MFA Thesis Statement
2009
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 1
I used to have a view of the NYC skyline. Then the neighbor built on to the back of his house, and now all I can see is a box made of wood, drywall and shingles. It took only one day for it all to be suddenly gone, and when I move there will be no sense of what had been there before. Pocahontas is a symbol of peace and alliance between the Virginia Indians and the first English colonists. She is credited with saving the settlers lives by providing corn and provisions for the winter. Really though, her symbolic position doesn’t reveal the actual truth of her life: her husband was murdered and she was kidnapped, raped, and after being whisked to England to impress the Queen with a forged Indian-Colonist alliance, she was poisoned. Her body was promptly buried in Gravesend, far from the land of her fathers and mothers and an ocean away from the place where we still revere her offerings of peace to this violent day.2 In Weehawken, New Jersey there used to be a castle complex called the Eldorado. It first opened in June, 1891 and it stood high up on the cliff, in the shadow of a famous Gothic Revival water tower and the reservoir that provided drinking water to the downhill city of Hoboken. The Eldorado was a pleasure palace, where one could see a show, play casino games, partake in sport, and enjoy the solace of the land across the river from the hard, dark city. It cost 10 cents to get in. The world’s largest passenger elevator took visitors up the Palisade cliffs from the ferryboat; the scar is still visible where the track was cut into the steep rock face. There was an 8,000-seat amphitheater, Roman style, nestled among the tall trees on the grounds of the castle, not far from the old reservoir. The place was in business a total of 4 seasons; the company never turned a profit. They went broke and the Eldorado was promptly demolished in 1900.3 The reservoir is now the Pathmark parking lot. The only relic of the grand castle is a small sign that has white letters on green metal: ELDORADO PL.
So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend’s name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 4
Those whose stories are remembered are at the mercy of the living; after awhile, people, places and things become symbols, or nothing at all. We carry meaning in our use of signs, but often to reduce something to a symbol is to simplify it, thus overlooking complicated truths and inherent contradictions. For example, the sacrifices of saints are never forgotten, but their fears and doubts, the things that truly bind our existence with theirs, are no longer. Their deeds and works are venerated at the expense of the individual.
I grew up in a machine shop. Ten to fifteen yard long schiffli embroidery machines rhythmically clanking all day, the smell of oil on hardwood and concrete floors, manly men with their big hands working sewing machines. Hudson County, New Jersey, “The Embroidery Capital of the World.” That was still true when I was a kid. Established by my grandfather, improved and expanded upon by my father, with his brother and sister at his side, the family business was the thing that moved their family out of a two-bedroom apartment with five kids, and eventually led to a nice middle class life for my sister and me and all of our cousins. But the best part was the unlimited cardboard, markers, tape, fabric scraps and kids to play with during the endless summer vacations spent at the shop in West New York. I still smell the dogshit baking on the sidewalks of 56th street between Madison and Bergenline. I always had a job at Manhattan Lace, even before I was old enough to know what a good work ethic was. I was an artist as well, so I created new lace and embroidery designs. It was a practical and money-saving bit of serendipity, to have an in-house artist. But by the late nineties, it became clear that it was all going to hell. Or, should I say, to China. The biggest customers were the first to go.
The Discovery, the Susan Constant, and the Godspeed were the first English ships to arrive in the Chesapeake Bay area in 1607 and settle in what became Jamestown, Virginia. Together they held 104 living passengers, all men and boys. Of those, Captain John Smith named half as having OCCUPATION: GENTLEMAN. Many had virtually no survival skills to last through the winter in the New World, and most of them died in the first year. It didn’t fully occur to them that they would need the assistance of the Powhatan Indians (Pocahontas’ people, of whom she was a princess in the Mattaponi tribe) to simply not freeze to death, or starve. They were so sure that their miracle awaited them in the New World, in the form of gold. They dreamed of it protruding from the ground, running in the waters of every stream, and dangling from the ears of savage women and girls. They would plunder every last glistening shard and be remembered as heroes. It seems illogical now that the powerful Virginia Company of London would entrust such inexperienced men to colonize a strange land. Apparently, competence and accountability weren’t worth very much; the ones with the most money were the first to go. The mightiest have the ability to conquer through their mere arrival, or departure.
“By this sign, you shall conquer.”
(A voice that spoke to the Roman Emperor Constantine in a vision just before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312 A.D.) 5
Twenty-six years later and across the ocean from the New World, Pope Urban VIII unveiled what would become the quintessential example of Baroque artistry in Rome’s Basilica of St. Peter. Bernini’s Baldacchino is a monolithic bronze canopy, supported by four spiraling columns. The columns were modeled in form after those that originally framed the ciborium in the old St. Peter’s Basilica, which stood in the same exact spot from the 4th through the 16th centuries, directly above the tomb of the apostle Peter himself. Although subsequently debunked, it was once rumored that these spiral columns had been taken from the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and brought to Rome by Constantine to adorn the original basilica structure. The Solomonic columns, as they became known, were two free--standing pillars of copper or bronze that flanked the entrance to the first Temple. They are described in detail down to the exact measurements in the Old Testament.6 They didn’t support any weight and stood independently of a frieze, marking the threshold into the sacred space. They were named Boaz and Jachin, and it is generally theorized that they represent oppositional but complementary forces: the male and female, perhaps. The full meaning and purpose of these twin columns remains a mystery. One story is that they were designed after the two columns in Egyptian temples meant to represent the eternal antagonists Horus and Seth, the conqueror and the conquered. The Masons regard them as having astronomical and navigational significance. Regardless, the coiling spiral took on new, glorious meaning in the Baldecchino. The work was not only meant to inspire awe through the glory of Christ, it was also a monument to the growing power of the Church. Since before the time of King Solomon, architecture has been used as an expression of power. The Baroque period brims with the hubris of these expressions, shamelessly ignoring the contradiction inherent in attempting to visually depict such intangibles as god, faith, and piety. The Baldecchino’s spiral columns themselves are adapted from a language of contradictory symbols, and what they hope to inspire in the viewer is itself an opposition: the idea of Jesus Christ, who existed simultaneously as both mortal and divine.
Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 7
There was a time, before now but after the Eldorado, where there were thousands of embroidery machines chugging away in Hudson County. Everybody knew somebody who worked in the trade. Alexander Hamilton had the idea to harness the powers of the Great Falls in Paterson and a textile industry was born. Silk was imported from the orient, and when it became too expensive they invented rayon, which is now the standard for all American-made venise lace. I own Manhattan Lace now. I get a couple of days work a week out of it, and on the weekends I walk to the cliff’s edge to see the place where old Hamilton was killed in that famous duel. The spot is within visible range of where Henry Hudson docked his ship the Half Moon exactly 400 years ago in 1609, two years after Capt. John Smith and his English gentleman conquerors drank their first taste of the brackish water of the James River. We live in a land of mighty rivers, but nobody seems to notice. The bus to the ferry cruises south down Boulevard East, empty. Rivers are what put us here, first the Dutch and English and later the Germans, assembling their new schiffli machinery in the New World. Schiffli refers to the shuttle on the embroidery machine that holds the bobbin thread. It’s a German word; it means little boat. Nowadays if you ask any teenager in Hudson County about the embroidery industry, they don’t know what you’re talking about. That ship has sailed. Where once were the castle and grounds of the Eldorado are now the Highwood Estates. We live in the attic.
Several years ago, while in a strange limbo between the embroidery trade and my life as an artist, I had a night of soul searching. Often when I do this I will draw. Drawing is my common denominator, my first love, and the genesis of my every idea. I sat at my desk and drew a form. It was somewhat columnar, but organic, twisting and writhing, cinched at points and constrained at each end. They were columns but they didn’t support any weight. I didn’t think I had much interest in architecture at that time. I knew the lines I drew somehow represented a life. A life constrained by the powerful forces of society, temptation, fear and doubt. This was a lean time. I was beginning to doubt the existence of miracles; I was starting to believe that those untold riches may not even be worth finding. I had lived my life always looking forward, taking the present for granted and forgetting the past. It was reckless and unfulfilling. I was wishing for something monumental, some bit of proof, the revelation of saints, or artists.
That night I had a dream. It was as clear as morning, and still is. I was in a winter landscape, walking. I had had a companion, but quickly lost him when I wanted to go exploring and he wanted to stay behind. It wasn’t his fault, he knew where he was. I came upon a snow-covered mound. It reached up in front of me to a plateau at the top. I was interested in what lay beneath the whiteness, and began to paw at the virgin snow with my hands, furiously after awhile. The white shroud fell away and I saw what was an entrance to a cave. It was tall and wide enough for a woman to walk into, maybe even several women. Inside the dark recess, a door became visible. As my eyes adjusted I saw it was a very old door, nearly petrified wood, with heavy cast iron hinges and a handle. Just then a snarling red dog appeared at my side; its teeth were bared and it aggressively nipped at my hands and legs. What does one do when a dog attacks? Punch it in the snout. So I did. Hard. Immediately the beast was tamed, and sat down, looking up at me. I then realized it was a wolf. A red wolf with three eyes – the two where you’d expect, and a third in the middle, atop the others, right in the spot where my fist had landed. I could see the beast’s third eye was weak, as it was somewhat smaller and half-closed, a slight trickle of blood flowed from its corner. Did this wolf just smile at me?
And then it spoke: “I like that.”
I don’t recall exactly when I realized that the wolf was me. Not until awhile later, and I’m still realizing it now. I turned my attention to the wounded animal and asked, “What’s behind that door?”
The she-wolf replied, “Whatever it is, it’s been there a very long time.”
I began making sculpture because I wanted to give physical life to the things I’d been drawing. My subconscious had referred me back in time, to finding things in history that had actually existed all along. My personal history included. I began to work with lace and fabric, materials I knew so well but for some reason hadn’t considered as part of me. Years later, I am in my studio, the pen in my hand creating those same lines again, those familiar forms. At first I questioned my faith in those marks as retrograde in my own development, but soon it became somewhat of a personal quest to find out why I kept returning to these forms, or rather, why they returned to me. So when I again found myself leaning over a drawing of spiraling, columnar shapes being constrained by cold metal, or propped up by precarious architecture, I remembered the Baldecchino. I went back in time from there, to the old St. Peter’s Basilica, and then to King Solomon’s Temple. These were all monuments to the power of God, via the hand of man. The flying buttresses holding up Chartres compensate for the impossible heights that man tried to aspire to, but that our earthly physics wouldn’t allow. I thought of St. Teresa’s ecstatic baroque gesture, how her ‘becoming’ is almost perverse. The forms I am creating refer to these gestures. They aspire to be divine but are tethered to the muck. They allude to the miracle, with its complications and contradictions. They are gold and grass, faux shining facades. They aim to seduce you before you discover they are just objects, symbols to represent something that is hard to put words to. That gesture, the one that grasps for revelation – that is a rebellious gesture, one that brings with it the risk of annihilation. There is a ratio of risk to reward, which must be acknowledged, then ignored. The danger of self-destruction is tempered by the possibility of untold recompense. It is the necessary mindset of martyrs, or artists, explorers, conquerors.
The grey-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall. And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 8
The story of Pocahontas’ life was hijacked at almost the very moment of her death; a bronze statue of her stands outside the ruins of the church at the Jamestown settlement. If it weren’t for the fringed leather dress and moccasins, her statue’s saintly posture would be indiscernible from that of the Virgin Mary. The promise of the Eldorado as a peaceful haven for all was promptly erased to make way for pricey Victorian estates; the water tower still stands only because residents fought to save it from demolition by the Pathmark people in 1980. I fear that the legacy of my own family’s story in the embroidery trade will soon meet a similar fate; once the sign hanging over route 495 falls, it won’t be replaced. In my work I point a finger at history’s erasures and embellishments. I try to parse the humanity from the symbology. The gestures I am creating focus on the motion of the seeking, they intimate the possibility of revelation. Alas, The Truth is complicated. Unraveling the meaning in symbols often leads to greater mystery, like the secrets of Boaz and Jachin, and the erasure of the female from our version of God. The audacity of the Baroque era is a feat of the powerful which has left an indelible mark on my aesthetic; this guilty pleasure is a nod perhaps to my own hubristic desires. I have approached my ideas with an archeologist’s heart, brushing away layers of history and attempting to capture the human essence hidden within the symbols we employ to find meaning. I suppose I am a hijacker as well, of this symbology. I use these symbols in an effort to extract their origins by placing them so that the viewer may discover something more to their meaning, or something new. I discovered that the forms that I have intuitively arrived at have connections with the structures of the most ancient societies. I wonder at the fundamental meanings contained in these symbols, and the powers they hold in the subconscious; I marvel at the idea that we are connected by inherent truths that have manifested themselves in visual and architectural form that continually repeat and reinvent themselves again and again, for millennia.
* * * * * * * * * *
A lamb is a baby that we kill. People have been doing it since ancient times, and the conflict that arises in our hearts when we kill an innocent being drew our attention toward God, and an overarching plan that aids us in reconciling our brutality. This is why martyrs are symbolized by the lamb. With Untitled (Hagne) I set out to make a piece inspired by the story of St. Agnes of Rome. Using the Solomonic column as well as the Marianic column, I wanted to show the contradiction of womanhood vs. sainthood. Spiraling and churning upward are drapes of gold, interspersed with bands of grass – signaling both the earthly and the divine. On top stands a white lamb, as if thrust upward unwillingly, without understanding what she symbolizes, or why she is here. She looks down and ponders the precarious balancing act required to remain high up on display. She wants to get down.
Sainthood for a woman comes with certain sacrifices, and I don’t mean martyrdom itself. It requires an erasure of her human self, the part that makes her an aspect of nature, her biology. The Immaculate Conception is that of the Virgin Mary, who was born without a navel, without sin; surely Jesus wasn’t borne by a mere mortal woman? Mankind has referred to Mother Nature as all-powerful, but will still make every possible attempt to tame, train and exploit her at first appointment. Like the symbol of the pomegranate – globe-shaped and crowned and containing a thousand red seeds; garlands of pomegranates adorned the twin pillars Boaz and Jachin; the fruit has since become a symbol for the man Jesus, the god Christ. The royal pomegranate is perched on its throne, disemboweled. It’s seeds spill out onto the ground – some will germinate, others will perish. I think about my grandmother, who sat in her chair with her cigarette burning and told us stories of her life on the lower east side (LES, today) growing up in a tenement during the Great Depression. She was something of an artist but she didn’t perform any miracles. That is, if you don’t count her successive generations, who all wear the invisible yet indelible mark of her existence. The piece is called Matriarch.
We assist in the building of the architecture that embodies the power to oppress us. Great forces fall (as they always do), the churning earth eats our monuments, and then we awaken again and build anew. On the surface, time cheerfully continues its rampage with the power to effortlessly expunge all form, like the snap of a bed sheet. But underneath, a secret inner world remains. There is perpetual life in those hidden places. Untitled (Cappella) is both a shifting outer world, and a quiet, consistent inner world. It is the memory of the mighty fallen, a record of its erasure, and the reminder of the cycle that permits the fertile soil to once again bear fruit.
NOTES
1. David Eagleman, “Metamorphosis,” in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 23.
2. John Smith, “The Generall Historie of Virginia” in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 262. ref. in The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History, Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalo and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star”, (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007), 83.
3. Lauren Sherman, and Ellen Robb Gaulkin for the Weehawken Historical Commission: Images of America: Weehawken (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 27.
4. Ibid., 23.
5. Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, (Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada, 2000), 179.
6. 1 Kings 7:15-21; 2 Chronicles 3:15-17.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Ibid., 24-25.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 1
I used to have a view of the NYC skyline. Then the neighbor built on to the back of his house, and now all I can see is a box made of wood, drywall and shingles. It took only one day for it all to be suddenly gone, and when I move there will be no sense of what had been there before. Pocahontas is a symbol of peace and alliance between the Virginia Indians and the first English colonists. She is credited with saving the settlers lives by providing corn and provisions for the winter. Really though, her symbolic position doesn’t reveal the actual truth of her life: her husband was murdered and she was kidnapped, raped, and after being whisked to England to impress the Queen with a forged Indian-Colonist alliance, she was poisoned. Her body was promptly buried in Gravesend, far from the land of her fathers and mothers and an ocean away from the place where we still revere her offerings of peace to this violent day.2 In Weehawken, New Jersey there used to be a castle complex called the Eldorado. It first opened in June, 1891 and it stood high up on the cliff, in the shadow of a famous Gothic Revival water tower and the reservoir that provided drinking water to the downhill city of Hoboken. The Eldorado was a pleasure palace, where one could see a show, play casino games, partake in sport, and enjoy the solace of the land across the river from the hard, dark city. It cost 10 cents to get in. The world’s largest passenger elevator took visitors up the Palisade cliffs from the ferryboat; the scar is still visible where the track was cut into the steep rock face. There was an 8,000-seat amphitheater, Roman style, nestled among the tall trees on the grounds of the castle, not far from the old reservoir. The place was in business a total of 4 seasons; the company never turned a profit. They went broke and the Eldorado was promptly demolished in 1900.3 The reservoir is now the Pathmark parking lot. The only relic of the grand castle is a small sign that has white letters on green metal: ELDORADO PL.
So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend’s name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 4
Those whose stories are remembered are at the mercy of the living; after awhile, people, places and things become symbols, or nothing at all. We carry meaning in our use of signs, but often to reduce something to a symbol is to simplify it, thus overlooking complicated truths and inherent contradictions. For example, the sacrifices of saints are never forgotten, but their fears and doubts, the things that truly bind our existence with theirs, are no longer. Their deeds and works are venerated at the expense of the individual.
I grew up in a machine shop. Ten to fifteen yard long schiffli embroidery machines rhythmically clanking all day, the smell of oil on hardwood and concrete floors, manly men with their big hands working sewing machines. Hudson County, New Jersey, “The Embroidery Capital of the World.” That was still true when I was a kid. Established by my grandfather, improved and expanded upon by my father, with his brother and sister at his side, the family business was the thing that moved their family out of a two-bedroom apartment with five kids, and eventually led to a nice middle class life for my sister and me and all of our cousins. But the best part was the unlimited cardboard, markers, tape, fabric scraps and kids to play with during the endless summer vacations spent at the shop in West New York. I still smell the dogshit baking on the sidewalks of 56th street between Madison and Bergenline. I always had a job at Manhattan Lace, even before I was old enough to know what a good work ethic was. I was an artist as well, so I created new lace and embroidery designs. It was a practical and money-saving bit of serendipity, to have an in-house artist. But by the late nineties, it became clear that it was all going to hell. Or, should I say, to China. The biggest customers were the first to go.
The Discovery, the Susan Constant, and the Godspeed were the first English ships to arrive in the Chesapeake Bay area in 1607 and settle in what became Jamestown, Virginia. Together they held 104 living passengers, all men and boys. Of those, Captain John Smith named half as having OCCUPATION: GENTLEMAN. Many had virtually no survival skills to last through the winter in the New World, and most of them died in the first year. It didn’t fully occur to them that they would need the assistance of the Powhatan Indians (Pocahontas’ people, of whom she was a princess in the Mattaponi tribe) to simply not freeze to death, or starve. They were so sure that their miracle awaited them in the New World, in the form of gold. They dreamed of it protruding from the ground, running in the waters of every stream, and dangling from the ears of savage women and girls. They would plunder every last glistening shard and be remembered as heroes. It seems illogical now that the powerful Virginia Company of London would entrust such inexperienced men to colonize a strange land. Apparently, competence and accountability weren’t worth very much; the ones with the most money were the first to go. The mightiest have the ability to conquer through their mere arrival, or departure.
“By this sign, you shall conquer.”
(A voice that spoke to the Roman Emperor Constantine in a vision just before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312 A.D.) 5
Twenty-six years later and across the ocean from the New World, Pope Urban VIII unveiled what would become the quintessential example of Baroque artistry in Rome’s Basilica of St. Peter. Bernini’s Baldacchino is a monolithic bronze canopy, supported by four spiraling columns. The columns were modeled in form after those that originally framed the ciborium in the old St. Peter’s Basilica, which stood in the same exact spot from the 4th through the 16th centuries, directly above the tomb of the apostle Peter himself. Although subsequently debunked, it was once rumored that these spiral columns had been taken from the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and brought to Rome by Constantine to adorn the original basilica structure. The Solomonic columns, as they became known, were two free--standing pillars of copper or bronze that flanked the entrance to the first Temple. They are described in detail down to the exact measurements in the Old Testament.6 They didn’t support any weight and stood independently of a frieze, marking the threshold into the sacred space. They were named Boaz and Jachin, and it is generally theorized that they represent oppositional but complementary forces: the male and female, perhaps. The full meaning and purpose of these twin columns remains a mystery. One story is that they were designed after the two columns in Egyptian temples meant to represent the eternal antagonists Horus and Seth, the conqueror and the conquered. The Masons regard them as having astronomical and navigational significance. Regardless, the coiling spiral took on new, glorious meaning in the Baldecchino. The work was not only meant to inspire awe through the glory of Christ, it was also a monument to the growing power of the Church. Since before the time of King Solomon, architecture has been used as an expression of power. The Baroque period brims with the hubris of these expressions, shamelessly ignoring the contradiction inherent in attempting to visually depict such intangibles as god, faith, and piety. The Baldecchino’s spiral columns themselves are adapted from a language of contradictory symbols, and what they hope to inspire in the viewer is itself an opposition: the idea of Jesus Christ, who existed simultaneously as both mortal and divine.
Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 7
There was a time, before now but after the Eldorado, where there were thousands of embroidery machines chugging away in Hudson County. Everybody knew somebody who worked in the trade. Alexander Hamilton had the idea to harness the powers of the Great Falls in Paterson and a textile industry was born. Silk was imported from the orient, and when it became too expensive they invented rayon, which is now the standard for all American-made venise lace. I own Manhattan Lace now. I get a couple of days work a week out of it, and on the weekends I walk to the cliff’s edge to see the place where old Hamilton was killed in that famous duel. The spot is within visible range of where Henry Hudson docked his ship the Half Moon exactly 400 years ago in 1609, two years after Capt. John Smith and his English gentleman conquerors drank their first taste of the brackish water of the James River. We live in a land of mighty rivers, but nobody seems to notice. The bus to the ferry cruises south down Boulevard East, empty. Rivers are what put us here, first the Dutch and English and later the Germans, assembling their new schiffli machinery in the New World. Schiffli refers to the shuttle on the embroidery machine that holds the bobbin thread. It’s a German word; it means little boat. Nowadays if you ask any teenager in Hudson County about the embroidery industry, they don’t know what you’re talking about. That ship has sailed. Where once were the castle and grounds of the Eldorado are now the Highwood Estates. We live in the attic.
Several years ago, while in a strange limbo between the embroidery trade and my life as an artist, I had a night of soul searching. Often when I do this I will draw. Drawing is my common denominator, my first love, and the genesis of my every idea. I sat at my desk and drew a form. It was somewhat columnar, but organic, twisting and writhing, cinched at points and constrained at each end. They were columns but they didn’t support any weight. I didn’t think I had much interest in architecture at that time. I knew the lines I drew somehow represented a life. A life constrained by the powerful forces of society, temptation, fear and doubt. This was a lean time. I was beginning to doubt the existence of miracles; I was starting to believe that those untold riches may not even be worth finding. I had lived my life always looking forward, taking the present for granted and forgetting the past. It was reckless and unfulfilling. I was wishing for something monumental, some bit of proof, the revelation of saints, or artists.
That night I had a dream. It was as clear as morning, and still is. I was in a winter landscape, walking. I had had a companion, but quickly lost him when I wanted to go exploring and he wanted to stay behind. It wasn’t his fault, he knew where he was. I came upon a snow-covered mound. It reached up in front of me to a plateau at the top. I was interested in what lay beneath the whiteness, and began to paw at the virgin snow with my hands, furiously after awhile. The white shroud fell away and I saw what was an entrance to a cave. It was tall and wide enough for a woman to walk into, maybe even several women. Inside the dark recess, a door became visible. As my eyes adjusted I saw it was a very old door, nearly petrified wood, with heavy cast iron hinges and a handle. Just then a snarling red dog appeared at my side; its teeth were bared and it aggressively nipped at my hands and legs. What does one do when a dog attacks? Punch it in the snout. So I did. Hard. Immediately the beast was tamed, and sat down, looking up at me. I then realized it was a wolf. A red wolf with three eyes – the two where you’d expect, and a third in the middle, atop the others, right in the spot where my fist had landed. I could see the beast’s third eye was weak, as it was somewhat smaller and half-closed, a slight trickle of blood flowed from its corner. Did this wolf just smile at me?
And then it spoke: “I like that.”
I don’t recall exactly when I realized that the wolf was me. Not until awhile later, and I’m still realizing it now. I turned my attention to the wounded animal and asked, “What’s behind that door?”
The she-wolf replied, “Whatever it is, it’s been there a very long time.”
I began making sculpture because I wanted to give physical life to the things I’d been drawing. My subconscious had referred me back in time, to finding things in history that had actually existed all along. My personal history included. I began to work with lace and fabric, materials I knew so well but for some reason hadn’t considered as part of me. Years later, I am in my studio, the pen in my hand creating those same lines again, those familiar forms. At first I questioned my faith in those marks as retrograde in my own development, but soon it became somewhat of a personal quest to find out why I kept returning to these forms, or rather, why they returned to me. So when I again found myself leaning over a drawing of spiraling, columnar shapes being constrained by cold metal, or propped up by precarious architecture, I remembered the Baldecchino. I went back in time from there, to the old St. Peter’s Basilica, and then to King Solomon’s Temple. These were all monuments to the power of God, via the hand of man. The flying buttresses holding up Chartres compensate for the impossible heights that man tried to aspire to, but that our earthly physics wouldn’t allow. I thought of St. Teresa’s ecstatic baroque gesture, how her ‘becoming’ is almost perverse. The forms I am creating refer to these gestures. They aspire to be divine but are tethered to the muck. They allude to the miracle, with its complications and contradictions. They are gold and grass, faux shining facades. They aim to seduce you before you discover they are just objects, symbols to represent something that is hard to put words to. That gesture, the one that grasps for revelation – that is a rebellious gesture, one that brings with it the risk of annihilation. There is a ratio of risk to reward, which must be acknowledged, then ignored. The danger of self-destruction is tempered by the possibility of untold recompense. It is the necessary mindset of martyrs, or artists, explorers, conquerors.
The grey-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall. And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
(David Eagleman, Metamorphosis) 8
The story of Pocahontas’ life was hijacked at almost the very moment of her death; a bronze statue of her stands outside the ruins of the church at the Jamestown settlement. If it weren’t for the fringed leather dress and moccasins, her statue’s saintly posture would be indiscernible from that of the Virgin Mary. The promise of the Eldorado as a peaceful haven for all was promptly erased to make way for pricey Victorian estates; the water tower still stands only because residents fought to save it from demolition by the Pathmark people in 1980. I fear that the legacy of my own family’s story in the embroidery trade will soon meet a similar fate; once the sign hanging over route 495 falls, it won’t be replaced. In my work I point a finger at history’s erasures and embellishments. I try to parse the humanity from the symbology. The gestures I am creating focus on the motion of the seeking, they intimate the possibility of revelation. Alas, The Truth is complicated. Unraveling the meaning in symbols often leads to greater mystery, like the secrets of Boaz and Jachin, and the erasure of the female from our version of God. The audacity of the Baroque era is a feat of the powerful which has left an indelible mark on my aesthetic; this guilty pleasure is a nod perhaps to my own hubristic desires. I have approached my ideas with an archeologist’s heart, brushing away layers of history and attempting to capture the human essence hidden within the symbols we employ to find meaning. I suppose I am a hijacker as well, of this symbology. I use these symbols in an effort to extract their origins by placing them so that the viewer may discover something more to their meaning, or something new. I discovered that the forms that I have intuitively arrived at have connections with the structures of the most ancient societies. I wonder at the fundamental meanings contained in these symbols, and the powers they hold in the subconscious; I marvel at the idea that we are connected by inherent truths that have manifested themselves in visual and architectural form that continually repeat and reinvent themselves again and again, for millennia.
* * * * * * * * * *
A lamb is a baby that we kill. People have been doing it since ancient times, and the conflict that arises in our hearts when we kill an innocent being drew our attention toward God, and an overarching plan that aids us in reconciling our brutality. This is why martyrs are symbolized by the lamb. With Untitled (Hagne) I set out to make a piece inspired by the story of St. Agnes of Rome. Using the Solomonic column as well as the Marianic column, I wanted to show the contradiction of womanhood vs. sainthood. Spiraling and churning upward are drapes of gold, interspersed with bands of grass – signaling both the earthly and the divine. On top stands a white lamb, as if thrust upward unwillingly, without understanding what she symbolizes, or why she is here. She looks down and ponders the precarious balancing act required to remain high up on display. She wants to get down.
Sainthood for a woman comes with certain sacrifices, and I don’t mean martyrdom itself. It requires an erasure of her human self, the part that makes her an aspect of nature, her biology. The Immaculate Conception is that of the Virgin Mary, who was born without a navel, without sin; surely Jesus wasn’t borne by a mere mortal woman? Mankind has referred to Mother Nature as all-powerful, but will still make every possible attempt to tame, train and exploit her at first appointment. Like the symbol of the pomegranate – globe-shaped and crowned and containing a thousand red seeds; garlands of pomegranates adorned the twin pillars Boaz and Jachin; the fruit has since become a symbol for the man Jesus, the god Christ. The royal pomegranate is perched on its throne, disemboweled. It’s seeds spill out onto the ground – some will germinate, others will perish. I think about my grandmother, who sat in her chair with her cigarette burning and told us stories of her life on the lower east side (LES, today) growing up in a tenement during the Great Depression. She was something of an artist but she didn’t perform any miracles. That is, if you don’t count her successive generations, who all wear the invisible yet indelible mark of her existence. The piece is called Matriarch.
We assist in the building of the architecture that embodies the power to oppress us. Great forces fall (as they always do), the churning earth eats our monuments, and then we awaken again and build anew. On the surface, time cheerfully continues its rampage with the power to effortlessly expunge all form, like the snap of a bed sheet. But underneath, a secret inner world remains. There is perpetual life in those hidden places. Untitled (Cappella) is both a shifting outer world, and a quiet, consistent inner world. It is the memory of the mighty fallen, a record of its erasure, and the reminder of the cycle that permits the fertile soil to once again bear fruit.
NOTES
1. David Eagleman, “Metamorphosis,” in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 23.
2. John Smith, “The Generall Historie of Virginia” in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 262. ref. in The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History, Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalo and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star”, (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007), 83.
3. Lauren Sherman, and Ellen Robb Gaulkin for the Weehawken Historical Commission: Images of America: Weehawken (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 27.
4. Ibid., 23.
5. Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, (Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada, 2000), 179.
6. 1 Kings 7:15-21; 2 Chronicles 3:15-17.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Ibid., 24-25.
