I spent the morning with this little guy and a bunch of his buddies.
A co-worker and I spent the first part of today rifling through storage boxes and unwrapping pieces of donated artwork in order to acquire accurate dimensions of individual pieces with the intent of finalizing a design for a custom-built glass display case to house them. These pieces were collected by a local dentist throughout his life and were recently donated to a dental institute to be displayed in the main lobby. There are many sculptures, artifacts, paintings, and glass works in the collection and we needed to sort through the lot to find a few select pieces.
I didn’t mind though. The warehouse reminded me of on Indiana Jones film, and although this single storage building in Brockport, NY wasn’t quite on the scale of the government storage facility depicted at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark I was amazed by the amount of crates and the complex storage system.
The man who helped us un-crate the items was full of interesting stories as well. He has spent his life in the moving and storage business and has discovered all sorts of unusual items. He has been gifted several thousand dollar NFL memorabilia and discarded cook books which, unbeknown to the owner, contained antique paper money within its pages, and has been in the middle of messy divorce separations where he has literally been physically attacked and shot at.
Our crate was in the top row
It wasn’t until we were on our way out that I had actually noticed how many piles of crates were there. We passed a small separation in the piles for a structural support, and this crevice revealed the true depth of the operation.
Now, 3 rows tall by 4 rows deep by...how many columns?
Another sculpture, and Inuit "Hunter with Antler Teeth" from soapstone
This is an Inuit sculpture carved from whalebone.
I will post photos of the finished display cases when they are completed. They feature floating glass shelves in an eight foot back lit resin panel, if the contractor follows the design requirements they should be quite spectacular.
Last night we sat down to watch my favorite artist documentary about Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy creates site-specific land art primarily from material found at the site. He will use leaves, stones, twigs, moss, hair, clay, water, ice, sand, snow, anything that the site provides and allow the work to be derived from the materials available and how the site speaks to him.
The first time I was exposed to Goldsworthy was during an art history class in College. Much of the course was dedicated to studying the Naturalist/Artist relationships and imitating those relationships in our art. We worked at a small-scale first with studying principles of art such as space, order, perspective, and so on while viewing the Rivers and Tides documentary in class. Then we increased the scale and as a class constructed a large labyrinth deep in the woods behind the college. It was a great experience and my only regret was that I was not exposed to an art style like this before.
The whole time we were growing up my brother and I were experimenting with natural materials much the same way that Goldsworthy does, usually on a smaller scale and with less patience. Collecting, analyzing, sorting, arranging, only falling short of photographing. We were not aware we were creating art. It is my belief that if more young children were exposed to this type of artist, who essentially makes his living by playing in the woods, than I am confident that they would reflect more positively their time spent growing up in the woods. Goldsworthy primary skills with which he creates his fantastic artworks is patience and observation. Many of the ephemeral works he creates require hours of study and construction. The final work is not predetermined but derived from the location.
The reason I admire Goldsworthy so much is I envy his ability to become so consumed in nature such that it seems to be channeled through him. The ability to enter a location in the environment, a stream bed or cow pasture, and not only perceive the natural beauty that exists but to be able to enhance it through the reconfiguration of materials. I wish many times I had the patience it would require to produce one of these fantastic natural sculptures. One section of the documentary depicts Goldsworthy attempting to create one of his signature egg-shaped stone piles on a beach with the intention of the sea rising to envelope it at high tide. Goldsworthy took hours to build up a few layers of stone only to have it collapse not even half-way completed. He began again, still racing the tide. This repeated four times, each time gaining a little more height with an increasing understanding of the stone he was working with. Ultimately, he was unable to complete the sculpture within the allotted time before the tide reached his location, but the next scene flashed to the completed work with an approaching tide in the distance. I don’t know how I would feel if after a full day of toil I had absolutely no progress to show for my efforts, and still have the resolve to return and compete the work, still facing an innumerable amount of possible failures. I would wager many of us would have long since gone home and not return.
I have had the opportunity to visit a few of Goldsworthy’s installations in the past, both at Kentuck Knob Sculpture Garden during a college Architecture Club trip and more recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. when my wife and I went on vacation there last year. I did not expect to see it but was able to recognize his work immediately as it stretched the entire length of the ground-level garden and broke into the building through the glass curtain wall. The low stone domes are meant to resemble the numerous architectural domes throughout the city. I do expect to visit another of his famous installations in the coming years though, the Storm King Wall, at Storm King Sculpture Park in Mountainville, NY down in the Hudson Valley. This work was detailed brilliantly in the Rivers and Tides documentary.
xkcd is one of my favorite web comics as it serves both to satisfy my comedy needs and keeps my level of nerd-iness in perspective.
It doesn’t matter how much you know about computers, nearly everyone can relate to this:
As you browse through the archives you can be almost guaranteed to encounter a few that are without doubt above your intelligence level. I am continually impressed by the vast array of material and dramatic nature in which a few stick figures can communicate any number of ideas.
I spent the morning with this little guy and a bunch of his buddies.
The man who helped us un-crate the items was full of interesting stories as well. He has spent his life in the moving and storage business and has discovered all sorts of unusual items. He has been gifted several thousand dollar NFL memorabilia and discarded cook books which, unbeknown to the owner, contained antique paper money within its pages, and has been in the middle of messy divorce separations where he has literally been physically attacked and shot at.
