Articulating Anxiety

thesis insights by Tor Dettwiler regarding his found-object figure sculpture

August 2004

I. Introduction

    I have heard it said that “art is mainly about fear”.  As I look back to my early drawings and paintings I certainly see a theme of anxiety that continued throughout my photography and now into my most recent sculptures.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I am the second of two to spring off a couple of struggling scientists of various Northern European descents.  I grew up in a Tut’s tomb-like home filled with book stacks and specimens in place of the conventional comforts and décor.  It is here that my pop house-husbanded his geo-entomological interests while my ma shelved her botanical background to finance the family with a now forty year career in computers.

    Like many artists, the culture I came from has been the catalyst for my creativity.  The analysis of nature by my folks inspired even the errant interest of their youngest to portray angst-filled chains of food in whatever media, when and wherever I could.  My main interest throughout my artistic career has been the human figure.  Had I the academic inclination of my brother and parents, I may well have gone into medicine.  Instead, I sought out on my own to study the body.  I decided early that I did not want to simply analyze the inner and outer workings so as to more illusionistically reproduce it on canvas or in clay. Rather, I dissected the body to get a general understanding, then strove to reassemble it in a more personally sensible manner…one that would conform to my compositional needs as a visual designer…and comfortably suit my nature to tangent off the tour route of trained thought.  ‘Subjective Anatomy’ I coined it.

    I enrolled in undergraduate photography to personalize the morgue of images from which I often referenced while drawing or sculpting.  Having picked up a few darkroom parlor tricks, I began amusing myself with ways of manipulating my image through distortion.  This new media fascination focused the figurative theme to self-portraiture.  For the next seven years or so, I experimented within the context of urban decay, akin to the micro-cycles of life found on the forest floor, to serve as backdrop for the body.  These musings on mortality couched well with my wonderings of where we go once the worms feast (having not been brought up to believe in an omnipresence to take care of those disquieting details).  Eventually the recipe-based process of photography dulled my sensibilities until I found my images regressing morbidly to a blood’n guts silliness reminiscent of my adolescence.

The objects in the environment in which I photographed had become particularly meaningful to me.  I began collecting them like a gluttonous rock hound with archeological aspirations.  Their shape, color, and context were all important to my selection process…just as my general study of anatomy was for my early work.  By redefining each found object, through its three-dimensional incorporation with the figure, I could satisfy my subjective tendencies anew! 

This sculptural sabbatical from my two-dimensional penchants has served to synthesize most of the mediums I find meaningful together.  The wonderful representational quality of the photograph, now manifest in the physical found object, composed within the tactile richness of the sculptural space, fused in the bio-graphical form of the figure, frozen in the eternal struggle for survival = this is what I am attempting to articulate in my work.

II. Graduate Work and Development

Theme(ing) my work maintains a productive atmosphere in the sometimes sporadic, and potentially vacuous, environment of my studio. Keeping a consistent mindset gracefully links the time span between hours spent sculpting, and the “full-time” demands of making a living, without such, the re-invention of the proverbial wheel would become maddening.  The broad topic of anxiety, being a universal experience of any intellectually strategizing organism struggling for survival, provides a boundless expanse for tangent thought indicative of my creativity.  Analogizing underwater phenomena focuses my feelings into a personal symbol system that provides a degree of coherence to a cryptic array of ideas.  Choosing the shark as an archetype for our perpetuating internal stress, I can metaphorically indulge in a multitude of primeval spookings.  Cross referencing/inter breeding or turning a phrase, proverb, myth, or mundane phenomena, with my theme injects a welcome whimsy to an otherwise heavy subject.  Such phrase-lathing comes most commonly in the form of the found objects I incorporate.

When viewing my sculpture, recurring forms and images will surface.  Decrypting this visual language is not necessary to appreciate the phobic nature of the work: as one can savvy the gist of an Italian opera without knowing the language (though it does add a depth to the experience if one is familiar with the story being told) I believe a layman interpretation is just as valid.  In my case, the dark under-coloring of my pieces sets the stage, in the least, for a theatrical display of bump-in-the-night fathoming.  Lyrical translations of these three-dimensional dramatizations circle around our insomniac-prone “due yesterday” culture.  Food for Frenzy – Dendrites in Distress (slide #1) illustrates this aspect of anxiety in relief poly vinyl chloride(pvc) and found branches. “I lay paled, sleepless, on a seabed of panic…mine Janus of thought sends dendrites in distress.  I am but food for frenzy, entangled in the roots of what must, while the ever present feelings of undone circle ominously.”  I wrote in my journal after having left the sweat soaked bedding of my biological need…to indulge my obsessing mind.  Attempts to remedy that which kept me from sleep further entangled my inner peace amidst brambles of solution-less pursuits.  Exhaustion allowed for a few hours of shut eye…during which I was plagued by shark forms forever circling: representative of feelings of undone, projects needing completion, relationships in flux, all causing conflicted consciousness betwixt past and future… negating the needs of the present (to sleep).  The bed form in the upper right hinges open to reveal a diptych(ed) painting of a face while representational hammerheads swim in high relief below.  

This symbolic splitting of the face and shark references launched numerous variations throughout my thesis.  Janus, the Roman god of transition, linking December to February, year to year, is portrayed with a face on both sides of his head.  During my bouts of insomnia, when I had way too much time to ponder on such things, it occurred to me that the reason I could not transition into sleep was due to my manic awareness of what I should have done (in the past) with what I should do soon (in the future).  This facing two sides simultaneously prohibited the necessary vantage (the present) in which to fall asleep, thus, the face-slicing separation of the portrait.  Like the journal entry alludes: when I did finally manage a few hours of sleep…my dreams were riddled with one of our cultures primary sources of (unreasonable) anxiety: the primeval predator, feeding on the weak and wounded, always moving, never sleeping = the shark.  In my humbler moments of pensivity I knew that my worst fears were only real in my head…that the trials of the world outside were not as dire as my cartilaginous captors made it out to be.  That, in a cat-chasing-its-tail fashion, we psychologically prey on ourselves more than we may on others…and this self-predating can resound even louder in our heads, when there are fewer worldly distractions, such as during sleep time.

    As the theatre, pop music, even the evening news will attest, many anxieties revolve around romance, unrequited or just plain poorly matched.  In my next piece entitled Clutching to Janus (slide #2) I fur line the split face of the figure to suggest a vaginal source of the upset.  Here the torso morphs out from the center of an automotive clutch-case cover: providing needed levity for an otherwise inwardly spiraled subject of lost-love discombobulation. He twists around in an anfractuous position with one hand a- grip the greasy green plate and “past” side of face flipped open in the direction of a lost marble affixed to the far edge of the machined part.  Inside his halved head, whose murky shark pallor matches the clutch cover, is a bushing of steel balls with yet another marble imbedded even deeper.  The implied jest could read: though he’s lost his marble, he still has his bearings.  The actual brain or obvious pun in the form of marbles, nuts, bearings, noodles, worms, gears, plumbing pipes, all speak toward the anxieties portrayed being of the  endogenous sort: that the sanity, stability, orientation of the individual is in larger part dictated by personal perceptions of that individual…less so by the ‘real’ world outside.  The use of found objects in my art is an irreverent homage to archeology, alluding also to anxieties being prehistoric in nature, warranting careful uncovering and study with often misunderstood findings…distorting reality in their attempted retelling.

In slide #3 Brainbaiting the Predator Within I use a combination of cement and steel, glue and sand, ceramic and pvc (a harden able plastic in putty form), to oppose the present in my signature psyche splitting of the face.  The found objects used in this table-top sized, monstrous looking, faux bronze piece, are primarily shark teeth.  Used to line the overbite opening separating the face, these jagged motifs suggest a nut cracker function that, in the open position, reveal a gilded brain form inside.  The old, claw footed, bed suspended the sleepless for centuries, and in this sculpture I have enlisted the front two feet to stilt up the Janus head.  It’s hollow bottom extracts a worm length of skull noodle, wrapped through and around a large fish hook, to lure (itself), the bump in the night, to feed.

When an idea, novel or not, gets a thorough dead horse beatin’ by it’s original thinker…it’s akin to territorial mariners netting the last mated pair for an over traditionalized fish fry.  Similar still to poopin’ where one eats: this next piece Overfishing One’s Waters (slide #4) deals with the proverbial ground hog day repetition of life, love, and creative passion at risk of rutting in mediocrity…en route to premature oblivion.  Incorporating the oxidized, bulbous, trap from a bathroom piece of copper

plumbing, I suggest an ova linear continuum, interrupted by a four prong fish hook.  The use of scrap wood to construct its base housing lead me to build the next sculpture entitled: Endogenously Pressured on a much grander scale. See slide # 5. Here, again, I

employ found pieces of crusting pipes and store bought, faux finished, extensions to tell a story of self-inflicted weight on the mind.  “If it is the symbolic shark most feared and phobia disguises itself in many forms to evade conditioning (extinction), then in our (once) paper-based society, the tooth of the rag could conceal quite a bite.  How often is a

written worry weighed from within, a lover’s words hung on the letter scale of our authenticating analysis, dangled precariously over the depths of our doubting hole (in the ice) as bait for bad news.” I wrote in my journal about this copper colored piece, oozing a figure out of an enshrined, gauged, length of pipe.  Fish having scales, and sharks schooling in kinship with such, I stretch to jest with the figure dangling a letter scale like a lure.

    In Hung-up on Janus (slide #6) I portray more of the Roman likeness by bronze casting a male face on both front and back of the head.  The bow side appears restful, with eye lids closed and only a slight furrow to the brow…which is in contrast to the stern side: where hands grip back over, and poke into, the ocular sockets in obvious turmoil.  This duality of being describes visually the two worlds of the anxious while asleep.  The normal façade of the physical atop the nightmared unconscious face as felt during dreaming.  A blonde wisp of follicled curiosity tufts up from the seam where the two bronze components come together.  Separating the bow side pulls a large coat hook from the dense fur lining of the stern side’s inner cavity.  Further study rewards the inquisitive with a pearl-like walnut shell on a bronze chain, nestled in the throat of the piece.  This miniature houses a similar-style Janus head with polar shark teeth.  Shark teeth are the simplification of the shark symbol in my visual language. Their teeth growing in perpetual rows like life problems: just as one is falling out/resolving, another is poised to take its place! Teeth internally focus the hurt giving capability of the anxious. The animal fur inside suggests both the presence of a woman, and when stretched symbolizes a proverbial coat.  This Janus-jacket is kept on hooks in small spaces i.e. closets…silly-syntax of ones hang-ups or anxieties.  An idea revisited in hooks and hangers in other sculptures to come.   

Luring Achilles to Put Stress on Ones Gears (slide #7) is a culmination of many of the visual symbols and techniques I’ve been cultivating these past years.  It brings together my pseudo-archeological fascination with the found-object, my academic-seeming affinity with the figure, and a long standing interest finally initiated in the kinetic possibilities inherent in electricity.  The color of the piece comes from the brown-green, oil tinged, steel grey innards of the antique adding machine I gutted to stilt the figure from and mount the first gear wheel within.  Gears represent man-made shark teeth disguised as useful, somewhat rational, symbol for the brains inner strength and strategizing.  My head spun, the summer I sculpted this piece, with yet another round of self-spookings, doubling the original proportions to include more gear wheels, more rope forms, and biomorphic gill casings to tie it all together.  The shark motif pursues prey in my most personal of waters, taking on a depilated quality, in place of the former furs, though still inspiring the viewer to enter inside the piece’s femininity to be fully engaged.  The figure, a tangible manifestation of the psyche, dangles inches from the spinning “teeth” of the first wheel recessed inside its open maw.  His insomniac split face is removed all together (to be later found on opposing sides within the switch box that controls the kinetic quality of the piece) and instead serves as a hole from which a single rope-thick dendrite feeds through for him to dangle.  Where his left foot once was now juts a prosthetic/prophetic/proverbial fish hook. The missing foot suffered severing by the spinning teeth of the gear and now rests in the revolving “belly”(displayed under-considerably like Rodin’s lover Camielle’s once proud achievement and attractor)now distanced and slated for errant digestion.  All combined in a bastardized illusion to the weak link in the protective chain that anchors oneself to appreciation = the Achilles heel to the heart.

Heartflight (slide #8) had been in production for nearly the four years I have been enrolled at GSU.  Perhaps its slow maturation placed it above the rest aesthetically, warranting its solo spot on the post card for the show.  Whatever the reason, it supports the first cast bronze component of my sculpting career, and due to my cavalier sprue removal, I consequently sport a permanent three and a half inch scar on my bicep! The piece began with the bequeathing unto me of a pair of wild turkey claws from a hunting friend.  Their rich red color, and wonderfully pebbled skin, tipped off with soot dark talons somehow conjured up a thrice repaired human heart.  This aggressively equipped organ is representative of a passion-ruled personality.  A shout out, if you will, to all the folks who are governed not by the rational, safe(r) path, but by the emotional, often impetuous route in life.  Like a tiny mouse snatched by a great condor, a proportionally undersized brain form dangles fishing lure-wise from the found-object feet dividing two massive metallic wings.  The shark reference indicative of my work is partially coded in the form of elongated tooth replicas, that are designed to mirror, somewhat, the metalized turkey feathers on the opposing wing.  Though the entire relief appears to be of the same material, only the triple bypassed heart is bronze.  Just as the British royalty has been faulted for its bad teeth and insanity, I believe purity in media also leads to undesirable inbred mutation.  By sculpting in unconventionally combined pvc, epoxy, wood, tin, and whatever else suits the specific purpose simultaneously I am able to better portray what I see in my minds eye, rather than what the material is prone to express of it’s own accord.  This sculptural stubbornness/anal retention on my part afford me more personalized growth within my media. This sentiment could be exemplified in contest to the glamorized glass blowers who leave no fingerprint to denote their work from all the other, would be, Chihulies.  The limitless possibilities of found-object sculpture are what seduced me out of the industry-cloned, cake baking recipe-like, process of photography years earlier.  I had felt self-suffocated by the notion of trying to pioneer in someone else’s back yard, as it would be akin to doing, if I spent my life’s adventure with someone else’s image making invention. 

As self-righteous feelings fester, perhaps with the help of the rarely fumigated air of my studio, my work grew in size.  Dorsal Luna (slide # 9) stands five feet tall and is comprised of cement and steel, paper mache, epoxy, and a myriad of other ‘un-pure’ materials.  In the Achilles piece I played with scale perception by positioning the thickest nautical rope lengths at the base of the sculpture and the thinnest at the top with an intermediary width midway…then presenting the entire composition atop a taller pedestal.  This visual trickery, like the thinning vertical stripes for the fashionably heavy, is designed to make the viewer believe the components atop are heavened higher.  In Dorsal Luna I have morphed a killer whale-sized, danger fin, down into a vaginally open, wave/crescent, moon shape, and positioned four, semi-submerged, koi-sized, toy-sharks in the lowest level of the piece.  By juxtaposing these dramatically different scales, of the same, basic form, I am hoping to generate more anxiety in the reading of the figures state of mind.  The dorsal fin symbolizes the omni-presence of the proverbial shark and may also relate to the delta shape of female genitalia.  Dorsal shaped wave crests pay homage to shark fins/teeth/shark domain (place where we worry most). Turbulent times cause waves in an otherwise stereotypic sea of emotional tranquility.  The crescent moon form correlates to waves/fins/teeth in addition to symbolizing conventional sleep time partially obstructed (not full: waxed/waned).  The crescent moon illuminates the hunting area for nocturnal fish.

It is important to note, when decoding my work, that I describe myself as a figure sculptor foremost, and in parenthesis I mention the found-objects.  This egotistical ranking means I find the figure to be center stage in art…all else is supportive backdrop.  The figure need not be whole to be respective of this philosophical orientation, as some of my latest sculptures abstract more cryptically, the figures form, to illustrate unsettling aspects of the human experience.  Thus, in Dorsal Luna, the entire triangular composition returns the viewer to the blue-silvered figure, clutching the tip of the dominant dorsal form, the way King Kong would hold fast to the Empire State Building if he were afraid of heights.  This male, colored by the deep blue of midnight reflecting off an expanse of ocean, contorts his split-head, concernedly over a shoulder, to gauge his distance from that which he fears most schooling below.  In gruesome consequence to his Janus-style split in the face, a length of cerebellum stretches semenishly out, and down, towards the patrolling brain bullies swimming behind a hymen of black fabric.  So from sinker-attached-skull-noodle to the small sharks heading deeper in towards the front base of the pyramid (that is the large dorsal), up its diagonal slope to the figure attached, one can circulate indefinitely, in return of the tail-chasing-cat experience that whimsically defines a universal struggle for survival in all things intellectually strategic.

    Sawing Lobes (slide # 10), Shell Game (slide #11), Pulling the Wool over the Skies (slide# 12), and Hooks, Line, and Thinker (slide #13) are all abstracts in the style of the afore mentioned cryptified figures my work can sometimes errant upon.  They are all economically built around a brain mold to suit the levitas these four lean toward.  The first in the series, Sawing Lobes, plays on the cartoon language of sleep.  The second composition parallels the downtown con game of guessing the whereabouts of the never-to-be-found pea in the walnut. In this Shell Game, as it’s titled, the nuts are brain halves and the pea is a hiding hammerhead shark.  The grifting components are presented in olden mock medical, specimen display, complete with Latin in-scripted, copper plates for each brain (translating as past, present, and future).  Whether with hinged panels, electrical switches, cryptic puns, or potentially subliminal imagery, I delight in providing second and third glance rewards in my work.  In the case of many of my brain forms throughout the show, I have incorporated messages or, more commonly, swimming sharks to reinforce the notion, to the connoisseur of my sculpture, of the self-predating nature of the anxious mind.  

Such is the case with the shell-brains sculpted, and the sleeping sheep in Pulling the Wool over the Skies.  “To ascend up over the clouds can feel elatedly like an escape from all one’s worldly pressures…watching the responsible cityscape shrink to ant-size, in an airplane window seat, smacks of slight of hand parlor tricking for the stressed mind in an ‘out of sight’ disregard = like “pulling the wool” to fool someone.  Gazing anesthetized over the cottony clouds compares to the topical contours of the brain, but fluffier like the coat of wool a sheep wears before shearing. Ahhh…sheep…the critters counted to induce sleep…sleep…the presence of mind that stress tends to keep from catching enough of to properly clothe our needs…but this plane serves as a pulley to draw a welcome blanket over my too sober perceptions of self worth…these meteorological masses of milk colored moisture candy-coat the watery domain of my worries…disguise the fins of my fear with the wings of this commercial flight…and give wonderful pause to my problems… sedating me deep in my seat… successfully herded in thought…for an unavoidable slaughter upon my return to ant-farm, USA.”  This elliptical extract from my journal attempts to explain why a pillowed piece of fuselage bears the cloven weight of a woolen sheep body sporting a cloud blue brain form for a head.  One so brave(or gallery brazen) to heft the “head” will reveal a shark-like submerged 747 in a cloud-lined pool in the place of sheep guts.  By inverting the brain form, one will discover a series of imbedded pulleys and rope instead of more conventionally organic mind matter.

    The last in this whimsical series of brain mold arrangements is the cinematically spoofed: Hooks, Line, and Thinker.  Another table top, in the round, ceramic-based piece that ropes two, large, cow-catching sled-like fish hook forms to a dangling brain with animal fur jutting out the back.  A conceptual rip-off of many of my earlier ideas made to poke fun at myself and my graduate seri(ousn)es(s).

    Medusa’d(slide #14) is actually a work in progress as I had not resolved the twisted telephone pole base it was to top.  It was inspired during a deliberately conscious bout of anxiety.  The sort suffered when reliant on the telephone to referee the needs of the heartflighter.  By breeding ancient myth with modern mayhem in the visual language of my experience, I can create a cathartic amalgam for sculptural public consumption.  The ego twisting of  bad, or worse no, news over the phone transfers the trauma to the phone form itself in this sculpture.  Squirming in all directions, from the wrenched receiver, are numerous worm/snake forms that, pre-unraveling, were the subjects brain.  Beginning its tell-tale Janus split, as the figure works up to a post fit feint, his nose separates around a similar shaped fish hook, baiting his nasal-now-worm tip. The presence of earless figures, as in this Greek-inspired piece, represents the unreasonable, paranoid, tendency of the anxious.  Medusa’d is a provocatively chaotic arrangement of cords, and sternocleidomastoidedness, painted to the pallor of Gorgan stone.

    Finally, my most recent of visual torments, Cantilevered Investment in the Wake of Harbored Desired (slide #15) is of a similar ilk to the Achilles monstrosity.  It began as the fifth of the brain mold funnies…but many months later evolved into another, sizeable,  culmination piece.  “If coat racks are for hang-ups…then stick my phobic (sharkskin) coat on a hook, will ya?   Ever been stuck in a relationship where you feel the ship sinking but your ranking mariners code tells you to ‘go down with it’?  Wondering why: “Can’t I leave her?” fearing your multi-leveled investment will be lost, should you?  Such dark harborings keep the life vest deep in the closet, blocked by the tangled bedding of unzipping lust and daily routine…all the while trolling your brain behind for life-saving saboteurs” outlines my journal convolutedly.  Colored in a gilded algae-oxide, reminiscent of the sea and a bronze patina combined, this piece, at first glance, rams a gilled wedge form into a roped, lifesaver, circle.  Erecting from the center, of this personal buoy, is the top of a coat rack.  The hanging notion replaces shark teeth as a self-infliction motif and is proliferated through out the sculpture.  The gender-based hypocrisies still alive in our culture curtail my overt use of phallic imagery. Instead of basing my audience to a cock-inspired blush, I employ analogous forms, like the graduating penile shapes of the zipper teeth, and the ‘happy to see her’ coat hook protruding out from the rack above.  Attached to this largest coat hook is a rope that functions as fishing line and fits through the brain form, on the top of the splash-strewn wedge, traveling inside to tie to a large clothes hanger.  Skinless figures in my sculptures are anatomically revealing, vulnerable, confession-like, soul-bearing symbols.  In Cantilevered they function the same in the form of a headless-neckless-armless torso that is draped surrealistically over the hanger like a human vest.  Surrounding this viscerality are mounds of fabric sailed up the walls, interrupted by the windows, and paneled drawings of slaughtered shark and proper clothing.  As this is an articulation of repressed anxiety, being that the shark is portrayed for the first time as the prey, as well as the pesterer, all such coding is caved behind a set of hinged doors. Where hooks and hangers abound, even the doors are decorated with the heads of sharks intertwined with the common holder of clothes, complete with eye hooks for handles.  The committed peruser will find, not only a miniature closet on the front of the sculpture (peep-showing a mermaid version of a clothes hanger hymenized by a dark veil), but a graphic panel underneath the cantilevering, decoding the wedge, and it’s keyhole form relationship to the circle that the  greater composition is based.  The curious gear-like base that the lifesaver sits atop is actually an allusion to the corrugated walls of a harbor, often posting “no wake” warning signs throughout.  It was those two words I quoted that inspired the image in my mind of a defiant brain, refusing to sleep, in a zone where watery consciousness is prohibited.

III. Summary

    Less is not more in the manic mind of the sleepless.  The drive to succeed (equates to survival in this particular psychosis) speeds our hearts to pulse past the present, pestering the details of a utopian future.  My multi-step, multi-media, sculptural process is an exasperating microcosm of this type-a hunting and gathering.  My need to scratch the aesthetical itch I currently cannot reach compels me to create three-dimensionally.  I suspect once I achieve an arguable level of expertise as a sculptor, I will see fit to return to the two-dimensional media of my past, bringing to it, aspects of my found-object experience.  The figure will remain omni-present, though I cannot predict the currently ubiquitous shark or Janus-head use.  A degree of anxiety will always be the impetus towards whatever I pursue, whether I choose to continue to theme my work specifically as such…I will have to sleep on it.