Horror Vacuui

A year ago, we had a fabulous trip to Turkey. It quickly resulted in a photo essay called "Pattern Exhaustion" for the Dallas KERA Art & Seek site (archived in here somewhere). And now, I proudly unveil the porcelain version of this, "Horror Vacuui"...a 42 inch tall vacuum cleaner that looks like it has a full body tattoo .

It could disappear totally in one of those silk scarf stores in Bursa. Or in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. Or in a mosque, where the idea was actually conceived, when I had a glimpse of a big honkin' vacuum cleaner laying in wait.I snapped a blurry iphone picture of that one in the Uli Camii, and have found some elegant pictures online of vacuum cleaners in the Blue Mosque (above). I admire the devotion of Muslims--everywhere we went, people were at prayer. Most mosques now have wall-to-wall carpet instead of individual prayer rugs, and in some of them it is the largest expanse of carpet you'll ever see. All day long men and women pray (in segregated sections) on hands and knees, their breath and bare feet touching the rug....then the residual of prayer is vacuumed up.

First I had to find a vintage vacuum for a muse, and it showed up in a junk store in Leakey, TX...a classic Kirby with enough attachments to fill the back of my car. Remember those old ads of women in high heels and pearls, merrily attached to their big vacuums?

Thinking of the term "horror vacuui"--which simply means fear of emptiness, and is used to describe the busyness of Rococo art-- I knew the whole piece needed to be covered with pattern. With a nod to Islamic metalwork, the heavy metal motor took on imagery from a glorious 14th c. basin in the Louvre. It was nicknamed the "Baptistery of St. Louis" as it was used for baptisms of

of French royalty at Versailles and later Notre Dame Cathdral. Imagine being baptized in a huge bowl full of hunters and wild animals.

After the term "Arab Spring" was coined, my piece in process took on the idea of spring cleaning...thus, Botticelli's Primavera landed on the handle. That gorgeous carpet of flowers in the painting is another example of "horror vacuui". Here's Flora herself from Primavera....

Flora meets Chlora? The pattern on the vacuum's bag is adapted from a Islamic prayer rug in the Met's collection...my detail from it goes around the bag...carpetbag, obviously!

My friend Jamie, who was on this eventful trip to Turkey, suggested that the vacuum be scarfing up scarves....we'd gotten quite concerned for the Turkish women who were covered head to toe in the hot summer, albeit in lovely silk patterns. And Anne and Sarah Jane went to great lengths to get into a classic Turkish bath in Istanbul. So, for them, I added two scarves, one of Ingres' Turkish Bath, and one of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Not that the women depicted look like Anne and Sarah Jane, of course! Turns out, though, that Picasso was influenced by this Ingres, which is pretty cool since both of them influenced me. As the piece neared completion, another idea jumped aboard. The highlight of the trip had been our last day's visit to the Chora Museum (the Kariye Djami) in Istanbul, which I'd studied in grad school and have never seen. The mosaics and frescoes there are splendid examples of late Byzantine art. The chapel there culminates in an apse with a mandorla shaped fresco of the Harrowing of Hell or "Anastasis". That story is suggested in the Bible in the emptiness of Holy Saturday, the day between crucifixion and resurrection. and is of deep importance to the Eastern Orthodox faith. In it, Jesus descends into hell and cleans it out, so to speak, sucking out Adam, Eve, and other old faithfuls. The vacuum cleaner needed a hose extension. Those boxes of vacuum attachments had been lingering in my carport, and I rummaged through them to find a detachable hose with a long skinny nozzle. I made it with coils of clay and then managed to break the nozzle. That was probably a good thing, because it had a penile shape, and I didn't want it going after the women on those scarves. So I remade it into a small triangular thing--what are those called--designed to get into nooks and crannies, deep down into the upholstery. And the wonderful Anastasis fit on it
just fine.
Assembling this thing was a challenge, accompanied by epoxy and grout, after all the metallics and overglazes were fired on various parts. All it needs now is a roaring sound effect, and then it'll scare my dog, who likes to bite the front rubber bumper when I vacuum.

Also, I have a pristine old Kirby for sale...and it's a beauty!

Presence is Fire, finally finished

Rusty Jackson photographed the firewood with all the pieces, and viewing the proofs made me decide to alter the piece. The mourners in bisque white were too stark, and the whole set up was too crowded. It was simple to tint the two cantors, which actually made them look closer to the original polychromed alabaster; then I did a bit of overglaze gold on the books and brooches (see my shot above, Rusty's earlier shot below).

(yes, we will reshoot the finished piece; amazing what a good photographer can do!)

Note that the distance between the andirons is wider in the top photo. I had to make some longer logs to "stretch" it out. The newer logs are on the bottom of the stack and the original ones are supported by them. Below it all is a pile of embers and ashes (all in tinted porcelain).

We just returned from NYC where I injested too much art...not complaining! At MOMA, I did get a close up look at the little Dali, copied on top of the cuckoo clock. Yes, those ARE ants crawling on the clock case, lower left.

Now, to find an empty fireplace that needs this!

Time Warp

"Presence is Fire" , an ensemble that will be installed in an actual fireplace (no burning please, although it probably wouldn't hurt porcelain which fires at 2300 degrres F).... includes a set of andirons over a pile of embers, and newly set with a load of fresh logs. The fireplace figures into the December Chlora story, with home and hearth decorated for Christmas. Above the mantel hangs a cuckoo clock. Like most cuckoo clocks, it drives everybody nuts. So Chlora decides to do something about this.

The clock was based on a Black Forest model sent to us some time ago by our friends the Dyllicks who live in Freiburg. Plus I found lots of others online, most with hunting themes, some with evergreen trees. Your run-of-the-mill cuckoo clock is basically wood-toned and roughly carved. A phoenix rising from the fire seemed to be needed on this one, so I found an image of one carved on an English chest from 1890; nicely shaped and gilded

.

Since Chlora's Christmas story gets into fawns, I also copied a deer on my clock, and the fir trees. Chlora paints the cuckoo red (of course; she needs more redbirds). And then the clock needed more color and I happened upon a polychromed one in an antique mall.

To top it off, what could be cornier than Salvator Dali's Persistence of Memory with its melting clocks? I painted it over the bend in the roof...hence the title, "Time Warp." This may be the only Dali I really like. It is quite small, at MOMA, and is one of those paintings that fascinated me as a child. The obnoxious clock gets thrown into the fire, in Chlora's story, on Christmas night, along with her wooden train and her training bra. Here it all is in MY fire, the kiln!

In Training

Another piece that figures into the December story is Chlora's training bra. She received this detested item of apparel in her Christmas stocking and promptly threw it and its package into the fireplace. The lacy little stretch number, size 28AA, was quickly made from rolling the porcelain into an old lace hankie, forming two flat cups, and adding on all those elastic straps.


Deciding on the images from art history was harder.

Three booby paintings auditioned for this role. This contrasting pair from the Louvre got to be the cover girls. Left, Franz Hals "Gypsy Girl", the provoceur of 1628-30, on the right, Rubens' s Susanna Fourment of 1622-25, the sweet gamine. Both of them could use some poetic uplift.

!On the back of the package is a mashup of verbiage from training bras of the 1960's...what odd research that is!-- with the Song of Solomon 8:8 : "We have a little sister and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister on the day she is spoken for?...

After her bra burning, Chlora figures she will agree to grow breasts only if they look like the blonde bearing her breasts by Manet, below, in the Musee d'Orsay. Wow.

Chlora's Train of Thought

Part Two of this large ensemble piece, "Presence is Fire", is a toy "wooden" train. I've got a cute little vintage Fisher Price "Huffy Puffy" train that served as a model. But it had only 3 cars, and it took me awhile to figure out just what cars were needed...all this harkens back to Christmas in the early 60's when I was obsessed with fancy electric trains. But Santa brought a plain wind-up train, no frills attached. Anyhow, Chlora fared even worse, receiving a wooden train. In the December story when she is asked to put more wood on the fire, in goes her train....along with some other items, as you will soon see.

The train ends up having four adaptations painted on it. At first I thought it might be a death train, as in we-are-all-on-this-train-relentlessly-going-one-direction. I explored Anselm Kiefer's huge paintings of train tracks to Auschwitz. Then I came upon the lyrics of the old song "People Get Ready a Train's a-Coming", by Curtis Mayfield, I realized it was a hope train from the civil rights era. The four paintings chosen represent the notion of "presence and absence"--two of each. On the Little Engine that Could, we have Monet's Gare St. Lazare, the version in the Art Inst. of Chicago. Next, I looked for Jesus' cry on the cross, "Father why have you forsaken me?" and came up with a gripping "Golgotha" by Munch, where people are abandoning him.

.Third, on the dining car is the unmatched image of loneliness, Degas' "Absinthe Drinker". I was tempted to construct a small Venus de Milo to put in the absence car, she with the missing head and limbs.

The Little Red Caboose brings up the rear of the chariot of fire with a woodcut from the Nuremburg Chronicle of Elijah and Elisha. I first discovered this image when thinking about the mantel over the fireplace...and it linked to mantle, ie. the cloak, that Elijah hands off to his successor. Different spelling, I discovered! And 19th c. trains were dubbed chariots of fire, of course. Furthermore, my good friend Jeff Smith turns out to have written a book about Nuremburg, says there are six copies here in the HRC, and he brought over a facsimile for me to work from. So on the engine and caboose we have Presence, bracketing the absence in between. Since trains are all too metaphorical, it is all derailed, a real train wreck. "Chlora's Train of Thought".

Presence is Fire: The Mourners

The next few blogs will highlight more about the sources behind a piece. Here is the beginnings of "Presence is Fire", an ensemble that is nearing completion

For some time, I've had this idea about making a fireplace; that is, the logs and andirons that go into a fireplace. Initially the andirons were going to be a pair of wooden African figures. A Nigerian pair from the Dallas Museum of Art was intriguing--they are the right size, kneeling and reverent. But wooden andirons make no sense.

Then I came across the catalogue for a exhibition at the Met: "The Mourners: Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy." These alabaster figures are so subtle and expressive, each about 15 " tall...perfect. The top photos show them installed in Dijon, then at the DMA and processing at the Met (kudos to my friend Russell Sublette, who designed the DMA installation and showed me around the show, plus behind-the-scenes in the Hamon Wing that I helped program so long ago).

In December I got to see the Mourners exhibition at the DMA. Stunning. From the 75 or so on display, I honed in on two of the cantors. One with an open book/open mouth, the other closed.

FRAME (the French American Museum Exchange) under the sure guidance of Rick Brettell, organized this show, and they put full photographic coverage of the figures online. See this link:

http://www.framemuseums.org/

I even tried to get permission to sculpt in the DMA gallery, knowing fully well from my museum career that this would be unlikely. It was. Sigh....isn't easy to copy 3D objects from photos. Anyhow, I managed, quite imperfectly to replicate the two, giving me further appreciation of the Gothic stonecarvers whose naturalistic detail is so refined and emotive. And they don't get to subtract their mistakes like I do...

The cantors as andirons are Part One one of this complex ensemble, already entitled "Presence is Fire". It will debut in the "December" story.