Notes on Theme and Three Variations,
Records No. 342-351, 1981
This piece of work contains a good variety of things, all of which have to do with my states of mind and interests over several of the preceding years. It was one of those times in a person’s life when they have to struggle every day to restore a sense of balance and proportion, but without sacrificing spontaneity, and remaining open to the unexpected. Overall, its inspiration was my need to put into a single thing, or a suite of closely related things, a lot of different responses to the content of my different interests and explorations. It arrived as a sudden notion about making a set of proportionally related lengths of wood and then combining them in different ways to make haptic and energetic, yet somewhat architectonic, ‘dancing’ arrangements.
This is the significance of the set that lies on the floor – simply the statement of what the theme is to consist of.
The first major construction, the one to the left, begins with an element of folded lead. This is partly a pun – a ‘lead’ in – and partly just an almost organic contrast to the black crown-like element. This second element is also a sort of praeludium, and a reference to the other end of the structure, in that it’s made of the offcuts from the pointed end of the descending stick.
Next, there’s a cast in wax of the interior of a green pepper, rather like an egg in a nest of old typewriter ribbon. This is related to a series of wax casts of the interior of sweet peppers used earlier in a work called Fibonacci’s Bones, and is about the masculine/feminine properties a sculptor participates in when making moulds and castings, and in Bones also refers to geological delights discoverable inside geodes and crystalline nodules.
The mathematical reference in Fibonacci’s Bones is to the way the Fibonacci series informed the arrangement of its elements (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,…) and to my (then) preoccupation with discovering relationships between order in number and number theory and in the visual arts; and which is also embodied in the installation/construction Pascal’s Triangle.
There’s also the interesting question of how one could have poured such wax and plaster casts without having an opening in the mould. The mystery of this can be seen, to a degree, in a previous working-out of it using a tin can in the piece, Sources, and in the plaster cast of a courgette which I still have and like to keep around the house. (It also occurs, together with uses of positive-negative spatial composition, in Sources (or sometimes I’ve called it Timaeus). This piece of work contains a lot of references to Plato’s description of how the cosmos came into being in the Timaeus dialogue.) It is by such activities as mouldmaking and casting, or for that matter, carving, that one can participate, in a poetic or at least an analogical way, in the fundamental generative activities peculiar to all three-dimensional form-giving.
The next thing one encounters is the square wooden ring which is engaged by the first upright stick. Apart from the fact that you have to have something stable to hold up a stick vertically, it’s one of the few ways you could successfully use the other members of the original, thematic, set of pieces of wood in this suite, but it also relates to the Rings and Slabs series. Finally, the descending stick’s point relates to the point of the carved pencil, which I had made some years earlier from a piece of broom-tree to amuse my children.
The next main construction begins with an opened-out box-bag, a simulation of the paper bags I was drawing from at the time, and which shows other aspects of ways of describing through drawing and projective geometry the positive-negative spatial relationships in which I have always had a natural interest.
The major rise-and-fall element resembles the path of a pony jumping over a hurdle, but in this case the path described by the two long sticks is actually supported by the hurdle, a new configuration from the original set of elements. But first you have a black wax cast of a sweet potato and its moulds, arranged informally to contrast with and enrich the severity of the other main components. At the apex of the jump is another piece of folded lead. This was intended to give the eye a moment of interest and rest, and to add a bit of élan to the jump.
The experience ends with a thin zinc disc. This was etched with the pattern of the marble intarsia floor pavement seen in perspective in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ. Several years before, as the result of reading Marilyn Aronberg Lavin’s book on it, I had become interested in the complex composition and possible meanings of the content of this painting. This came at the time when I had been asked to give some talks on order in number and in art, and of course, trying to arrive at a convincing interpretation of the meaning of the figures in the foreground has been something of a professional playground for art historians, off and on, for many years. I spent quite a long time studying all the available literature on the painting, and with the background of all the work I had been doing on number and mathematics, came to one or two previously unremarked conclusions about how Piero may have gone about constructing the pattern, and whether or not Leon-Battista Alberti may have used certain commonly-known procedures in his designs for the intarsia roundels of Santa Maria Novalla and the Rucellai Holy Sepuchre in San Lorenzo. The fact that the two men were friends, and countless other connections between them and the culture of 15th-century Florence, gave a particular depth of interest to my studies. I was helped a great deal through a sizable correspondence with Prof. Martin Kemp, who was very kind about it; he treated me almost as if I were one of his own graduate students. Unfortunately, I could never find a publisher for my little paper – Technical Footnotes to Piero and Alberti – the editors always objected that it didn’t fit neatly enough into the usual categories – but I eventually sent Marilyn Lavin a copy and had a very complementary and appreciative letter from her. Anyway, the pattern of the pavement still continued to fascinate, and this seemed a good place to use it; something quite attractive and possibly full of Platonic-Pythagorean references if you’re at all interested in early Renaissance art theories and their metaphysics.
Just to liven things up a bit, there are resting on and around the disc the parts of three-dimensional oak tangrams and another, rather strange object, adding a bit of visual juice to what I felt would otherwise be a rather dry geometry.
Finally, the third variation using the same basic elements, this time with a tension member made of hemp string. The parts of it at the start and finish are a black and a white brick drawn on with white chalk and black crayon, and a block of pattern-maker’s wood with a small lead sheet fixed to it with four galvanised pins. Into the lead is incised a figure adapted from an article on Brunelleschi’s method of making perspective drawings. It shows the minimum distance away from the centre of vision that it’s necessary to place a vanishing point in order to make the squares on the floor look in proportion in perspective, and not distorted one way or the other.
Off to one side is a very old glass bottle filled with earth and sealed with wax, and to which another small element is fixed.
All this may seem rather thought-out, but I can assure you that it was done with a pretty even balance between knowledge and feeling, and it’s only afterwards that one realises how one’s needs result in such things. And then, at last, you have to recognise that in the visual arts, one piece of work can only deal with so much. You can’t say it all in one piece. Or maybe, you just can’t sometimes say as much as you’d like to. Or maybe you do, and you just don’t realise it.
For my friends / Daniel Q. / March 2005
PS: Someone tried to define art as “that which delights the eye and informs the mind”. I think that needs to be qualified a bit, and if I had to propose a definition, it would go something like this:
Art can be distinguished from non-art in that:
[1] It is capable of giving us occasion for aesthetic experience which is not ordinary in kind, in degree, or both; and that
[2] It is brought into being with this intention.
Yet, non-ordinary experience can be occasioned by things or events of which it cannot be meaningfully said that there was an intention of this kind involved in their coming into being. To distinguish art from non-art in this way seems to require additional qualifications related to intention. These qualifications could lie in domains like craft, communication, discipline, discourse, dialogue.
That’s about enough of that, I guess. If anything I’ve ever made has given someone a little pleasure and thoughtfulness, that’s enough of that, too. I always thought it was a good thing, and I was trained to develop my mind and perceptions and sensibilities as far as I could. This is one of the ways it turned out.