work of wind
a site-specific installation exploring the language of change & chance through aeolian forces
2022 - present
Installed at BoxoPROJECTS, a multi-program arts initiative in Joshua Tree, California, five wood panels face the prevailing south-westerly winds and over the coming months will record their experience of this ubiquitous desert force.
The outcome of this work can’t be predicted and indeterminacy is part of its nature. But by sharing below how the installation works and some thoughts on what motivates its creation, I offer the viewer an entry point into the work - I think of it as an invitation, hopefully a welcoming one, to join me in the uncertain, ambiguous, & provisional character of the piece itself.
The middle three panels represent the conceptual heart of the piece as a whole. Two letter-sized panels flank a 10 x 8 inch blank landscape. The two outside panels show abstract representations of the wind while also functioning as experiments in the durability of the materials being used.
Each panel has been coated with a wax medium called cera colla, or ‘wax-glue’. This base mixture of beeswax, cottage cheese (casein), and ammonia has been tinted variously with tannin derived from the galls of local California scrub oak and with iron salt. When combined, these two ingredients make iron gall ink, the standard ink formulation used in Europe for the 1400-year period between the 5th and 19th centuries. Each panel offers slightly different opportunities for engagement with the wind, with the creation of gall ink being one of them. Click each panel for more details.
“The visible evidence of my activity as an artist is presented in terms of a provisional demonstration, functioning not as an object lesson but as language”
Three major influences on my thinking when creating the work came from a piece of writing attributed to American conceptual artist Mel Bochner; the desert itself; and Novalis, an 18th Century German poet and mystic.
Seven sentences of varying length, Bochner’s ‘Annotations to Ten Photographs’ gave the installation its conceptual scaffolding and in particular, the idea that this work could function as language. Bochner elaborates ‘language’ as being “a series of syntactical relationships with an unspecified abstract grammar”. I took this to mean the web of relationships between constituent parts, in this case the materials used, the specific site & its attendant natural forces, and ourselves, the viewers. But however defined, the idea of the work functioning as language and not as ‘an object lesson’ (about, say, the wind) was all the more appealing given the elusive material nature of the wind itself. Like language, the wind is mostly conceived as an affective medium rather than being substantial in its own right; not so much seen as felt, it is most readily understood through its interactions with the material world than through its own energetic fluidity.
This is where the desert exerts such a decisive influence on the work. In no other terrain is the impact of this invisible force more evident. The wind daily and doggedly sweeps, carves, and burnishes the landscape. In the lexicon of geology, abrasion and deflation literally move mountains while their corollary action of deposition creates dunes & drifts that inexorably reshape local topography.
And so it’s here, in a place alternately riven and riveted by these aeolian forces, that I hope this piece finds a voice for the existential vocabulary shared between both the wind and the viewer: one of accretion & dissolution, absence & presence, restraint & release, and, more generally, of chance, change, & coincidence.
In other words, whatever marks the wind impresses on these panels is less about reproducing a visible representation telling us something about the wind and more about momentarily apprehending - physically, mentally, emotionally - those aspect(s) of reality that the viewer already participates in and of which the wind is a vital but often overlooked partner. In this way, the gesture (of the work) begins to function more along the lines of Paul Klee’s axiom that “art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible”.
Finally, I’ll leave the last word to Novalis, whose exhortation to his contemporaries has been one of the guiding inspirations of this work and ultimately the spirit in which it was made.
“Give sense to the vulgar,
Give mysteriousness to the common,
Give the dignity of the unknown to the obvious,
And a trace of infinity of the temporal. ”