Category: Essays

by Steve Rockwell

Eleven miles out of Binghamton, New York, the timing belt on our Volkswagen Passat snapped. Occurring as it did going downhill, the moment was strangely peaceful with the car still moving – engine silent, the clang of the pistons hitting the engine block now subsided. I’m not a car person, so I would have appreciated knowing that the 1990 VW Passat uses an interference engine design. Meaning: a snapped timing belt will cause catastrophic internal engine damage. What were the VW engineers in Emden, Germany thinking!

Well, the consequence of all this was getting to know the Rod Serling of his hometown a touch deeper. Booking a motel in the Carousel Capital of the World turned into a roulette of Name the Appropriate Twilight Zone Episode. A Serling biography from a nine-year-ago-reading came to life – Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone: A Biography by Joel Engel, a Contemporary Books publication, Chicago, 1989. The book was a summer read on the Granary Lake shoreline at our family “camp” in Blind River in 1990.

Sandy and I had been returning from the release of the Summer 1999 edition of dArt International magazine at the Limelight Club in New York City. It had been a party and and a show, LL Gallery being the Limelight show venue. The Making Connections exhibition was curated by Leeza Ahmedy and Robert Curcio with works by critics, artists, and galleries featured in dArt, as well as regular LL Gallery exhibitors. Present at the event was legendary publisher of Avalanche magazine, Willoughby Sharp.

Sharp had championed Earth Art. With the release of his 1968 documentary, Earth, a fresh perception on art had been put forth: it might be something that couldn’t be bought, sold, and hung on the walls. His meeting Liza Béar led to the 1970 publication of Avalanche – not just a magazine about conceptual art, but an alternative exhibition space in print. Sharp was now at the center of the “painting is dead” movement. Avalanche #1 contributors included: Carl Andre, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. The Beuys section was a Portrait by Shunk-Kender, while Sharp contributed Body Works. To the art world, the critical mass of these new artists’ bodies of work turned into a global tidal wave.

In my 1970 group studio on Queen Street West in Toronto, I felt the acute “chill” of painting in its current state of rigor mortis. My effort, in the studio exhibition that year, was to concentrate and compress all experience, the visible included, into simple elements of dot, dash, and line. Framed as time increments and events, their attendant visual imagery might float freely as association. My present writing about these events merely accomplishes the “unpacking” of compressed material. While I had trashed the work from that year, their retrieval was made relatively easy. Like letters of the alphabet, it was no more difficult than reciting A,B,C. Repainting a dot or line just packages the “word” in a new context.

In 1994, I carried out The Abandoned Paintings project. Seven 24 x 20 inch canvases were left at considered locations in Los Angeles, New York, and the Algarve, Portugal. The Malibu “abandonment” as written into my account, read, “New York street trash became the basis of my next abandoned painting. After Griffith Observatory, the four of us drove to Point Dume in Malibu. It took us a while to get to the beach because a film crew had taken over the parking lot.”

“I took the painting out of the trunk and we walked to the rocky edge of the point near the water. The wind was strong. I tried wedging it into the rocks. It kept blowing over. Tracy suggested a spot further from the water. I pressed the painting into the side of the point and took pictures. We started down the beach.”

“A man in his sixties passed us walking to the end of the beach. We followed him with binoculars. He noticed the painting and approached it cautiously. Then he grabbed the top of it and began to read the note on the back. We saw him pack it up and walk toward us. Bob asked him if he found the painting at the end of the beach. He said, yes. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Bob asked. ‘I’m going to keep it. The artist said I could have it.'”

The Point Dume, Malibu location has been a choice spot for filmmakers over the years. The Statue of Liberty reveal in the original Planet of the Apes (1968) was filmed there, not in New York. For Planet of the Apes, Rod Serling wrote the first three major drafts of the screenplay, working from Pierre Boulle’s novel. The finished movie substantially altered his conception, but retained his central idea of the ruined Earth and the shocking Statue of Liberty revelation. The film suddenly becomes a parable about humanity destroying itself. When Taylor, the Charlton Heston character realizes that his space flight had returned him to a future earth, he cries out, “Oh my God, I’m back. I’m home!. I’ve been home all the time. You really did it. You maniacs!”

Not unlike the pressing of my New York Trash painting into the side of the point, that final frontal image was a matte painting by Emil Kosa Jr., composited with the real cliffs and beach, and super-imposed on the tip of Point Dume. The physical miniature/partial replica was used for the high-angle shots looking down through the crown. The high-angle shot looks down through the Statue’s crown toward the two characters on the beach, Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova. A 70-foot scaffold was erected at the cove, with a scale replica of the upper portion of the statue positioned in front of the camera.

Our Malibu tale ends with a white 1993 Ford Bronco XLT owned by Al “A.C.” Cowlings. I had been riveted with the other 95 million viewers who had watched the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase live on television on June 17, 1994. Two and a half months earlier we had left the Point Dume “abandonment” scene, while they were still filming the Frogmen TV pilot. To my “Did you see O.J.?” question, Bob had answered, “Oh, yeah, he was there.” The actual chase Bronco is now preserved at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

by Steve Rockwell

I threw away my work from the fall 1970 group exhibition at 567 Queen Street West in Toronto. After ten years in apartment storage, it was a quick toss into the bin outside. The nineteen cardboard and paper works, variously touched up with ink and pencil, had been glued onto hand-sawed wood frames, and bundled with twine into roughly a 2 x 3 x 4 foot package.

The show concept had been simple: reading the morning paper, while having a cup of coffee. Three sets of five collages used Toronto Daily Star’s weather forecasts, The Heart of Juliet Jones comic strips, and cards with a cup of coffee image (a CBC Radio promo, as I recall). The four trees on nearby Brant Street? All had been sublimated through applications of pencil and ink to paper. Seen now in retrospect, they may be traced to the experiences of a five-year-old adjusting to his move from Espoo, Finland to Gothenburg, Sweden. Then, open countryside had suddenly flipped into the restrictive, urban confinement of a hotel. The deposit of a stream of sensory material edging on trauma, compacted over time into an expressive resource.

The second floor suite of our Gothenburg hotel overlooked a cobblestone courtyard. Having spent hours at the window, I can say conclusively that nothing much happened in it. Our rooms were white, vividly so. Here, a discovery with cascading repercussions took place. The scratch of a coin on the window sill could produce a rich pewter line, almost black. To keep me from defacing the hotel room, my mother came up with a solution. Butter wrappers from the market, when wiped, turned to instant art paper vellum. A pencil tracing of Tarzan in profile from a Borden milk ad in a Gothenberg newspaper was my first stab at art. By eleven, I had a respectable comics collection with Tarzan as my main title.

Within a month we were living in a Gothenburg suburb apartment, not far from a farm. On one occasion, I witnessed a curious spectacle. Invisible to me, but the focus of a group of men in agitated conversation, was something on the ground. I had to have a closer look. What I glimpsed, after poking my head into the circle, was horrific but mesmerizing. Two enormous snakes were writhing on the ground with their heads having been crushed by rocks. The sight had the unfortunate result of infecting the memory of my wiggly hotel window sill markings, innocent as they had been. When we moved to a farm on the Norwegian border, I had enough encounters with the Scandinavian adder to consider the place infested.

I could understand how experiences like these might seep into the cultural imagination across generations. The Vikings carved serpent imagery into the heads and tails of their long boats, their aim – to magnify the terror in their opponent during an attack.

The discovery of the Laocoön and His Sons sculpture on January 14, 1506 in the vineyard of Felice de Fredis was explosive. Pope Julius II purchased it almost immediately, having it moved from its Esquiline Hill site to the Vatican across the Tiber. It energized the High Renaissance masters in its dynamism, anatomical detail, and psychological impact. The ancient masterpiece depicts a Trojan priest and his children being strangled by writhing sea serpents.

There is a written record of Michelangelo Bounarroti’s presence at the Laocoön unearthing. Papal architect Giuliano da Sangallo had grabbed Michelangelo and hurried him to the excavation site the moment the vineyard find was announced. At thirty years of age, he had already completed the David the previous year, and was a celebrated sculptor. The Laocoön‘s twisted, muscular forms are reflected in his Dying Slave sculpture and the treatment of Christ in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment. Marco Dente’s engraving is an early record of the sculpture as it looked after the 1506 excavation, still missing its right arm.

The weather forecast part of my exhibition had involved taking the stairs to the roof of our studio building and surveying the visible horizon that day. With a light pencil scribble, I would transcribe the sky onto a legal size paper from top to bottom filling it. Subsequently, at my desk on the second floor, a brush dipped in blue-black ink would act as a seismograph needle, further interpreting the pencil hatches into a slow deliberate downward stroke from top to bottom through the center of the page. This way a studio workweek from Monday to Friday might be compressed into five lines.

I had been directly inspired by Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Chapel of the Rosary). Designing every element of the space, from the architecture to the priest’s vestments, the artist declared the project the ultimate culmination of his life. Line elements from Matisse’s Stations of the Cross had a particular impact. While my first window sill scratches in Gothenburg hotel room were made in 1951, the year Matisse completed his life work, in 1970 as a 25-year-old fumbling about nineteen years later, my attention was rather fixed to the future than my own distant past.

Rome and Gothenburg are connected historically. Gothenburg in English means literally “Fortress of the Goths.” While the city itself was only founded in 1621 by King Gustavus Adolphus, its naming is symbolic of the area from which the Goths began their migration, first to what is now Poland, then making their way to Spain as Visigoths and to Rome as Ostrogoths, sacking the city, and instigating the collapse of its infrastructure. It took the Laocoön and His Sons sculpture a thousand years to be buried in soil, but it seems that someone from Goth-land may have thrown the first spadeful.

It had been Laocoön that struck the Trojan Horse with a spear, angering the gods, and Athena in particular. Giant sea serpents were sent to silence him, the two sons just collateral damage. The effect of the tragedy on the Trojans was to deem the horse sacred, a mistake that sealed their doom. Once the horse was dragged within the walls of the city, the Greeks poured out, and the rest is history. It’s not as if Laocoön hadn’t warned them, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

The Viking Age officially began on June 8, 793 at Lindisfarne (Holy Island), off the coast of Northumberland, England. These wooden sea serpents, out of which warriors poured, had been perfected in their mobile marine efficiency. While there had been pirate raids before, Christian Europe viewed this new Viking threat as a punishment from God – and these invaders had arrived bearing no gifts.

The four trees on Brant Street were planted a hundred years ago. Originally, the spot had been a public market dating to 1837, then transformed into Toronto’s first public playground in 1909. As part of a massive modernization project recently, DTAH landscape architects turned St. Andrew’s Playground Park into an award-winning, neighborhood green space. When I made the trees a subject of my work in 1970, they would already have been 44 years old. The most northern one, however, became a casualty of the park’s recent upgrade. In its place is a plaque honoring “Patricia Aquino: for making sure we grow as tall and healthy as the mightiest tree.”

Just a year or so before the four trees were planted on Brant Street, Joe, a nine-year-old newsboy began hawking newspapers for the Toronto Daily Star on downtown street corners. Living in Kensington Market at Oxford and Augusta, he had to get the papers from the Star Building downtown. If he walked down Augusta, he would have passed the playground after Augusta jogs on Brant, then turning left on Adelaide. Joe’s father Julius ran a small tailor shop in the Garment District, a lucrative area for Joe to unload his stacks of papers, as factory workers, fabric merchants, and laborers poured into the streets at the end of the day. The effort would not suffice. Continued financial struggles of Joe’s family necessitated a move to Cleveland, Ohio in May 1924.

While Joe’s meeting and friendship with Jerry Siegel in high school proved life-altering, money problems would persist, but there would be a celebration. On April 18, 1938, Superman Action Comics #1 was on the newsstands. After shopping their concept to numerous newspaper syndicates, the comics team of Jerry Siegel writer, and Joe Shuster artist had scored! Joe, the newsboy, had grown tall, but the duo’s brainchild, Superman, would cast a shadow greater than the mightiest tree, having given birth to the superhero genre.

by Steve Rockwell

Atlas Film Studios in Morocco is the largest film studio in the world by land area, spanning over 322,000 square feet. Morocco has a thriving movie industry, and Atlas Film Studios is at its center. Variations on the image of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders has proliferated over the centuries. Its depiction has stuck with me for as long as I can remember, Atlas having graced the cover of a Finnish encyclopedia called, Pikku Jattilainen (The Little Giant), a book that we owned.

The circle of my five-year-old world was tiny. I knew just three of its four quarters. To the north behind our house was a community center with an outdoor stage that put on a production of Hansel and Gretel. Across the road on the south side was a house with a coffee grinder, clearly visible through its kitchen window. Downhill to the road east lay the city – just a bicycle ride to the Helsinki Police Department for my father.

The road westward, however, was ripe for discovery, and its opportunity arose with a convenient distraction. On this particular day, my mother was hosting a hen party. A discrete slip, followed by a quick walk, for what seemed like forever, took me to a crossroads. When the evergreen horizon of teeth began morphing into silhouetted scarecrows, I knew it was journey’s end. Returning somewhat winded, I was pleased with my mother’s steamy chicory coffee – milky with a side of “korppu” (coffee bread rusk). With a dunk and rotation of the crisp around the rim of the cup came a sense of completion and satisfaction – an adventure private to myself. The background chatter and laughter of the hen party supplied its soundtrack.

Shooting for Scorsese’s Kundun began at Atlas Corporation Studios on August 26, 1996, finishing on December 20. The Atlas Mountains and desert landscape stood in for the Tibetan “Roof of the World.” Other Moroccan locations were used, but Atlas Studios was the main base. Still there, are the massive Tibetan palace sets and gates that were built for the biopic by Dante Ferretti, a production designer known for constructing historical worlds that are as much psychological spaces. He created a Tibetan world within Morocco.

Kundun screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, not only based it on the life of the 14th Dalai Lama, but cooperated with him and members of his family during its development. A crucial scene has a 19-year-old Dalai Lama travelling to Beijing in 1954-55 to meet with Mao Tse-Tung. Written into the script is his recollection of their exchange word for word: “Your attitude is good, you know. I understand you well. But you need to learn this: religion is poison. It undermines the race and it retards the progress of the people. Tibet has been poisoned by religion.”

Mao’s phrase “religion is poison” becomes the hinge of the entire film. What follows is the destruction of Tibetan religious culture, the violence, and the Dalai Lama’s ultimate flight into exile. The young Dalai Lama had arrived optimistic and hopeful, even having considered reconciling some Marxist ideas with Buddhism, but the meeting was a train wreck.

The Atlas of Greek mythology, a second-generation Titan, had unparalleled physical strength. He was the battlefield commander for the older generation of Titan gods, who ultimately failed in their rebellion against Zeus and the Olympians. His punishment was harsh and highly visible, Zeus condemning him to stand at the western edge of the world to hold up the celestial sphere on his shoulders for all eternity. Geographically, his shoulders would have covered what is now the Atlas Mountain Range. While contemporaries render him holding up the world, in Greek antiquity it was the sky that he held up.

Titan Road is a street in west-end Toronto. On Wednesday, October 31, 2007, the 14th Dalai Lama visited the Tibetan-Canadian Cultural Centre which had just opened there. He blessed the facility and greeted hundreds of people, with crowds reportedly lining up around the block for hours. I can attest to that since I was there. The printing company that employed me was at 30 Titan Road, the Dalai Lama’s visit taking place at number 40, just next door.

All morning, that day Tibetan monks made their way by foot, single file, down the street eventually encircling the Titan Road buildings at 30 and 40. We listened to continuous reports on the radio as the car with the Dalai Lama progressed to its destination here. When he did arrive, I felt that I needed to witness the event, like many others. It seemed odd to have been close enough to the Dalai Lama to have shaken his hand and said hello, had I wished to.

More significantly, as I reflect now, is the Dalai Lama’s stopping by the entrance of our building on Titan, less than 30 feet from the carpentry shop that had fabricated my Meditations on Space panels. (The current occupant at 30 Titan Rd., Unit #1 is MedPure, a medical supply facility). The book work was printed December, 1996. Shooting for Scorsese’s Kundun at Atlas Corporation Studios in Morocco finished on December 20, 1996. My own construction, painting, and publication had synchronized with Ferretti’s set design and Scorsese’s filming of Kundun to the same month and year.

by Steve Rockwell

I was introduced to Ramesses I, the founder of Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, in his then Wellington Street West residence in Toronto in the late 1990’s by Bill Jamieson. It is difficult to describe my sense of excitement, as the identity of the mummy was just in the process of being confirmed. Egyptologist Gayle Gibson had made evaluations. There had been discussions with the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta for a possible sale. After scans, anatomical analyses, and comparisons with royal mummies Jamieson’s Egyptian collection went to Atlanta in 1999. Then in 2003, Ramesses I received a ceremonial state welcome and was placed on display in Egypt’s Luxor Museum, barely two miles from where Ramesses I ruled just over 3,200 years ago.

Socially, it had been the shrunken heads that broke the ice. Jamieson’s purchase of the Niagara Falls Museum collection, however, was the big story. The timing mattered. He came across as a grand curiosity-cabinet figure at a time when museums were beginning to reconsider the ethics of collecting. Essentially, he had been a Toronto contractor whose loft became a museum, and who now holds a place in history for discovering a lost Egyptian pharaoh.

Jamieson’s loft was his business headquarters, his client list including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s. Objects came and went as he bought, researched, authenticated, and sold. His 6,000-square-foot home with 14-foot ceilings held thousands of objects; Egyptian mummies, one of the world’s largest private collection of shrunken heads (about a dozen), South America, Africa, and Oceania tribal art, electric chairs and Medieval torture devices, coffins, anatomical specimens, and curiosities from around the world. His Halloween parties became legendary. A sweeping curved staircase cut through the loft’s three floors making the panorama equal parts Madame Tussauds and Twilight Zone. Visiting guests reportedly included Tim Burton, Steve Tyler, and Mick Jagger.

Historically, Ramesses I ruled a mere two years, leaving little dramatic material for filmmakers. The reign of his grandson, Ramesses II (“Ramesses the Great”), on the other hand, stretched 66 years, with a trail of monumental temples. While traditionally identified as the pharaoh of the Exodus story, scholarship renders this less than definitive. Ramesses I came to the throne around 1292 BC, as Egypt reached the height of New Kingdom power, placing him at the beginning of the last great flowering of Bronze Age civilization, before its collapse a century later.