5wires.jpg)
SOUNDFILE of
cut-ups inspired by
Untitled: 3( 5)wires and Untitled: 5 (3)sides by David
Fought
nose time
of small
of movable
strings from
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007
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with the object:
reflections on recent work by David Fought:
You don't look closely at the white wall, do you? You're not supposed to. David spent hours re-plastering it, sanding it, painting it. In essence, he sculpted the wall to become part of the piece, but an incidental part. You wouldn't notice 5 (3)wires in the same way if you noticed the bumps and imperfections in the wall. But now maybe you'll notice that no wall is perfectly straight although it seems to be. And the wires in the wall are not straight either even though your eye at first glance sees them that way– as clean, crisp, straight lines. Take a closer look at the walls in your own bedroom and observe the way they have dips, slants or bumps. Then walk around your neighborhood and observe closely to see how "straight" all the buildings appear, how they hold themselves up under their own crooked weight.
*
I am listening to an R.E.M. song in our living room and I have the volume cranked way up so the walls throb and pulse and I am cleaning up the floor of our closet. I move a bag filled with miscellaneous items from the shelf to the floor and all of a sudden I hear a man's deep crackly voice overlapping the music like someone is talking in the adjoining hallway through an amplified source. The voice is familiar. I've heard this person somewhere before but the music from the living room is much too loud for me to discern what he says. Then I realize that I have inadvertently pushed the play button of my Microcassette Recorder that is in the bag I jostled from the shelf to the floor. The voice is David's. The moment where I heard my husband's voice in a new context replicates my experience of viewing his recent work. When I first enter the space of 3 (5)wires, I know there are shapes created by the bent wires and their shadows as I move around them and take them in at different angles, but I'm not sure what's familiar about them. They look the same. They are not the same. Is it a cityscape? I have to look again to understand the slight variation of repetition that is occurring among all three. Within each set of wires, one or two are placed one or two steps up or down in relation to the one next to it. And when I look and look again, a sense of movement begins like these are notations for a minimalist musical score or these are the leaps and lurches of an oscilloscope.
*
When I look at 5 (3)sides, I am also struck by how these shapes are familiar but un-placeable. Each plaster vessel shape is determined by 3 waxed wire hoops, and they are sitting in a variety of poses. They are all from a family whose name I don't know, but I can imagine where they are from. A mathematician had an idea and brought her 2D model on paper to life as a 3D object. A theoretical physicist made a model to demonstrate a discovery about space, time and mass. An engineer made a cast of a part of a machine or some piping. A geomancer has cast some earth in divination and this is the resulting shape. It has aged on his shelf.
*
David's materials are humble: coat hanger wire and a coarse, Fix-All® plaster. He doesn't purposefully obscure his process, but you have to look closely to see the scars and gouges on 3 (5)wires where you might have glanced and thought the wires to be perfectly straight. David's 'hand' is more readily apparent in the bumps and grooves of the standing sculptures. His process begins with collecting coat hangers with the largest gauge he can find. He hauls them to the beach, makes a fire in the middle of the day and burns them. He brings them home, oils them, takes them apart with pliers and then hammers them so they are not quite straight. He bends them into shapes. He holds them. From all that repetition, intimacy, time spent with the object, he discovers something about the object that is beyond an easy, clever explanation. He could get a machine shop to straighten them, or buy them pre-cut at Home Depot, but he prefers to spend time with them in an imperfect state. He has said that the process of being "with the object" is easily as important as the final work.
*
The delight of discovery, finding things in the woods, in the creek, on the street. David has an intimate, visceral connection with found objects and materials. He sees things I do not. He makes beautiful what has been discarded. When I first met him, he drew my attention to all of the blackened, dried banana peels in the city gutters, which I had never noticed. Years ago, he collected crushed batteries of all sizes from city streets, wrapped them with thread and then installed them in a box like a bug collector might collect a series of moth cocoons. Once he took some pieces of a heavy truck tire and made a mold of their shape from lead. Then he put the treads on our wall. He has an amazing collection of balls found all over the world (we used to have a stack of Bocci balls next to our bed). He says he doesn't know why he does this, but he likes to live with these things.
*
For David, readymade objects carry a previous meaning–a was-something or a did-something. Even paper was a "thing" before we cut it up or applied pigment to it. For work, David used to haul TV guides in a semi-truck from a manufacturer in the Bay Area to a distribution center in L.A. He thinks of the lives, past and present, of objects and things. He always wants to know where things come from. He once asked me, "Where do they make the backs of TV sets?"
*
From my studio window where I write, I watch him work, arms coated with plaster. He starts with three hoops, places them in a box, fills the box with plaster, then carves all the plaster away except for the plaster directly in line with the hoops so there's a straight line from one hoop to the next. He works in a trance-like state. He doesn't measure, but intuitively feels the shape that emerges. He shaves and files with a variety of metal rasps. I am struck by how similar my process is to this when I trim and rasp the hooves of horses. I give them a pedicure using a sharp, flat file. They have bones instead of hoops, which dictate the basic, pleasing shapes of their feet–a cone, a triangle and a truncated dome. For David, the plaster is the flesh, the shadow that fills the space between.
*
In Mr. Van Lannan's 4th grade class, David remembers that he was a cut-up, a class clown. But instead of sending him to the principal's office, this wise and discerning teacher made an artist out of a 9-year old. Mr. Van Lannan told David he could stay in the class and listen to whatever was happening, but he had to stay at his own work station (an area with tables, a sink and a collection of art supplies) and make whatever he wanted. David recalls making a paper mâché dog and layering it with different paints as he changed his mind about what color he wanted it to be.
*
I open How to Write by Gertrude Stein and read a few sentences from the chapter entitled "Sentences":
They are many ways to think alike about sentences.
It is very little that they open and close.
Close it.
It is useful to be and useful. Used. Any word may be in a sentence. A word is a noun. What is a noun.
A noun
Gertrude Stein's writing is not opaque or abstruse, but object-like and suggestive of the underlying shapes and forms that make up thinking and writing. She uses grammar in the way David uses physical shapes to suggest something about how we construct meaning or what David calls "objecthood" from the basic materials of wires or words. "What" is a noun just as 3 (5)wires or 5 (3)sides are objects.
*
David said about his work in a recent artist's statement: "these objects are what they are." One of David's favorite sayings from Stein is the following: "there is no such thing as repetition". John Cage (as quoted by David) says this in another way: "In Zen they say, 'if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four minutes. If it's still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on.' Eventually one discovers it's not boring at all."
*
David prints out photos of 3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides onto 8.5x11 paper and I use an Exacto knife to cut out the shapes made by the cast shadows, or I cut out the shapes made between the wires of each piece, or I cut out the entire shape of the piece itself. I place the stencils on top of related texts: a journal entry written while sitting in his studio, a book on Wabi-Sabi, the collected writings of Donald Judd. The result is a series of pleasing cut-up poems made from words and letters and parts of words. Read aloud, the sounds are bits of a passing conversation. The vowel or consonant sound-bytes draw attention to the phrases, sentences or words that are more whole. Performed with another reader, these poems become sound sculptures. The text does something similar to what David's objects do: it draws attention to the meaning inherent in the shape.
*
Here is my favorite paragraph that David wrote (from his Thesis):
In general, when we 'see,' we are not purposefully pointing our eyes and logically deciding what is there, even though that is what our eyes would have us think. The act of looking is no more manageable than are feelings of desire, and what we 'see' is at least as subjective as the act of falling in love. The simple materials that comprise these sculptures, placed in this particular manner, offer a puzzle to be solved by the viewer. The work both triggers and rewards scrutiny as one seeks sculptural resolution. As the viewer unpacks the puzzle, the objects become dissected into its disparate parts, only to be reconstructed into something un-nameable–all the result of looking. What we bring–how we see–is an important ingredient of this work. By making (and changing) decisions about what is actually there, the viewer consciously conspires with the object in a process of constructing phenomena.
*
What can you find that astonishes you about objects in space? What pulses can you discern in the life of some object's trajectory in an adjoining universe? The machine pauses for a second and there is the shape. 5 (3)wires emerged over the course of a year as David experimented with variations of a coat hanger stuck into a white wall. When he saw Donald Judd's work in New York last fall he was inspired to ask these questions: Why do slight variations in a pattern call our attention back to what we are looking at? How does a series of slight variations in a group of wires/objects create space and sonic resonance?
*
If I were an art critic, I would argue that David's work exhibits a tension between a modernist aesthetic (geometric, sharp, precise, clean, line-configured) and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (organic, dull, vague, crude, bowl-shaped); that is, the controlled light, cool shadows, and mathematical pattern of the straightened wires vs. the rough, distressed, one-of-kind plaster shapes. And yet elements of one are in the other. The dark, scarred wire that gives them their fundamental shapes goes through the same process–was burnt in the same fire and bears the same imperfections from the same hammer.
*
3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides are different solutions to the same question: what happens in the spaces in between differently shaped wires?
*
The wires in the wall serve as lines AND as objects simultaneously. The shadows are lines indicating the 2-dimensional, flattened aspect of a 3-dimensional object (the wires). 3 (5)wires begs the question: Does the object draw the shadow or does the shadow draw the object? 5 (3)sides are 3-dimensional in the way the wires in the wall are not: they deal with gravity by sitting or leaning; they have mass and texture and surface with an inside, front side, and back side.
*
The literary connection most obvious to me is that of the Haiku where the spare use of language creates the space for a moment of enlightenment. A something you realize or didn't see before.
boot crushed
on muddy trail
first bloom of spring
*
David hums the notes and chords that are 3 (5)wires.
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007
Works Cited
Baker, Stephanie, unpublished haiku, 2007
Cage, John. I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 1990.
Fought, David, Personal Interview, June 15, 2007.
Fought, David, non-Specific Objects (objects in-between), Master of Fine Arts Thesis, California College of the Arts, June 2004.
Judd, Donald, Complete Writings: 1959-1975, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, and New York University Press, New York, 1975.
Koren, Leonard, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 1994.
Stein, Gertrude, How to Write, Dover Publications, New York, 1975
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I think of children, playing, outside on a playground.
Inside there are wires, connected to shadows.
We are like sundials. Our projections move, around with us, in light. We can’t escape them, but they seem to disappear when we allow them to be there.
There are rings on a shelf. We try them on like memories. Like a wedding ring, there seems to be another dimension beyond the linear. Somehow we know this, somewhere we remember.
JARED WALKER 2007
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