press release
The John Hansard Gallery is delighted to be showing
the work of Gerald Giamportone, an artist living
and working in Los Angeles, whose work has not previously been
shown in Britain.
Gerald Giamportone’s work addresses
important issues relating to contemporary sculptural practice.
Whilst still reflecting the central issues of formalism, the
works in this exhibition extend those ideas by looking at opposing
concepts such as fragility and strength, temporality and timelessness.
They bring together seemingly unconnected materials from both
the natural world and industry; combining neoprene, talc, formica
and polycarbonate sheeting, with naturally occurring elements
such as wood, cork, rose petals, thorns or leaves.
The works are presented in a number of ways, ranging from floor
pieces to table top works to wall based photographic prints.
All share the common quality of being beautifully hand crafted
and despite their pristine, almost clinical, appearance are
very much products of a painstaking hand made process. The collection
and extraction of natural materials displayed within the formal
methods of sculptural display, present striking images, often
resembling topography, arctic landscapes or phials as if part
of a scientific experiment. The organic materials used eventually
disintegrating to a dry dust.
A monograph on the artist and his work will subsequently be
published by John Hansard Gallery in Spring 2005.
artist interview
GG: Gerald Giamportone
BB: Dr Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
BB Hello Gerald Giamportone and thank you
very much for agreeing to do this interview for the JHG and
for which we will share copyright, if that’s all right
with you.
GG [Nods]
BB Let me begin by asking you first to describe
some of the works in Gallery 1. These are works which many people
in Britain won’t be familiar with, so can you say something
about how these works came about.
GG Yes the works you’ll see in Gallery
1 include a series of tables. There are four tables that are
lined with various things – cork, Formica or felt. The
ones with Formica have shredded rose petals. The ones with cork
have thorns, though there’s another one with cork that
has long stems. The one with felt has leaves in it. Then the
other things in the front gallery are pieces o/in Lexand. They’re
actually rose stems that are in Lexand. They’re quite
interesting pieces for me because they kind of represent corrections
that cannot occur. And the stems, in maybe a hundred years or
so, will end up as residue at the bottom of these containers.
I’m very attached to these pieces. I still haven’t
figured out why but I’m very much attached to them.
BB Well there’s an interesting mix there
of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’
coming together – the plasticity of the containers and
the delicacy and fragility and the…entropicness (if you
can use that word) of the flowers…
GG Something like that – I do like this
idea of the residue – it’s sort of connected to
memory. If these stems do become residue, then they’ll
be this residue that used to be a rose stem. And ultimately
a rose. So this interests me very much. And then in terms of
them being things that are in a state of correction, they’ll
never be corrected. It’s the idea that they’re encased
in something that’s industrial and that has a precision
to it and that runs counter to exactly what they are. And so
there is this contentious relationship which I think is part
of the work in a larger sense as well.
BB Could just you say something more about
this ‘state of correction’? Why ‘correction’
– it’s an interesting word – why would they
be an object of correction?
GG I’m not sure that they are an ‘object
of correction’. I think it’s just a piece of language
that I’m using for the lack of a better piece of language.
And I think I’ll just leave it at that.
BB Okay fair enough. And then this other term
that you used…you see them as being ‘contentious’?
GG I think they’re contentious because
they run against the mechanicalness of the industrialness of
this sort of thing. They are kind of put in a state of….they’re
lodged in these containers and I can’t think of a rose
that wants to be lodged, so I think that there is this contentious
relationship.
BB The thing that they remind me of very much
are those ornaments that used to be left at gravesides –
they looked a bit like huge ‘crystal balls’, but
they were made out of plastic and they would have a coiled ring
of wire around the bottom of them to hold them up – like
a cup on a saucer. Then they had a statue of the Virgin Mary
or a rose, or both inside them. They would sit on the graves
for months or years afterwards. Your objects have something
of this about them too – memorials that want to decay
but that can’t…
GG I think that I can relate to probably the
last few words of what you just said – they want to decay
and they can’t. But I’ve never seen exactly what
you’re speaking of – not having been raised in Ireland
but they sound quite interesting. I frankly can understand a
bit of what you’re alluding to here with the work in terms
of…some people have said that they’re ‘funereal’
and I think that’s probably what you’re hitting
around. I’ve never really viewed them as that sort of
thing. I view them as an object and a part of objecthood that
I related to. And as opposed to having this immediate bit of
meaning for us that has to do with death, or funerals or Irish
graveyards or whatever. To me it’s just an object that
has come through me. I’m not really content with the idea
of necessarily being a cipher for things to come through. But
frankly I’m looking at these objects and I’m in
a state of wonderment as to why they came about and exactly
what they are – not that they need to be anything.
BB But you can’t suppress the, I suppose,
the part of these objects that refer to these things –
to death, love, mortality etc. These meanings are embedded in
these objects – they’re part of our collective mentality
– of what we think about when we think about funerals
and the rest etc. The very fact that they seem to be gradually
dying themselves would point to these associations.
GG Well I think that’s true but I think
I think the original conception really was a stack of plastic.
I had kept a stack of plastic on my mind for about 6 months
before I decided to buy a sheet of it and then I cut it in various
configurations and then I looked at the tubes and so on and
so forth and thought of what might fit in these things. How
this comes around to meaning is of course another thing, and
perhaps I’m being a little too revealing in speaking so
directly to materials. But it’s important. It’s
important to understand that meaning may reside in something,
but there is this physicality, there is this unknown, there
is this unformed sort of thing. I would say that I’m very
much attached to what that’s about and also I feel it’s
important to pay homage to what that’s about really –
more so than getting into all this layering of meaning and so
on. But they’re two sides. They’re not to be denied.
What you’re speaking of I don’t deny at all but
to reveal these things from inception is really about the materials
– perhaps even the absurdity of putting a stem inside
of this material – it’s an arcane sort of gesture
and I’m still wondering what that’s about and then
casing it a little further.
BB But it’s very particularly a rose
stem isn’t it? It couldn’t really be anything else
could it?
GG Oh it’s a loaded…it’s
a very loaded thing that I’ve chosen, but I didn’t
choose it because it was loaded. I chose it because it fit.
BB We were talking about language earlier
as well and I was wondering how do you approach these objects
in terms of the ‘poetic’ and the metaphorical. To
me, they seem to come back to this somehow. Is that fair to
say?
GG Well it’s a little like a piece of
rubber that just folds back to this sort of thing. But in essence,
in doing most of this work, I believe that I am kind of usurping
metaphor or usurping poetics if you’ll have that, in favour
of the physical once again, in favour of the sculptural and
ultimately in favour of perception. But I think that the work
and work in general is ensconced in interpretation. People simply
want to interpret. That’s going to happen. And as much
as we live in a physical world, the physical world is open to
interpretation. These are sometimes very disparate circumstances
and I think that the work does attempt to get into this disparate
sort of relationship between these things that I’m using.
BB Yes, because in a sense, many of the works
that are here, kind of defy categorisation as well. They’re
in between two or more forms. The photograph again which you’re
standing seems to me to be between photography and sculpture
and not fully residing in either category itself. Is it important
to you to occupy that space of ambiguity in your work?
GG Well I think that ambiguity is important.
It’s important also to try and come up with exactly what’s
in front of your plexus – exactly what you want to do.
It’s a very important thing. If it happens to be ambiguous
that’s great. If it happens to be something that plays
to an audience, so be it. I tend to think that I do more ambiguous
things and that’s what I feel more comfortable about and
that’s where the work seems to reside – in this
state of ambiguity. But I think blending the concrete and the
ambiguous is something to do with this.
BB Yeah – I’m sure you know of the story that Baudelaire
is supposed to have told – what when asked what ‘sculpture’
was, he replied that it was something that you bumped into when
you backed up to see a painting. And true or not, that story
raises the whole ‘problem’ of sculpture to some
extent – i.e. that it was for a long time viewed as being
too dense, too earth-bound to be able to signify what painting
could – i.e. the ethereal, the transcendental etc etc.
But it seems that you’re not accepting this – or
that you wouldn’t accept this kind of distinction.
GG Well I’ve used a rose in this work
specifically within this work to address sculpture and I’ve
used sculpture to address the rose, so you just taken things
from these places. And if I come up with something that’s
buoyant that happens to be sculpture, that’s all the better.
I’d defy exactly what you’ve said.
BB Because this is sculpture that’s
not about carving or forming in that sense…or shaping…
GG Oh it is about forming. It’s a great
deal about forming but I think it’s the forming that’s
obviously of the mind and obviously of the unknown. It’s
just (not to sound too obvious here) about ‘how can I
put this together?’ ‘What is going to actually arise
from this?’ What is going to emit from this sort of thing?
BB Yes I think that that was badly put, on
my part. The word that I was grasping for was modelling more
than forming… you know, the idea that something is carved
out of something else.
GG Right, so that’s the chisel thing
- that’s the typical sort of sculpture which I admire
enormously but it’s just not what I do.
BB But there is this reference back to that
in the work here – for example in the way that you use
talcum powder. We were talking earlier about it being soapstone
– (and the fact that soapstone was itself one of the first
modelling materials used by carvers, because it was a relatively
soft stone). The connection has resonance for you, hasn’t
it?
GG Well it’s something that I happened
upon. I think to me, the beauty of it’s incredible logic.
Soapstone is the softest mineral and here I have made it into
a flat fractal that seems to represent sculpture. And it’s
not really meant as a piece of wit or something ironical –
it’s simply what it is. And for me, somehow the fact that
it’s flat and it’s also a sculptural material. I
mean we’ve seen ‘primitive’ cultures carving
things out of soapstone for centuries. So it has a bit of meaning
but it also has these dissonant qualities, just because of the
way I’ve cast it. But it seems to represent a fracturing
as well. It has these dissonant qualities to what sculpture
is. But indeed it’s also sculptural.
BB They’re paradoxical qualities aren’t
they? Because this is stone, but it’s stone that can be
blown away.
GG Yes, paradoxical qualities. Nonetheless
I view it as sculptural and I view it as something that addresses
sculpture.
BB Jon Thompson curated a show some years
ago at the Hayward Gallery. It was called Gravity and Grace
and it brought together some Arte Povera works, which I think
was interesting wanted to ask you about for two reasons here.
One is because, for me, some of the work here reminds me of
that of, say Giovanni Anselmo. But also, because the work here
does seem to share with those works, these qualities of having
both gravity and grace. I always thought that that was a wonderful
description that Thompson used to describe that work –
not least because at first glance these terms ‘gravity’
and ‘grace’ don’t seem to go together, but
yet in this context they fit perfectly.
GG Well ultimately, as I said, the floor pieces
are really about logic and I think when things become logical,
they do have a grace – an incredible., perhaps a lasting
grace. What more could you ask from a piece of art? Not to tout
what I’ve done but frankly, I’m just pleased with
this equation.
BB But grace, elegance, these tend, to the
western mind, to draw us back to ‘the beautiful’
– something that in contemporary art today we perhaps
have some difficulty with. We tend not to know what the status
of beauty is anymore. We’re not quite sure if ‘the
beautiful’ is earnest enough. Or what is it that gets
under our skin about beauty and that we can’t quite handle?
Could you just tell me whether or not for example, you would
speak of these works as beautiful?
GG I view these specific fractals as beautiful
– without a doubt – and if it gets under somebody’s
skin then so be it. I frankly don’t really want to deal
with the science of fractals though I can probably go on a little
bit about that – not too long! But I think that the fact
that they do have beauty and they do have function is something
that is important to me and is important to the work. I don’t
think they’re beautiful fiat by the same token. I think
their beauty, frankly has yet to be realised, by myself or by
perhaps a future audience.
BB What do you mean by that exactly?
GG Well perhaps there’s more of a history
to come to this work and this is a very hopeful statement, but
I just think that beauty can be defined in various ways and
I don’t need to cater to the moment at all. Because the
moment might be rather faulty. The moment is temporal and maybe
those are not the sort of things that I’m addressing when
I’m doing this.
BB But you do speak of being contentious…
GG Yes…well it’s less that I’m
contentious, it’s just that…ultimately if you look
at this work – it’s very soft and very quiet. I
mean talc – what else could be softer or quieter? And
ultimate contentious thing? Perhaps we’re speaking of
places which are ultimately just not ‘speakable’
about. And that’s okay – that’s fine –
I think we possibly need more of that. For me to stand here
and tell you that that is what the work embodies is highly pretentious,
but I don’t mind work that is seemingly contentious because
it doesn’t really immediately signify something to you.
And perhaps later on maybe there is more of a signifier to the
work, and it becomes less contentious.
BB The other reason why I spoke about Arte
Povera was because of it’s ideal of it’s being a
‘poor’ art (in both senses of the term). Nothing
was to be in the work that didn’t have essentially to
be there. It had to be…not pared down in the Mimimalist
sense…but any extraneous signifiers had to be left out.
Also there’s something so very physical about some of
that work. As a viewer one encounters it, almost in a psychological
way. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this and this is
just my response. But I wonder if you could say something about
this and the way the viewer interacts with the work?
GG As I said before, my interests are in expanding
perception. I do really think highly of Arte Povera. I saw a
show, just so many months ago in Los Angeles at the Geffin and
I was utterly impressed. I don’t really do work thinking
of Arte Povera. I have other ideas. I live in the middle of
Los Angeles – a lush place, a wealthy place – and
to do Arte Povera would be counter to the culture. But who knows,
maybe I am just this kid sitting in a corner with a piece of
wood, trying to come up with what he can. But ultimately, the
work is really about expanding perception. And that’s
exactly what I want to do.
BB Can you give me some hint as to what you
might mean by ‘perception’?
GG In the case of these works, I think its
just the marriage of these tables and this frail object that’s
the rose and the various ways that I’ve cast this rose
– where they’re shredded or whether they’re
pulverised – you know just exactly what they look like
as planes. Actually these newer tables that I’ve done
are kind of interesting to me because they’re both planes
on a rose. The leaf is a plane and the petal is a plane. And
so now they’re sitting on a table which is a plane as
well and which has an inset which I’ve specifically made
as a plane. To me it’s kind of interesting thing to pull
those things together. It’s also interesting because you
don’t necessarily think of a plane as sculpture.
BB In the way that one doesn’t necessarily
think of photography as sculpture?
GG Well the history of photography is sculpture.
Some artists say at the turn of the century – Medardo
Rosso being one of them – just cataloguing his work, that
you can come forward quite a bit and talk about photography
and sculpture – there’re been quite a bit written
on it.
BB I guess what I was talking about was just
the fact that one tends to associate the plane with something
other than sculpture – with drawing perhaps or two dimensional
work. And in terms of that categorisation of one genre as opposed
to another genre, that this photography again seems to be between
genres – to be defying any systematic attempts at categorisation.
GG Well I’m not really a defiant…you
know objecthood for me is the preceding object and the history
of objects. It’s kind of that marriage.
BB But these are all objects that have crumbled
– that have memory, that have a past, that perhaps have
a future and all of that would seem to suggest a certain irreverence
towards the object?
GG Not necessarily. I just think that things
are wide open and why not? Things are wide open for you to interpret,
for you to form, to divine and so on and so forth and I think
I take those liberties.
BB Do you think that your work has anything
in common with any of the early ‘postmoderns’ shall
we say, or ‘late moderns’ or late mid century artworks?
GG Absolutely, they do seem to have some connection
to Minimalist work., although I think that the rose stems etc,
take them to another place. I think they have some connection
to Art Povera without a doubt. The fact that they do raise so
many questions and I don’t mean to go over this too lightly
or too quickly. The fact that sculpture would be questioned
or whether the flat plane would be questioned or any of this
sort of thing, is somewhat postmodern. But it’s not like
I’m trying to embody all this and I don’t mean to
speak for myself.
BB I’m not asking you this question
so as to exhaust the work of any meaning, but just as a way
to try to understand the work a little better through talking
about it. And as you were saying earlier, this talking about
the work can be a problem in itself. In talking about it, We
are doing something to it. We are changing it and re-forming
it. It seems to me that the shaping of words has an impact on
the work. I wonder what you think of that?
GG The shaping of words. Yes I think that
the shaping of words is very important. Language falls out of
meaning. It becomes too laden maybe with some meaning that comes
from a moment – a moment we’re going through –
a ten-year moment, a two-year moment whatever. So I think that
when I ascribe language to this work, I try to bring some language
forward – not a conscious thing, but just in terms of
having thoughts and trying to form language with regard to the
experience of this work. Perhaps some language is expanded a
bit. This language may not extend to the average audience but
it’s definitely something that comes to my mind anyhow.
BB Do you see yourself as working with a particular
set of syntax – to extend that metaphor a little?
GG I don’t try to do that – I
don’t think that that’s one of my intentions. We’ve
got to communicate so we’ve got to come up with language
that tends to align itself with what we’re doing. That’s
the best we can do. Some language aligns itself better than
others. But I don’t have language that sets up parameters.
It’s just not what I’m about.
BB When you talk about meaning and meaningfulness,
do you see these works essentially as being empty of meaning,
or as having meaning attached to them?
GG I think that if they vacate meaning, they
vacate meaning and I’m content with that state.
BB And you said also earlier that you want
to see it…that it’s very important to you to put
the work there so that you see it, so that you can bring an
object into being. Could you talk a little bit about that?
GG There isn’t too much to say with
regard to that. I think that that’s ultimately how we
operate. A painter wants to see something. A sculptor wants
to see something, and it becomes part of a realisation he goes
after and that’s all that I have to say about that.
BB Okay we haven’t talked about the floor
pieces yet and the fractals. Could you tell us something about
how they came about?
GG The floor pieces came about because…just
thinking about pedestals…thinking of things that would
hold sculpture and I put the fractals on top of them. I think
the fractals work extremely well as renditions of sculpture.
BB Why do you call them ‘fractals’?
GG I call them ‘fractals’ because
they’re cast as fractals and they have fractures in them.
They get into this area of exactly what a fractal is which is
something organic as well as something which is geometric at
the same time. They have all these properties. So that’s
one of the reasons why I call them ‘fractals’. There
are other reasons…
BB Why are you so interested in tracking the
breaking-up, the dissolving, the dissolution of things?
GG One of my ideas with regard to sculpture
– and as I say I’m not new to this – is this
idea of ‘sculptural dissolution’. So this furthers
the idea of ‘sculptural dissolution’. One of the
people who came up with this before is Donald Judd – as
we all well know. But I think that this perhaps takes this a
little further. At least that would be my intention. This idea
of dissolution within the fractal and within the material that
I’m using, seems to work very well.
BB I wouldn’t have said that Judd’s
work speaks of ‘dissolution’ particularly. They
are open and they’re… ‘serial’ I suppose
is the clichéd term to use.
GG They are floorworks…but I think that
in his work, he was concerned with getting rid of abstraction.
That’s primarily what he’s known for. But I think
that in his critical thinking, he was very concerned with this
idea of sculptural dissolution. But these pieces are just, you
know, they’re objects – they’re things that
I’ve done because of a plane of wood, a material, several
materials and they’re things that I ultimately wanted
to bring into existence.
BB Fascinatingly one of the floor pieces has
trolley wheels attached to it – which you know raises
many associations for the average viewer as well. Can you tell
me why you decided to put one on wheels and the other not?
GG I think the one on wheels actually was
just the idea that you know, I had things that looked so fragile,
it would be nice to have the impression that they would move
or something like this and it just created this tension. The
other is just a typical pedestal that sits on the floor, on
the earth and perhaps has sculpture on it.
BB Do you conceive of sculpture as something
that is experienced in the round? It seems to me that several
of the objects that you’ve got here, one never sees the
back of (literally) and I just wondered because one of the definitions
of Minimal sculpture referred to the fact that you could walk
around it. You could experience its weight in relation to the
bulk of your body, in relation to what else is there. But you
have this very ambivalent relation to the round. One can’t
for example, get under the fractals. One can’t get behind
the tables or behind the photographs.
GG That’s partially true. The tables
you can definitely walk around and likewise the metal floor
pieces. In terms of the fractals themselves, they do have these
fissures and the fissures do have shadows. There have been some
early arguments that one of the reasons that sculpture is so
much more interesting than painting is that you do have shadow
to it. And you do have this thing where you can go around it
and it does hold your interest from this point of view. But
I think what I’ve done is just compacted these shadows
and given them to you in a more concentrated experience.
BB What do think when you hear of people talking,
say of the psychological impact of the work. Does that have
any resonance for you?
GG Well you know, I think I operate out of
a level of insularity and if that gets shared it’s great.
I realise at the moment that there’s a lot of work that
is audience friendly. My work is friendly but from a different
place.
BB Could you tell me a little about this final
piece here in which the rose stems are again used, but this
time there is no plastic receptacle in which they are encased.
It’s a piece that’s taken a little bit of time to
evolve. It’s a piece with ango-iron and natural green
clay, perhaps a piece of wood within that to just hold the rose
stems very slightly, and a pedestal. Frankly I’m very
satisfied with this piece and I probably have less to say about
it than just about anything.
GG You have brought up this word ‘pedestal’
a number of times now. What is it about the pedestal that especially
interests you?
BB I just think it lifts things from the ground.
It perhaps lifts rose stems off the ground – rose stems
that are without their rose, without their thorns, without anything
really. It sort of venerates exactly what they are in an elevated
place.
GG Gerald Giamportone, thank you very much
for this doing this interview for us, thank you.
external events
Turner Sims Concert Hall
The John Hansard Gallery is also organising a one-day
symposium to accompany it's forthcoming Astro Black
Morphologies exhibition (5 April - 14 May 2005) by
Flow Motion. This symposium comprises an exciting
line-up of internationally-acclaimed speakers from both academic
and artistic worlds, and will explore the connection between
astro-physics and visual art practices today. It will also afford
delegates with the opportunity to experience the performance
piece Astro Dub Morphologies.
The symposium is scheduled to be held at the Turner
Sims Concert Hall, Highfield Campus, University of
Southampton, on 7 May. (Come back soon for further details.)
Funding
Exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery and
WilkinsonGallery have been supported by the
The
Henry Moore Foundation.
Performances at Tate Modern have been funded by The
Felix Trust for Art.
