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Lullaby 2009 to 2012
Drummer
Drummer

Strummer
Strummer

Singer
Singer

Husher
Husher

Purrer
Purrer

Installation Lullaby
Installation Lullaby


[ → Lullaby german text by Matthias Vogel ]

[ → Booklet in German, pdf-file ]

LULLABY  is an improbable monument, which draws on aspects of earlier works but differs in theme, scale, technique, materials and the degree of figurative realism. It combines unlikely stable abstract forms with figuration to express ephemeral themes of existence, and as the title implies, this may only be a soothing notion.
The work contains five sculptures and each proposes a possible life hierarchy: Drummer personifies ‹fate›, Strummer ‹chance›, Singer ‹desire›, Husher ‹self-love› and Purrer ‹obsessive ordering›. Life casts were taken from the faces and hands of the artist’s daughter, son, wife and self to create the figures. For obvious reasons the cat had to be modeled in clay. The works were made largely in the cavernous Cavag Pre-Cast Concrete factory in Lucerne, Switzerland. Each figure is depicted creating music or sound and placed in relation to a formally massive abstract pedestal. This fit is not always harmonious. All the figures are partially gold leafed, signaling the source of illusion. Works were created through an unusual process of simultaneous breaking and repairing and have a phantom expression.

In Drummer,  in a play on traditional casting techniques, the figure was created in relief by pressing the young model in earth and filling the empty cavity with plaster. She is depicted beating a large drum. Later, exacter casts of face and hand were set in. The reverse side reveals a playful iron homage to sculptor David Smith. The base is also made of construction plaster and takes the shape of a repeating railroad track, which forms a large broken clock too. It is a predetermined way with a fixed start and terminus.

In Strummer,  eight identical cement mortar figures play a string less Picasso-esque guitar and make a circular procession on a heavy wheel. It’s the same injection cement used to support tunnels and mines during construction. The circular parade has no beginning or end. The eightsided wheel is cast in the prized material of high modernist architecture, industrial concrete, and is imprinted with a radiating geometric depiction of infinity.

In Singer,  more dramatically, a siren with a threatening curled spiral tail stands on a round rusted metal disk supported by I-Beams. The hard cool metal contrasts with 1'500 pounds of warm porous Turkish Limestone. The constructivist design of the base stands in for a fountain basin or the calm, still surface of the sea and its mysterious depths, or a pier. The updated seducer of myth is depicted at the moment she immerges from the water. She twists painfully herself to the breaking point with desire, braces against the brisk sea air and opens her mouth in song. Decentered, she rests at the perimeter, trapped in implied circular motion.

Husher  depicts the creator of Lullaby as a four headed roughly cast cement Shiva that rests a top the improvised and decaying skeletal frame of a large pedestal. This is fashioned from common concrete re-enforcing mesh, cement fragments, sheet metal and wire. Placed all around, various fragments of the bust, casts of corn-offerings and playful birds give a sense of turning. It is forlorn: a preposterous unfinished monument. The figure holds his finger to his lips as if to hush, to consol, to command silence, or to keep a secret. In spirit the base recalls early 20th century pioneer assemblage constructions. It also frames the void.

In Purrer,  a bronze cast of the family cat rests a top two large boulders from a local quarry and brings to mind found stones favored by the master sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Aside from a bit of cleaning and repair, the blocks remain unworked, a mass of raw matter. Concrete wedges are inserted at the very bottom and de-center the weight. Literally tied up in knots, the cat is portrayed in a self-satisfied but impossible acrobatic position of self-cleaning. Obsessed, he seems unaware of the tons of tipping sandstone that threaten his comfortable perch. Equally, his very presence seems to hold the blocks in check. Is the work about the negation of meaning in the animal world, the problematic of the search for order or the stand off between reason and instinct?