A Representation of the Great Lakes in Inch and a Half Galvanized Steel Arranged in a Space Like This
galvanized steel
4’ x 12’ x 6’
1984
As the literal title suggests, this work is a reflection on the problems of representation and the schematic repositioning of objects separated from their actual originals. In this case, the North American Great Lakes constitute the impulse for a progressive re-picturing of the lakes up to their final embodiment in a material as distant from la source as their reconfigured image. The title is also a straightforward description of the piece; fixed on a glass wall in front of the work it constitutes another form of representation, configuring a contest of hierarchic meaning between the actual object and its linguistic descriptor, which one reads through to the work inside. An unresolved oscillating reciprocity is initiated between image and word.
The procedure for the development of the piece began with two observations: the first was witnessing, in the early 70s, a pantographic cutter at work in a steel factory. This machine uses a guided light beam to follow an engineer’s drafted line drawn on paper, while simultaneously directing oxy/acetylene torches to cut the pattern out of steel plate. The two travel in perfectly choreographed synchronicity. The second instigation was the memory of a childhood book, Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling, written in 1941, about a native boy’s model canoe making an eventful voyage from the headwaters of the Great Lakes in Lake Nipegon out to the Atlantic and beyond. Holling’s illustrations included small sketches of the lakes as objects: Superior as a wolf’s head, Huron as a trapper with his pack, and so on. This convincing imaginative transformation had a great effect on how I subsequently saw the world; a body of water as an object became possible.
Model for Arthur Erickson's Canadian Chancery, Washington, DC, with Great Lakes proposal in Reflecting Pool
The production of hydrographic charts, formerly dependent on laborious manual surveys, now uses global-positioning-satellite-derived information and automatic digital plotters to produce contours of land forms and bodies of water. These graphic techniques constitute the first removes from the physical and specific watery aspects of the lakes themselves, and are already a massive reduction of the complexity of incident and particularity that the immediate physical experience of the lakes provide.
For the piece, these already-reductive charts of the individual lakes were first photographed as slides, then projected onto tracing paper at their final scale with their outlines re-contoured in consideration of the limits of the pantographic cutter, which is easily confused by detail. Each of these processes remove the representation further from its original source, and demonstrate the chart’s inability to depict with any fidelity the lived experience of standing on that shore.
Learning to read a nautical chart involves looking out across a body of water at a three-dimensional complex (rendered two-dimensional through distance) of overlapping land masses, and then looking down at a two-dimensional plan view of the same place, and trying to reconcile the physical reality of one with the abstract schematic of the other, to determine where you are in a moving liquid on a pitching and yawing vessel: at best an approximate process. It is a complex act of dimensional imagining; but even this rough matrix can get you safely home.
For a century the economy of the Great Lakes depended on vast ore carriers moving from the mines of western Lake Superior to the eastern steel mills of Lakes Michigan, Erie and Ontario. A REPRESENTATION… acknowledges that moment, now fixed in history, when steel traffic was still vital to the lakes, when looking down on that frozen water from the air seemed like looking down at galvanized cut-outs of lakes set into a rumpled and unruly landscape.
The final configuration of the piece, as a one-ton stack of propped steel, makes one more reference, to a modernist tradition of abstract steel sculpture. From its early forged figurations through its increasingly nonrepresentational formalisms, to its conceptual facticity, the transformative potential of this ur-material of the industrializing world has carried with it an heroic allegiance to modernism’s indebtedness to engineered progress. A weakening of that paradigm, and with it a reduced capacity for convincing metaphor, has accompanied the shift offshore of those once vital industries, now replaced by economic service industries dependent on virtual and digital representations. A REPRESENTATION…anticipates this melancholy shift, while reaffirming the quidditic obduracy and refractory doggedness of the palpable thing itself.