The Cloud Metaphor

Thoughts on the Poetry of Things

https://www.berndnaut.nl/

When I came across Berndaut Smilde, I immediately liked his work. There's a good reason for this: To a certain extent we're ploughing the same field. I herewith have a passable excuse for posting some of my own work.

Brain Cloud, from 1983, 16" x 22": It's a fresco of sorts - acrylic paint mixed into Polyfilla(TM) on aluminum window screening stapled to particle board with a hardwood frame painted with commercial enamel. It seems to me that I have based my career on materials and approaches that beg to be underestimated. It's passive-aggressive transgression I suppose.

This one’s called A Case of Meteorological Hyphenization, 1988, 7" x 9.5". It’s a colour photograph (a C41 print in fancy talk) that I took out of a window on a moving train. It’s mounted on plywood (which I gessoed to protect the print from acid in the plywood), then I surrounded it with linoleum, and covered it all with clear table top epoxy. On the very top there are two blobs of titanium white oil paint connected with a cotton thread that came out of my clothing - my pants probably. One needs to seize opportunities when they arise. The usual description of art would have said, "mixed media", but that's not very informative. I really like the little shadows that the paint clouds put on the sky.

This one's included because after all these years, I still really like it: The Infinite Choice of Primaries, 1992, 20" x 29". It's a copper foil covered circuit board painted with acrylic and mounted with linoleum on plywood. The lovely thing about the circuit boards are the arrays of tiny holes. I obtained a stash of component-free circuit boards from my local scrapyard, which is a great place to browse - except for the dog. My friend told me he was bitten by the dog. He needed stitches and he probably should've sued.

My daughter's friend tried putting on some red/blue glasses that came with a 3D comic book to look at this painting. She was a funny girl. She's still funny, but now she's a woman and a mother and I consider her part of my family. Little did she know that when I was an art-college student, I had spent quite a while experimenting with various "hand-tooled" methods to suggest or produce virtual three dimensions.

For example, I simultaneously filmed a couple of fluttering maple leaves with two 8mm movie cameras, one loaded with black and white film and one with colour. The lines of sight of the two cameras were at 90 degrees and I planned to project the two films on top of each other. They couldn’t be beside each other because that would be too much like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, but nonetheless, I supposed it would read differently if I found a way to simultaneously present only one film to each eye.

I'm also reasonably sure the idea was partially a negative reaction to my reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (his take on aesthetics). He claimed the art was in the forms and shapes, and not the colours. The colours, were just a decorative add-on, and that seemed a bit blind to me.

Unfortunately, the project was getting bogged down in technical considerations. My further imaginings considered inflating a large, clear plastic bag loosely filled with Styrofoam granules elevated with a fan and projecting the two films on that. The thought of the noisy failure of the project delighted me - three dimensional animated ben-day dots. I never made it. The two reels of film are in a box somewhere. And in retrospect, it would’ve looked pretty good projected on steam, or one of Smilde’s clouds.