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.

Inspired by Pat Boas

Why did Pat Boas choose Black Box? To get the answer to this question is the main reason I look forward to the artist talk. It is a week of wonder, what will she find to talk about for half an hour with this seemingly silent object? It won't hurt that she is a writer, and here are some of her words:

"In my work I explore the vernacular structures with which we communicate, often finding visual poetry in the ephemeral, ambiguous nature of their common codes. Examining the play between word as image and image as word, I have come to regard reading and writing as mysterious acts—ones that bind us together yet are intensely private."



This is Pat Boas' installation space for the Portland Building. Her comment about the mystery of that which both binds us and is private reminds me of how I felt about Buck's jar- the things that are inside and yet visible at the same time. And I agree that something about McCracken is ephemeral, I will keep my notepad handy to capture her visual poetry about it.

John McCracken ~ Stonehenge, Planks

Why wasn't I surprised to see a tall thin man standing erect, pillar like, when I found this image of John McCracken outside his New Mexico home? Later when reading an interview with him he was asked if his planks weren't like portraits of himself. He had to admit that they probably were and he could see himself more often creating portly sculptures if his own body type were not quite so lithe. He very much could be part of Stonehenge himself.

Looking at the photo again and seeing this tall thin man looking skyward, it also wasn't surprising to find that McCracken has a connection with the paranormal, UFO's and aliens. When asked if he is a follower of Eastern philosophy, his response is that he finds it like Western religion, philosophy and psychology -- a bit stilted and rigid. His interests run to Casteneda and Edgar Cayce and the channeled entity called Seth. When describing his own work John McCracken has said:

You've got a physical object that exists in different lighting conditions, environments and you're mixing different states and atmospheres of mind. So you have many possibilities for different kinds of perception. Sometimes my work looks like junk to me-stupid and brainless. And other times it looks like messages from the world I have interest in.

Others have described his work with their finely finished surfaces as being dramatically alive, perhaps like a computer screen or a pool of water. Or somewhere in between -- I know that the Black Box can evoke all sorts of reactions but they're all very positive. Ultimately McCracken's work whether it is the Black Box or his planks is very positive and optimistic.

Stonehenge in Washington

One of the best things about Stonehenge, for an Oregon girl, is that you don't have to go all the way to England to see it, you can see an almost identical replica of it right across the Columbia River from Biggs Junction, just an hour east of Hood River. I was there a month ago, after visiting Maryhill Museum. I was with my uncle and my niece, she's nine. She sat in the car while we wandered Stonehenge because she was so mad at us for taking her through the Rodin collection at Maryhill museum, so much erotic nude sculpture really shook her up. We didn't realize exactly what we would see downstairs in the Rodin exhibit, just past the hundreds of chess sets from the world over. When she said lets get out of here, we did. She still wanted to sit and stew while we surveyed the blossoming orchards of the Klickitat county just above the Columbia river. Nine year olds do better with McCracken Black Box's in my experience, than they do with Rodin's sculpture. If you're not nine I hope you go to Stonehenge and Rodin at Maryhill very soon.
As for healing powers, I have no doubt McCracken's art has some, but I won't be chipping off any of his sculptures for health reasons, these are made of plywood with a coating of fiberglass finished off with a polyester resin. It reminds me of the book I'm reading by Tom Spanbauer, Now Is The Hour, when the main character Rigby John plays the game poison with Puke, the bologna breath radio obsessed boy from his grade school. They go around the farm and put every toxic chemical they can find into a bucket, the whole time I'm reading I'm thinking, please don't let them drink it.

This one is called light and was made 5 years ago. It was just up at David Zwirner in New York last fall.

John McCracken ~ Stonehenge and Other Realities

Each of the surfaces of John McCracken's Black Box at the Portland Art Museum reflects a different image. Your world opened at different chapters. Your life in review – where you've been, who you've met, what you've done. As you approach the the edges you have a view of what your world could be, where you will be. Of course, this means you need to be with the Black Box for more than the moment it takes to walk by it on the way into the room with Sol Lewitt's Incomplete Cube, Frank Stella's Eskimo Curlew and works by Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and Dan Flavin. John McCracken uses color in much of his work, but I find that his use of black to be most compelling. It usually takes me more places, including the internet where I found this one minute video of an exhibit of McCracken's work in New York City.

Black again, but this time black pillars, rising up like Stonehenge columns. Until last year Stonehenge was thought by most to be an ancient burial site. Following the seamless web of the internet on a search of Stonehenge, you'll find an article from Britain's Timesonline site that puts forth a new hypothesis that people travelled there for its healing powers. Evidently there was an inner ring of about eighty bluestones weighing 4 tons each. These bluestones had been dragged more than 150 miles from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire. Researchers have concluded that for thousands of years, the Preseli mountain range was home to magical healing centres and holy wells. Dennis Cummings writes about Stonehenge:

They found chips of the bluestones scattered around the site, leading them to believe that people had broken off pieces to heal themselves. Also, in studying bodies previously dug up from the site, they observed that there were a large number of seriously injured corpses and analysis of the corpses’ teeth showed that about half of them were not native to the area.

One body, that of a man from central Europe who had an infected kneecap and abscessed tooth, is thought to have died around 2,300 B.C.E. The fact that the man, known as the “Amesbury Archer,” traveled such a distance with an injured knee suggests that he was attracted by the bluestones’ supposed healing power.

So Stonehenge might be thought of as an "ancient A&E of Southern England" or perhaps a prehistoric Lourdes. Watching the man in the black suit in the video, I'm reminded of why many people including myself visit art museums or galleries. Art provides us a place of solace, a chance for observation, thought and introspection. John McCracken's Black Box can be approached to view this world and other realities as well as retrospection and healing similar to those bluestones of Stonehenge.

How the Black Box Could be Even Less

Here is Kasimir Milevitch's Black Square of 1923. This makes our John McCracken piece look like a box of color crayons. I haven't taken the time to look at that box for very long, I haven't given it a chance to hold my interest. Now look at Milevitch's square. Milevitch is right up there with Mondrian, they are the fathers of geometric abstract art. Milevitch said he was trying to "free art from the burden of the object"- so does that make McCracken's box a prisoner? I mean, if Milevitch is saying that a two dimensional square on a white plane is free of objectification, what has McCracken done by blowing that into a box outside of which one can stand and see herself? He has made an object of the square. In a way he has made an object of the viewer. There are so many artists in between, and so many boxes.

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.