simultaneous looking backward--the Enlightenment, fragments--and looking forward--technological developments in the arena of science and medicine? Rees's body and organ fragments function as relics--fragments that represent a whole--and as complete sculptures--objects deliberately constructed to appear as a fragment. Through his work, Rees confounds traditional limitations on image making and the body's representation. His varied influences, anchored by technology and metaphysics, collide within his work, illustrating the multiple intelligences and modes of perception that we must reconcile in our culture. Rees's role in the visual construction of our changing modernity is to make physical and visible a body that can become obsolete without technology. As our culture becomes more digitalized and computer-oriented, entire bodies can be left behind if they are not accounted for through computer imaging or internet access. Rees recognizes that technology is the inevitable extension of our own physical and metaphysical bodies which exist in a system of bits, bytes, and constant questions about the mythologies and truths of creation, recreation, and existence.

Dana Self
Curator
Notes:
1.Unpublished artist's statement.
2.Barbara Maria Stafford in Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine,
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) p. 24
3.Stafford, p. 26.

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Gimme A Little Death Baby

Dion Kliner

bold.

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6 January, 1999

Gimme A Little Death, Baby: Michael Rees from Ear to Ear.

From Ear to Ear. What is from ear to ear? Two expressions come to mind: To smile from ear to ear, and to have a throat slit ear to ear. The reference in the first is often to sex. In the second, death to be sure, but so too is there the whiff of sex. The combination of sex and death has a comprehensive history in both art and literature. Michael Rees combines the references, but turns towards their light rather than their dark aspect. His interest is not in any violence to the body per se, but in, as Rees says, “ecstasy of the body as it is in vision, sex, sleep and death.”

{This leads to the third implication of “From Ear to Ear” i.e. the gray matter which resides between the ears. The holographic engine. The pathological organ.}

In writings about the work of Michael Rees there is an overriding emphasis on the body and on the technologies Rees employs. As much as Rees may make use of technologies that can be applied to the body, and though recognizable body parts are included in the works themselves, something more than the body is afoot.

We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.
--Max Born

Definition: ‘Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.
--Alfred Jarry, from Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll.

Though most talk of fin-de-siecle similarities is ca-ca, I can’t help drawing a parallel between two aspects of the last turn of the century in France, and our own. One of these is a correspondence between technological revolutions in industry that include the bicycle. Clearly our new bikes are better, though then as now they get you where you’re going. In France there was also a revolution in art of a magnitude that had never been seen. IN this matter, if the advent of computer driven media and technology is putting us on the brink of another aesthetic revolution, then Michael Rees is one of its tremors.

In Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, Shattuck describes the avant-garde arts in France at the turn of the last century as characterized by juxtaposition without transition. Movies represented the purest form of the art of juxtaposition. Eisenstein is the radical juxtaposition, the hard edit, the image in conflict or collision as was much of the art of the early twentieth century. Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dad, Orphism, Simultanism, Surrealism, Vorticism, all shared a common impulse.

In the work of Michael Rees, juxtaposition is still a key element, but it is juxtaposition with transition as opposed to conflict. Transition, whether of the body, sexuality, form, or any other boundary is much more the defining characteristic of art at our end of the century. Rees’s is not the explosion in a shingle factory or the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. It’s not even the clumsy stitching together of a Frankentein monster, but a much more seamless creation. Movies, especially horror movies, are not unrelated to Rees’s work.

Going to see Rees’s sculpture is like taking a trip to a surreal knacker or the back rooms of fossil storage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I am reminded of that now as I glimpse the odd bits of skeleton that Rees displays. Over here is vertebral columns with pelvises attached over there a skull. You’d expect all these skeletons to be pushing up daisies, instead they’re festooned with fungi like growths, and uteri, and ears, and other things besides. The growths turn out to be representations of the ckakras of Hindu philosophy. Though decidedly human, these extra-skeletal additions make me think of Dr. Moreau and strange science fiction experiments that include alien abduction. The materials themselves contribute to this. Jut what the sculptures are made of is unclear, the color and quality of the materials adding to the strangeness. The translucent amber sculptures glow and sparkle like crystal. Ajna 3 Amber is in part a skull. Placed inside is a uterus. Sprouting from the top, the front and the back are tuberous chakras. The head of a cow is a part of the stalk that comes from the top. Nearby stands the vertebral column of Ajna spine Series 12. As the light moves through them it is broken and reflected by the faceting on their surfaces, which is a byproduct of their manufacture. The effect is dazzling, jewel-like. The opaque black and white sculptures could be plaster stone or plastic. The black sculpture, Ajna Spine Series 13 has a rich black granulated surface that absorbs both light and sound. The single large sculpture in the show, Cakra Seuss, seems carved in wood.

What are these exquisite corpses? It seems we’ve entered the palace at 4 am. In A Land, Jacqueta Hawkes calls art “fossils of the psyche”, a phrase most apt in describing the sculpture of Michael Rees. If so, are the sculptures a glimpse of past, present or future? Are they images of the ruins as we were, are, or those that we will rise into.

For Hawkes, the development of the human brain, of consciousness, past a certain point became a pathological condition. Like the Irish Elk with its massive rack of antlers, what for us started out a positive adaptive function that allowed us to survive and progress has become the engine of destruction: “There is some merciless force in evolution that may cause trends, once they have begun, to become excessive and at last pathological, the unfortunate species concerned being utterly helpless and unable to check their racial suicide.” The development of those materials processes, technologies, and attitudes that enable us to kill ourselves and destroy the planet are symptomatic of the brain’s progression into a pathological organ. Extinction is never far behind. Perhaps, then, the sculptures are shades of what we are as a deranged consciousness transforms the body into strange and monstrous forms, weird hybrids of internal and external physiology with plant-like appendages. The body reduced to a skeleton, the head replaced by pure consciousness and an organ of creation.

Admittedly, the developing brain as it takes hold of consciousness portrayed as a rampaging organ of destruction and generator of aberrant morphology is a compelling image along the lines of The Blob, yet Hawkes is not convinced by her own doomsday scenario and neither, most assuredly, is Rees. Hawkes changes to an optimistic note and believes that what initially led us to the brink, is now reversing itself as another hell raiser is put back into its box; “mind, which at first denied men their instinctive sense of wholeness, is at last returning such a sense, but on its own mental level. Consciousness is melting us all down together again—earth, air, fire, and water, past and future, lobsters, butterflies, meteors, and men”. This is his territory. Rees seems to b participating in a reunification on a mental level of his own, making the sculptures the ‘pataphysical’ remains to come.

More than a Dr. Frankenstein or a Dr. Moreau, beyond a mere physician or metaphysician, Rees is a ‘Pataphysician’, a creator of imaginary solutions. You hear a lot about art in a prescriptive sense in terms of asking questions as opposed to having answers as if answers were anathema, something to be avoided. As if answers were a pathogen all of their own. Yet Rees proposes answers to our questions of… of what? It doesn’t matter. And if they’re only answers to his own questions? It’s enough to recognize that there are answers there. Not hard and fast answers. Not bludgeoning and unyielding. Not the kind of answer that would gladly slit your throat. No. Let’s say instead that there are solutions being proposed.

Undeniably, part of the solution Rees proposes is spiritual. It is also lyrical and delicate. It is fuller even than Rees’s own Visual Taxonomy, a grid of images that catalogues references, inspirations and influences. Balancing this, the solution also includes an earthy humorousness in a nonsensical way as do the sculpture. Ajna Spine 13 is more nonsensical than most as a series of tuberous protrusions are bookended by human ears. Cakra Seuss participates even more fully as its name would suggest. This is the way though and this is the fullness that Rees attempts. The all encompassing sex and death and sleep and vision.

Looking at the sculptures themselves, they are not adult scale, but they don’t mean to be child-like either. Most are the size of a pet, something you could hold in your arms. By engaging this scale Rees allows them to inhabit an otherworldly realm only vaguely human. We know we’re involved, but don’t know quite how. To see how the sculptures would change by changing scale one only has to look at Rees’s Cakra Seuss, a towering piece that indicates a logical and fruitful direction for Rees to go; one which he has already started on in this and even newer sculptures. Cakra Seuss has come down off one of the tables and begun to enter our domain as more of a personage. The animation of the work is delightful and unavoidable. Besides the practical problem of stabilization, I don’t understand why Rees didn’t let this piece take the final step off the tables and take possession of our space fully, as this sculpture seems capable. Imagining a room full of overgrown Ajna Spines is truly to be in a land somewhere between Dr. Seuss and the day of the Trifids.

And what about the bases? Something is clearly going on here and yet they are consistently overlooked or given very short shrift. The bases could have been simple. Plinths would have done to elevate and isolate these delicate pieces. Yet Rees chooses the tables, and he makes these tables himself. Is this the physical expression of the irrepressible desire to create that is the subject of much of Rees’s attention, but which he denies himself in his sculpture? What else is going on?

The bases stand one atop another, one table on top of another much as Eric Satie had stacked one piano on top of another in his apartment. Never mind the pianos. Why does Rees stack tables? The table that stands directly on the ground has legs that are short and squat. The table above, legs that are long and spindly. The decrease in mass suggests a speeding up in time and space. Looking from the ground up gravity lessens as table surmounts table, the whole thing picking up speed as it stretches to the sculpture. It seems as if the squat table below had sampled a little cake labeled ‘EAT ME’ and been stretched accordingly. As in Alice’s wonderland, odd juxtapositions, nonsense and the absurd are always at hand in the land of Michael Rees. On the more rational side of the glass the multiple bases with their varied designs reflect Rees’s stacking of visual and intellectual references in the sculptures themselves. Each platform becomes another platform of meaning. Thinking of the vertebral Ajna Spine Series 1.11 in particular, it seems possible that the whole configuration is a grand representation of the computer itself:

Floppy Disk
Software Reproduction of Ajna Series 1.11 here
Mainframe
Platform

{hardware, platform, software, file, user)

There are other aspects of the tables as well. Firstly they are zoomorphic. Early Roman and Greek tables always had the foot of a lion or other animal beneath them. This could have been a metaphor for humanity’s conquest over nature. Currently, it is decidedly not a metaphor but a seeming reality. It is the hell raiser, of a mouse that grows a human ear, the transposed heads of chimpanzees, or a cloned sheep that is identical to the parent. These hell raisers have yet to be returned to their box. To whatever end, as a culture we seek that this mastery over nature (what was previously metaphorical) becomes reified.

In that no two of my tables are identical, they are offsprings of the many permutations that are embodied in the word “Table”. In the history of the table as cultural object, there is a shift between the zoomorphic (like nature) and the linguistic (a construction of human mind and of culture). They are nouns that are are related in a familial way. They are in the family way, pregnant with contextual meaning.

Finally, a table is an object to place things upon and a chart of the comparison of information (Table of Elements). As a chart, it is representative of a categorical study. This kind of study, which begins in Aristotle and reaches full maturity in the work of Darwin and Freud, is at the root of what we understand of art. Namely, that nothing is understood without its context. These tables become the frame of a 19th century context, which includes Victorian furniture, wooden medical and scientific furniture, and the works of Freud, and of Darwin.

The isolating aspect of the tables, the focusing of the viewer upon the subject of the sculpture as a specimen in a cabinet of wonders is a little like the grid in Peter Greenaway’s movie “Zed and Double Nought”. They are a frame against which to see the work or in Greenaway’s movie the disintegrating corpse. And, unlike Greenaway, they are decidedly not a grid. Instead, they contribute to the sense that the sculptures are displayed as “Fossils of the psyche”. This is emphasized by their placement upon tables instead of bases. The sculptures and the tables are allowed to interact in comparison to one another as similarities and differences remind one of the potentials of genetic or linguistic permutations.

It is valuable to me to resist the modernist prejudice against the base and resist the sanitation of a sculpture dissected from its base (its context), in favor a fuller range of meaning. Certainly sculptures without traditional bases take the architecture or the earth upon which they stand as their base. Hence, even in modernism, no base is without content, no base is truly anti monument. -mr

Maybe I’m doing Rees a disservice by calling the tables bases. After the thought and work put into them and their relationship to the sculptures, they are clearly part of the sculpture in a way that most bases are not. Without them, the sculptures become very different works. They become disengaged and precious objects rather than a part of the mix. On a base more base they would lose their connection to the ground which seems significant for many reasons, especially when the composition of tables and sculpture is seen as pyramidal.

Ken Johnson, in his review of this show in the New York Times, commented that the discovery that the sculptures were not made by hand was disappointing; his enjoyment and understanding of the show compromised as a result. Curious. Would it have made a difference if the sculptures were made by hand but not Michael Rees’s hand? It would be interesting to have known Mr. Johnson’s impressions of the sculptures had he remained uninformed. Nevertheless, I believe Mr. Johnson has a strong point when he warns of the danger inherent in the use of new technologies by artists and the too frequent tendency to end up with nothing but technology on display. I don’t believe Michael Rees fits into this category. The reason is that Rees isn’t doing anything that couldn’t be done by hand given enough time using traditional modeling techniques plus the lost wax or some other model making and casting process. Nothing, in fact, that couldn’t be done by a skilled modeler or a skilled sculptor working with a skilled craftsman, or done for that matter by a skilled craftsman under the direction or from the instructions of even an unskilled sculptor.

{Johnson dismisses the intuitive, rigorous, and time-consuming aspect of this sculpture created in CAD (computer aided design) programs on the computer. Probably this is due to his lack of understanding about the way the sculptures come about. This is generally indicative of an art world indifference to a major means of cultural communication. Every industry massively depends upon the computer to build things that cannot be done any other way. Maybe this is a little akin to being disappointed that the New York Times is no longer laid out and type set by hand. Perhaps the New York Times would be a better newspaper if it were laid out by hand? By contrast, Mr. Johnson would gladly trust imagery made from a CAT scan to determine whether he had a tumor or not. And would also count on that information as the surgeon went to remove it. Why not involve the computer in art in just as precise, removed, and unequivocal manner? In my hands, it is certainly capable of creating ubiquitous objects.-mr}

As every art student rather disappointingly learns, the use of assistants has been commonplace in art making since before the Egyptian sculptors had someone else polish the stone. The Renaissance masters had workshops with assistants who did much of their painting for them. One such master is reputed to have only painted the hands and faces of his pictures. Sculptors regularly hand off small studies to be enlarged for bronzes or carved into stone by skilled craftsmen. At other times in history the use of assistants is understood as interfering with the integrity and authenticity of the art created. Economics, politics, and aesthetics play a part in the use of assistants and how they are viewed, with tension seesawing between pro and con. During The Banquet Years, and in those immediately preceding them, the vanguard artists did their own work. Rodin and Duchamp bracket these years and participate too in the use of assistants. Rodin learned the craft of being a successful sculptor dealing in commissions that made the use of assistants imperative in the decades before 1885. Duchamp changed the concept of artist’s assistants altogether by ushering in the Readymade thereby making industrial processes and workers into anonymous assistants.

Like Duchamp in his participation with modern technology as an assistant, neither the identity of Rees’s assistant nor the quality of the work qua work is in question. Just as it was neither germane nor helpful to inquire whether the fountain was a well made urinal, so too the quality of Rees’s sculpture must be seen to lie beyond the body of the work itself. It resides instead in a more abstracted realm that could be called its essence. A perfect symmetry exists between Rees’s Cartesian interests in the body and spirit on the one hand, and his method of art making and its comprehension on the other.

Until recently, no matter if an artist worked alone or had assistants, there was always something lost in the translation. It can be a surprisingly long way from the mind to the eye to the hand. So long, in fact, that crossing may be altogether impossible or only on the shakiest of bridges. It may be a technical inability, a communication problem, financial difficulty, or more seriously, a skeptical gap, a form of impotence. The greater the number involved, the greater the potential loss. Technology is also like that. Unfortunately this isn’t usually the type of influence Paul Valery had in mind when he wrote that “No word comes easier or oftener to the critic’s pen than the word ‘influence’, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague notions that comprise the phantom armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analyses than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another.” With the new technologies that Rees uses, it’s like having the perfect assistant/technician. No loss of vision occurs as one mind modifies {influences?}the next.

Doing this, exposing the quality and profundity of your ideas without benefit of the escape hatch of compromised expression because of technical or procedural difficulty, is a naked and risky and potentially terrifying act. The spectator’s knowing that there is no limitation to expression except the richness or paucity of the artist’s intellect and imagination makes the art itself transparent in a way that other styles of art do not now and have not in the past. Rather than seeing the forms first, it is possible to see almost simultaneously into the consciousness of the artist and to understand it, and judge it, at that rock bottom a foundation. This is the strength and primary interest in Rees’s work. Being brought into the infinite space of that velvety blackness that is both the background of the CAD screen and the artist’s mind makes the experience a visionary or hallucinatory one.

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Michael Rees, A Visible Man

HOME DESIGN

Steve Walker

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In the past, when an artist was said to be called cut t i n g edge,” it meant his or her work might be unsuitable for sensitive eyes and ears. Today, the phrase takes on its literal meaning, and the edges artists are cutting are out of materials once thought beyond an artist's hand - speak both about the work itself and the process it takes to get there. Michael Rees is a “cutting edge” artist in the newest sense of the phrase. After nearly two decades in New York, Kansas City native Michael Rees has come back to town. Ensconced in 4000 square feet of raw space in a West Bottoms warehouse, Rees is focused like a laser on one corner of his massive loft.

Here is where Rees has set up two computers, a printer, a modem and all of the necessary accouterments of the contemporary communicator. The hardware has, in a sense, become his virtual studio. Rees used to sculpt with steel and other familiar media. Not anymore. “If you’d told me four years ago that I would be doing everything on computer, I would have said you were nuts,” Rees says, sitting in front of his web site (http://www.sound.net/~zedand00). He has created what is akin to a gallery in cyberspace that makes his work as accessible to a curator in New York as it is to a like-minded kid on the Ivory Coast. “Though I can imagine going back to sculpting like I used to, I haven’t made anything with my table saw in two years,” he says. “Before, I’d come home too tired to work on anything. Now I can’t wait to come home and play. I’m on the computer everyday”

After an academic path that began at Vassar, swerved to Kansas City Art Institute and concluded with an MFA in Sculpture from Yale, Rees is back at KCAI to teach design and form. His pre-vious sculptures and installations have
had hints of organic qualities, including, he recalls, kinetic sculptures that breathed. But like a Picasso or a Duchamp or any artist who experiments equally well with varying media, Rees’
energy balloons in direct proportion to how the work is evolving.

His latest project is an edition of five sculptures entitled “The Aqualine Creature," an imaginary organism that was born on a computer screen via Rees’ imagination and became tangible through a process called rapid prototyp-ing. Less foreign to engineers and indus-trial designers than Rees’ contemporaries, rapid prototyping uses lasers to fabricate objects from a computer-gener-ated design. The technology is called "additive” because it works in the opposite manner of a woodcutter’s “subtractive” lathe the latter chips away at and reduces the original form while rapid prototyping is an additive process it begins from scratch, finely layering an object into existence.

“The epiphany for me was figuring out you could do this with computer software,” he says. Rees calls the process “a beautiful and poetic means of making something” but the work is more than about manufactur-ing. “I’m creating a mythology about this imaginary organism. If you see the objects and don’t worry about the technology, they’re not alienating.”

The five pieces that make-up “The Aqualine Creature” - tooled of resin and measuring 18 x 14 x 6 inches displayed as a whole - include an external shell, which has been delicately halved to create a top and bottom, and three internal organs
fractioned into what Rees calls “literal and imaginary or metaphorical organs.”
The lungs have trachea and bronchial tubes while the mythical organs are less confined by biology but just as fragile and exposed. Laid out on a white base, the pieces recall a graceful autopsy or some-thing strangely amiable from the science fiction genre.

But it’s the “aqualine” that defines it. It’s not a leap at all to think you’ve seen it in a National Geographic nature special, where it would be swimming so deep below the oceans surface it would have to be photographed with robotic cameras. Rees begins using CAD (computer aided design) to construct what might be called the wire frame of the organ-ism; it resembles what a traditional sculptor might do with a skeleton of chicken wire. From there, he renders the creature using his keyboard, adding color and textures. In some cases, Rees has scanned his own finger and trans-ferred its surface to his objects in a way “that’s so exact, you could lift my fingerprint from it,” he says.

Lastly, a process called stereolightoraphy moves the organism or object from a screen to reality, constructed out of such materials as plastic, wood, plaster, ceram-ic or paper. What can result are solid pieces with multiple appendages or
objects that are semi-transparent. Like “The Visible Man” models that kids of the Sixties had on their desks, this state reveals a demonstration of how skin, bone and organs work in concert. “You could call me a surrealist, which is easy to grab onto,” Rees explains. “In fact, I’m not. But to give people a handle, lets call it surrealism. Or call me a specialist in rapid prototyping. Or better, think of it as animation. And in five years, you’ll be able to do this at Kinkos."

“Michael is involved in an analysis of the sculptural form that others don’t have the breadth of knowledge to d o" , says Dominique Nahas, who in June curated a group show entitled "A Natural Selection” at New York’s Z Gallery. (He was also represented at 1995’s Whitney Biennia1 and the museum owns three of
his pieces.) It featured examples of Rees’ current work that The Village Voice
called, “exquisite hybrids of the post-mechanical and the postorganic.”

"His work, especially his photography, shows an intertwining of space and ambiguity between what’s living or not, what’s artificial or not,” Nahas adds. “What constitutes a natural reality from an artificial reality? Michael’s on
the verge of asking important ques-tions that don’t have answers yet.”

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s Dana Self, who will curate a Rees show in November, says that he was select-ed for the solo spot “because his work has important elements wrapped up in a package that is quite compelling.Its about technologies that are futuris-tic, its interesting, and it has design ele-ments not like those of textiles,” she adds. “It’s mysterious, ambiguous and kind of creepy in a good way.”

Rees considers Dr. Seuss a major influence” and referred to a furry aquat-ic creature suspended in fluid in an adventure from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. (A sparkling new collection of the author’s work lies atop less important publications in packing boxes.) Not surprisingly, he envisions the nearly boundless world of animation as the next logical habitat for his creatures. And he reminds potential techno-phobes who may find his work chilly that “the processes are just tools that allow you to expand the scope of what you can do. The center of the work is the object, its not just a conceptual exercise and it’s not just engineering.”

“To be f a i r", Rees wrote in an article for an Italian publication, “it would be possi-ble to create ‘The Aqualine Creature’ using traditional processes. And it would have taken a lot longer and been a lot
more complicated. Designing and work-ing with CAD and stereolithography
have created a new way that ideas come to form in my work.”

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