S K E E TM c A U L E Y-A R T I S T ' SS T A T E M E N T

 

Since receiving an M.F.A. from Ohio University in 1978, my work has been an ongoing study of the relationship between today’s consumer-driven cultures and the natural environment. During this time I have continuously shifted strategies of making work between "real-life" documents on location and "reel-life" records of studio sets. I find that this shift not only helps to inform the work, but also keeps me from assuming a position of either-or. The slippage of culture and environment cannot be effectively addressed from a monocular point of view. Neither can any meaningful conversation between art work and audience. It is always been important to me to allow more than one entry-point to the work so that this conversation is facilitated by the work. Otherwise, I am beating a silent drum.

From 1981-89 the location work concentrated on contemporary Native American cultures. In 1989 this work culminated with the publication of Sign Language: Contemporary Southwest Native America by Aperture (New York). An exhibition was organized by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and travelled to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and five other cities. Artwork from Sign Language can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Amon Carter Museum, among others. I also received two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowships (1984 and 1986) in support of Sign Language. More recently, work from Sign Language has been included in the exhibition and catalogue entitled "Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Between the years of 1988-92, I also made work in the studio which more directly considered objects significant to the dominant culture. These pieces initially took a variety of forms including 20x24" Polaroids, light boxes, video, and eventually installation. On the surface, this work appears to be more conceptually based, even though to me the concepts are one with the more documentary based work. The traditions and value systems of society today are clearly reflected in the production and consumption of a material world. I find that the act of shopping may be the purest form of self-expression. Working in the studio feeds this for me. The studio work was exhibited at the Burden Gallery in New York, Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, Moody Gallery in Houston, and the Center for Research in Contemporary Art in Arlington, Texas. Works from this period can be found in the collection of the Polaroid Corporation.

Soon after Sign Language was published in 1989, I began receiving commissions to illustrate articles by several national magazines. In 1990 while on assignment for Connoisseur magazine, I met Tom Fazio, who was being featured in the magazine as being on the cutting-edge of golf course architecture. I found Mr. Fazio to be a master at blending the golf course with the beauty of the surrounding environment. Fazio toured me around his Champion Hills Golf Club while it was under construction in the mountains of North Carolina. He explained how he had moved a stream from one side of a fairway to the other as a way to make the course more "playable," while a mountain had been "taken out" so that the new and improved view could include the mountains behind. I was both shocked and intrigued by his satisfaction with this. His world view contradicted everything I believed, yet I was also able to appreciate his effort as a dialectical synthesis of nature and culture. The product of massive land re-formation became, in the name of sport, an aesthetic consumption of the great outdoors. This experience led to my ongoing interest in the golf course as a fabricated and perfected environment. I have since found this world view to be very popular. Every day a new golf course opens somewhere in the world, and has so for the past 7 years. The architects of golf are essentially playing God with their environmental designs. The products of their design are at once Heaven and Hell. Nature is revised to become a "new and improved nature." But, I have found the intersection of nature and "new nature" to be slippery and seductive. I sometimes find it hard to define that intersection. I am attracted by the edge, and I admit being seduced by a perfected nature.

The resulting art works are "larger than life" (32"x88") panoramic landscapes inspired by the Hudson River painters such as Alfred Bierstadt and Frederic Church. My interest in landscape is primarily one of understanding it as a cultural construct. Most of what we know about the American landscape has been through the compositions of these painters and their photographic peers, rather than by experience. Their compositions suggest a peaceful coexistence of natural sublimity and technological achievement. With the aesthetic devices of color, scale, and light, these artists fabricated a landscape of mythical stature. At the same time, the paintings conveyed a rhetorical expression of a national belief in Manifest Destiny. This may not be far from how contemporary golf architects construct and view their work. Golf architects attempt to create a seamless harmony between the golf course and the surrounding environment. Ironically the success of the design relies on how persuasive a fabricated landscape may be.

These "golfscapes" have been the subject of several one-person exhibitions, including Feigen Contemporary in New York, the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Dallas Museum of Art. Examples of these works have been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

More recently, I have been photographing bonsai trees from the collection at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, California. As with the earlier work, these art works are also large in scale, measuring up to 65"x40". The results are monumental, inspirational, and yet another visual insight to a cultural need to perfect and/or recreate nature. Irony is again part of the code, as the viewer is dwarfed by the enlarged dwarfed tree. Finally, the joke may be best appreciated with the knowledge that my renderings of the "enhanced nature" of the bonsai have themselves been computer-enhanced.

The origins of bonsai (in China as early as 600 A.D. and later assimilated into Japan) have both religious (Zen Buddhism and Taoism) and philosophical cultural significance. In Japan, bonsai trees are used to adorn the "takonoma." This is the shrine or space in the Japanese home where the beauty and serenity of nature are contemplated. The bonsai is an illusion of a perfect nature that represents the deeper spiritual meaning of life. The object of bonsai is to simulate nature. This simulated natural beauty is intended to remind us of something other than the plant itself: a change in seasons, mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, storms, wind, rain, snow, or frost. The philosophy of bonsai emphasizes a profound significance of leaving things out, or "less is more." What is not suggested, not said, is more important and expressive than what is said.

As with a Zen poem, the bonsai is without contradiction and yet full of contradictions. Scale is commonly an important factor in any experience with the natural environment, and the bonsai miniaturizes this experience. The art of the bonsai is a representation of a perfect tree form, and any likeness of nature is generally enhanced without human reference. The scale of these works give several clues as to how perfection is achieved. Copper wires are coiled around branches to re-shape their natural tendencies into illusions of the effects of age, and/or wind. Bark is stripped, bleached, and sanded to simulate many years of weathering. The results are simple and profound, seductive and tragic. Very Zen.

As a "natural extension" of the bonsai work, I have most recently been shooting Suiseki stones in the studio. Suiseki are sort of bonsai stones - miniature stonescapes. In Japan Suiseki means "water stone", Americans call them "viewing stones". The eastern traditions reach back to the thirteenth century Chinese appreciation of natural stones. Tradition runs strong. True Suiseki stones are always handsized, found and presented without manipulation. Tradition in the west allows the cutting of the stone. The line is drawn at carving and polishing the stone, a.k.a. Biseki. Differences in geology have also effected the evolution of the Suiseki. Presentation of stone will mostly happen in the form of either a "dai" - a hardwood stand made specifically for the stone, or in a "suiban" - in a shallow dish surrounded by sand or water. The stones I have been photographing are from the private collection in Santa Monica. Most of the stones in this collection have been found in the Mojave desert of southern California and are distinctly American formations reminiscent of southwestern American landscapes.

Age, profundity and irony are entry points to the images of these Neo-ancient mountains of molehills. As with the bonsai work, the stones and their image shout in silence. They are at once sacred and profane - microchips of a larger place and a longer time. Profound - as in Wegman goes to the mountains - minimal and mini-mall, very zen and very dumb. Owning a piece of the American landscape has never been easier or cheaper. But, concepts of profundity are never as simple as they sound. An average of 2-3 weeks have been spent lighting and photographing one stone - an act that could also take a sixtieth of a second.

As with most eastern arts, simplicity, beauty and memory are important elements of stone appreciation. My strongest initial response to a stone is one of a surrogate to "the mountain experience". Scale is always an important part of my memory, and we know that memory can make scale uncertain. The pieces themselves address this slippage of scale - by recreating memories from stones, which serves as a surrogate experience is, itself a re-re-recreation of scale. Watch your step.

Ultimately, I am not interested in converting a viewer. It’s more about suggesting that things are not always as they appear. With irony, the initial response is not necessarily the resulting response. What you see is not always only what you get. I am more motivated by the grey areas, rather than a singular option of either-or. The strategy of providing more than one entry point (i.e. beauty, scale, or humor) for a work allows us room to explore, while hopefully challenging what we may think we know to be true.