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| 11.16.03 creators: killer clowns of the art world |
| 4.18.03 creators: aesthetics of totalitarianism |
| 11.8.02 creators: in praise of graffiti |
| 8.21.02 classical light/baroque light |
| 12.05 web exclusive (unless i can sell it): did the great artists use cameras? |
| Beauty of Tools, Tools of Beauty Ananda Coomaraswamy says that "a cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, . . . a hymn than a mathematical equation;... a well-made sword is not more beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only...beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is...do or do not serve their purpose." The definition of beauty as suitedness to use is wrong. Sometimes beauty is wildly in excess to any possible use, and though a simple sword that is perfect for killing may be beautiful, so may be a fantastical blade that is suited for little but to be looked at. But Coomaraswamy's definition also contains an important insight. We are surrounded by a world of artifacts designed to bring our desires to fruition. These objects, whether they are buildings, pieces of furniture, vessels, or tools, if they are well and truly made, are experienced as beautiful within our act of using them, because they are satisfying means of realizing our desires; they take up a place in the economy of our longings. Indeed, few objects are so simply and obviously beautiful as a well-made tool, the purpose of which is by necessity inscribed in its design, and craftsmen are devoted not only to making, but to an appreciation of tools, a love of the means by which they achieve their ends. In craft, means and ends become intertwined so that the process itself by which the crafted object is made is experienced as an end: the process itself is beautiful, like a dance. An excellent craftsman at work on a pot or a cabinet, is engaged in a beautiful process which eventuates in a beautiful and useful object. The tool is both the expression of a desire and the means for its satisfaction, but to that extent it can itself be the object of longing. My step-father is an amateur carpenter and cabinet-maker. A Quaker, pacifist, and political radical, he was a conscientious objector in World War II. While working in a lumber camp where objectors labored in the Pacific Northwest, Richard contracted polio. He spent a year in an iron lung and emerged a paraplegic. He never moved very far again without the use of artifacts or tools: crutches, wheelchairs, specially adapted cars and electric vehicles. For that reason and also due to something intrinsic, he had what I perceived as a child and still perceive as an adult to be an unusual relation to the artifactual environment. The way he uses things - with care, skill, and a kind of gratitude that manifests itself in patience - is an inspiration. I never really understood the use or the aesthetic of tools until he came to live with us when I was 12. Together, we built a system of cabinets for tools and implements behind our house on Livingston street in DC. During that project, he taught me the use of the circular saw and other power tools, and in doing so he continually slowed me down and showed me how and why to work with care and to work in harmony with the tool. But even more than with the power tools, I was struck by the way he held and applied a hammer and the other simplest hand tools. He had great precision but also strength: he worked with care but also decision. Richard was never a connoisseur of tools in the sense of collecting them for their own sake or buying expensive things; the hammer I remember best from 1970 was the simplest and most humble possible, with a somewhat rusty head and a plain wooden handle. He still has that hammer. Few things enraged Richard more than failure to take care of his tools: he kept them well-organized and put them away carefully when the job or the day was finished. |
Wolfgang Laib The art of Wolfgang Laib often seems displaced in the institutions in which it is installed. But there is no more beautiful body of work in contemporary art. Laib's extreme simplicity is achieved in an arduous process of devotion; he works through immense complexities to arrive close to emptiness, close to perfect serenity. Laib's family lived both in Germany and India as he was growing up, and though Laib started out to be a doctor, but never practiced, he was also pursuing a unique approach to art that made use of his split heritage and proclivity for asceticism. His first works were stones, either pebbles or boulders, which he painstakingly smoothed into perfect ovals in an imitation of the natural processes by which stones are worn in rivers. Laib has always been interested in world religions, and in the early seventies was particularly immersed in Sufism, a variety of Islam that teaches ecstatic union with God through music, poetry, dance, and even sexuality. Perhaps the most perfect expressions of the Sufi spirit are the poems of Jalaludin Rumi, the thirteenth-century leader of the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes. On the 700th anniversary of Rumi's death, in 1973, Laib placed a large, smooth red marble stone outside his tomb. A sort of cult has grown up around this stone, and women come to touch it in the belief that it will make them fertile. Laib also exhibited small arrangements of pebbles, apparently in their natural state, but in fact smoothed in a careful process. After this, Laib developed his milkstones. These are square slabs of white marble, which he works painstakingly, so that the upper surface is slightly indented. Then Laib pours milk onto the stone to achieve a perfectly white surface in which the liquid cannot be distinguished from the stone. These appear to be minimalist sculptures, and have a certain glossy artworld shine and style. But they are evanescent and must be continually renewed: repoured each day, lest the milk curdle and stink. The identity of the enduring marble with the milk is the theme of the stone, though the work is also formally beautiful as a simple white square. Laib also works with pollen as a medium, and spends the springs at his house in Germany collecting pollen from flowers and trees. Though all the pollens are yellow, they range from almost white to almost orange, and thus create very different effects. Laib sifts the pollen into squares on the floor, often preferring worn stone surfaces for the installation. But he also displays pollen in mounds, jars, or shallow dishes. Breathtaking in their purity and simplicity, these works direct an experience of nature into something central and essential. Laib's later works include rooms and enclosures made of beeswax, which like the pollen installations are fragrant. And where the pollen tends to disperse in the slightest breeze, the beeswax tends to sag in heat. Laib's work is monkish, we might say: it is a discipline both of renunciation and of affirmation. It is reductive in the sense that it always seeks essence and strips to essence as a meditative practice. It is ecstatic in the sense that it expresses the merging of the artist with the material, and essentiality of the material to the world, so that finally a yellow square on the floor with dissolving edges and the faint scent of spring is a synecdoche of all things. |
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