Vol. 38, No. 18

1-4-2005
By: Susan Wittstock

Arts reach

Department of Art at work around the globe

Malcolm Cochran is working on a sculpture shaped like a 30-foot long wine bottle for a new Hudson River park in New York City; Mary Jo Bole is in the Netherlands operating a book press; Ann Hamilton is creating videos for a lighthouse in Puerto Rico, and Michael Mercil is returning from Sweden after carving black stone into sculptures.

Faculty in the Department of Art are creating art that is finding homes in locations throughout the United States and abroad. With each exhibition and commission, the reputation of Ohio State reaches a little further.
onCampus checked in with a few of the faculty for a peek at the projects they’ve been working on. For information on additional projects, visit http://arts.osu.edu/.

Malcolm Cochran
As a child, Malcolm Cochran and his father took a voyage to Europe, sailing from a pier on the Hudson River in New York. As a recipient of a Hudson River Park Trust commission, Cochran is now creating a public art project that provides a clever nod not only to his own experience, but to the glory days of luxury liner cruising that once dominated the travel industry in New York.

“My idea evolved from doing a model of an ocean liner to putting that inside a bottle, like a ship in a bottle,” Cochran said. “But when I think about traveling, it’s not so much the exterior, but it’s the cabin that becomes important.”

Cochran’s giant wine bottle is made of steel and coated with zinc and bronze, which will receive a bottle green patina. The interior, viewed through seven portholes and through openings in the neck and bottom ends of the work, will be stainless steel and mimics the stateroom of a luxury liner. The interior is inspired by photographs of the RMS Queen Mary, which first sailed in 1936, and is documented well enough for him to use as an example to pattern his designs. Using stainless steel will give the interior the look of a black and white photo, Cochran said: “I wanted it to have that silver tone and sheen to it.”

The bottle is scheduled to be placed in March at the new Clinton Cove Park, at 56th and West Streets, and will officially open to the public in April 2005. Eight site-specific pieces of art will be created for the 550 acres that will comprise the Hudson River Park Trust system of parks that will stretch from Manhattan to 59th Street. “It includes the area where ocean liners once docked,” Cochran said.

He was invited to be considered for the commission in the fall of 2001, and his project was accepted in the spring of 2002. To construct the bottle’s hull, he is working with Odom Industries, a Cincinnati company that specializes in vessel forms for industry. “It took me a long time to figure out who could make this,” he said.
By luck, he found Odom, which had the equipment to make a large, round metal structure and has a CEO, Tim Odom, who is an Ohio State alumnus. “They don’t normally do art fabrication. They were really excited about this project,” Cochran said.

While the bottle was being made, Cochran worked with a matching mock-up made of plywood and fashioned the interior furniture out of cardboard, which was then used as a pattern for the final versions.

“It is the most complicated thing I’ve ever done, in terms of logistics and fabrication,” he said.

Cochran, who is the artist behind the Field of Corn in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, is currently busy on several other projects. He is a finalist for a commission to design a fountain in Goodale Park in Victorian Village, and has had a design accepted for the north reflecting pool of the Ohio Supreme Court Building — a piece that will consist of text such as “truth,” “wisdom,” etc., formed from granite to be completed late summer or early fall.

Mary Jo Bole
Mary Jo Bole spent most of her winter break in the Netherlands, working by hand a digital stencil printer at Knust Press in Nijmegen to create copies of her latest artist book. “It’s called Daily Spy History and it captures the flavor of Dresden,” Bole said.

The book reproduces colorful, sometimes irreverent, watercolor sketches of Dresden, Germany, that Bole made while spending three months there last summer on a Greater Columbus Arts Council grant. The sketches are of everything from museums, grocery stores and people drinking beer to famous Dresden landmarks and the fire bombing of the city during World War II. The finished book will be 110 pages long.

The book will be on display with many other samples of Bole’s art at an Ohio Arts Council-sponsored show at Cincinnati’s Weston Art Gallery in November 2005 and the Feinkunst Krüger gallery in Hamburg, Germany, in January 2006. “The Hamburg show will include book projects and a small grouping of things I’ve done since about 1998,” Bole said, including sculptures.

“A lot of my work is funerary in nature — I’m really drawn to materials that suggest longevity,” she said.“They make sense for the concepts I’m working with.”

A new piece she has been working on for three years that she plans to finish for the German show is called Winifred, Ruth, Winifred, and is a companion bench to an earlier work, Granny’s Necklace. Both pieces, when finished, are bronze benches large enough to seat two people, and have incredibly intricate mosaic tile images on the seats.

The tile tessarae are hand cut and then placed by hand by Bole, who had to recut all of them from 1/8 of an inch to 1/16 of an inch to gain the photographic effect she wanted. “I had to get it down to that scale, otherwise it was too cartooney,” she said. Recent MFA alumna Shauna Merriman is helping with the project.

The pattern portrays repeating portraits of her mother and her late grandmother and late sister arranged in two large circles on the bench. Inside one ring is exploding flowers; inside the other, a doily.

Bole also will continue to create works utilizing monument plaques. In 2003, she organized a residency for herself at the Dedouch Monument Plaque Company in Chicago, where she learned the almost lost art of transferring photographic images by hand onto copper enamel plaques. The company, which had been in business since 1893, folded shortly after Bole’s residency. She made 60 pieces while there, including images of children’s socks, which she is integrating into an eight-foot version of her great grandmother’s mourning brooch.

Ann Hamilton
This fall, Ann Hamilton had an installation on view at Mass MoCA, a contemporary art museum in Massachusetts. “One of the challenges of the scale of the space was how to engage its presence without filling it,” Hamilton said of the large, 300-foot- long 19th century industrial space renovated as a gallery/museum space.

“The main room had 40 ceiling-mounted pneumatic mechanisms \0\0that used air to pick up blank sheets of paper one sheet at a time, shuttle them across a track on the ceiling and drop them 24 feet to the floor,” she said in describing the exhibition, titled corpus. Hamilton covered the individual window panes of the double high windows with red silk, which, depending on where viewers stood, appeared either transparent or opaque. Twenty-four speakers, moving up and down in unison from floor to ceiling, broadcast recorded spoken-word pieces.

“In contrast to this room of light and sound and airborne papers, the installation also included two other rooms. One, dark except for a single window. Overhead there were four swinging speakers — imagine a tether ball,” Hamilton said. The speakers spun rapidly overhead to create a doppler effect with the sound of a chant-like vocal composition by Meredith Monk from an earlier collaboration, Mercy. “For some people, the sound and rhythm is mesmerizing and they don’t want to leave; for others the room is uncomfortable and they flee to the third upstairs room. ... I like that tension.”

The second room overlooking the main space had 30 thick, wooden benches painted white and lined up as if in a meeting hall. “Yet, there’s no pulpit,” Hamilton said. But there was a sermon, of sorts. Words, “the,” “beginning,” “in,” “was,” were projected onto the wall, from the sweep of light projected onto the walls from a spinning video.

corpus received a positive review in the New York Times, where John Rockwell wrote that, “Passing through this huge piece is like a 21st-century pilgrim’s progress, a book of the hours in which we move from awe to disorientation to fear to sovereign observation from on high.”

Hamilton also has a commissioned installation, aloud, in the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm that began this fall and continues through spring. There are 14 brightly-colored hand-cranked wind machines positioned in the museum’s Gothic Hall, where medieval altar pieces line the walls. Visitors are invited to don one of 28 felt coats and hats available at the exhibition and operate the noisy wind machines.
Hamilton also created an artist book that displays images of the mouths of the altar pieces’ carved statues. The images are taken from a videotape she made in June where she animated the statue’s mouths by moving her hand in front of them.

Hamilton also is working on a permanent installation for the southwest tip of Puerto Rico, the Cabo Rojo Lighthouse, comm-issioned by Arte Público para Puerto Rico. The installation occupies the entire building where she has continued to explore the phenomena of turning sound and light. There, she is creating a series of videos of a hand reading fragments of a text that will be projected on walls inside the lighthouse and recordings of voices reading fragments of poetry in several languages that will be played from rotating speakers. The lighthouse’s isolated location on the edge of landscape, buffeted by wind and sea, evokes metaphors she hopes to explore in tandem with “the process of writing and of reading,” she said. “I am interested in how the solitary process of reading is something that can forever change you, but which leaves no material trace and how the act of reading might become the material of the work.”

Hamilton also is involved with a project in California that will open next fall. A 70-foot tower is being built just north of San Franciso that will have two staircases arranged as a double-helix structure inside. “I will work for the next several years to commission different sound works for the space from other artists,” she said, although she plans to create a project herself for the space at some point. “It moves me into functioning as more of a curator.”

Michael Mercil
In 1999, Michael Mercil began working with his wife, Hamilton, and the landscape architecture firm of Michael Van Valkenburgh, Inc., on concepts for a new park in Battery Park City in New York. On Sept. 30, 2004, he was able to attend Teardrop Park’s official opening.

“In designing the park, we asked how we might make room for a sense of the wild in this part of the city,” Mercil said. “The exaggerated changes of landscape grade and elevation work to enlarge the relative scale of a small space by inviting visitors to ramble up and down and around and through it.”

Hamilton and Mercil created a sequence of stone sections for the 1.9 acre park that “refer to the geological structure — the folding, scraping, lifting, dropping and eroding — of the Hudson River Valley,” he said. He hopes children, and adults, will have fun playing on the landscape. “It invites a kind of physical and emotional abandonment that, in post 9-11 New York, offers temporary respite from the pressures people now feel for safety and security.”

In November, Mercil traveled to Sweden to begin carving a set of stone sculptures that will be featured in an outdoor exhibition at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park. The piece, Shadows and Ghosts: a Dream of the 21st Century, will eventually also include a set of white plaster casts or “ghosts” of the black stone “shadows.”
The stone is from a Swedish quarry. “They have the right combination of computer tools and, more importantly, highly skilled stone finishers,” Mercil said.

Mercil also is working with Robert Silberman, photography and film historian at the University of Minnesota, on a project that includes an exhibition next year of works by Marcel Duchamp and his long-time lover, Mary Reynolds. Mercil and Silberman are collaborating with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Minnesota’s Fred Weissman Museum to gather pieces for the exhibition. He also has upcoming exhibitions of his own art at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.\0\0

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