"Luditectonics" by Alana Keres

[Randy]

Tribeza is a fine, four-color arts publication here in Austin, TX. "Luditectonics" is an article about two Austin sculptors and their unique forms of "play."

Luditectonics: The Artwork of Play
by Alana Keres
copyright Alana Keres, 2003

One of the things I admire most about artists is their ability to amuse themselves. Observing an artist at work is like watching a wild goat climb a vertical rockface - ascending from one invisible step to another as easily as you and I would tumble into the ravine.

*Amuse.* It's a good word in the context of a studio. It's root, *Musein,* means 'to stand open-mouthed.' In ancient times one would muse in front of a temple effigy, presumably to be inspired by what the god breathed out. While it is clear that our culture has plenty of ways to amuse itself, the difference between an artist and say, a NASCAR driver, is in the results of their musing. While both may be completely absorbed in a particular objective --the artist to follow an evanescent thread of image, the racer to keep his flesh from mixing abruptly with the hardware all around him-- only the artist is compelled to disseminate what has been delivered by his muse. To go William Burroughs one better, beyond the virus of language there is art, one that replicates in ways even more subtle and playful than the codons of speech.


i.

When Donna Pardue began producing her uncanny little relics, she was drawn in by the translucent quality of apple flesh. Her first torso, "Adam Ate Most of It" (1998) was carved out of a Granny Smith apple; she says it was like working with cool, damp marble. Just as German artist/healer Wolfgang Laib explores the paradoxes of milk and stone, the 47-year old Texas native works with a simple medium containing an iridescent play of associations: the Edenic apple of the first work's title, the Norse goddess Idun and her apples of immortality, the Druidic Avalon (meaning 'place of apples'), a realm without disease or death -- even the homily of the 'apple-a-day.' The mythography of the apple is bound to the transformations of time, so Pardue was intrigued by the changes in her sculpture's 'flesh.' After a few hours the tissue began to mottle and thicken, eventually forming a second, chamois-colored skin, In a few weeks the torso had taken on the appearance of an aging Eve: wrinkled skin, pendulous breasts and a slight pot belly. Pardue had created, to her amusement, an inversion of the 'natur mort' (still life) tradition. Rather than the artist illustrating idealized fruit, the fruit illustrates the actual artist.

As she mastered the proportions of the drying fruit, Pardue made progressively smaller works, as if to condense the power of the image. The artist shaped tiny hands into gestures of blessing or protection, widespread in both Western and Eastern ecclesiastical art. Cutting an apple longitudinally, she saw in its profile the curve of a question mark, a kind of visual pun on the shape of the human ear. In the welter of questions that attended September 11, Pardue created "The Ears of Sundry Gods" -- fifteen rumpled appendages pinned to the gallery wall like war trophies. Unlike Pardue's torsos, hands and feet, the ears were human scale and therefore a more complicated presence. "Is every prayer heard equally?" she wondered, "or do conflicting petitions (and religions) cancel each other out?" Were they in fact human ears, do we merely borrow our hearing from the gods? Eyes and mouths can be closed, hands and breath withdrawn, stopping sight, taste, smell and touch. But hearing is not discretionary, the ears are ever-accessible. Perhaps hearing's inevitable openness mirrors where the artist 'stands open-mouthed,' --creating a *muse-en-abîme,* so to speak-- and imitating the complete openness to life (and death) we ascribe to our gods.

ii.

If Donna Pardue's works are rendered on the scale of a private joke, Randy Jewart's are much more gregarious. "I consider myself an instrument of the artworld," said the artist, handing me a 25-pound stone balloon. "Staying engaged, the whole process of making things appear out of nearly nothing, I believe in it."

While Jewart has been making and selling his artwork since the early nineties, with the birth of his first child three years ago, the 33-year old turned his attention to balancing art with family life. Part of the solution was to bring the process of new fatherhood into the artwork. "How do you make a sculpture without losing money?" he wondered. The answer, he decided, was in the medium: cold, hard cash. With the 'Coins Project' started in 2000, the artist began to weave twisted, leaning, perforated towers of coins, naming the works after the numbers involved, "6000 Quarters," "40,000 Nickels in Progress," and what has been so far his magnus opus, "103,520 Pennies."

Jewart labors over the towers for days, weeks and sometimes months. The work is painstaking but repetitive, leaving him free to converse with passersby. "People love change!" he laughed, "and everybody has a change story. It's a very social way of making art."

The 'luditechtonic moment' arrives when the towers come down. His earliest coinwork, '3900 Quarters" shows his 1-year old daughter gleefully attacking a glittering fortress of money--testimony to the effect of babies on the budget. In the "Coins Documentary" presented at the 2001 Washington, DC International Film Festival, Jewart paints himself copper-colored and shatters a high-rise temple of pennies with a golden bowling ball -- one that bears an impressive resemblance to his shaven, shiny head.

The Coins Project solved a number of problems: they were site-specific, recyclable, easy to understand, invited audience participation during construction, and made people laugh out-loud upon their demise.

"I have always considered my family my most important audience," Jewart
confesses. "Parents and aunts and uncles as well as my wife and kids. They are normal people -- smart, talkative and soulful, but not that interested in contemporary art. So when I make something that appeals to them, I feel I have managed to reach into the world in a real way."

***


"Time is a child, playing a game of dice.
The kingship in the hands of a child."
Heraclitus

We build things up and watch them unravel; we tighten, tone and clarify, only to be disheveled by history's passionate embrace. Pardue and Jewarts' sculptures tackle the transformations of time, but instead of the fingerwagging moralism of the Vanitas, they reveal it's playful side, softening our hard beauties, shaking us down for a little loose change.

###

For documentary images of Randy Jewart's coin projects:
http://www.randyjewartinc.com/www.ra...sframeset.html

[benny]

Brilliant! Your post relates back to the thread about 'materials' and what 'matters' in the artistic proccess. Good to see sculptors taking the cold hard edge off reality by lightening up - and making some perfectly simple sense in 3D.
Any ideas out there on the possibility of raising enough small change to commission Christo to wrap the Whitehouse? Send donations to this site now!

Benny