Writing
Constrain / Contain: Thoughts from the Train
After months of planning and scheming, working in my home studio and troubleshooting all possible scenarios, I arrived in Syracuse last week, met my new family for the week, and began installing my first solo show. There are always a few catches, as I have learned in my short run at carpentry, but I had brought more than enough tools and surplus materials, so I ended up finalizing my work and finishing the pieces a day ahead of schedule. It was then that I was able to step back for the first time ever, and see what I had been staring at on graph paper for the last nine months, finally realized in form.
I was excited to see that all my work, through the way it was constructed, a shared vocabulary of materials, and placement in the gallery, carry on a macro scale the same sort of movement I strive to articulate within each piece. The paint on the walls, the hanging pieces and the weighty wooden piece (which I have been calling “squeeze”) simultaneously pull the eye through the room and anchor, or center it. All the pieces belong, both conceptually and spatially.
What does that say about the work? I had hoped that it would be what Robert Irwin calls “site specific” (being and circumstance, Robert Irwin. Notes on a Confidential Art). However, perhaps my hand is too evident (when my gestures are framed in a gallery with wall-to-wall carpet and a drop-ceiling) to fall into Irwin’s classification. One day, I would like to find a location where I can enter into a dialogue within the confines of the venue, where the architecture carries more weight and my work may just become another feature in space.
But that’s for the future. Having the chance to conceive of a show theoretically and physically on my own, make new friends and contacts in a new city, and substantiate myself as an artist, has been a wonderful experience. I couldn’t have done it alone. Thank you to all my friends at home who helped me get this show on the road, and who spent time critiquing my ideas and troubleshooting concepts: Alex, Joe, Lisa, Melora and Steffen. Having you all so close to me (and willing to help) is unfathomably valuable and good.
A thank you as well to my new Syracuse friends: I’d like to thank Tere for everything: you were simultaneously an event organizer, detail-manager, publicist, cook, chauffer and friend. Ed, thanks for untying all the knots I managed to get myself into, and teaching me a few new ones to take home. Thank you to Pedro, whose words helped shape my ideas and works, and helped put my work in context. I look forward to our dialogue in the coming month. Thank you, Caroline, for putting up with my antics, helping to put it all together and showing me a Syracuse beyond the stretch between my hotel and the gallery. Thanks to Sebastian, Sol and Shane for helping me put the finish touches on the show, and for putting your own touch on the windows. That collaborative process removed the space once more from the idea of the “frame,” and put it all in perspective. Thank you to all the folks at the vitamin warehouse for all the materials, and to the guys at U-Haul as well.
Of course, a big thank you to Ana and Lilliana, for being who you are and putting all this in place. Thank you for your patience, understating and friendship. And thank you to my parents, for your continued support and love, and for trekking all the way over here for the show.
This is new territory for me. This was the largest audience my work has ever received, and is also the one furthest removed from my personal circle. Criticism and commendation from that far feels much different than pats on the back from friends and family. Also, though I’m sure next time will be smoother, having the chance to present myself to a class of university students gave me insights on my work and on my practice, lifestyle and my own perception. With all this behind me I can now perhaps stop avoiding the answer to the continually surfacing question: “What do you do?”
Please join me in March for the closing of the show, and a dialogue between myself, Pedro Cuperman, Teresita Paniagua and perhaps some surprise guests! More info on that to come.
Thanks for reading,
sam
One cannot be constrained without a container, and to be contained is, by definition, a source of constraint. To create Contain / Constrain, I began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes from friends, the side of the road and stores’ recycling bins. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, their original functions now realized, used up or lived out, I cleaned, fixed, and elevated each piece with the care and respect they may have once commanded. The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work.
In today’s age of electronics, extreme-product-sales, “multi-task-enabling” machines and a definitive spot for each said object, we find ourselves constrained by our own innovations. We work, live and play frame by frame: be they mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical. The interruption of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of these recognizable, re-purposed, residential relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair.
When working on these pieces, I rarely occupy this headspace. Mine is closer to the nirvana of oneness with my hands, my tools and the environment of my studio/home (dog breaks, stocking the woodstove, snacking). Yes the cardboard fulfills all the roles I mention above, but my own impatience and lack of funding (rather than intellectual stimulus) perhaps pilots my choices of materials. Cardboard is free, and I am able to quickly manipulate it to create the designs and patters I find within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. This spontaneity is important to me – I find the further my work strays from my original intention the more I like about, and gain from, the work. The process of working for the sake of staying busy (and warm) has an ironic place in my art; I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity. Thinking back over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment.
Receptacle / Reception / Reciprocate (This Side Up)
Environmental Art involves the creation or manipulation of a large or enclosed space, which effectively surrounds its audience. -Richard Serra
Environmental Art relates to a viewer’s body by occupying the viewer’s sphere. The artist manipulates this interaction in order to appeal, horrify, or confuse the viewer by intruding on personal space to varying degrees and with varying force.
I attempt to vitalize cardboard boxes so that they appear as some sort of biological organism spreading across the gallery space. I try to find a balance between the quick, dynamic swoop of the “arms” and the viral creeping of the “feet” and joints. I constructed a system while trying to avoid overly dictated (but still present) paths, framed moments, and “scenic overlooks.” Through the play between micro (boxes) and macro (entity/environment), I hope to juxtapose the human scale and something much bigger.
Cardboard fascinates me. Each box, its sole purpose to carry something else, has travelled so far to be here. I am interested in this transport history and in the universal form of cardboard boxes.
I love the skewed geometry and varied dialogue boxes so freely create. Each is simultaneously a frame, a container, and a brick. Boxes carry merchandise, stock store shelves, and deliver gifts. The thrill of opening a box is universal, but when one considers the contents’ origins or distributor (e.g. Cargill, Con-Agra, and Tyson), the mass-produced quality of the enclosed object(s) is elucidated.
As with most of my work, this piece started miles from where it is today. When I first began, it resembled a frankenstein of two other large-scale cardboard projects, but through placing and editing, I have arrived at something altogether its own. I set two grommets into every box of each “arm,” and joined “feet” with screws. Using grommets to string boxes on wires allows the “arms” a lot of mobility, and just as an entire spider web vibrates when one strand is plucked, much of this integrated network moves when a viewer pushes a box or hits his or her head. Grommeting each box forced me to slow down. This process of “value-adding” to the boxes became important to me. Adding something to a product born of the same process became an inside joke.
The removal/recycling of all the cardboard contained in this space posed a big problem for me. I didn’t want to throw it away, couldn’t keep it, and carting it to the recycling center seemed droll: how could I allow these boxes to become lost in a sea of un-grommeted, un-valuable cardboard boxes? My employer and friend, Dana Hoey, suggested an alternative: use them in gardens as mulch.
So, for the harvest of 2010, three gardens in the Hudson Valley may expect to turn over soil chanced with the occasional grommet. This conclusion is perfect for this piece. Using the boxes, once-biological, once-receptacle, and once held in reception, to reverse and extend their purpose to contain (crops) and abate (weeds), is the ultimate reciprocation.
When I first began this piece, I wanted to use found wood and other wood-born objects in juxtaposition with the cardboard. To me, the connection is liner: wood becomes lumber, cardboard, paper, ash, and soil. However, I’m happy to have stuck with one material, and perhaps the more organic elements I was looking for will surface when I finish mulching gardens with the residue of this environment.
I couldn’t haven’t done this project without all the help I received. Thank you to Arthur and Judy, for somehow balancing one another, wearing me out, and helping be get to where I am today. Without your push and pull, generosity and kindness, this process would have been a lot less fun. Thank you to Julianne, for being so much more than you had to be. I could always turn to you if I needed a kind word, but you were never spare with your criticism.
Thank you to Carol, and all the helpful associates at Tiberio’s IGA in Red Hook for allowing me free reign of their cardboard boxes over the years: I have used at least 2,000 boxes from IGA alone in the last two years at Bard. Thank you to Michael at Red Hook Natural Foods Store, for a last-minute bale bail-out, all the conversations we had and for all the seconds: without them, I would have gone hungry many late nights in the studio. Thank you to the folks at at Williams Lumber in Rhinebeck for donating, transporting, and fork-lifting the gigantic bale into my exhibition space.
Thank you to Dana Hoey and to Roman Hrab for taking cardboard as mulch in their gardens. Our three gardens together will allow this piece to live forever.
I’m a friend of Pedro writing a book on intersemiosis… I just finished writing these lines about how artists create their own languages. My previous example was Magritte. … or the “environmental art” of emerging artist Sam Horowitz who takes the vocabulary of recycled material, such as cases and cardboard boxes, and gives it a new syntax. His “Writing” contains its own codes, much as the work of Gordon Mat-ta-Clark who re-conceptualized the spaces in which we live and work—houses, office buildings, factories—by deconstructing them in various ways, sometime by laboriously planning and cutting large openings in the walls of buildings, thus turning over our most familiar enclosures, sometimes just to let the sun shine through again.