Forevermore, Dr. Evermor - In Praise of a Steampunk Pioneer

"Dr. Evermor's Forevertron, built in the 1980s, is the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world, standing 50 ft. (15,2 m.) high and 120 ft. (36,5 m.) wide, and weighing 300 tons. It is housed in Dr. Evermore's Art Park on Highway 12, in the town of Sumpter, in Sauk County, Wisconsin, United States."
(Photo found here.)

"I don't think there’s any damn need to alter anything at any given point in time, because any kind of shape or form can be anything! It’s all in the way you look at it! I make that vast statement in the many birds I've created here. Those special bird bodies out there – I’ve got electric motors in them. Who says you can’t have electric motors in a bird to make it a power-bird? It’s a rebellious forum that I am presenting in all these things. If an art teacher says, “You can’t do that, you've got to have a bird body shaped like a bird body, I say, “The hell with that, I’ll put any kind of body I want on it!"

"This is a very different kind of art, because there’s never anything imposed on the piece itself - the parts are always used as they are. Thus, you have to put a little twist or torque into it, in order to get some kind of human communication between the finished piece and the more or less rigid, sterile, pre-existing shapes and forms. You have to get some kind of magic going there, and we have a lot of people who have come here, taken pictures, and then they go home and produce things. There are fifteen to twenty people out there trying to do Evermors, but they fail on just that issue of getting enough energy flowing so that the piece has a little magic."

- Two quotes from Dr. Evermor found in this interview.

Tom Every was a depressed man in 1983. At the age of 45, after a disillusioning battle with Big Brother, and in a state of chronic dissatisfaction with the burgeoning commercialism and de-humanizing artificiality he sensed in the modern world, Tom  - a former demolition expert, born in Brooklyn, Wisconsin - turned to the one thing he knew well: scrap metal; vintage industrial machinery. His epiphany arrived in the form of a fictional character - and a story - which emerged in his psyche at the time... the story of "Dr. Evermor", a Victorian inventor from Eggington, England, whose singular purpose was to build a spacecraft to the stars. But, this was no ordinary spacecraft; nor was its proposed destination found on any official celestial map. This vehicle was designed to propel Dr. Evermor to the center of creation - the phenomenal, virtually-timeless lap of "God"- on a magnetic beam of lightening within a magnetic force field, both conjured and fabricated by Evermor, for his first and final solo-mission.

Patron Saint #10: Deborah Remington - The Future Looks Back

Ackia -  color screenprint - 1975, Deborah Remington

“My work concerns the paradoxes of visual perception, the enigmas and quirks, and how it all forms the basis for our realities. The impact, excitement, and energies created by incongruity, juxtaposition and opposites all interest me.

The images are couched in paradoxical terms and must challenge the mind’s eye, must invoke opposites and hold them in tension. The work at times seems to refer to something in reality, but then the reference is denied. Identity; the fusion of so many experiences, so many inquiries, so many intuitions is also a primary issue.”

- Deborah Remington, from a quote found here.

"...Drawing doesn’t have to have color for me. The Japanese would always say, ‘Can’t you see the color there in the black and white?’ It’s implied, and if you’re a really good artist and if the paintings are wonderful enough and if they really sing, then the viewer gets a sense of color. That influenced my work a lot, mostly the philosophy of calligraphy.”

- Deborah Remington, from Inside and Around the 6 Gallery with Co-Founder Deborah Remington 

(via a 2008 interview with Nancy M. Grace)

"Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem "Wail" drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness."

- Excerpt from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, 1958

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 

              madness, starving hysterical naked, 

       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 

              looking for an angry fix, 

       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 

              connection to the starry dynamo in the

machinery of night, 

       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 

              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 

              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 

              contemplating jazz, 

       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 

              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on

tenement roofs illuminated, 

       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 

              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 

              among the scholars of war..."

- The initial lines of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, 1955, found here (with audio).

“This was the time of the Rosenbergs and the [Estes] Kefauver hearings, the Hollywood blacklisting. It was horrible. The police were everywhere, and it was kind of a fascist country. This was the climate within which and against which we were working. We were trying to break all the rules. It didn’t matter: you just broke the rules. You rarely got anything substantial out of it, but by hit and miss we did.”

- Deborah Remington, from Inside and Around the 6 Gallery with Co-Founder Deborah Remington (via a 2008 interview with Nancy M. Grace)

***

"It was a great night, a historic night in more ways than one..." wrote Jack Kerouac in 1958, for his semi-autobiographical Beat novel, "The Dharma Bums." He was referring to an actual event, a poetry reading that took place in a San Francisco art gallery - the 6 Gallery - October 7, 1955. 

In his thinly veiled account, Kerouac mentions a number of Beat luminaries on the scene that night.  Alvah Goldbook was, of course, the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who astounded the crowd with an impassioned reading of his definitive poem "Howl". "Old Rheinhold Cacoethes", on the other hand, was Kenneth Rexroth, while Kerouac's close friend friend, Gary Snyder, appears as Japhy Ryder. Earlier, he mentions a "delicate pale handsome" poet, Ike O'Shay, referring to a very young Michael McClure*. Of that night, McClure would later write: "Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America..."

Deborah Remington as an art student in the 1950s - Photo credit: unknown
Currently found: Remington's NYT (2010) obituary (click to enlarge)

Oddly enough, one figure who does not enter into Kerouac's fictional account - although, certainly worthy of a mention - was a six-foot tall, redheaded woman** - and one of the six Beats who owned the gallery - artist, Deborah Remington. (Her co-owners were artists, Wally Hedrick, Hayward King and David Simpson, and the poets, John Ryan and Jack Spicer.) Granted, Kerouac was loaded on California Burgundy - Dionysus being the god of lost histories - and focused on the Beat literati, but, it's hard to imagine that such a strikingly beautiful young woman would've fallen outside his radar. Then again, judging by her own brief account (via an interview excerpt included in this .pdf file), Remington fails to recall the presence of Kerouac and several members of his poetic posse that night. Go figure.

Patron Saint #4: Louise Nevelson, Assemblage Artist

Louise Nevelson - photo found here

“Humans really are heir to every possibility within themselves, and it is only up to us to admit 

it and accept it. You see, you can buy the whole world and you are empty, but when you 

create the whole world, you are full.” 

- Louise Nevelson, via an interview by Arnold Glimcher “Louise Nevelson Remembered”

One loss that is unlikely to be mentioned during this 9/11 memorial weekend are the works of art destroyed at that time. Which is understandable... the loss of artwork can't really be compared to human lives. As one of the pieces was created by an artist I felt compelled to talk about these past few days, however, I thought it might be mentionable here at this time. The artwork in question was an immense wooden wall sculpture,"Sky Gate - New York" (below), erected in the World Trade Center in 1978. It was created by a Ukrainian, Jewish immigrant named Louise Nevelson who died 10 years later, at the age of 88. Despite her legendary contribution to Abstract Expressionism and contemporary sculpture, hers is unlikely to be a "household name". As one critic wrote at the time of her first exhibition: "We learned the artist was a woman in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns."

Nevelson - Sky Gate - NY -1975

Louise Nevelson's birthday is coming up. She was born the 23rd of this month in 1899, and died (you'll note the symmetry) in 1988. She was a late bloomer even by today's standards. She didn't begin exhibiting until she was in her 40's and wasn't really accepted in the art world until her 60's. Even then she was as at least as notorious for her strange costumes and mink false eyelashes ("a cross between Catherine the Great and a bag lady") as she was for her assemblages, which were once described by art historian Robert Rosenblum as being "junkyards of secular carpentry (transformed) into almost sacred altarpieces where light and shadow reign". Actually, this is an apt description... maybe she was unconsciously inspired by her father's ownership of a junkyard, but, in any case, her assemblages were created by found objects, and that which others discarded. She felt that, not only was she recreating the world but that she was likewise rescuing these objects and imbuing them with a new spiritual life.

I find her work enigmatic, futuristic and oddly refreshing; like something that might have lined the space capsule of Nicholas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Two of her works are featured below.

Nevelson - Case with Five Balusters, from Dawn’s Wedding Feast, 1959

Nevelson - Sky Cathedral (detail)

When I found the photo of Nevelson (above - top of post) I was dumbstruck by her powerful beauty and strength of character... I was also conscious of the fact that her variety of beauty is almost impossible to find in today's media circus, and we are all the more poor because of this lack. In reality, the youth of today are being indoctrinated to despise and marginalize the "elderly" and signs of aging in general, and aging women in particular, by the media. In part, this is hype generated by various corporations to sell cosmetics and other products. But, in the case of women, the tragedy is far deeper and more insidious than that. And nowhere is this more clear than in the case of creative, professional women. I'm not referring to the stars of television reality shows; I'm referring to real women who actually accomplish and contribute something enduring and meaningful to the history of human culture. To that end, and, as this is an art blog, I will be doing a series of posts about female artists in the coming weeks. And, like Louise Nevelson, they too, will be patron saints of this blog... courageous, full of beauty and character, and with a genius that is all too often overlooked. And, many of them will have lived and worked to a ripe old age, and not have been any less relevant for it.

Below is a video clip featuring some of Nevelson's works. For a glimpse of a music video inspired by her vision, try Nine Inch Nails'  "Me, I'm Not".
For a lengthy interview with the artist, click here.
The primary quote source for this post was Carol Diehl's Art in America article, "The World of Mrs. N".
Also, I've read that Dawns and Dusks is a definitive Nevelson resource.
And lastly, for those of you who'd love to own a Nevelson original, you might want to look into the work of her granddaughter, Maria... who, and I mean no disrespect, is either channeling her grandmother or is a direct reincarnation.

Patron Saint #1: Wassily Kandinsky (& the Blue Rose)

"This all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a
spark. Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after
years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief,
of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which
has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game,
is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of
darkness. This feeble light is but a presentiment, and the soul,
when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a
dream, and the gulf of darkness reality. This doubt, and the
still harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy, divide our
soul sharply from that of the Primitives. Our soul rings cracked
when we seek to play upon it, as does a costly vase, long buried
in the earth, which is found to have a flaw when it is dug up
once more."

- Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910

Wassily Kandinsky was born in December of 1866 in Moscow, and died in France in 1944. He was a painter and an art theorist, and is generally considered the father of Abstract art. He was also a member of The Blue Rose*, a Russian Symbolist group, and the Blue Rider, an Abstract Expressionist movement.

He was also an early influence of mine, although his style was so unlike my own. I've chosen to honor him at this time, however, because I find I'm suddenly a bit gun-shy about presenting my own ideas. At the same time I am trying to remind myself that artists like myself come from a tradition. There are several Russian artists who were also theorists - Naum Gabo and Kasimir Malevich come to mind - but I'm afraid that I can't rely on my twice-removed heritage to bolster me up. After all, Kandinsky, Gabo, Malevich were men. If they were women, chances are we would never have heard of them. And, regardless of their gender, if they were resurrected from the dead today, their words would be lost beneath a deluge of useless, pointless, gutless chatter. They'd take one look at what currently comprises the art world and the world in general and quietly shuffle off back to their graves.

It's been raining for three days straight. Bear with me.

***

A link to Kandinsky's work will appear on the sidebar of this blog.

Re: Video - the music heard in the background is that of Enya.

***

*The name, Blue Rose, was taken from a unfinished novel by the German Romanticist, Novalis (1772-1801), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and concerned a blue flower; a flower which apparently held an important symbolic meaning for many European artists, poets and writers (among them C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald). This excerpt might interest some of you:


"I long to see the blue flower. I cant get rid of the idea, it haunts me. I never felt like this before, its as if I dreamed of it years ago, or had a vision of it in another world, for who would be so concerned about a flower in this world? and I've never heard of anyone being in love with a flower... but when I forget about the blue flower, a nameless longing takes possession of me, no one can understand this. I'd think I was mad, if it were not for the fact that my thoughts are so clear and connected, and I understand so many new things. I've heard it said that in the olden days, animals, rocks, and flowers all spoke to humans. I'm haunted by the idea that they have something to tell me, and I feel as if I could comprehend their speech." 

- Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Full Text: German, English.

***

Further note on the blue rose: According to Wikipedia, the true blue rose does not and cannot exist in nature due to a "genetic limitation". For this reason they have generally symbolized mystery, and "a longing to attain the impossible".

Apparently, the impossible was attained, however, in 2004, by genetic engineering.