Dice Works for the Tramway
Then I remember thinking: "An artist' s place is in a work, an artist' s place is a red place".
Dice Works for the Tramway |
I began to work on the sculptures related to Rodin and Seurat
simultaneously, after the dinner which followed the opening of "Dice Works"
in Glasgow. We were on the second floor of a restaurant, eating on long tables that faced
each other -the mood was great, we were starting to soar upwards and I thought: "I
want to become an artist -an artist is someone who is in artist' s place". Then I remember thinking: "An artist' s place is in a work, an artist' s place is a red place". |
When I examined Seurat' s "Baignade, Asniθres" after that dinner, the first thing I noticed -after stopping at the red hat of the figure at the extreme right of the painting, known as the "Echo" -were the long shadows of the seated figures. I started to sketch them on large sheets of iron and then I placed them on long posts, like enormous chairs. I spent whole afternoons on these shades facing straight ahead, in this mixed pose of self absorption and attention, characteristic of Seurat' s sitters.
| The first sign of the riverbank emerged one afternoon when I was sitting on the middle
shadow. I felt a long pull drawing me backward to the left. The pull was so clear that I
could locate its exact center. To mark it in space, I took a post, pointed the height of
the source, put it in place and went quickly back up to the shadow. This experience was
repeated a number of times. I joined up the marks on the posts with ribbons. Within a few
days I was able to see the signs of the bank spreading out radially from my position.
After joining up quite a number of points I began to feel that I was dealing with a vast
oval space. During this period, indulged in a sort of catalepsy of projections, I gradually realized that the river was emerging from an egg. I spent a lot of time raising and lowering the riverbank and the level of the water, in an attempt to define my position in the egg. I remember turning the residents of the riverbank upside down, again and again. I also remember that in order to arrive at a solution I thought of the space as a basin, and the two sides of the river as my feet. |
 Preparation for Divination with Dice |
One strange device which I used to determine between the sitter was to join smaller replicas of the figures to the bodies of the larger effigies. In some cases I placed the smaller figures on the eyes of the large ones, tied to the back of their heads by a string.
When I began to put myself in the position of the only swimmer who is looking towards the riverbank, I was visited by images of the double reflection of the bank. I constructed another symmetrical group of sitters and their shadows. I placed the banks facing each other and then started to move them closer, until they were almost overlapping, and then pulled one group through the other. In this way they were like the inhabitants of an island in the middle of the river, sitting back to back. Before long the studio was full of these double figures, the oval feeling was receding and I felt that I was almost excluded from this dense arrangement.
 Reclining Standing Figure |
One afternoon, as I was sitting by the window at home, the light striking me from the side, and looking at Seurat' s painting in a book, I cut a tiny figure out of paper. Little by little I pulled its shadow across the book until it lay over the shadow of the central sitter. This gentle identification, after all the fuss of building the river bank, led me to find a way to enter the work. I placed an effigy under the shade of the central sitter, crouching in such a way that an imaginary light striking it at an angle from below -as if on a stage under the bank's surface -would cast its shadow to touch and lie upon the shade of the sitter. |
As these movements were taking place, I realized that I was about to be born. I made a double red head, sewn along the seam of the eyes. One day, soon after that, while I stood working in the riverside with the double head lying beside me, I realized that I would have to cut the seam open. I drew and manufactured a king of cleaver out of iron, and placed it next to the head. I was suddenly overcome, by fear, -almost a king of quiet inner seizure. I went into the next room and fetched a large iron deer.
| In the midst of this frenzied upheaval (which now, as I describe it, seems like a
wonderful, life), I corrected the position of the figure in the red cloth underneath the
shadow. I turned the body gently, pressing the knees very sharply, and the head emerged
beneath the seam of the cloth. Two days later I returned to the river to work, stretching the cloth at the extremes of the river' s surface. |
 Luminous Shoe |