Somewhat as if one were to hammer a table together with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: "Hammering a table together is nothing to him," but rather "Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing; whereby certainly the hammering would become still bolder, still surer, still more real, and if you will, still more senseless.
Franz Kafka 1
Making a work is an unpredictable dialogue with the substance, . . . materials have a reserve of possibilities built into them.
Robert Rauschenberg 2
The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it,
The poet speaks the poem as it is,
Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks
By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
The statues will have gone back to be things about.
Wallace Stevens 3
The lifeworld is a construction of nature and culture, an articulation of and intervention in the chaos of its ground. It is through this intervention of the thinging of things 4 that the isotropic urspace of the chaotic ground is rendered anisotropic. As Brian O'Doherty notes, "Space now is not just where things happen: things make space happen." 5 Experience of the natural and cultural domains within the lifeworld is problematized by the narratives--the myths--by which that experience is mediated, "either by culturaizing nature of by naturalizing culture." 6
Like the construction of the lifeworld, the works of Arthur Koch are articulations of and interventions in the chaos of their ground. With the rigor, precision, wit, and elegance of a mathematical proof, the construction of a world out of earth. From the fundamental elements of three-dimensional form--volume, line, space, light, gravity--and quotidian materials Koch constructs formal relations of tension and balance metaphoric of our embodied selves.
The dichotomy of nature and culture is established in Koch's works by the combination of fragments of found wood--limbs, stumps--with processed wood in the form of dimensional lumber, sometimes new, sometimes reused from its former quotidian function. In these constructions, the these objects are taken up as materials, retaining their nature in their use even while their are transfigured by Koch's use. Indeed, it is what inheres in the nature of these materials that motivates their being taken up as material within the medium in which they are taken up, and which conditions their use in that medium.
Sculpture entails an emphatically tactile engagement grounding the visibility of the work in its materials, and that in turn is grounded in the reflexive experience of embodiedness. Donald Kuspit has urged that:
in the last analysis, sculpture's visibility is derived from its tactility, rather than dialectically bonded to it. In sculpture the visible exists as a quality of touch, contingent upon the sense of bodiliness that the sculpture conveys. Every sculpture proposes a mode of touch, which is the basis of its visual effect. And every mode of touch is rooted in an imaginative, unconscious sense of the body. 7
Exteriorized in the materiality of the quasi-subject 8 of the artwork, the sense of bodiliness underlies the sense of presence evoked in encounter with the work. Again, Kuspit:
When a sculpture--even an abstract sculpture--caries the kind of conviction we call "presence," we are unconsciously reading it as a metaphoric symbolization of the body's emotional meaning. Such meaning is difficult to articulate, for it is fraught with the difficulty of knowing and mastering one's own body and the body of the other, especially an other to whom one is intimately related. As the symbol of one's self, one's body is privileged, and in a sense the first object in the world. . . . Sculpture is optimally a metaphorical projection of bodily presence in alien material, a kind of phantasy introspection of the latently human in the manifestly inhuman. That displacement of the body's inner image, summarizing the most primitive experience of it. 9
Anosognosia is the most overtly figurative of the works in this exhibition. Two vertical reused two by six planks joined by carved and smoothly finished traverse hardwood members encase a section of the trunk of a sapling, twisted and bent to the breaking point in its middle to form two legs, with a phallic stick inserted at the crotch. The squared corners of the aged encasing planks, and the rubbed finish surfaces of the traverse members contrast in their worked character with rough texture and seemingly unworked character of the sapling, a contrast of culture and nature. Yet the bent condition of the sapling reveals that it too has received the intervention of artifice on natural material.
Absurd Fraud seems to balance a sheet of plywood on the corner inserted into T-base constructed of two by fours. Battens of one by two lumber divide the sheet of plywood, structurally stiffening the plane while imposing a geometrical figuration of the surface that seems a vector diagram of the disposition of forces acting on the sheet of plywood. The vertical batten divides the plane of the plywood sheet into to right triangles, with their common hypotenuse dividing the sheet vertically as if a plumb line corresponding to the action of gravity on the work. The horizontal batten, perpendicular to the vertical batten and extending to the corner by which the work is attached to the wall, divides one of the right triangles formed by the vertical batten into two smaller right triangles. A large curved piece of bois d'arc wood is set into a cut out section of the plywood sheet, its curve reversed in the rounding of the section below it. In its tentative balance, sweeping curves, and its very verticality, Absurd Fraud is an analogue of the standing human figure, animated in its precarious balance of moving from one moment of precarious equilibrium to the next.
The element of tactility in Koch's use of materials is perhaps seen most directly in Smooth Curve. Installed high on the wall with its lower edge approximately seven feet above the floor, Smooth Curve is a section of split bois d'arc wood, its faces left rough from splitting, its protruding edge alone finished to a smooth, convex curved surface. Unavailable by virtue of the height of its installation to ready palpable tactile inspection (quite apart from the impropriety of touching artworks in an exhibition), Smooth Curve nevertheless elicits a vicarious, visually funded sense of palpability, the more emphatic for the contrast of roughness and smoothness of its surfaces.
The floor piece Hammer embeds one end of a segment of an arc of worked wood into a section of tree trunk; the free end of the arc shaped into a wedge with the surface smoothed at its terminus. The exposed top section of the trunk and the side opposite the arc extension are also smooth, in contrast to the gnarled roughness of the exterior of the trunk. Like Smooth Curve, Hammer employs a contrast of roughness and smoothness, a trope for nature and culture, for that which has the particularity of its being without the intervention of human agency and that which has its particular-ity of being by virtue of human agency.
Screwing Up combines plywood and pieces of lumber in a nexus of complex, repeated planar shapes spatially rotated in relation to each other, with extensions protruding into the surrounding space; a section of twisted natural wood is attached to one side, suggestive of a corkscrew. Similar in its use of linear extensions, Dominion presents a trope of culture as establishing dominion over nature, with a stump caught within four two by six planks, the axis of the stump skewed from the vertical with one point on the stump contacting the ground plane, while two of the plank ends tip the stump. The planks of Dominion surrounding the stump vary in their extension: two feet, three feet, five feet, eight feet. The sequence of lengths is a segment of the Fibonacci series, the progression having the property of approaches the ratio of 1.618. This number, found by taking the square root of 5, adding 1, and dividing the result by 2, is the harmonic relation of the Golden Rectangle. Arcs with radii of the length of the planks in Dominion form a spiral, here an implied line in the space defined by the work. 10 In the explicitly mathematized proportions in Dominion the problematic of the relation of nature and culture is particularly acute: while one might regard the manifestation of the Fibonacci series in the material of the dimensional lumber elements as a metaphor of culture, one might equally regard this as a manifestation of the underlying, inherent proportions of the natural domain. One is confronted with a fundamental question: mathematics is clearly a cultural construction, yet describes relationships within nature: is mathematics thus not an aspect of nature?
Wood in its natural state is combined with reused and new dimensional lumber in Destructive Creation. A curved bois d'arc limb, with the small twigs reaching out from one end toward a window in the gallery as if the branch were still alive and heliotropic,terminates at its other end in a point carved as one might whittle the end of a small stick. At this end, a large bois d'arc timber is carved with a smoothly finished surface, anchoring the end opposite the twigs with its mass. A framework of used and new dimensional lumber joins and supports these two treatments of the same wood.
In Outside In, the rough bark on the exterior of sections of tree trunks is turned inward to enclose a central cavity within the cube formed of the cut interior wood. The three units installed in a horizontal row form a progression in the treatment of branches emerging into the interior cavity. The left piece has a protruding limb, extending from the cavity of the piece into the viewer's space. The middle piece has short, cut branches, within the interior cavity, while the right piece has no branches within the interior cavity. Together, the sequence read left to right is that of a progressive withdrawal of the extension of the trunk into exteriority.
Agents of Change, twelve units each ten inches square, is a catalog of permutations on wood, its diversity of properties, its transformation, its imitation. The sequence of installation, read left to right, moves from the more natural to the less. The left series of six pieces consists of squares of leaden gray bark, of weathered wood, of branches with bark peeled bare, of heavily weathered wood with a section polished, of dark wood with eroded paint or plaster adhering to areas of the surface, and of another weathered piece. To the right of the pilaster dividing the two sections of the work, the leftmost panel consists of brown wood-grain plastic laminate, the next of heavily applied white oil impasto with an area of dark wood exposed, of a piece with five horizontal strips of yellow wood embedded in concrete, of a piece with a surface of gray plastic laminate, the lower right corner cut at forty five degrees, of a piece constructed of laminated plywood with the edges exposed as the front plane, and of a square covered with white paper embossed to imitate troweled stucco or plaster. The series of twelve units is thus installed to emphasize its division into the natural and the artificial. 'Change', referenced in the title, is bivalent: the changes wrought by the vississtudes of time, and the transformation of the natural into the artificial and the imitation of the natural by the artificial.
Similar in its combining wood in the natural state with used and new dimensional lumber, Pompous Sleeze forms a low horizontal curtain of plywood, framed with two by two and two by four lumber. Bent, curved limbs move through the rectangular aperture in the principal plane of the work, crossing like the huge snake engulfing Laokoön and his two sons. The movement of these limbs is doubled by the assemblage of lumber into a curved shape arching over the central plane, replicating in a mirroring reversal the crossing of the plane by the natural in the domain of the cultural.
Culture, the conceptual alterity of nature, arises from intervention in and from within the domain of the natural, and intervention which constitutes the alterity in which it intervenes. The apparent circularity of the instantiation of the cultural from the natural which is itself constituted as such in opposition to the cultural is an aporetic tension. In Arthur Koch's works, the tension between the natural and the cultural is posited and manifested in the materials themselves, and resolved in their conjoining in the artwork, where nevertheless it remains visible, a metaphor for one's own condition, situated in a tension between nature and culture, a tension the artwork qua quasi-subject makes visible for the viewing subject in encounter with the work.Arthur Koch is Professor in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington.
| Agents of Change | wood, formica | 12 pieces, each 10 x 10" |
| Absurd Fraud | wood | 5 x 93 x 100" |
| Smooth Curve | bois d'arc wood | 6 x 12 x 37" |
| Outside In | walnut, juniper, bois d'arc wood | 10 x 30 x 37" |
| Anosognosia | wood | 85 x 11 x 18" |
| Dominion | wood | 61 x 50 x 115" |
| Pompous Sleeze | wood | 53 x 36 x 120" |
| Screwing Up | wood | 37 x 24 x 48" |
| Hammer | dogwood | 5 x 6 x 48" |
| Destructive Creation | wood | 48 x 36 x 78" |
