Measure and Alchemy

Gathering evidence of paradigmatic order, in cosmic, social and individual spheres, has been the pursuit of philosophers, theologians, scientists, astronomers, and artisans since the beginning of written history. Attempting to name the inexplicable, signify the indescribable, and depict the immaterial has consumed those interested in understanding and representing the structures that direct and perhaps control our existence.

One can witness this investigation in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Later, in the 18th century, fueled by the belief that ultimately order is quantifiable and describable, and financed by the burgeoning publishing industry, the age of the enlightenment provided opportunities to disseminate schematized representations of these abstract systems. For example, diagrams illustrated in Diderot's encyclopedia (1762 - 1772) provided a lexicon and instruction to the viewer with the aid of fleshless diagrams of the human nervous system, numbered and dissected tools for tradespersons, and geometrical astrological charts.

It is to such 18th and 19th century compendia, and the subgenre of scientific, horticultural, and cosmological instruction manuals that sculptor Martha Glowacki often looks for models of the human quest for identity and structure. The simplification and even the erasure of complexity found in these schemata suggests a desire to demystify by removing ambiguity and contradiction; thus making a codifiable order out of chaos. Yet, with 20th century eyes, the reader is aware of the fallibility and falseness of these diagrams. The unexplained and the suppressed levels of dis-equilibrium of phenomena are not described by such schematic imagery as their calibration and linear exactitude render these abstractions steely cold and precise, yet, often wanting for what is unseen or absent. Glowacki's sculptures inhabit this absence by making physical those early models for order (in fact sometimes naming them Didactic Objects). Through the processes of their evolution into 3-dimensionaliry - construction, fluxation, accumulation and accretion - the works renew and assert a vulnerability and excess that ferments beneath the surface of the original illustrations.

Glowacki's printed sources include archaic geological charts, astrological projections, maps and globe gores, and horticultural treatises. Her sculptures are visually tied to, though they are not simply physical displays of, the original illustrations; they are permutations that extrude potent metaphorical gleanings from diagrams of the natural world. The artist feels an intimacy with nature and the landscape and she often creates a web of symbiosis between the sky, earth, and plant forms; the diagrams; and the human desire to seek self organization and social order. Ultimately the works, while carefully based on marks, charts, and maps, embody the impulse of marking, charting, and mapping; measuring the relation of our humanness to each other and the cosmos.

A repeated theme in Glowacki's work is that of the cultivated, and rigorously controlled landscape.

Martha's grandfather had a peony farm, and as a child she observed both the methods of controlled cultivation as well as the symbiotic relationship of ants amassing on the tight blossom heads to free each petal from its sugary enclosure, all in the ostensible service of fruitful propagation.

Twain depicts a grape vine attached upright to a stake by strings arranged in a conical shape. This configuration, illustrated in Vineyard Culture, (1867), allows the young plant to grow in small patches of ground between bare rocks. Glowacki's grapevine departs from the illustration, however, in that grafted onto the artist's parent vine is one vine which bares thorns and another which produces sweet buds. The vine has no leaves or natural growth and is planted into a mounded hillock, peculiar in its fecund and velvety plumpness, and which has a meandering cleft around its perimeter. Though vine training appears torturous, it has been developed to produce a more prolific harvest. The simultaneous grafting of thorns and buds onto a single vine may at first recall vernacular folksy treatments of the rose and the thorn theme such as the maudlin tune Sweet Barbara Allen. But more compellingly, Twain suggests the supple types of order which can embrace transition and mobility, those that are not petrified in the stability of fixed dichotomies of good/evil, thorn/bud.

The artist grew up on land bordering a large naturalized park and spent much of her childhood playing there. Within this park a grove of crabapple trees was planted, each tree on a mound in the center of a large crater. The mounds had incised trenches probably to capture nutrients and water before they could flow away. Children often hid in the craters surrounded by copses of bushes which grew together in the same holes.

Another work, Glasshouse Series: Double Palmette, shows a silver vine trained as a topiary to grow more bountifully and exotically. The surfaces of the entire piece are exotic, covered with furry patinas of bronzing powder, rust, graphite, and pigment. Its branches are drawn and pulled taught bilaterally to expose the grape buds to the sunlight so that they fully ripen before they become too moist and rot. That this bondage and taming is necessary to yield the desired results is discomfortably perceived by the viewer as an ironic metaphor for the structure of social and intrapersonal relations. Constraining  ustoms, manners, and diplomacy as well as the even stronger and more insidious inculcation of mores, sexuality, and the construction of the personal self within a society, bring to mind all sorts of adjustments (sometimes to the point of perversion) one must make to become a "functioning" member of society. Yet, these tortured, twisted, and controlled vines are held in traps or cages, a form that Glowacki likens to Victorian Greenhouses of cast iron and glass: confined, but also protected. If this greenhouse is an environment that encourages growth, and infractions and variations on codes of conduct are not allowed to germinate, doesn't this produce a certain moral code designed to foster excellence?

"It may be objected to this mode of training, for the less vigorous varieties, such as the 'Pinots,' that it keeps the grapes too far from the ground, thereby preventing them from properly ripening also that by keeping this long stick in too upright a position, the sap, flowing all the time toward the top, prevents the shooting of new stems on the old wood, and the shortening of the stock from time to time, the consequence is, that these stocks, by overgrowing, soon exhaust themselves, …"

Just as the trap/greenhouse/cage can be read as emblematic of sexuality it also represents a constraining system of a priori rules and public censure. On the floor of this cage are iron curls, scattered about like vineyard rubble and decaying leaves. Shavings from industrial excess, the refuse of the fine-tuning of our labored productions, they become in this trap a richly sensuous signifier of something out of kilter, yet also, something which functions as the pungent humus which supports growth.

Glowacki's references are to landscapes which have been cultivated, articulated and groomed, never those that are indigenous, wild, corpulent, or fecund. This meticulous control becomes almost exotic, delectably suppressing natural chaos and serving to heighten the observer's latent recognition of trembling sensuality, made still and fetishized in this tortured captivity. It is the rural landscapes of England and Tuscany that most appeal to Glowacki. The evidence of the enormous effort required to remove the rock and rubble and build long, meandering fences to contain, demystify, and grid the landscape with forced geometric impositions invokes ruminations on humankind's meager attempts to understand and control their environment and their desires. Patterns in the tilled soil and trellised vineyards elicit an elemental response to the beauty of the physical phenomenon while they also engage a desire to diagram, dissect, and analyze order. When the artist's intentions and the viewer's narrative projections are fused, the energy from the fetishized objects (trees, vines, staffs, nets, and the tools of cultivation) collapses with the rigorous methods to diagram abstract knowledge and systems.

While in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison an important awareness developed when the artist worked as a cataloguer of objects at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. The collection for which she was responsible was neither one of decorative arts nor archaeological objects, but one of household and industrial goods. This eclectic collection included pans, pewter tea pots, many mousetraps, and a cache of Victorian hair jewelry. It was her responsibility to examine, research, and investigate the provenance and possible importance of each object. There were many objects and artifacts that had oblique pedigrees and were often banal specimens obscured by dense dust and accretions, yet they were compelling to her in their mysterious appearances and antiquated functions.

Glowacki continues to be seduced by forms and surfaces which are imbedded and inscribed with their own often elusive histories and anthropomorphic memories. Additionally, this desire to recuperate meaning from old and archaic specimens and artifacts speaks to the desire to take measure and find order in systems from epochs when mechanization, practicality, and 'pure' beauty were pronounced. Yet, these objects may have always embodied a tremulous undercurrent of longing and excess, even in their own times.

While working in the catacombs of the historical society the artist was reminded that as a child she would wander through the dog-eared dioramas of the Milwaukee Public Museum. At that time she wanted to figure out how those materials were cleverly put together to make the narrative tableaus, fraught with mythic dramas of the tides and the stars, glacial advancement and geological stratifications, and human development; "to create a landscape inside a cage."

Later, Glowacki took classes in the history and methods of cartography, astronomy, and cosmology. These studies conceptually reinforced the relationship of "astronomy and cosmology [which] tied in to early people's world views [which] were intimately connected to the maps that were drawn, and in turn, were based on religious beliefs." She saw the crossover between these disciplines in the history of astronomy with Ptolemaic thought. Ptolemy (ca. 200) theorized and charted the first projections in recorded history. Projections are the representations of latitude and longitude on surfaces, planes, or geometrical objects that correspond point by point to a given figure. Throughout history there has been a series of ongoing debates among cartographers on how best to represent latitude and longitude. Glowacki is interested in this dialogue: the impulses and investigations that propel the analysis. She is not so interested in the definitive scientific conclusions.

"When such a conical surface is extended on a place, a network with circular parallels and rectilinear converging, meridians arises. Lest the proportions of certain parts of the mapped territory should be too much deformed, only the northern or the southern hemispheres should be laid down on the same map by this projection, which is consequently inconvenient for maps, embracing the whole earth."

Projections have formed the visual frameworks for a series of works by Glowacki: a projection of the earth's surface, an ecliptic path, and the path of the zodiac. These works of woven, soldered, etched, distressed, and patinaed metal become the iconic material diagram of the act of mapping. Not a map of the heavens, the works articulate the process of positing measure, not its result.

Didactic Object: Livio Sanuto's Trapezoid is a 3-dimensional projection that looks like a webbed trapezoid, bifurcated at its center and holding undulating golden ribbons that emerge from the core of the fissure. Parallel ribbons were traditionally emblematic of flows of energy: rivers, fire, and wind, from ancient Assyrian and Egyptian cultures. They were used both to schematically describe the landscape and to imply its ceremonial nature and power. The artist acknowledges the obvious sexual connotations of the ribbons and this suggestion is strengthened by the paradoxical protection/containment of the netted projection. Again, Glowacki imposes a system of measure onto a landscape. Though that system is often too far removed from our frame of reference for us to immediately understand or recognize, it feels hauntingly familiar because of the manifestation of subliminal energies.

The net-like forms of Didactic Object and Traveller stand upon staffs of cast metal. Borrowing form the role of Masonic staffs, wherein ritual objects specify an individual's role in a ceremony and their placement in the fraternal society, Glowacki presents the staff as an instrument of learning, a ritualized object with ceremonial function: as a tool, and as a fetish. She is equally indebted to Ghanaian speaker's staffs. The wooden staffs carry carvings at the top which are morality tales in tableau form. These parables instruct individuals on to how to conduct themselves and inform them of the intended function within the Ghanaian cultural and societal context. Again, the artist is drawn to the signifying nature of the object itself and the role that it plays is orchestrating order, elucidating a matrix for the energy flows of human social organization. Referencing these other sources Glowacki wants to produce (pseudo) functional objects which can sustain a powerful agency in our human society and ecosystem.

Martha Glowacki has no prescribed religious beliefs, but she holds dearly a quality and reverence akin to animism or nature worship. Raised in a religious faith that kept no ritualistic objects, she feels her fascination with them may be due to "the kid who was excluded from the tree house." In graduate school in metalsmithing Glowacki studied a panoply of Byzantine liturgical objects, enameled pieces from France and Germany, and Medieval vestments and woodcarvings. The artist responded to the beauty of the ciboriums, censors, and reliquaries, yet she was particularly intrigued with how their materials and processes helped to activate an emotional charge in the viewer. Traveller, Jester, and the Didactic Objects invoke an emotional response through their symbolic and associative forms, their admixture of distressed and encrusted materials, and the suggestion that they are tools for an important ritual function. Yet that function cannot quite be named.

On the top of Traveller are balance two nets that appear simultaneously as twin butterfly nets and a lorgnette for the viewer to peer into the cosmos. Because the mesh changes density between the rather large netting of the cone and the fine mesh screen in front which would allow only the most minuscule of specimens to pass, Traveller would be ineffective as a trap. The handle is cast iron, thus, because of its weight, it is entirely impractical as a butterfly net. At the base of the staff/handle is a wheel which makes more quizzical its purpose. Is it meant to travel along the ground as an instrument of measure like the waywiser used by surveyors to measure land?

These nets are once removed from nets of projection, created as a 2-dimensional globe gore which when wrapped creates a spherical globe. The artist began turning and wrapping her gridded globe gores and rolling them into cones which in turn became like nets and traps. (Of course, she had been collecting nets, cages, and traps since her days with the historical society.) Flaring out of the pointed back end of these cages/nets, as if to simulate the flow of energy or wind, are pointed golden ribbons. While traveller is uncharacteristically whimsical, it still asserts the artist's concern for calculating the relation of things and making tools that map our human condition and vulnerabilities.
Three Wands and Fine Specimens are tableaus that are based on yet another form of organization and rigor. Wooden frames were cut and reassembled to form an arch and a curved shelf, which the artist then cast in iron, creating both a stage and a shelf for order and display. The rusted surfaces, in juxtaposition to the medicinal-type glass backing situate these prosceniums as a toxic site of pharmaceutical waste. The medicine shelf is an irrepressible reference to control, containment, and the suppression of disease and illness, and it is ironic, if not surprising that on these platforms figural plant forms mutantly proliferate. Fine Specimens holds gold colored, truncated trees which, because of pollarding (a botanical method of cutting a stalk back to encourage bushy growth), erupt thorns and tiny buds on otherwise non foliated branches. The limbs intermingle, but the trunks are firmly held in florist's flower frogs, (the spiky stands which hold plants in floral arrangements) attenuating the longing for and bifurcations of natural order.

The figures suggested by Three Wands appear to cavort luxuriously and suggestively expose their beauty to our gaze The wands subtly reference allegorical depictions of the three graces. These 'women' are tied together by their beauty, and their ability to inspire - always a prototype for genius and genesis.

Glowacki's most recent works continue to use the shelf as a metaphor for order, control, and organization. Chymia et Alchymia: Cones and Chymia and Alchymia: Mirrors, seem however to have been taken from the workshop of a modern alchemist. Historically the practice of alchemy has been seen as part art, part science, part metallurgy, and part magic and early alchemy was the source for many important developments in science, ritual, and philosophy.

". . . we might do well to learn from the experiences of those who were first to track the machinic phylum - artisans and metallurgists. Before the advent of modern methods, they did this by using their instincts and the empirical know-how accumulated through the ages. They had to track everything from stratified ore deposits to a metal's melting and crystallization points, and then to experiment with different ways of crossing those bifurcations through forging techniques; they had to look for their own hybrids, that is, synergistic combinations of metals in which the whole spontaneously becomes more that the sum of its parts (alloys), and to allow the materials to have their own say in the final form produced. All of this involved following a given material's local accidents and imperfections, rather than imposing a rigid, pre-planned form on it.

According to metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, this know-how had been developed well before the Greeks began to apply formal reasoning to these problems, and it was therefore mostly of a sensual nature. The artisans, in a sense, developed a special ability to follow the phylum, to track the machinic effects created by nonlinear phenomena in nature, . . ."

In the light of the cold rationality of modern science such paradoxes seem strange, yet, in these pieces Glowacki embraces the dichotomic nature of her interests and her art making. Mysterious and inexplicable geometric shapes, and wand-like mirrors, sit on shelves of white enamel. While more formal and spare than the growth in Three Wands and Fine Specimens, viewers expect, nevertheless, that the results of these strange object's use will be something not quite of science and not quite of sorcery.

Even as a student of the various methods which humans employ to find, map, and control the timeless order of the universe and our position to and in it, Glowacki feels, in our fin de siècle, very mortal. Contemporary polydemics like AIDS, TB, and devastating, medically resistant viruses and bacteria that maim and kill unrelentingly are diseases we may scientifically understand but still can do little about. Perhaps we are not so far removed from the middle ages when it was believed that bodily fluids controlled physiology, health, and disposition, as well as human actions and psychology. An anatomical chart, a diagram, a map, a botanical guide, a carefully crafted aesthetic object can often furnish solace and a comforting fragment of knowledge in the chaos of nature and the mutability of time.

Recent analysis and theorizing suggest that there exists an internal impulse to seek order, or at least a mediated equilibrium, in all states of being including both the individual psyche and social organization. These systems have forces that govern the dynamical behavior of social flows, yet finally are only made stable by nonlinear, inexplicable factors: or what are called bifurcation regions. These bifurcation's may be perceived by some to be the absence of order and embody levels of fear without stratification, yet in the hands of metalsmith Martha Glowacki, they are implicitly the site for adaptation and change.

"we must work on the society in which we find ourselves, tracking the flows of matter and energy, destratifying…, setting into flux human practices that have sedimented - in short, we must find the right viscosity for our fluxes, the exact consistency that would allow humanity to self organize without the need for coercion and war."

Michal Ann Carley is a curator, artist, educator, and writer who resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Notes

1. Barbara Maria Stafford Body Criticism, Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1991), p. 24.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massume (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 409.

3. DuBreuil, Vineyard Culture, Improved and Cheapened, (Cincinnati, Robert Clarke & Co., Publications, 1867), p. 137.

4. Martha Glowacki, interview with the author, 18, May 1994.

5. Ibid.

6. E. Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas To the Early History of Cartography with Reproductions of the Most Important Maps Printed in The XV and XVI Centuries, translated by Johan Adolf Ekelöf, Royal Swedish Navy and Clements R. Markham from (Stockholm: 1889), (New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1973), p. 5.

7. Manueal DeLanda, "Nonorganic Life," in Zone 6: Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, (New York, Urzone, Inc., 1992), p. 160.

8. Ibid, p. 159.

9. Ibid, p. 155.

By Michal Ann Carley

Metalsmith Magazine – 1994 Fall

In association with SNAG‘s

Metalsmith magazine, founded in 1980, is an award winning publication and the only magazine in America devoted to the metal arts.