My eighth-grade art teacher once had us make wire sculptures of our favorite shoe. In her demonstration, she instructed us to be mindful not only of the sculpture itself but of the shadow it would cast. For my project, I selected a strappy sandal for its grid design, which I thought the wire material would translate well. More importantly, heeding my teacher’s advice, the shadow of my sculpture would be an accurate impression of the shoe itself (something that wouldn’t necessarily be true of a more ‘blocky shoe’ such as a sneaker) due to the delicate nature of wire that could capture the simple details of my sandal.
At the time, I was unaware of the layers of translation and meaning that were driving my creative decisions. The material restraint imposed by the project influenced my choice of shoe. The delicacy of the wire translated the elegance of the shoe. The wire representation of the shoe projected a shadow of the shoe that imitated all these qualities. Yes, I was the meticulous sculptor – cutting the wire with my pliers, bending, and wrapping pieces around each other – but my craft was intuited from the material I was given and the reference itself. They were my hand’s guides. True inventors of their own image and shadow.
Our human-centric worldview will have us believe that we are in control of what we create. Tradition and the long history of making have led us to forget where we derived our artisanal knowledge in the first place. Neanderthals began making tools in the Early Stone Age 2.6 million years ago, but one can assume that they were only able to figure out what to make of nature’s material because of the qualities they possessed. In this way, we can imagine material itself communicating its own purpose. Material knows its boundaries and limitations. It knows its capabilities. What it can and wants to become.
Throughout Ovid’s Metamorphoses, human beings transform into spiders, birds, trees, and mountains as they pass through tragedies. When Clymene’s daughters mourn the death of their brother Apollo Phaethon, they grieve so intensely that they turn into trees. “Their tears still flow. Oozing from those new boughs, / they’re hardened into amber by the sun” (Book Two. Lines 394-395; trans. Stephanie McCarter). When Apollo chases Daphne to rape her, she prays to her father, the river god Peneus to change her form. Just before the sun god has her in his grasp, she is turned into a laurel tree. The laurel is viewed as a symbol of victory and achievement. It tells that story as it is made into crowns for the heads of emperors and kings.
Another example of the multiple transformations of matter in the poem is in the story of Syrinx and Pan. Mercury tells us that Pan desired the nymph Syrinx, who was a follower of Diana, the goddess of chastity. Like Apollo, Pan chased after Syrinx, and she called out to the stream nymphs to transform her. She then turns into reeds:
How Pan, thinking that he had captured Syrinx,
hugged not the body of the nymph but reeds;
how as he breathed, his breath flowed through the shaft
and made a gentle noise like one lamenting;
how charmed by this new art form’s pleasant sound,
the gods said, “This exchange between us will
remain”; and how he joined unequal reeds
with wax and gave to them the girl’s own name. (Book One. Lines 763-770).
And thus, the reed pipe was invented. Out of tragic events, Ovid places souls in the natural world. He sees more than the bark of a tree. He sees its past, and more importantly, he sees the beauty in the potential it holds to be transformed into a musical instrument or a tapestry. Ovid sees the artistry in the material.
The question then is: Who holds the power of creation? Is it humans? Or, rather, is it the materials? Is it God?
My senior thesis advisor in college was the brilliant Edward S. Cooke Jr., a true material culture guru with a prodigious sensibility for understanding global crafts on every level of making. As a parting gift, he kindly gave me a copy of his book Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History. In my first week back home, I read the book cover to cover. From my conversations with my advisor, I already knew that his encyclopedic knowledge extends far beyond the surface of these objects. He has a distinguished wisdom that reaches into the multivalent meanings found in the materiality and creation of objects. This is equally captured throughout the entirety of his book.
Professor Cooke’s wisdom also extends to life itself, in the same way he can map the metamorphosis of objects as they move across time, geographies, rising technologies, and functionality in different cultures, he also sees how we evolve and change throughout our lives. As a student on the precipice of jumping into the real world (and, God-willing, academia), through him, I learned what material objects can teach us about how we hold knowledge and memories, and how we use them to build the world and shape ourselves.
If these objects have the power to raise deep questions about humanity, then we must consider their autonomy in the process of creation. Cooke writes, “just as artisans often exerted their own agency upon a material, so did material often dictate the limits and possibilities of the medium to the maker…Materials and their properties were intertwined with artisanal knowledge and thus complicate a simple notion about the materiality of an object” (14-15). One example of this can be found in wood. Wood is a material of immense variety. Its composition is shaped by both its external environmental conditions and genetics as a species. The anatomy of wood, Cooke explains, determines its potential use. Species have different tensile and compression strengths, specific gravities, and degrees of hardness, all of which play a role in the maker's decision of material for what they are making and the consumer's choice of taste. Yes, the selection of the wood is ultimately up to the craftsman’s will, but the material is already restraining his choice. Therefore, we can see the act of creation as more of a dialectic between the creator and the material versus a total domination of the material.
Cooke cites the Islamic Art scholar Margaret Graves, who calls this intimate conversation “intellect of the hand.” She explains that creation happens “through [a] responsive process of making and thinking that reacted to and were stimulated by the materials and techniques in hand, as well as preexisting and medium-specific forms and motifs” (97). Thus, when we build the spaces we live in, mold the plates we eat out of, and make wire sculptures of shoes for your parents to admire on their bathroom wall, we enter an intimate conversation, a true collaboration with the materials we work with. Not only does this make creation fully immersive and dynamic, but it is what gives objects meaning. Through this process of choice in form, material, and ornamentation, objects gain their ability to tell stories. Stories that are true reflections of the makers themselves. In this way, they map the history of human thought.
I’ve merely scraped the surface of Professor Cooke’s book. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in an enriching history of global objects, their materiality, and ideological/physical transformations across time, geography, and cultures to read it. It does not speculate about our relationship with objects and craftsmanship, but is rather a historically accurate account with a nearly scientific approach to understanding material culture. Still, returning to the question I proposed about the nucleus of creation, I cannot help but sense a “mystical” or “spiritual” presence involved in the dialectic of creation.
Before my professor, there was another sensible soul with a unique power for understanding the materiality of things – John Ruskin. I’ve long been an admirer of Ruskin’s writing. The way he writes about his observations is as if nature itself were speaking to him. He has a unique way of revealing the inner workings of materials by imbuing them with a distinct voice that speaks with purpose. Take, for example, this passage from his lecture “The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy”:
“It is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ― I am not earth—I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me; it is all my life—without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing; I could not minister to you, nor nourish you — I should be a cruel and helpless thing; but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality.”
Not only is Ruskin interested in drawing out the soul in the smallest rock, but he is interested in approaching it, in his writing and art, to approach its true likeness. In his lecture “The Relation of Wise Art to Wise Science,” he posits that wise art is only the “shadow of wise science.” With this statement, he positions the act of making art as a way of gaining knowledge, as in an experiment, and that to know completely by these means is by representing and nearing the subject so that the work created becomes the shadow of the thing itself. To fully achieve this again requires a complete understanding of the material itself. Comprehension of what they can and want to become, a skill to discern what can become a convincing mimetic shadow of life, or even one’s own imagination.
At the start of the lecture, Ruskin encourages us to learn by “heart [and] being, as it is, a faultless and complete epitome of the laws of mimetic art,” the lines from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that read, “The best in this kind are but shadows: and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” However, he quickly turns this quote on its head by adding:
“[Shadows] Make them as beautiful as you can; use them only to enable you to remember and love what they are cast by….There is nothing that I tell you with more eager desire that you should believe—nothing with wider ground in my experience for requiring you to believe, than this, that you never will love art well, till you love what she mirrors better.”
What Ruskin is trying to say here is that Shakespeare affords more responsibility than, in Ruskin’s opinion, is merited. Not because Shakespeare's work isn’t genius, but because he forgets that by writing, he is in relationship with “a Being, greater than himself” that is guiding him through the process of creating literature.
This relationship is reflected in the relationship that the artist has to her materials. Ruskin uses the example of a bird constructing its nest as an example:
“The bird has exactly the degree of emotion, the extent of science, and the command of art, which are necessary for its happiness; it had felt the clematis twigs to be lighter and tougher than any others within its reach, and probably found the forked branches of them convenient for reticulation. It had naturally placed these outside, because it wanted a smooth surface for the bottom of its nest; and the beauty of the result was much more dependent on the blossoms than the bird.”
The bird is viewed as an architect like any other, acutely aware of the quality of the materials it uses to construct its nest, as the human architect is of the stone used to erect his cathedral. Reflecting on this anecdote of the bird and its nest, Ruskin asks us to consider if “perhaps, the very perfection of their art is in their knowing so little about it?” Perhaps, what always mattered was enjoying the dance of making. Holding the hand of your materials and making deliberate steps to tell a story.
As my art teacher predicted, the shadow cast by my wire shoe sculpture was, in fact, quite lovely. Projected on the white wall of my middle school’s art gallery (and later on the wall of my parents’ bathroom), it looked like a painting. Yet, the shadow is but an artful translation of an already skillfully rendered translation of the sculpture, a carefully intertwined shadow of my sandal, built of wires wrapping around each other in an endless cycle of figuring out what works best to pull off the great mimetic act of making art.
Onward,
Daniella
so thought provoking