Drawer #7.7: Bamboo Scaffolding

I had this very clear vision the other day of something new I wanted to make. It was going to be  beautiful, a quality that I’ve been yearning for in my work. I pictured a yards-long drawing of the bamboo construction scaffolding used here, its sheath of green screen drawn line by line onto the pages of the chunky accordion-folded albums that I'm always coveting at the Traditional Chinese Painting stores. I started some experiments with green ink pens & then, the clear vision got deeply murky.

The murkiness got me to thinking of this drawer, #7.7, and the myriad times over the past 12 years that I have addressed myself to the scaffolding. What is it about the scaffolding that in all those myriad times I have yet to capture in a such way as to put the subject to rest? 

If you’ve been to Shanghai or to Hong Kong or to any Chinese city at all, then you know what it is I’m going on about. Every visitor notices it: construction scaffolding made not of steel but of tapering, not-so-straight bamboo poles, lashed together with either wire or the fibrous flat cord, really a gigantically long twisty tie, in compartment 2 of this drawer. In Shanghai, the scaffolding goes up 5 or 6 stories, mainly around existing structures, for restoration projects. But in HK, to this day, even skyscrapers get bamboo’d: in effect, an eighty-story-tall basket. 

The very first thing I built in Shanghai: miniature scaffolding around all the furniture in our sitting room (not so great for He-Whom-I'm-Trailing after a long day at his first overwhelming welcome-to-China job.) The sticks were real bamboo, made by someone’s hand, split & split & split from thick bamboo poles into the thin rods used for the bars of bird cages. I bought them in large bundles, much to the bemusement of the lady at the bird and insect market, then tied them together (with the help of half a dozen art students from Shanghai University) with the ubiquitous pink string that was then & still remains a local favorite material of mine. 

Photo credit: Qilai Shen

The images from that install eventually became the windows/lightboxes of the pavilion in the center of the first room of an 8-room installation at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St Louis. The poor curator! He’d invited me to do the show on the basis of the minimalist sculptural installations that I made pre-China & instead, he got an entire Shanghai Circus event…

Photo credit: Britt Bailey, 2005

Emerging from under & behind the Pavilion was a red pipe also clad in scaffolding, a miniaturization of actual building works projects I'd glimpsed on a train trip, massive pipes making crazy curves as they traversed canals & culverts…

Photo credit: Britt Bailey, 2005

And, in another room, the dismantled sitting room scaffolding, just hanging about…

Photo credit: Britt Bailey, 2005

With few opportunities for installation work in SH and the massive cost & logistics of shipping work back to the States, I resorted to a foldaway site: the pop-up book. A slightly nutty idea for me to pursue, given my preternatural inability to measure but, during a residency at the Doulun Museum, I  managed to complete 6 pop-ups. Which didn’t go a long way towards filling the museum’s massive exhibition space at the end of the residency with a show. I suddenly had a wild urge to collaborate with the scaffold builders.

One look at my model and the scaffolding crew leader (on the left holding the model) saw right away all the deliberate choices that I couldn't get the museum staff to explain. Through our shared experience as makers, without a common spoken language between us, the crew & I understood each other perfectly clearly. It was so exhilarating [especially as there were oh-so-many cultural misunderstandings that did not go well with that show…]

The bamboo poles were delivered to the back of the museum but since they were extremely long, the only way to get them up to the museum’s 6th floor was hand-over-hand up the outside wall:

The crew brought shiny wire for binding but understood right away when I asked for “the other material” & then up they went…twisting the ties until the ends spiraled into pigtails…

To the visitor ascending the stairs into the the glass atrium, the space appeared to be under construction (like everything everywhere) but once he or she entered the structure, it slowly revealed itself to be built according to the logic of Chinese Gardens, with the meandering zig zag paths that cannot be traced by demons & the framing devices of the Gardens’ windows. The pop-ups were made of paper cut from magazines about treasured historical examples of calligraphy and were set into hinged frames within the bamboo structure. Of course, there was a pop-up scaffold.

When I finally found a studio space of my own, miniature scaffolding continued apace, now in gridded red line structures (reed from IKEA of all places) that actually got the scaffolding "wrong".  For these were dimension grids, where the scaffolding in fact surrounds either a volume (an old building) or a void (a building coming up.) A visiting sculptor/friend cleverly recognized that the grids could be built so as to collapse on to themselves, saving me from a shipping disaster…(Blessings on you, redballproject.) 

Installation at Bruno David Gallery, St Louis, MO, 2011. Photo credit: Bruno David

I tuned into the sheathing & its particular shade of green when Great World (Da Shi Jie 大世界) was suddenly clad for restoration. A structure of telescoping tiers, the building had most recently served as a children’s entertainment palace, reformed from its earlier function, pre-revolution, as an adult entertainment palace for bawdy foreigners. The sheathing enclosed Da Shi Jie, transforming its banal faux-neo-baroque architecture into a fabulous green-glowing wedding cake tower that I took for my own…

   

Installation at Bruno David Gallery, 2011 Photo credit: Bruno David

And then there was stripey scaffolding: what about that! Red & white…

Collection of M-Restaurant, Shanghai, China; currently on view at Glam

And diagonal yellow & black striping:

On view at the Ukrainian Museum, NYC until Sept 2017. Photo credit: Bruno David

And eventually, in another search for an accessible/mobile site…

Opening at Frontline Gallery, Shanghai, 2011

Phew. 

As I puzzled out loud to HWIT about this ineluctably attraction of mine, he said, “Well, it’s work-in-progress, when that stuff is up.” And that got it exactly right in my head: it’s a fixed moment of flux! It’s a signifier of becoming, not the thing, completed, contained, that it’s going to be, or that it was, but rather a sign that something is coming into being. And it is also a thing in itself, a form & a volume, but one that is transient, ephemeral, a thing that will eventually reduce down to a pile of lines & a heap of netting. It’s a thing that contains a void that eventually itself gets voided. A form for the fleeting nature of things-coming-into-being; the mutability of reality made manifest. 

Back to the drawing board.

(Thanks, dear reader, for your visit!)

Drawer #7.7 From top: Compartments 1, 2 & 4: painted bamboo, pink string; 3. Green twisty tie material used to assemble full-size scaffolding. Photo credit: Bruno David

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 6: University Students

A big thank you to the students from the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology that came to my workshop at the American Culture Center last Saturday! The workshop theme was hat-making out of ordinary household items like the specialty hangers for drying underwear (see row 3, left & center, & below.) Not everyone bought into the idea but a lot of fun & invention filled the day. The students come to USST from all over China, and even from as far away as Ulan Bator, Mongolia (top center) and are as sweet a group as I have met in a long time. (Photos above are thanks to the photographers of the Center's new Media Center...below thanks to a Snake in my neighborhood...)

Jenny Tarlin, the director of the American Cultural Center, does some amazing programming (I say humbly) in her mission to introduce students to American Culture beyond Hollywood & the Big Brands. Two days after my show opened there, we had the wonderful culture-juggling experience of attending a workshop version of Pearl: the Opera, conducted by Sara Jobin.

Named for the daughter of Hester Prynne, the heroine of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the libretto for the opera was written by Carol Gilligan and her son, Jonathan Gilligan. Jobin, the first woman to ever conduct the San Francisco Opera, and Gilligan, the author of In a Different Voice, a hugely influential book on women's notions of morality, have together founded the Different Voice Opera Project; their mission is to foster the production of contemporary operas in which female roles come to something other than the traditional dire end. The music for Pearl, DVOP's first production, was wriiten by Amy Scurria. Click here to hear the "A" duet of the child Pearl and her mother.

(Fair warning: it's a long one...)

Drawer # 6.7 : Opera Mops

There are not a few days when I wonder what exactly happened to my aesthetic in China, "shanghaied" by a color palette too highly & discordantly keyed for my "real" taste, by a maximalism of decoration & pattern & tacky materials not at all in keeping with my pre-China work. I mean, was there any way to even imagine ten years ago, while welding rusty steel sheet into industrial forms, that I would some day arrive at this drawer?

Sometimes, when I look at this Shanghai work from outside myself, it puzzles me: is it my real work or some crazy detour down a road somewhere between the Beijing Opera Props Shop & the peddler's cart...

There's a piece of art school advice that I sometimes hear in my head. Not a piece of advice I'd think to give, but I've heard it from students who have heard it from their teachers: that the trick to making work that's authentically yours is to make art as you did when you were a a kid. And this work I make now, without much in the way of tools or equipment, certainly is that: a return to making something simply out of what's at hand.

And then there's what I think of as the DP [displaced persons] thing. A friend here, the writer Lisa Movius, likes to point out that while we foreigners think of ourselves as "ex-pats", we're really economic migrants just as much as the "floating population" of laborers come to the city from the Chinese countryside.

Which is an ironic turn in life for me, the child of immigrants, albeit political rather than economic refugees, people who found their way to America post WWII via DP camps. The experience of which was vivid to me as a child as it dominated the conversations of the adults around me. "Oh," they'd slap each other on the back after church & say, "I haven't seen you since Camp." By which they didn't mean Summer.

It struck me one day, at the performance of an english-language theater company, that life here is in its way kind of like DP Camp: a microcosm of the world left behind recreated in a foreign place. Theater erupts as soon as any group of exiles congeals: there was a theater company in the DP camp at Bertesgarten where my mother & her family were interned and even in some of the concentration camps. There's clearly some essential human need that's satisfied by the interpretation of life thru drama. Art doesn't even need community, just materials, as witnessed by the things that made it from DP camp to my parents' house in Queens: from packages of silk stockings, scrap bits of backing board used for paintings; parachute silk for embroidery; aluminum cans for bracelets... not unlike the detritus of Shanghai that end up in the drawers.

That's what I'm thinking when I'm outside the work.

When I'm inside the work, at my best, I'm amusing myself, indulging in the over-the-topness that the material world here inspires...wondering how to turn this latest stripey mop on its head...with an assist from a willing student in an American Culture class... and into Beijing Opera headware. Taking it from functional object to gesture to object transformed... the quotidian become theater.

Last night at the Lit Fest, with this post nearly written, I got to see Chris Doyle, my favorite of all cinematographers, and, with director Wong Kar Wai, the creator of some of my favorite Chinese films, In the Mood for Love,  & Chungking Express. Doyle, his head shaved by Ai Weiwei, in a multi-media presentation called Away with Words, interviewed himself thru his Chinese incarnation, Du Kefeng, about process, motivation, meaning, language/wordlessness. It was transcendent: one of those [rare-ish] moments when you feel the glory of your calling.

I was too transfixed to take notes. What stays in mind is Doyle circling in, again and again, to the need for engagement with where you find yourself,  to revealing the things, masked by familiarity, that an outsider's eye can see and finally (the one quote I did write down) to manifesting "the bridge between what you see and how you respond to it."

So maybe it's not a detour, maybe I'm not as lost as I thought I was. Still, it's kind of a weird aesthetic...

If you happen to be in the northeast far-reaches of Shanghai, please come try on the Opera Mop & other hats made from household goods & pearls at "Shanghai Crowns & Fascinators." Opening Tues, March 19th, 3-5 pm. Thanks to the Center's director, Jenny Tarlin, for the opportunity!

American Culture Center
University of Shanghai for Science & Technology
516 Jungong Road, Yangpu
Shanghai 200093021 5512 3295 (China - Office)

From the top: 1 & 4.  Pompoms from Beijing Opera headware, fake pearls; 2 & 3 fragments from headware (metal screen, epoxy, paint, blue fabric, wire springs & fake pearls) in the pattern of "happy clouds"  See post # 16 for related images. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David

Virtual Drawer # 3: Beijing Opera Props Shop

The Beijing Opera Props Shop at 654-658 Guang Dong Lu in Shanghai. Always a place of wonder.