John McCracken ~ Sketchbook and Kindergarten

Yikes, I was all set to write about John McCracken's process. You know, what it takes to make those beautiful, luminous objects -- the cubes, the planks, the rectangles. the blocks, perhaps a pyramid. Then I saw a review of his newly published book entitled Sketchbook and was taken totally off track. The image of the book above is from Amazon. Click this link to see a different version.

The book itself is a compilation of McCracken's sketches from 1964 to 1968. Zane Fischer, the reviewer tells us "The sketches frequently are accompanied by his scrawled thoughts, and there is an easy harmony between the evolution of the blocks on the page and the philosophical and metaphysical meanderings of the mind behind the notes." He goes on to offer this nugget about play and creativity. "The sketches are a demonstrative thesis on the value of play and the correlation between hand and mind, object and idea. If play were still valued over performance, performance would improve and translations—particularly for physical and visual objects—would be unnecessary."

That discussion leads into Fischer's suggestion that we all leave a heap of Froebel blocks (Friedrich Froebel was the inventor of kindergarten back in the early 19th century) on our kitchen table when we have guests over to our homes. No one will be able to resist stacking the blocks and no two people will stack them the same. Froebel evidently had a significant influence on Frank Lloyd Wright as well other architects and artists including Braque, Klee and Mondrian.

Who knows if John McCracken had any Froebel blocks. What we do know is he continues to create these beautiful objects, thinking of them first and then producing them himself. He will spend hours upon hours mixing colors and sanding surfaces. At one point he hired an assistant but that didn't last; McCracken is too much of a perfectionist. So each and everyone of McCracken's sculptures has been part of him for many hours. As a person who time travels, John McCracken could also be there with you the next time you visit the Black Box or any of his other sculptures. Look for him in the reflection off the Black Box; he's the very tall, very thin man looking into the distance.

John McCracken ~ Black Box

Portland artist, Pat Boas, will speak on May 14, 2009 at the Portland Art Museum as part of the monthly gallery talks by local artists. Her talk will involve Untitled, 1969, by Philip Guston and John McCracken's Black Box, 1965. Amy and I have been selecting pieces from these monthly talks to be part of Fifty Two Pieces. John McCracken's Black Box leads off week 19 – it's hard to believe we've been writing this blog for nineteen weeks.

The photo above certainly doesn't do this beautiful black box the justice it deserves. Hopefully we'll find a better one as the week progresses; I can foresee more search time at Flickr. On a recent visit to the Black Box it was its usual beautiful self sitting as a cube, perceived as black as you approach. But then you realize as you stand before it that it is not simply black. It picks up the nuance of the environment around it as it occupies space on the first floor of the Portland Art Museum's Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Some of the sides are a lesser black, more of a gray. These differences are caused by light and reflection – the reflection of the white walls, the white light, and the white from Robert Irwin's disc that lives next to it.

So except for the thin layer of dust that was on the Black Box's top the other day, we can see reflections of ourselves and everything around us. This is one of McCracken's goals when he makes his highly polished planks, rectangles and cubes. That tension embodies the equilibrium between the figure and the ground, creating a dynamic for us the viewer. We'll be exploring more of this during the days to come. The week's posts could develop into both materialism and transcendentalism. Be ready.