Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Disjunction and Event/Processual Research : Collage/Constrained Spaces/Spatial Body

Processual Making/Messy Entanglements : Creating sustained flows of engagement resulting in some connections that can occur but not others, working practices that can create a pattern or field of relations/resistance or constraint.

Movement is Material.

Mobility/New Social Assemblages

Ingold/Thrift

Movement creates differences, it resists and perpetuates between human bodies/spatial bodies.

Constrained spaces shaped by the tensions of the environment.

Combined works/conceptual frameworks with research as an integral part of the practice to produce ways of sensing/making ecologies of  knowledge.

Ecology-as-Assemblage

An assemblage is able to retroactively affect its parts.

Human identities and bodies are inherently multiple, relational and dependant on more-than-human presences. 

On Landscape Ontology, Bryant. 2011

The co-existence of such heterogeneous dimensions and demands makes up the 'event.' The event is a sudden intensity generated by the juxtaposition and superimposition of differences. The event tends to exacerbate differences rather than making everything similar.

Disjunction and Event.

Bernard Tschumi.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Matter-Feels-Converses-Suffers-Desires-Yearns and Remembers.

New Materialism/Interviews and Cartographies.

Ann Arbor, Karen Barad, Dolphijn and Tuin. 2012

Agency is about an ability to respond, to change things, about the possibilities of worldly reconfigurations, in this way it enlists non-humans as well as humans.

Human capacity becomes distributed rather than situated in a hegemonic subject-object relationship. Rather it is a result of complex heterogenous entanglements, networks, imbroglio's, assemblages and ecologies. In this perspective, agency is not something possessed solely by humans or for that matter, non-humans.

Choreography of existence : Holloways and making of landscapes.

Dimitrij Mlekuz.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

The Drawing Stage : The Mark that Functions/Comes into a Mediality/Form/Language

Outpost 210524

Light Drawings/Duration/Surface/Intermediaries.

Drawing/Inscriptions/Mediality/Conversation

I created 'False Divisions' in an effort to name the parts which in practice are so multifaceted as to continuously express the existence of all others.

What defines/constitutes drawing? 

One thinks of its properties, line, marks, surfaces, its characteristic colourlessness, its acts, gestures, rhythms and spaces of thought.

Avis Newman.

The Stage Of Drawing-Gesture-And-Acts.

Avis Newman.

Catherine de Zegher.

As I made my choices, the body of the exhibition grew as an assemblage of parts comprising groups within groups, clusters, pairs, singularities, a 'body of relations' as one might understand a body of thought. In the selection and organisation, I tried to suggest that drawing is by definition in a state of flux finding inspiration in 'modes of thought' that are not linear. But which propose a space of fluctuations and overlapping relationships and allow for an uncertainty and a play between parts as in Melanie Klein's formulations of positions.

Drawing, draws us in close, into an act of scrutiny, retracing the drawer's movements between hand and eye is one of the profound pleasures of looking which connects us to a recognition of our own past acts. When we look, we enter the intimate space of a work that is as close to the action of an artist's thought as one can get.

Avis Newman understands drawing more fundamentally as to evidence the materialization of an act of consciousness, where a gestural act, embodies an act of thought. Her concern has been with the visual traces of those phenomena, which are embedded in all our actions and ultimately connect us through language.

In the inscriptive act of drawing there exists the shadow of our ambivalent relation to making marks, before the time when 'image' and 'text' are differentiated to go their separate ways. When one looks at a drawing there is a consciousness of the ghost of the 'text' in the 'image' in the Image. It is that combination of events where the mind simultaneously perceives in a single stroke the registration of a gesture affirming the existence of another, a line of delineation that speaks of this or that and the mark that functions (comes into a mediality) as a sign which possibly is connected to other signs. In such circumstances thoughts float between reading and perceiving. It is in this inscriptive nature of the activity of drawing that can hold we can hold in suspension this differentiated state of consciousness, irrespective of what is being drawn.

Generative Forms.

Drawing Assemblages.

Germ Cell/Idea/Breath.

The synthesis of Geometric with Organic Forms.

Christopher Wilmarth

Nine Clearing Works.

A portal, an architectural entranceway.

Wilmarth continually examined the concept of duality, contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality and ethereality. He employed a 'painterly technique' that emphasized the tactility and richness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform.

His sculptures retain the spiritual implications of 'place' endowed with particular qualities of light, clearings that can create a release, where light can open even when the place remains the same, just like the mind and new thoughts, creating moments of these pavement epiphanies of confinement and release.

Works from 1985 onwards contain and further develop a figurative impulse ( re-emerging of the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes) with the larger more emphatically abstract 'places'. Fusing the organic with the geometric and conjuring a multitude of symbols, head-soul-heart-aura-egg-germ cell-womb-cup.

Laura Rosenstock. 1989

A Clearing for a Standing Man. 1974

Poetics of place and person articulated by the evocative power of light.

He endowed his sculptures with a sense of  'Place' and 'Person' which was critical to his intension as was his lifelong concern with the evocative power of light.

Light gains character as it touches the world, from what is lighted and who is there to see. I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time. The universal implications of my original experience have located in and become signified by kinds of light. My sculptures are places to generate this experience compressed into light and shadow and return them to the world as a physical poem.

On Mallarmé, Wilmarth notes that his imagination and reverie meant more to him than anything  that was actually of this world. His work is about the anguish and longing of experience not fully realized, and Wilmarth found something of himself in it, especially the feeling that for Mallarmé 'the essence of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed'.  

Christopher Wilmarth. 

Christina Iglesias.

Shelters

Ceramics of Organic Abstraction.

A loosely defined style characterised by an ongoing exploration of biomorphic or organic form and surface.

Garth Clark.

Rising Above The Polemic : Organic Abstraction in British Ceramics. 1995.

References to landscape and natural phenomena, nature's associations of fecundity, earthiness, process, growth and decay.

Gordon Baldwin.

Leylines 2012 : Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14

Spatial Drawings on Paper and Glass. #14, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Christopher Wilmarth : Light and Gravity

 Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view. Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters. Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color, Josef Albers.

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

Life is change-day and night, cold and warm, sun and rain. It is more in-between the facts than the facts themselves.

I believe it is now time to make a change of method in our art teaching, that we now move from looking at art as a part of historical science to an understanding of art as part of life.

In art we can still experience revelation and wonder.

On Glass Pictures

Opaque Glass/Sandblasting

Colour Intensity

The flatness of the design elements offer an unusual and particular material and form effect.

Colour Intersection/Instant and a Spatial Flow

Colour Interaction

Square-on-square studies, of closely observed colour events staged within a controlled setting.

Oral History

Interview with Josef Albers, 1968 June 22-July 5

The role of art in society to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality

Working in Collage and Stained Glass under Itten

Collage to Montage

His belief that he teaches a philosophy (of how to see) not technique.  

Guggenheim Museum. 1994

Catalogue

32. Skyscaper 11
1929
Sandblasted flashed glass 36.2 x 36.2cm.

30. Skyscraper 1
1927/1929
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass 34.9 x 34.9cm.

28. City
1928
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 33 x 55.3cm.
Badley damaged with sections of glass missing.
Alber's numerical notations in white chalk or pencil are visible on the surface.

21. Frontal
1927
Sandblasted opaque flashed glass with black paint, 34.8 x 47.9cm.

https://ia800808.us.archive.org/9/items/glascoli00albe/glascoli00albe.pdf

A Spiritual Documentation of Life

Marco Pierini

Art is something that cannot be taught, what can be taught is craft

His program focused mainly on the study, analysis, manipulation, assembly and transformation of matter.

Albers structured his teaching method as a natural, consistent consequence of his unusual training.

He brought to life works of art that are never merely the result of a thorough process or of the correct application of norms and rules. Rather, they are works of art that discover their own rules in the very process of their making.

Art is not an object but experience

The Artist as Alchemist

Nicholas Fox Weber

He (Albers) saw his art as representing an ideal for the integration of the individual in society both in its tone and in the simultaneous independence and interdependence of its forms and colours. 

TEACHING FORM THROUGH PRACTICE 1928

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi

Immaterial Architectures : Organizing Structures/Making Metaphysical Space

Architectural Surface : Constructional Forms in Glass
Organizing Structures : Artist Notebook, Body/Landscape

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity
Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.


Slow Photography/Blue Transitions : Phenomenology of Visual Structures

Thought In The Act : Learning through making.

 

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color/ Art as Experience, Josef Albers

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/