Sculpture
March 2004
Jno Cook, Dennis Kowalski, and Frances Whitehead
Idea-Based Sculpture
by Claire Wolf Krantz
Chicago artists Jno Cook, Dennis Kowalski, and Frances Whitehead exploit the relationship between concept and the object that embodies it, examining and commenting on the social systems around them. Until recently, the notion that art arises from ideas embedded in objects had been fundamental to Western art. Only with Modernism have the categories of “idea” and “object” have been called into question. The “object,” traditionally conceptualized as sculpture or painting, was theoretically divorced from the idea in mid_20th-century conceptualism as well as in current neo-conceptualism. Other Modernists explored the idea as a process in which the medium is both subject and object of exploration. These theoretical conventions are employed by many artists today as they explore the unique properties and capabilities of newer media such as video and computer-based technology. However, some contemporary artists find the most interesting art is to be found in objects intrinsically coupled with ideas that lie outside the artmaking process itself. No longer asking the question, “What is art?” they sometimes ask, “How does the art object function in the world?” while simultaneously crafting objects that pertain to worldly affairs.
In their often straightforward-looking sculptures and installations, Cook, Kowalski, and Whitehead create highly complex works that are meant to be understood as a function of both the concept and its manifestation as a thing. They pursue personal agendas related to philosophical, social, and political issues, while situating their work within the dialogue of contemporary art.
Jno Cook critiques the social systems in which art is made, evaluated, and distributed. Bored with works that he considers repetitive as objects and stale as ideas, he creates witty spoofs on conventional thinking. Cook’s background as an inveterate tinkerer and his education as an engineer explain why his works often involve machines and mechanical systems that solve seemingly complex problems in simple, but idiosyncratic ways. His job as an industrial engineer involved systematizing irrational and non-functioning social systems in the workplace. Now, his writings and public performances point to the preposterous workings of the institutions involved in art. His artwork, going beyond his ironic and biting tone, exhibits a commitment to the serious consideration if art and his respect for artists.
As early as 1983, while he was an MFA student in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cook jabbed at the school’s social and educational systems. One project exposed the predictability of student critiques. For "The Last Critique,” he displayed 17 30-by-40-inch photographs at Randolph Street Gallery, accompanied by a script that he had written to mimic a critique. Then asked his review panel to enact the various roles he had written for the teachers. Because his script recognizably portrayed the students’ experiences in critiques, he was effective in calling attention to the subjectivity, predictability, and biases of his teachers. A somewhat expanded transcript of this event was published in Exposure (1984).
During this time, Cook also wrote several monologues about the Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s book, The Americans, which provide clues to his attitude about what is important in art. In "Dissecting the American Image," published in Exposure, Cook highlighted the contradiction between Frank’s use of wit and irony in his pictures and his seriousness of purpose as he exposed the foibles of – as well as his identification with - his new countrymen. Inspired by Frank’s use of concrete images to convey complex ideas, Cook has spent his career in developing simple solutions to systems (and products) that he believes are unnecessarily obfuscated by commercialization and institutionalization. Yet I suspect that implicit in both Frank’s and Cook’s endeavors is the hope that our muddling social systems can be changed for the better. To that end, in addition to creating a kind of art that delivers his message but is largely unsalable, Cook provides his time and expertise to artists in constructing and maintaining Web sites for use in disseminating ideas and information.
Other aspects of Cook’s art are his playfulness and joy in inventing things that work. He collects parts of photo equipment and other mechanical devices to discover what he can do with them. For example, in his show “Reclaiming Technology” (1989, Randolph Street Gallery), he exhibited a variety of cameras he had constructed out of “found” materials to demystify the increasingly complex technology used in making images. By constructing simple facsimiles of elaborate and expensive commercial products or overblown art-related products (i.e., complicated pinhole cameras), Cook created cameras that could perform various imaging functions, although in unconventional ways. In another exhibition (“Dysfunctional Toasters,” 1999, Beret International Gallery) of simple mechanical devices with complex meanings, he altered ordinary toasters to “talk” via embedded sound chips that were scripted and recorded by Kirsten Daleske. Pressing the toaster’s lever activated the recordings, which then voiced various complaints about making toast. One toaster poked fun at AOL, saying, “Ding, you’ve got toast,” to signal real bread being toasted.
Cook’s fascination with computers and the Web resulted in “No Carrier” (1996, Beret International Gallery), a multi-faceted exhibition including computers, computer graphics, and screen manipulations that poked gentle fun at the pretensions surrounding our love affair with computers and the Internet, their impact on out lives, and their needless complexity, which is too often mistaken for profundity. One section of his huge show, titled Reflections of the Future, included 160 doll heads encased in jars. Placed on the floor and connected to each other with 300 pieces of plastic medical tubing resembling a rhizome, the installation referred to the Internet and Cook’s fatalistic view that in the future we will all be involuntarily connected to each other. These heads inside transparent jars, joined in a web of hospital-like tubing, gave me the sense of violently imposed interconnections among people, exposing their lack of individuality and privacy.
Employing similar devices of wit and iron, Dennis Kowalski has turned hs attention to wider social and political issues in America. Kowalski’s education in architecture focused his early attention on buildings: their physical attributes, their placement in space, their relationship to the body, and their embeddedness in the societies for which they are made. In his 1975 installation "Crow Creek Boundary", at the Federal Plaza in Chicago, he constructed a semi-enclosed space using lengths of wooden boards laid on top of concrete blocks that simulated a boundary. The boards formed a line or edge in the field, demarcating interior space from the exterior, as well as the sculpture’s placement in a landscape. The title refers to an event in which the U.S. government herded Native Americans off the land they were occupying. This piece marks the beginning of Kowalski’s exploration of how power relations and societal attitudes determine land use among the powerful and the disempowered.
In a 1976 site-specific installation at Name Gallery, Kowalski carried his architectural concerns indoors. Using the floor, wall, and columns of the gallery, he built a large piece out of roofing materials, wood, and concrete blocks that conflated references to sculpture and architecture. A section of plywood angling from floor to wall alluded o an attic, or to the roofs of the wooden Victorian houses typical of many Chicago neighborhoods, while flat sections could be associated with submerged rooms or basements. This piece and others from the same period reflect memories of is home in Chicago and his exploration of how sculpture can investigate fundamental components of architecture and also be a critique of the cold, unattractive buildings spawned by the International Style at that time. In a 1978 installation at Art Park he carried these concerns further, building a 7-by-30-by40-foot enclosure that resembled some of the Postmodernist buildings build in later decades.
In the 1980s, Kowalski shifted his focus to social and political themes. His biting humor and anger became palpable as he directed his attention toward what he considers arrogant and hypocritical U.S. policies. He began to explore American use of military and economic power, the corruption of outer space and the environment, and the plight of Native Americans. As part of his 1983 installation "Industrial Promotion Hall-Hiroshima" (Marianne Deson Gallery), Kowalski hung a shelf on the wall on which he placed his model of the remains of the only pre-1945 building surviving in Hiroshima. Above were three drawings of B-29 airplanes, seen from below, the first rendered as though it were approaching the viewer, the next dropping a bomb, and the third leaving the area, giving a chilling feeling of what it must have been like to witness this event.
His 1984 installation "The Captain’s Anxious Hearth" addressed the juxtaposition in American life of cozy domesticity, military aggression, and the military’s effect on the environment. Kowalski constructed a realistic-looking fireplace on which he placed a model aircraft carrier adjacent to china dishes and cups, referring to home and hearth. In the fireplace, he suspended a model atomic submarine, placed to suggest that it was beneath the sea. Above the fireplace hung his paint-stick drawing of a polluted, ugly landscape. In the 1990s, Kowalski added American consumerism and its effect on nature to his increasingly complex installations. These works addresses our increasingly domesticated and tamed landscape as we pretend that land carved out by roads and commercial interest for tourist consumption is actually wilderness. Particularly effective and focused on our increasingly plastic, despoiled and domesticated landscape, one series of sculptures combined objects made of natural materials, such as wood, with fabricated ones, such as photographs, found objects, and plastic materials.
"All that Glitters" (1993, Columbia College Art Gallery), which addressed U.S. foreign policy in regard to the exploitation of land and people, was a large installation in several sections, including glittering gold wallpaper, which framed a photo of gold miners, a carpet of Astroturf on the floor, and a garden hose and bottles of water on the Astroturf. Photos of degraded and in explanted countries were crumpled up among the bottles of commodified water. Another section included “mug shots” of Kowalski himself, implying that all Americans are complicit by virtue of being American.
Some of Kowalski’s wit turns to the patronization and exploitation of people, either by Americans directly or with their aid. In the 1997 installation "Native American Housing" (Beret International Gallery), Kowalski used floor tiles to make small facsimiles of houses that resembled precariously stacked hoses of cards. They also called to mind the cheaply constructed cinder block housing scattered by the U.S. government over Indian reservations. Divided into three sections, subtitled Plaines, Northwoods, and Southwest, the installations were made of artificially colored and patterned tiles and rocks fashioned from natural materials to mimic the colors and contours of each type of landscape. For instance, in the Southwest section, several piled-up rocks, looking huge compared to the tiny “houses,” cleverly alluded to what remains of the land in the Indians’ increasingly sterilized and commodified living spaces. Convinced of the wisdom of traditional Native American thought on ecology and spiritual values – in contrast to many Anglo views - Kowalski makes a pungent point about his concerns for America’s misuse of resources.
Whereas Kowalski’s wit and playfulness in grappling with such serious concerns resemble Cook’s methods of using art to convey a message while avoiding moralizing, France Whitehead presents a more sober, philosophical, and linguistic approach to her work as she addresses questions relating to how we obtain and transmit knowledge. In sculptures and installations consisting of variously constructed and “found” objects and texts, she examines the cultural history of objects as they are viewed and named.
In the 1980s, Whitehead was known as a Post-Minimalist abstract sculptor because of the beautiful, reductive objects she created in various organic and industrial materials. However, these sculptural objects were conceptual in their inception, their meanings based on the complex ideas that resided in them as a function of their materials and manufacture. Following this focus on singular objects, Whitehead began creating installations that could render a multiplicity of non-hierarchical impressions simultaneously. In them, the various parts still carry meaning within themselves, but the relationships among the parts increase the information’s complexity, thus subverting any expectation that meaning can every be reduced to a single element.
Whitehead’s burgeoning interest in naming and classifying knowledge cohered in several installations inspired by her outdoor garden. In the "DREAM" (1993), an installation first exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, she created an indoor garden consisting of materials whose names and functions were important to understanding the piece. Here, Whitehead juxtaposed natural and fabricated elements to explore the contradictions that lie in everyday things, particularly in domestic items. She constructed plant holders (found in the home) of galvanized iron (an industrial material) to hold two plants whose names reflect their characteristics. "Atropa belladonna" is a nightshade, its beauty seductive while its effects are deadly;"Laris nobilis" (the laurel plant), on the other hand, is regarded positively for its associations with fame. Whitehead also made galvanized iron "Datura" (another nightshade) blossoms, which she attached to the rims of the planters, "Belladonna" and "Datura" share similar characteristics in that their seductive beauty kills- a reference to desire and its probable consequences. Shamans also use these plants as hallucinogens to facilitate access to an alternative reality where healing can occur. In another contradiction, Whitehead fabricated a beautiful veil out of plant resins that she hung from the ceiling. Over it she suspended her datura blossom sculpture, fashioned to drip oil of laurel. This sweet-smelling perfume base, which contains plant terpines, dripped from a “deadly” container onto the veil and slowly dissolved it.
Whitehead addressed Enlightenment attitudes toward the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in her multi-part sculpture "Objects of Knowledge" (1999, Chicago Cultural Center). In it, she focused on how we create classification systems for knowledge that, in turn, cause bodies of so-called information to be invented. On a long, narrow steel table she placed a series of encyclopedias dating from 1953 from which she cut out round core samples. These cores were lined up for “examination” but some of them were also sliced into so-called specimens, which contained meaningless squiggles displayed with a lens to magnify the unintelligible “information.” The closer one looked at the data lodged in the encyclopedias, the more meaningless it became. The table also held a glass box encasing a mid-century student microscope focused on a microfiche image of a building from the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris. Shaped in concentric circles, this building was expected to be able to hold all knowledge, properly documented and classified. The top of the box contained etched information gleaned from the Internet about the building and the ideas behind its creations. Thus, Whitehead created an elegant, multi-part sculpture that conveyed information about how knowledge has been acquired and viewed until the present.
In her disturbing installation "Strange Attractors" (2002), Whitehead examined the violence done to nature in the process of controlling it. The piece was inspired by an instructional drawing of a rack for mounting dead butterflies that illustrates how to display insects for classification and delectation. Whitehead’s copy of this drawing was displayed on the wall at the Hyde Park Art center next to a beautiful display of dead insects encased in a vitrine, borrowed from the Field Museum of Natural History. Whitehead also fabricated a real rack identical to the one in the drawing, sized to human scale. This giant mounting rack made of wood, glass, and huge stainless steel pins is a gorgeous piece of sculpture, yet it is frightening in its implications: it provokes us into imaging ourselves in the place of an insect – killed for dubious scientific ends or aesthetic pleasure – our vulnerability put on display for ultimately frivolous reasons.
Whitehead’s most recent project brings her work out of the gallery and into the public sphere. Under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts (2000-01), in a public art project curated by Mary Jane Jacob, she collaborated with other professionals and the community in Murray City, Ohio, to produce a plan for cleaning up a severely polluted site. As a result of widespread coal mining, this rural community’s water is contaminated. Other problems, including poverty, lack of jobs, recreational facilities, and community centers, compound the distress. Whitehead and her team devised a design for a water treatment facility incorporating landscape design and recreational and community facilities. As part of the project, she explored local history and culture with townspeople and students, paying particular attention to vernacular speech, which reflects their history and culture. This colorful language, laden with local meaning, will be inscribed into the cement structures. After coming to an agreement with the professional team and the townspeople, Whitehead used her design skills to create a series of drawings that transform the concepts into objects (a brochure and CD-ROM) to be disseminated. The town will use this plan for fundraising for the project.
By undermining the art historical separation of concept and object, Cook, Kowalski, and Whitehead have expanded the understanding, in the world of art, of the object and its relationship to the idea. Loaded with a complexity that accommodates confrontation, discrepancy, and contradiction, their work must be understood as a function of the viewer’s direct confrontation with the thing itself, and to a lesser degree with any accompanying written explanation. Their endeavors address deeply held convictions about the world at large, of which the art world is a small but significant part. Always well crafted, their works, with their accompanying beauty and wit, are seductive, inviting the viewer to engage with complex ideas that can be puzzling and stimulating. The questions implied – What is this thing? Why is it placed there? How shall I think about it? – define the innovative and stimulating endeavors of these three mid-career artists.
Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.