Tom Friedman: Soap and hair 1990
This very controlled line drawing by Tom Friedman is made of his own pubic hair and a block of soap. What is interesting about it is how it makes us think again about what is an everyday experience of hairs in the bathroom. We are disgusted when other people's hair gets stuck in the soap, and as a textural experience we usually associate it with the abject. However the process of geometrically controlling the shape of the hair as it is formed over the soap, allows Friedman to lay this hair down as if it follows the groves of a record, the precise circular geometry it now follows, moves us away from the abject and we begin to enter the territory of the sublime. The soap now becoming linked metaphorically to the geometry of the cosmos, the rings of Saturn or oscillating sound waves. The soap and hair piece was an object that came from a series, all of which had their origin in 'bathroom materials'.
"Initially I was drawn towards materials that had to do with personal hygiene. Cleaning materials. There are all sorts of incidents that sort of redirect me or clue me in to things: things that just happen and become significant to me rather than having a very logical reason for them. I came to using cleaning materials when I was in graduate school." Tom Friedman
Friedman refers to the fact that the process behind the work began while he was still at college. He wasn't clear about what was happening and part of the initial idea was derived from a conversation with another student. This 'messy' start is typical of many ideas, they gradually resolve themselves as they are worked through. I. e. there were quite a few 'failures' made before he hit upon the idea of the hair and soap bar. This is an artwork that relies on changing expectations as to the surface texture that we would expect to find on a bar of soap. However some textural ideas are less context specific and rely for their effect on the building up of surfaces from small units.
Pia Männikkö’
Pia Männikkö 2018 'Some people knit'
Pia Männikkö
The artist El Anatsui uses thousands of metal bottle tops, as well as that thin metal you sometimes get that covers the tops of champagne bottles. He joins each piece by using small loops of wire to construct large sheets of complex texture, that once made can be draped, bundled up or made into other forms, by being 'stitched' together using the same copper wire that joins all the individual elements.
El Anatsui
I think of this as drawing rather than sculpture because it is to do with surface and not mass. These pieces operate like huge sheets of paper or textiles, their own weight causing the material to fold and bend. This is texture as materials play, a product of the careful linking together of basic units. Just think about what can be done with a box of paper clips and some post-it notes, anything that can be sourced in great numbers can be turned with a little invention into a textured surface.
Jan Fabre
Jason deCaires Taylor: 'The Silent Evolution'
Simon Starling has used the same idea to comment on Henry Moore's ubiquitous presence in the major cities of the world, leaving a full sized replica of one of Moore's warrior figures for two years underwater. Starling takes two unrelated stories of what he terms 'alien introduction' and finds a connection between them. He found lots of Moore's sculptures in Toronto as well as an infestation of Russian zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. Starling suggests that both Moore and the zebra mussels came to 'infest' Toronto with European maladies.
Simon Starling: Infestation
Aganetha Dyck develops the surface of her objects by leaving them in specially designed apiaries. Her objects are slowly transformed by the slowly growing bees’ wax honeycombs, and as they are transformed, like Jason deCaires Taylor's work, we are reminded that there are other creatures in this world besides humans and that in the case of the bees, our ever expanding use of chemical products has decimated many of the world's bee populations.
Aganetha Dyck
It's interesting to compare Pia Männikkö's masking tape surfaces with Aganetha Dyck's honeycombs, they are structurally very similar. Dyck is though also referring to the fact that bees are having a hard time at the moment. Over use of chemical sprays has decimated many of our bee populations and paradoxically they are now safer in cities than in the countryside.
The fact that bees build structures that are not that different from human artists, hopefully helps us to develop a little more empathy with them and their plight. Perhaps we might contemplate caddis fly larvae and their building habits or puffer fish and their circular constructions with more thoughtful and empathetic insight in future, however I'm not sure we are really capable of getting over our obsession with capitalism. For instance, French artist Hubert Duprat uses the Caddis fly larvae instinct to collect natural, substrate materials like sand, gravel, leaves and twigs to build protective shells around their bodies. He puts them in special isolation tanks, and gets them to use their excreted silk to hold together the gold, pearls and precious stones like sapphires and rubies, that he puts into these tanks. He then sells the results of this 'collaborative' venture as very expensive exotic fashionable jewellery. I suppose this is no different to the many other human/animal/vegetable/mineral collaborations that humans have forged over the course of many lifetimes. A Roman general's purple robes, were dyed with an extract of the murex shellfish,10,000 of which were needed to produce just one gram of dye. One pound of murex extracted purple dye cost 150,000 denarii or around 3 pounds in weight of gold. The transfer of animal or vegetable lives into capital, is a strange thing indeed. During the time of the Dutch 'tulip mania' the bulb of a tulip, known as "the Viceroy" was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders, about ten times the yearly wage of a skilled craftsman. If we then throw into this mix the price of an artwork by one of todays blue chip artists, lets say a Jasper Johns 'Flag' painting which recently sold for $36,000,000 dollars and we can see a recurrent theme that has been part of human life for a long time. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, the worth of something is dependent on what a residing economic power decides is valuable. When it comes to the most expensive things, there will usually be some sort of scarcity factor and some aspect of cultural kudos, whether this is the 'rich beauty' of a hard to achieve purple, the attraction of owning a rare and exotic tulip or the salesroom achievement of being able to outbid everyone else in the gaining ownership of the works of one 'special' individual, who's productions are deemed to be in some way unique. All of which seems far away from simply valuing the experience of texture, but there is a continuous thread that links aesthetic value to monetary value. If you have time to spend contemplating how interesting a texture can be made by rolling small tubes of masking tape and sticking them together, you are probably not having to work all hours of the day labouring in the fields; having time to appreciate things is a luxury, especially an appreciation of the textures of rich surfaces. It is in that small gap between having to work all day to survive and having time to value things that possessive attitudes can develop, instead of the things you appreciate being gifts that can be a bounty for all or having a practical use for everyone, they can become something that Marx called fetishes. The value of objects is simple and straightforward as long as it is linked to their practical or social use-value. However when it becomes a commodity, something changes, it is as if value is inhered in the object itself and not the process that it is part of. This severing of the object from its place in a process, is what lies at the core of our lack of empathy with the rest of the world. The entangled processes that underpin relationships between people, plants, animals and materials are replaced by capital, something that sits in a thing or object of value, rather than in a process; something seen as a possible possession by an individual, rather than an aspect of social life, thus separating the object out of the system and giving it honorific status far beyond its actual use value to the world. It is now only of value to the individual investors that have raised money in order to access the cultural capital that these objects possess.
This text has now been woven, and a texture has been created, a surface rather like a textile, that can now be used, possibly to wrap around you as an idea, or to help you think about a different way to use textual surfaces in your work or to use simply as a distraction, a text to read whilst looking for something else.
Jasper Johns: Flag: Cast metal
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