(short version)
STORY OF THE SKULLS
AFTER A DECADE downtown Manhattan, mostly on charming Elizabeth Street, in 2002 I moved to Greenpoint in north Brooklyn. It was like moving to the countryside. A small community of artists, writers, musicians and movie grips hung out at the few neighborhood bars by the water near the Pencil Factory. It’s namesake among them.
The Pencil Factory itself, home of the No.2 pencil, with its huge yellow, black and beige glazed pencils wrapping the parapet, was the view that charmed the move into my new studio.
Though a respite from downtown New York post 911, I missed happy days on Elizabeth Street and old Manhattan; the rough but ever ready, the sleepless and tireless, oddballs and highballs, air electric from the ever humming hive. That sense of belonging.
New York City, fearless destination of hapless dreamers from all over the country and the world, yet treated with cautious disdain by much of America switched roles. As international travel wained post 911, middle America sympathetically warmed to the Big Apple.
Beyond it’s manufacturing heyday and past its bohemian club scene, opulent Wall Street decadences and the vibrant creative art culture that drove its world renown, New York City would develop the infrastructure for media, finance, I.T. and tourism to fuel it’s future
As Manhattan exodused, many early Dumbo and Williamsburg pioneers and long time residents were priced or bought out amid the big Brooklyn rebuild. Hello Bed Stuy, Bushwick and ‘East Williamsburg’?.
Looking north to Greenpoint, the ‘Polish neighborhood’, its elegant shipbuilder’s brownstones on sylvan streets named Kent and Oak and Noble, block size high-walled studio lots, old vacant dockside warehouses, acres of parking lots, the city pound and depots of jaded MTA buses, all jigsawed along the rambling waterfront bordering a single and two family residential core. A developers wonderland. To expedite things, a Greenpoint/Long Island City location had been proposed as part of the ‘residence village’ in New York’s bid to host the Olympic Games, which although unsuccessful, plans were no doubt drawn and seeds of ‘renewal’ sown.
Famous in its distant maritime past, as the spot by Newtown Creek with the best beaches to see yachts race East River regattas, it would now join the roster of the ‘cool international scene’ of places to be well…’Seen’.
Sunny Greenpoint by the river took its debutante’s bow and everything changed.
Fast!
Growlers of craft beer linked the hipsters, skaters, coders and well crafted beards and a new cool emerged. it’s criteria; entrepreneurial, driven, tech-savvy, creative, environment conscious, leisure loving, ambivalently ambitious. A dollop of cynicism and a smidge of nihilism to complete the ensemble. A far cry from punk.
I.T. was the ‘it’ word. Again.
The digital pioneers and lifelong gamers of this exciting, disruptive, online world found a sympathetic lifestyle amongst the artists, musicians and movie people, with flexible timekeeping and laidback demeanor belying the
frantic and busy back end of their own ‘next gig’ economies.
But beyond the concerts, exhibitions or movies that their brew mates had going on, the code for the Greatest Show On Earth was being written, it would have a cast of billions and enrapture the globe.
No cyber geek, though I’d programmed as a kid, and was a long time fan of things Apple, like most people I knew, apart from its utility, I took much of ‘online’ with a grain of salt.
Conspiracy theories raged. One poor mope I knew was so convinced nefarious chem trails were making zombies of us that he’d print out reams of internet ‘research’ and leave them stacked at my front door. Regularly!
The chem trail craze dissipated as chem trails do but soon there were better questions to ask like, “Did we go to the moon? Is the world actually flat? Did dinosaurs exist? Who built the Pyramids, the Annunaki, aliens or a lost superior race?” Ancient man could not have been that smart!
Not smarter than us, than me. I can google it.
There was something amiss. The collective memory had begun to unfasten.
Following 911, as paranoia and isolationism grew rampant many closed doors and closed ranks. If you see something say something the ubiquitous parlay, seeing furtiveness in the ‘other’. The internet, for all the fantastic tools and change it brought was also fertile soil to invest in this social/isolated interaction. Escapism, tribalism and fantasy had all the marketing potential the web could offer. Hanging out in ‘MySpace’ away from the crazy world around was alluring and enticing. You knew who your friends were on friendster.
For the marketers, a ‘wrapped’ audience.
I hadn’t engaged the digital world since college days but jumped back in in 2002 after Apple released their Titanium Powerbook G4 which I considered a game changer. The next would be the first iPhone which I speedily adopted after it’s launch.
Never a gamer, my online addictions were ancient European cultural studies and news. NYPost, Irish Examiner, NYTimes, The Guardian, , Le Monde, Pravda, London Times, The Standard. Reading the same story in all of them to go between the lines and get the ‘gist’.
News was draining, commenting on it worse.
A vicious new game. Truth mercuric. Reality amorphous. A jungle of vitriol and misinformation.
On the other hand twitter would bring communities together and help birth the Springs of mostly peaceful rebellion in Arabia and Africa.
Commentary on human rights, women’s rights, and the environment were openly aired and virally disseminated in places where such viewpoints had never been openly addressed or suppressed by state, often theocratic, actors.
As in the real world, the trolls, spies and the blackhats who like to throw spanners in the works and fuck shit up. Disruption.
In the affluent west, a somewhat ‘Clueless’/Seinfeldian perspective took hold and we entered what I like to call, ‘meh’ time. A ‘whatever’ for grown ups. Everything boring but sorta funny, don’t care about anything, indignant when entitlements are questioned. Feign expertise.
A dispassionate schadenfreude de rigueur.
Wellness, self growth, meditation, fitness, diet, ‘personal space’, gurus, trainers, instructors, all signaled a move to the interior, into self. Self help, self care, self identity. Selfies..
Somehow along the way gossamer threads had strained and snapped.
“This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories, for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered” by Thoth. Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of what they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”
Plato, Phaedrus
Plato put the new writing technology to good use in his dialogues, mostly about what Socrates said. Luckily he did, or we’d likely have never heard of either of them.
In the millennia of oral tradition, learning was hard gained by years of listening and training to recall with mnemonics of verse and song the knowledge learned. Each expert in their field committing their knowledge to the reliquary of a well trained memory.
The Age of Poets. The Age of Psalms.
Socrates suggested a reliance on writing could thwart the effort, fail to communicate nuance or feeling and would make people forgetful and thoughtless. Writing had been around for millennia, mostly of sacred script. Enheduanna, priestess of Sargon, being credited with authorship 2,000 years prior, but he believed knowledge was best understood through personal exchange and face to face dialogue. Hands on. To be attentive, to attend as a physician would a patient, was the path to wisdom.
He may never have written but presumably he read. In a predominantly oral storytelling culture Literacy was a rarity to the vast majority. Those having the ability to read and write were considered ‘saints’. Until very recent centuries the gatekeepers of knowledge, men, generally in positions of religious, state or regal authority could still dictate who had access. Certainly not all and definitely not women. One author, Paul, credited for much of the christian canon, in his letters to Timothy put paid to that, deriding and sidelining any feminine wisdom of old and decrying the thought that women could teach. Be humble and shush!
There would be no more oracles at Delphi, the vestal virgins spurned, the sacred fires extinguished.
What was written by deified royalty and their poets like the 4,000 year old stele of Hammurabi where the 300 commandments, divinely issued by the sun god Shamash, carved in stone for all eternity could now be overwritten by priests with ink on parchment and hold the same immutable authority. Cut and Paste.
In the Rock, Paper, Scissors world of history Hammurabis Code of stone carved laws that said women could buy and sell property and get divorced. could now be papered over.
Paper beats stone.
I can’t help but think the new game will be ‘code’ paper scissors as paper goes the way of the rock. The dearth of female coders will no doubt shape things for years to come.
Code beats paper.
I wonder what Socrates thoughts on the internet might be. Perhaps an eight second reel may suffice to explain!
I remember being offended if the person I was speaking to started texting mid sentence. Not unusual today to see everyone lined up silently together, all thumbs. Beats listening to people talking on the phone I guess. Or just listening.
We all do it these days.
Ghost in person. Death of urbane. Meh!
. Social media use had skyrocketed. MySpace kicked off in 2003 and ruled from 2005 to 2009 as the most visited website in North America. Facebook, it’s origins in a nocturnal schoolboy notion of indexing ‘who’s hot’ and ‘who’s not’ spread to colleges nationwide, then internationally till eventually hitting mainstreet with millions joining the cast from 2006 on. Twitter tweeted contemporaneously.
Frustrated by the vapidity, the shortening attention spans and growing detachment, watching interaction sucked down a digital sinkhole while the hubris of the newly minted troll culture and conspiracy gurus licensed any ridiculous deceptive whimsy, criticism or attack, I was at a loss for words. I saw the web as a vast ocean of discovery and information exchange but the pirates were plentiful, busy and brazen.
Where to drop anchor in the maelstrom?
Attention and trust is needed to listen, to give credence to what someone says in person. As long as it’s not shifty, jejune or extreme the benefit of the doubt’s generally given.
Online, common sense and a circumspect attentiveness is of course preferable to gullibly falling into groupthink BS or flattering tribalism to avoid the beguilements of medusian snake oil salesmen redoubtably raising armies of cynics and doubters sowing division at will, fomenting fear at a growing digital gallop. Simple truths the last redoubt. But then that crafty caution and cynicism seemed to carry into the real world. It became hard just to have a bit of ‘craic’ as they say in Ireland. Everyone on the defense.
I wanted a mnemonic for the times. My own psalmsong as I straddled the curious line of growing up in a world of dewey decimals and aging into the digital. The BC AD divide I call it. Before Computers, After Digital.
Mine would be the last generation to dip our nibs in an ink pot, untethered to phones and ubiquitous surveillance. I have some hi-8 video from the nineties but for many they’d have trouble finding a photograph of some years. There was an immense freedom in that. Even now if you don’t have your media channel you barely exists in the youth culture. Pretty soon life before the millennium will be viewed.as of legend.
I wanted a herald to signal our shared humanity and eternal ingenuity, to give that nod due all authors of the collective world memory, the thinkers and tinkerers, teachers and sages, who accumulated and passed down wisdom, from the 2 million years of Acheulean axe industry to the ten millennia of sculptural sophistication at Göbekli Tepe and up, to a man on the moon with a Speedmaster watch. To remember, that genius and creativity are always the eternal keystones of humanity. Long before any keystroke on the World Wide Web.
In an old manifesto I wrote in the mid nineties, foreshadowing the current ‘AI’ debate, I railed about how the hand was fast becoming the mouse. In the realm of the arts, I considered it an outsourcing of ingenuity of mind and hand to a digital eye. I could not envision sculpting in CAD on a flat screen so completely detached from the form, the tactility of material, my own mistakes or an unexpected nuance. It’s forte was in engineering, architecture and industrial design where such human foibles are desirably eliminated. Machines can make prototypes, Artists make masterpieces.
Lest it sound like I have a general disdain for 3D printing, I don’t. I believe it’s industrial prototyping capabilities are unassailable. It’s use in the making of prosthetics and eventually recreating organ tissue was mind blowing. The sintering processes and laser fusion of metals like titanium, almost like micro welding atoms will create unimaginable steps forward. Recently my friend Michael Baggio,a master jeweler, took a small 5 inch sculpture of mine ‘TreeGod’, scanned it and had tiny 3D printed wax duplicates cast into exquisite sterling silver jewelry. Soon the ability the create beyond the human eye on a nanoscale level will be commonplace.
My main objection lies in the curtailment of the hand. Traditional trades had been dying for years as designers, architects and manufacturers created easier and easier methods to assemble rather than build. The Tekton of old, the carpenter,replaced by the tech. As a sculptor I objected to the very conceit of the term ‘3D’ as some fantastic futuristic progression. Humankind has been making and duplicating 3D objects for millennia. An object is fashioned by hand, that is then used to create a mold, a material is poured into that mold and out comes a 3D object. The production value one gets from a mold will always outshine what’s delivered by a machine shooting generally plastic filament.
My greater objection was it’s becoming so accessible, ubiquitous and generating naught but more meaningless unfit for purpose plastic tchotchkes to satiate the petrochemical industry. If you really want a shot glass to last take a shot at blowing it rather than the oil industry. In the world of supply and demand if we demand more wood over synthetic resin more forests would be planted and maintained instead of producing more plastic and synthetics.
Getting back to the sculpture. It would be fashioned by my own hand, time and again if necessary, without digital aids, CAD, or rapid prototyping. It would be entirely human, nothing artificial about it.
Another imperative was it had be of traditional time tested material of the right heft and tactility. After decades of using old ‘organic’ materials like shellac, beeswax, natural resins and plaster.
I precluded the use of synthetic resins.
Years of working in ancient encaustic and bas relief would serve me well. Truth is Hideo Kodama, the pioneer of 3D print, using the concept of a resin and light fused system would be nothing strange to any encaustic painter from the days of Homer. Beeswax, damar resin and pigment is formulated, applied to a surface and fused with heat. Subsequent layering is again fused with heat. In my own practice I’d pretty much taken that layering to the limit which is what first drew me to sculpt.
I wanted an object that could cross borders, race and belief, human and perfectly imperfect. A piece that could sit as comfortably atop a pillar in the Göbleki Tepe temple as it could hanging in Mister Spock’s starship quarters but I was still a neophyte in the purely plastic arts with much to learn.
As a working title I took an old charm of my mother’s, who’d often declare, “You’re one in a million!”; signaling your specialness in something or other and then wrought it into a more Damoclean conceit.
Yes indeed… You are One in a million, but remember, you are one in a Million!
The object would be a Skull and the idea for ‘UR1 in a Million” had form.
For millenia, the world over, skulls were held sacred. Skulls have been embalmed, decorated, collected, celebrated and displayed.
The metempsychotic Celts believed the Skull to be the seat of both power and the soul and kept their vanquished decapitated adversaries close in the belief the wisdom within could pass to the victor.
Fashioned from skulls, the Hindu kapala, skullcup, when bloodily drunk from, speeds the adept to transcendence and are seen carried by Hindu deities like Kali wearing skull necklaces. In Tibetan Buddhism similar traditions exist but the skullcup is fashioned in gilt bronze to contain dough cakes, Torma, symbolic of the flesh and blood as in christian tradition. The skull itself is a symbol of the emptiness desired in deeply meditative states. The Aztecs honored them as ancestors and gave us the Day of the Dead.
Beloved by pirates, bikers, musicians, tattooists, punks, pagans and renaissance painters. Ubiquitous as a symbol of caution, danger, poison, death. The skull bearing individual always a rebel and a free thinker. A half dozen Catholic Church ossuaries in Europe, Polish, Serbian, Italian, Czech, Spanish are built of bones and festooned with bone chandeliers, garlands of skulls and skulls embedded in walls. Still huge attractions. The ancient limestone and gypsum mines beneath Paris, where Plaster of Paris was sourced, now referred to as the catacombs are bedecked with the skulls and bones of 6 million souls.
To separate it from the multitude given the popularity of the motif, my skull would be in high bas relief and could be hung on a wall, solitarily or in multiples. It would fit in the hand.
I wanted the lines and shadows that give it form to jump from a distance. Tricky to achieve with a small monochromatic. As a votive, like a crucifix, or mezuzah it had to convey a certain gravity and stand apart from the common sinister undertones.
It could not scream poison or death or danger so typical of the iconography. It had to be elegant and approachable, day or night, although I think it shines best in shadow or hard lit at night. Appropriate in a darkened music studio or grandmas sunlit kitchen. As a piece alone or in hundreds, it had to convey light over dark, hope over despair, friend over adversary, a new Yorick!
I did not want some vanitas or momento mori, pointing to death or impending doom. I wanted a Celebration of Life and it had to be beautiful with the hint of a smile.
It would be a Momento Vivere.
In 2007 I began with a plasticine sculpture of the roughed out idea. A brutish primitive effort but it contained all the elements that I’d later refine.
By the end of the year the general form was realized. A stylized dip where the zygomatic met the sphenoid would give it the illusion of depth, but awkwardly the jawbone would have to be inverted. A difficult sleight of hand to make the incongruity work. Still a neophyte in the purely plastic arts I had much to learn.
After the first rough plasticine rendition I moved to wax. From that molded wax piece I made a cast in plaster which I again reworked with wax and molded again. Subsequent castings were of Hydrostone, the material for most of my work these days. Twice the strength of Roman concrete and although a dense finicky difficult to work material it rewards with the final appearance, texture and heft of polished white marble. Sensuous and cool to the touch.
Another casting from the mold of that wax adjusted model would again to be further refined and adjusted. Then again, and again, and again.
From the first raw rendering in early 2007, to the sublime ‘version 19’ in 2015, the progression of was a long labor of love. Each new rendition, a new sculpture, a new mold, a new casting and another month. By 2016 a full three years had gone into the execution during which I made a small number of pieces for friends from molds 13 and 18 before some tumultuous years of trauma, bereavements, house and studio moves led to a long hiatus before I reignited the project in 2019 in a new studio in the Hudson Valley, built out for purpose. Production values were refined, packaging and websites designed and I readied to launch Skull One.
But the zeitgeist was off. Times had changed and so had I. Political strife, climate chaos, the global pandemic amidst a cacophony of conflicts and a growing authoritarian chauvinism.
A stultifying ‘stasis quo’.
Having striven to imbue the skull with a sense of beauty, grace, calm, I feared these qualities might now seem naive, drowned out by cynicism, anger, and a lack of civic camaraderie right at the beginning of the covid lockdown.
I had another skull in mind and postponed presenting ‘Skull One’ thinking it now needed a companion in the world, a champion, a yang to it’s yin and I decided to see where the new piece might go and later present both as a larger evolution.
I was naive myself perhaps. Being blind to the endgame of that progression and the evolution took me another four years.
As the new sculpture grew further from the first organic iteration it became more and more structural. Growing three times larger than it’s original ‘Skull One’ armature.
My intent with Skull One was to express a feeling, a mood. Smooth lines and curves. A big enough presence on a wall, but small enough to carry, cool in the hand and smooth to the touch. Almost smiling, reassuring, like a friend or a worry stone.
The new pursuit was to find balance between the flat planes and hard lines I was working into the existing substrate. In my encaustic paintings I’d always liked to incorporate a few sharp lines into the organic forms. It’s a thing of mine.
As it grew more stylized sharpening lines resonated new shadows, a mechanization and symmetry set the jawline into a skyline, the round of the skull, a futuristic dome. Still a damn nightmare with that inverted jaw, worse with the flat planes. Oftentimes, almost like a diary the times, they manifested monstrous or twisted or tragic or just looking at you funny. Sometimes coming from myself I’m sure but also from the civic breakdown, the politic, the pandemic. Each new piece a fight, a meditation, a prayer.
Over four years thirty three new pieces emerged, each a morphism, refinement or adjustment of the one prior and it became more structural. Soon I began to see it as architecture. I saw a skyline and I refined and adjusted that skyline as much as any other element of the piece. As in Skull One, to lend depth and shadow, the dome of the skull is setback from the wall. The set back now forms a ‘retaining wall’ tying seamlessly to the jaw.
Now near perfect in form whether standing, balanced on its chin or lying in repose. There will be a few more adjustments and refinements, and a piece, likely the 35th in this 4 year progression will see the completion.
Eminently suited for scaling to any size, any proportions, as I work on the final perfecting, I’m preparing my own skull to execute a much larger piece and hope to find patrons to work with.
In my dream world I imagine it fifty feet tall, a colossus in white bronze looming down from a height, or in stone and concrete face up, multi storied, rising in a Gehryesque architectural abstruction, smiling up the earth to all our fallen stars.