The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into being.
Martin Heidegger 1
I am a stag of seven tines.
Song of Amergin 2
David Iles' sculpture evokes a world now nearly lost to many who live in the complex cultures of urban landscapes. We live in a world in which the very attempt to understand that world always already entails a reconstruction, a mediation of experience by concept, a mediation which further separates one from the world one is seeking to understand. 3 The world enacted in Iles' works is a world in which one is close to wildlife, whose activities serve as metaphors for aspects of the human lifeworld with which they interact. It is a world in which meaning is constructed within lived experience, rather than reconstructed as a concept. If Iles's work seems uncanny, ominous, that sense derives both from the alienation one has from this natural world, and the character of the aspects of the human lifeworld his works engage, no less than from the traditional iconological resonances of his motifs. These traditional associations, like the motifs in Iles' works, have their basis in observations of animal life, and lacking those observations the meanings of the motifs are now nearly lost, recovered more through the mediation of textual hermeneutics than directly through lived experience. To say that these resonances with traditional meanings are now largely to be recovered through a hermeneutics is to reiterate the distance we have moved from a lifeworld close to nature, for it was from within such a lifeworld that the meanings of these motifs initially developed. It is further to say that for us, detached both from direct lived experience of that natural world and from a culturally transmitted knowledge of the traditional iconology initially devolving from that world, an exegetical hermeneutics is necessary to disconceal what might otherwise be evident to our ancient, and even many of our recent ancestors. And might be evident also to those who grew up close enough to the remnants of a pre-urban landscape to have spent entire childhood days following crows through the woods for miles as they perturbed an owl intent on returning to its nest to sleep through the day. Indeed, the animals of that natural world have increasing come into the urban and suburban domains: crows now pursue owls through the woods of suburban housing developments, deer brows gardens in exurbia, and bears swim in backyard swimming pools: another layer of complexity in a hybrid ecosystem that is an interaction of nature and culture. This is an interaction that is always already problematic, for if one defines nature as that which has being apart from human agency, the definition in itself is a concept, a product of human agency, as is the referent of the concept as such. There is a venerable Latin maxim, of uncertain authorship but of at least medieval vintage: Cultura fit secunda natura, 'culture becomes second nature.'
Iles' works entail narrativity in the ur-sense of myth, muthos, a telling, a tale, a fable. As Thomas McEvilley suggests, "a myth is a device to mediate between culture and nature, either by culturalizing nature or by naturalizing culture." 4 The narrativity of Iles' works functions on several levels: the level of a metanarrative of the relationships between nature and culture, the level of the motifs represented and the manner of their formal representation within the work, the level of the presentation of the work within the supremely artificial cultural space of the gallery, and the inflection of viewer response to content by the title of the work as a parergon, the title being neither a part of the work nor separate from the work. 5 The ostensible narrative content of Iles' works is condensed and implied more than at length and explicit, less like a novel than like haiku, though one might develop a novel from the situations engaged in these works.
As one might with We Thought They Were Religious People. In the shallow space of the bas relief, crossed sticks within a niche in an textural field like a stone wall reference the Christian tradition. So also the frame surrounding the bronze: 3/4 by 3/4 inch black wood is stacked three layers deep, the terminus of each extended end crossing in a half lap joint, suggesting both a cross and the mode of construction of log cabins. The use of the past tense in the title suggests that this is not a object of current religious use, but an artwork evoking the sense of an artifact, the tone of an elegy. As D. S. Carne-Ross has remarked:. . . literature and the other arts are the purest witness to what has been lost. They reveal, as nothing else can, something that once was presence and now is absence. And could, though in no foreseeable future, be presence again. They bear witness to earth when there is nothing but world, . . . Bearing witness is not what the arts are happiest doing-they have other ends in view; this is merely one of their sidelines-but it is what we have to ask them to do for us now. But for them, we would not even know that we are living without what men have always had. They alone remember and remind us; everything else encourages us to forget and be content. The arts teach us to be discontent with this "world we live in"-though not of course in the sense (or the non-sense) of directing our attention to some "other world," for they are autochthonous and belong here. They remind us that we have no gods, no sanctities of place, no valid ceremonies to mark the seasons of the year and the stations of our lives, and scarcely any more the innocent realm of natural creatures and forms. 6
Bird Was Up To Something has a crow in an antler-like branch, holding the strings of a skeleton marionette in its beak. Crows pick up things with their beaks and carry the things about, sometimes flying off with the items. Perhaps the skeleton marionette is a lost toy, found and appropriated by the crow. But the affect of the black crow on a silhouetted antler-branch discounts such an interpretation. Silhouetted against the void of the white gallery wall, the crow on the branch has an ominous aspect: the hadaig, 'night crow,' of the Book of Ballymote. 7 The placement of branch and crow high enough on the wall above eye level, above head level, emphasizes the threatening aspect: what if above one, looking down on one, tends to be perceived as potentially threatening. There is an ancient association of crows, or their poetic equivalent of ravens, with death. In Native American traditions, the sky being "tends to be amalgamated with the mythological personification of the thunder and the wind, represented as a large bird (the crow, etc.); he beats his wings and the wind rises, his tongue is the lightning." 8 Like the wind, and the lightning, the crow may sweep down on one. The potential downward thrust is adumbrated by the pendant marionette, a plumb bob marking the verticality established by gravity. One moves in any direction with equal ease, except upward, and especially vertically. Gravity imposes an awareness of embodiedment and its limitations: unlike the crow, we cannot take wing and fly. Gravity is a heavy, serious thing, as its etymology from the Latin gravitas suggests. Compare the downward vertical thrust of the surgeon's scalpel, and its reiteration in the vertical thrust of the stenographer's pen downward toward the head of the patient's mother, in Thomas Eakins' painting The Gross Clinic. 9 In Iles' Bird Was Up To Something, the downward thrust of the pendant marionette establishes a vertical movement against the horizontality of the spreading antler-branch to the right, and the diagonal vector of the crow's body to the left, the gestalt forming an inverted pyramid, inherently precarious balanced on the fulcrum of its apex.
Like the crow in Bird Was Up To Something, the crow in We Knew She Had A Previous Life also sits on a branch extending from the wall, holding a small silver tiara with seven jewels of the same metal in its beak. Crows pick up things with their beaks and carry the things about, sometimes flying off with the items, and are particularly fond of picking up shiny things. The crow of We Knew She Had A Previous Life fills its traditional roll as a bird of omen-the ur-sense of 'ominous'-as a bearer of omens. 10
The recurrent stag-antler motif, suggested by the branches of Bird Was Up To Something and We Looked For Him Every Year as well as directly in the three antlered skulls of The Good Year and the nine antlered skulls of Life in the Lowlands, evokes Cernunnos, the Celtic lord of the animals, well known from the Gundestrup cauldron in the National Museum, Copenhagen. In The Good Year, Life in the Lowlands, and We Looked For Him Every Year, the stag motif remains in the animal realm, but for the implicit reference to hunting and the annual cycle of the seasons. The aspect of hunting is explicit in We Looked For Him Every Year, in which twenty seven shells (three are spent) point downward from the tips of the antler-branches. The radial symmetry of the skulls and antlers around the implied vertical axis of The Good Year suggests the international symbol for biological hazards; the plasticity of the form manifests a distant affinity with bronze works from Brno-Malmomerice, Czechoslovakia from the third century CE. 11 The formal symmetry of Life in the Lowlands also entails a reference to hunting, specifically to the venerable practice of arranging hunting trophies, and arms, in a symmetrical array found in abodes ranging from mobile homes to baronial castles. Bilateral symmetry inevitably references the bilateral symmetry of the body.
So also in Pursuit of Power: the bilateral symmetry of the humanoid marionette figures with deer forepaws, antlered skulls, skeletal vertebra , pelvis and femur in the form of plastic models elicit the viewer's own embodiedment. The marionettes' conglomeration of parts are combined with elongated, attenuated lower legs in the natural wood of branches with bark peeled, visually integrated by their close relationships of value and hue. Suspended from a five by five natural wooden grid, the marionettes hang with a posture suggestive of a preying mantis. One supposes that Dante has platted a new subdivision of the Inferno for these creatures, whose pursuit of power has rendered them powerless puppets.
If one finds Iles' works disquieting, surely that affect derives from their form and content. Their form and content in turn derives from the artist's lived experience of being in the world. Collectively, synchronically and diachronically, we make the worlds in which we live: if we are disquieted by those worlds, it is for us to make other worlds. Philosophers from Empedocles to Martin Heidegger to Nelson Goodman have found the facture of artworks the model for worldmaking. 12
| 1 | I Think They Were Religious People | wood, bronze | 21 x 19 x 2.5 inches |
| 2 | The Good Year | bronze | 13.5 x 16 x 14 inches |
| 3 | Bird Was Up To Something | bronze | 60 x 60 x 22 inches |
| 4 | Pursuit of Power | wood, plastic | 138 x 60 x 60 inches |
| 5 | We Looked For Him Every Year | bronze | 24 x 30 x12 inches |
| 6 | Life in the Lowlands | bronze | 68 x 46 x 6 inches |
| 7 | We Knew She Had a Previous Life | bronze | 16 x 18 x 16.5 inches |
David Iles received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas, were he was subsequently in charge of the foundry. He lives and operates a foundry in Sanger, Texas. Recent commissions include forty five animal figures in eighteen groups in seven environments depicting Texas native wildlife, commissioned by Trammell Crow for donation to the City of Dallas, 1996-1997, and bronze sculpture of Texas wildlife for the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building, the University of North Texas, 1998. The exhibition From Stories Not Told: Recent Works by Denton Artist David Iles was at the Center for the Visual Arts, Denton, 1998.
Happy and fortunate are those who, knowing allJane Ellen Harrison urges that ornithas is better rendered 'knowing in birds' than 'discerning omens' in that for the Greeks and Romans observation of birds as a mantic exercise was primary; Epilegomenon to the Study of Greek Religion and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religions (New York: University Books, 1912, 1921, 1962), 98-99 et seq. Return See the openwork ornament in the plastic animal style in the Moravian Museum, Brno, reproduced in N. K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, 1985), 368. Return Empedocles, Fragment 23, The Fragments of Empedocles, trans. William E. Leonard (LaSalle: Open Court, 1908, 1973), 26-27; Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17-81; Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Return 6
these things work without offending the deathless gods,
discerning the omens of birds and avoiding transgressions.