The Theme of The Mandi Tree (September
2003)
The Mandi Tree stands in the central
courtyard of Twentynine Palms High School, dedicated to the
memory of Mandi McMaster and her friend Rosie Inks, who were
murdered in Twentynine Palms in 1997. Deanne Stillman, in
her courageous best-selling book Twentynine Palms (Perennial,
2001), told their stories and that of Mandi's mother Debie
McMaster in her dogged pursuit of bringing the killer to
justice. To me, Ms. Stillman wove a compelling web and laid
out the silken steel threads of structural violence, violence
against women, and an unsustainable society.
My installation Under
The Mandi Tree seeks to simultaneously hold the darkness of
violence with the light of peace until the flash of searing
explosions can give way to the late afternoon sunlight on
the ocean waves. This experience was based upon a meditation
I had in the months leading up to the second Gulf War. The
installation conjures a giant puppet sculpture of foam as Buddhist
nun breathing a three-dimensional visualization of a class 4 New
Kind of Science localized structure algorithm. Not under a
bodi tree but rather the Mandi Tree, we seek the path of
non-violence and peace.
NKS Musings
New media and sound artist Maurice Methot laughingly
described our artistic adventure as poets poking at science. There's
something there that we cannot leave alone. Why do I find
NKS compelling while I am currently deeply involved and
committed to the pursuit of tradition craft such as Baroque
painting techniques, and etching?
Superficially, it sometimes seems like a diversion from my
intent on mastery of craft. Yet increasingly it seems to
cut to the core of visualization -- the simultaneous perception
of time, scale, behavior and environment.
Class 4 emergent properties at
phase transitions appear for me to represent the incipiency of
the paradox of collective behavior in response to what's going
on in the environment for singular agents of action. It is
that interaction, that snapshot of time, accumulated in the
evolution of the system like layers of pigment and medium upon a
canvas, of gliders and switch engines, that is most
fascinating. Are we zoomed in on one particular agent or
at the system level, or other focal lengths? Is it the
freeze frame, the evolution itself, or the resultant organism --
or all simultaneous? Is it a two dimensional slice of
time, or is it a three dimensional visualization?
Why? The short answer would
be that it is a way of grasping scale, time, and dimensionality
all at once. Is it a two dimensional slice of time, or is
a three dimensional visualization of the interaction, the mosaic
resultant, or the volume of the system itself? Are we
conscious of the vectors of momentum?
Recently, someone commented about
one of my etchings that it was abstract, but all of a sudden
realized that it was a representational close up -- the viewer
hungers for meaning. I perceive all of these
dimensionalities, probably through the miasma of
influences of new media art, our postmodernist trek, surrealism,
science and most obviously our contemporary visual culture.
So how can I representationally
express the totality of my perception? This installation
is exactly that -- an experiment of pushing the
"how." The medium of puppetry owes much debt to
the genius of Julie Taymor in its (and her art of) the surreal,
the primal, changes of scales, ideograms, the craftsmanship of
Fellini's workshops in Roma, the aspect of carnival, our
anti-globalization/global justice art of resistance, non-linearity, operatic, the
shadow sides of us, shamanistic masks and the evocation of
primal wisdom and knowledge. The medium of sculpture gets
me the dimensionality, the large scale, visualizing in the third
dimension, concretizing versus evoking metaphoric ways of
sensing the world. Abstract painting allows me to take off
where Bhavsar used the rangoli technique of layering pigment and
DritiBose's interpretation of rangoli as a Bengali women's gendered
and personal means of expression. Using larger scale (but
not yet large enough for my vision) industrial scrap material evokes 3D cellular automata spaces in layered
pigments.
But in all of this, I felt
compelled to bring in the human element, and am still faced with
the challenge/problem of how to integrate representational oil
painting. Following Bacon's extrusion of the human form,
how can I express the human experience, body and humanity as a
snapshot in the the flux of multiple cellular automata processes
(cellular, structural, environmental, mosaics of
meanings)?
In the end, that challenge
remains. Yet I feel that in the form of an installation,
especially in the desert in the community of other experimental
artists, I can further approach the multiple layering of
segments of perception involved in the totality. The
boundless horizon gets us out of the computer monitor's frame,
the photographic frame, the male gaze, the artist's
frame... Hopefully we approach a synaesthetic
understanding of the experience of that perception.
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