'Damn the Defiant'

all images Thomas Armstrong via Columbia Classics

The film 'Damn the Defiant', starring Alec Guiness and Dirk Bogarde, is what I'd call a pretty good maritime yarn. Released in 1962, directed by Lewis Gilbert, it's the story of a mutiny aboard an 18th C. British Naval ship.There is a good Wikipedia synopsis here. I was intrigued enough by the closing battle scenes to take some screen shots with a view toward abstraction. These images could become paintings, we'll see. Let me know what you think.

Eben Goff coast_pole .2

'coast / pole' took place during two trips to the North Olympic Coast in Washington State; the first during winter of 2002 and the second in spring of 2003. Driftwood poles were collected locally and carried to specific stretches of coast where, after the day's first high tide began to recede, the poles were set vertically into sand or rocks along the tide line. The pole configurations took shape in response to their surrounding topography. The quantity of poles used in these arrangements ranged between 25 and 100. All constructions washed away with in 24hours. At the outset of this project, a self portrait photograph was taken wearing a hand-made mirror mask and a fishing net that had washed up on the beach.

Eben Goff

Alchemical Vessel

Point of Arches

caption text for coast / pole 4

coast / pole 4
xerox

caption text for coast/pole 1-4

coast / pole 1
xerox

coast / pole 1
xerox

coast / pole 3
xerox

coast / pole 2
xerox

coast / pole 2, washed out to sea
xerox

All material courtesy Eben Goff

A little time back i posted an artwork, 'coast_poles' by Eben Goff, and at that time I promised some further reading of the piece after giving my readers some time to puzzle out the work for yourselves, to make your own discoveries, find your own opinions.

As promised, here is my email to my friend Lisa (which I also mailed to Eben), in which I give my best understanding of Eben Goff's piece, and his reply to what my guesses were about his work, which really constitutes an explication from Eben on this enchanting artwork .

My guess

"Lisa, I didn't realize I was a navisphile, never heard that word, great word!
I think the look of the photos results from a couple of manipulations. First I'm guessing they were shot slightly off focus, with settings to reduce rather than emphasize contrast. If you notice these images are all identified as xerox, and such a post shoot manipulation would allow further degradation of the images. On the other hand, they may have simply been made with a pinhole or other primitive camera and transferred to xerox for a little more softening. I would guess also that he has used a somewhat inferior paper to enhance the effect. I'd guess he's aiming to recreate the feel of an even earlier period, the very early days of photography and the first ethnographic photos of aboriginals in the 'wild'. Many tribespeople objected to being photographed, as they felt it was a way of capturing their soul. Certainly he has captured a bit of the spookines of the earliest photos of the 'other', which is strongly transmitted by the photos of early explorers and ethnographers.

From my reading of Ebens explication or introduction to the piece, it seems the driftwood poles serve two purposes, first to emphasize the contour on the land, whether straight or other, and second to demonstrate the action of the tides, a sort of Rorschach of the tides in a before and after way, because maybe this is more emphatic than high water/low water photos. Going a little deeper, I think the inclusion of the otherworldly shaman (spookiness again) is quite a clue, and indicates we are on spritual ground here. I would suggest ceremonial (possibly ritual) recognition , even evocation, of the spirit of the tides. Akin to the Shinto recognition of Kami. The tides bring and the tides take away, a force to be celebrated, reckoned with, and appeased. Remember that the poles were all driftwood, brought by the sea and the current and the tide, elemental and strong forces of nature. I would guess the geographic coordinates serve as a reminder that we are very much viewing the piece through Western eyes and culture. The work only demonstrates, but does not really allow us entrance into the shaman's ability to enter the 'otherworld'. It does point us in that direction, starting with our makers (latitude and longitude), but encourages us to make a deeper connection with the natural, and the unseen world.

What do you think?

Thanks for your questions, they allowed my to think this work through in a way I hadn't previously done.I just felt it was important and had merit, but without trying to explain it to you I would not have gone into it so deeply. This has taught me something, that the way for me to understand art I feel is important is to attempt to explain it to a knowledgeable and receptive friend. Of course it's all speculation, but I will send this to Eben to get his take, rather than just ask him questions."

Eben's Reply


"Thomas, Thanks for getting in touch with me again. I’m back now from summer travels and can do justice to your inquiry. Your observations about my Coast_pole piece are sensitive and on point. I very much appreciate the sincerity of your read on my work.

For you, for me, and for your curious friend there’s a lot to unpack about Coast_pole. While I made it some years ago, it has always felt fresh to me; it’s one of the rare works that has never lost its relevance.

After I made the pole constructions I was had only black and white photographs and some journal entries I’d written while camping out during the construction of the works. I thought for a long time about how I could re-present this piece. I wanted to emph asized the act of looking in or through, as in a window, and to communicate these acts that had taken place at a specific ‘elsewhere’, seen by no one, and immediately washed away. I messed around with the material for years, as paintings, as prints, and once as a stage performance/sculpture made with my talented choreographer friend, Hana van der Kolk that we showed at Dixon Place in NYC.

The resolution that eventually came about was actually quite simple: On one particular evening I pulled out the Coast_pole folders of photos and Xeroxes look at them again with fresh eyes, and what I saw this time around was in fact a complete work. The messy pile of papers that had accumulated from my various efforts to translate the experience was all the work I needed; it was like a second performance. So I selected images from whatever I had. And that’s what you see now on net.

Regarding how the images came to have their ‘patina’, well, out on that wild coast it was often raining, and drops got on the camera lense, maybe wind blew sea spray onto the glass, and other times my hands were cold or I was rushing before the light disappeared and ended up with blurry photographs. In selecting the photos used to represent the works, I was attracted to those images conveyed some atmosphere of the place, where you could feel the weather. But just b&w photos, (enlarged, framed, etc.) did not seem to be enough, I craved more material depth from the images to give them a physical reality that corresponded to roughness of the poles in the waves and rocks. The photocopy’s scan streaks and degraded resolution, along with the wear of paper folds and dog-eared corners from shuffling around the couple studios I had over those years, had accumulated as exactly the kind of tactility I was looking for. Plus the pages of text had been written on my beloved old Remington 5, a typewriter made in the late 1930’s.

It all yielded a kind of found-object essence and captured the compelling qualities of an artifact: the archaic, the original, the handmade, the natural, the specific, the lost, the found, the used, the irreplaceable, knowledge.

The documents were certainly modeled on the visual qualities of old ethnographic portfolios. And the reductive, factual character of the text descriptions, with their latitude and longitude coordinates, is not far from the objective manner of writing developed by the sciences. At the time I don’t think I was fully self-aware of how I was appropriating this style, but I knew that I was attracted to the enchanted, mysterious air we ascribe to things from a past age. Early ethnographic photos are very charged images- in part because of the rich quality of old photographic prints and second, because they were often taken at a time and place on the cusp of great change as a result of contact with European culture or industrial technology or both.

…There are some unpublished photos of me wearing the fishing net and mask, standing beside a large glass television tube that had washed up on shore from who knows where…

But there was nothing very scientific about the acts of making the pole arrangements themselves. As you commented Thomas, bringing the mask with me out to the coast and staging that portrait of the costumed dancer or shaman-like character initiated a very spiritual aspect to the work I was doing. From its beginnings the project grew from a very intuitive and poetic spirit of searching, navigation, and discovery. In those years, I was living near the shipping yards in Seattle (my hometown). I was making paintings of the spaces under freeway bridges near the docks, also convenience store parking lots, warehouses, and the whole neighborhood was built on the land where, only a couple centuries earlier, the Duwamish Tribe had lived in their long houses and fished the harbor. I was struck by how rapidly and drastically things had changed. So, in the paintings I was layering elements of the primitive, the wild, and animal with the modern industrial landscapes, bringing these different ages together, and painting it all in very mysterious looking images. For what its worth, I also remember at that time reading Suzy Gablik’s book ‘The Reenchantment of Art’, in which she makes a very urgent call for artists to connect with the ecology, the mythic and archetypal.

Growing up in the northwest of North America, I moved through a lot of the relics of the local indigenous cultures material and artistic works. Totem poles, dancing masks, long houses… Haida, Tlignit, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl… Even the route to the coast that I usually drove passes through the Makah reservation, which has an incredible museum at Neah Bay full of artifacts from the famous Ozette archaeological dig. So these people and their visual culture are very real to me, even now while I live in Los Angeles. And furthermore, I had visited those beaches many times before hiking out to build the sculptures.

Coast_pole has another formal connection, which is to the Shinto ‘Tori’, the gates built to mark our movement between sacred and secular spaces. All my life I’ve been attracted to the Japanese aesthetic sensibility of spare and natural forms. When I was a teenager I visited the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima across the water from Hiroshima. From that visit I remember very clearly looking through that beautiful Tori Gate set in the tide flats, back across the water back in the direction of Hiroshima, with its haunting concrete building remnants from the atomic bomb explosion.

But to the point: I consider the poles as an extension of drawing. Sinking them upright into the earth is way of marking space. They mark geographic, terrestrial space (as opposed to the somewhat abstracted container of a sheet of paper or canvas). By placing the poles in lines relative to the shape of the coast I was making marks that had a specific relation to the place they were made. It was a series of durational gestures expressing my connection to that place. And it’s a mark in time, like music. The contemplation of space is equally a meditation on time. A pole construction, like an offering a meal for time, and the mortal standing next to the ocean, drawing a line through our mutable world.

It was something that felt absolutely right and necessary to me, and maybe that’s precisely the reason the piece has remained important to me. I listened to a courageous personal vision and followed it through: Making art as a mode of being in the world, a means of investigating my surroundings, making physical gestures that connect to or grow from my experience of the earth. This kind of ‘being’ refers not so much to our social matrix, but to an existential, romantic sense of being; one that finds personal bearings in the impersonal landscape of time, geology, nature, architecture… Now, having had a lot of other experiences with art and landscape, I see that Coast_pole has a very clear relationship to the romantic theme of ‘ruins’. In ruins human endeavor can be perceived as a product of nature, or perhaps even the inverse: it allows a product of nature to perceived as a human artifact. A quote from Kant speaks to this,


"Everything goes past like a river and the changing taste and the various shapes of men make the whole game uncertain and delusive. Where do I find fixed points in nature, which cannot be moved by man, and where I can indicate markers by the shore to which he ought to adhere?"

All of my artworks, both representational and abstract, sculpted and drawn, relate to material process in landscape. I feel Coast_pole express clearly my interest in dynamics of construction and erosion, duration and place, perception and navigation. Even in my more recent studio-based work I’m taking nature as guide, and our labors as part of it’s being, (though sometimes moving against its character). In thinking of the studio as a kind of river bed, I consider my decisions and efforts as a natural, human expenditure of energy, and as an artist I take great care in positioning specific material situations in order to record the traces of this constantly circulating gain and loss."


So there it is. Please share your views via a comment.

coast_pole Eben Goff

'coast / pole' took place during two trips to the North Olympic Coast in Washington State; the first during winter of 2002 and the second in spring of 2003. Driftwood poles were collected locally and carried to specific stretches of coast where, after the day's first high tide began to recede, the poles were set vertically into sand or rocks along the tide line. The pole configurations took shape in response to their surrounding topography. The quantity of poles used in these arrangements ranged between 25 and 100. All constructions washed away with in 24hours. At the outset of this project, a self portrait photograph was taken wearing a hand-made mirror mask and a fishing net that had washed up on the beach.

Eben Goff

Alchemical Vessel

Point of Arches

caption text for coast / pole 4

coast / pole 4
xerox

caption text for coast/pole 1-4

coast / pole 1
xerox

coast / pole 1
xerox

coast / pole 3
xerox

coast / pole 2
xerox

coast / pole 2, washed out to sea
xerox


All material courtesy Eben Goff

I stumbled, happily, across this arresting art project by Eben Goff. I found it haunting, but at first I didn't delve into why, I just enjoyed it on it's surface, letting it tug at me but not wanting to analyze too much. I'd revisit it every few days. Recently I directed a friend who shares my interest in art to it. In trying to answer her questions I found I was looking more deeply into the work, and simultaneously into my response to it. It was a fruitful endeavor. I had originally contacted Eben to ask his permission to share this piece with my readers, but he was traveling over the summer and we had only a little dialogue. After digging into it with my friend, I had a set of responses to the work and sent them to Eben to see what he thought, and his reply surprised me, I don't usually get this stuff right but he confirmed my reading and elaborated on it. I'd like to share the 'conversation' with you, but not just yet. What I plan is to give anyone interested a chance to do what I did, to work with this piece and arrive at your own conclusions and discoveries. In short, right now I want to share it, but not spoil it for others by laying my interpretation and Eben's response all over it just yet. This will allow you to have an unmediated response of your own. In a week or two or so, I'll re-post this with a transcript of our exchange. Should be fun, stay tuned. And great thanks to Eben for being open to a dialogue, and to my friend Lisa Obrecht who got me really thinking about this piece and helped elucidate our responses. A portal to Eben's masterful work, and other pieces, can be found here.

News of Windvinder

Windvinder at sea

and here

Wipke rode the back of Windvinder for about 300 miles on the open sea.

She returned to land aboard this large outrigger canoe, a tuna fishing vessel.

Wipke and a local islander making a new tail fin for the Windvinder

Others have been inspired to build their own Windvinder's and set them free on the open sea. These 'offspring' have been dubbed 'Yellowfin', after the first new vessel, seen here, with yellow 'sails' or wings.

Wipke writes:

Marianas

"The strange thing about the Guam reports is that they do not contradict each other. And they come from very different phone numbers. Even from different countries! After all, it’s not so impossible that some kind of Windvinder is underway there. Two old canoes are easy to find, make them watertight, put two beams in between and a single-shaft windmill drive, and that’s it. The single shaft Windvinder doesn’t even need a keel or a center board. As long as it is very small, it can be really easy. Well, nobody has said that a Windvinder has to be big! Maybe the smallest ones have the biggest chance to survive…

The problem is the shaft. Wings could even be made from plywood, for a small six-blade windmill, but the shaft…? Bamboo doesn’t work, I have tried it. Not even for a one meter model. You need something really straight. But the islanders are masters in improvisation…

The more interesting question is, if the Mariana Windvinder really exists, how did he jump there? Most probably he is born north of the typhoon tracks. Or he is incredibly lucky; or both. But some connection with the original Windvinder must exist, because he seems to have our phone number on board. This contact number is not published on this website or anywhere else, it's only written on the Windvinder - and his descendants. "

"Possible construction of the Mariana Windvinder, as described in the various reports of the past months: Two old canoes connected with bamboo spars. Windmill and propeller sit on the same shaft, no gearbox is necessary.

The windmill with six sails is not the most effective and certainly not the most storm proof solution, but no other windmill can be repaired or replaced so easily, without any special tools or knowledge. Bamboo and some rice sacks can be found anywhere.

The use of simple sails can be a good way to try out how much sail area is actually needed to propel the vessel against the wind. The sails can be reefed easily by furling them partly or completely around the bamboo.

It's also possible to use only three of the six sails. This could explain why some reports mention "three wings" and others "many"."

This drawing is a conjecture by Wipke based on reports of a 'sail wheel' as the means of propulsion for the Yellowfin.

Yellowfin sighting.

all photos and other materials courtesy Wipke Iwersen

This amazing story just gets better. I thought of Wipke Iwersen and her Windvinder project recently and wondered how things were progressing. So I wrote to Wipke and now she as replied. (Some of my long time reader may recall my earlier article on Windvinder, found here). Apparently, the Windvinder is doing well and Wipke and her team have recieved many reports of sightings, some with photos. He has needed some repair here and there, and recently wipke travelled to the South Seas to complete ome extensive repair work that was beyond what the locals could reasonably be expected to complete. She reports:

"I'm just back: 3 months in Oceania - repairing Windvinder and leaving him on the open sea again. This was not planned - but that's life! Windvinder was on a little island; fishermen had brought him there. Normally I don't hear of these repair-stops at the islands, or only when he is already gone again. (Mail on paper...) But this time they phoned me; the gearbox was broken, and that was something they could not repair on the island. So I took the opportunity to see and help him one more time - very probably the last time! But who knows...

Except for the corrupt officials, the islanders were very nice people. We had a great time, doing all the repairs together. A fantastic launching fiesta, some hundreds of miles of sea trials and a really moving Bon Voyage ceremony when we finally left Windvinder alone again, in the middle of the ocean. I went back to the land with a local tuna fishing vessel, a big outrigger canoe - after some 300 miles on the back of the Windvinder. Unbelievable trip...

There are even new Windfinders - that is REALLY great. Some bigger, some smaller - simple bamboo constructions, but very fast and very seaworthy. Powered and steered by nothing but wind. They have sails instead of epoxy wings. I had heard of them already last year; there were several sightings around the Marianas. But no photos, at that time. (How many fishermen bring a camera for a fishing trip in their outrigger canoe...?) I could only imagine what they could be... (I put some sketches on the Windvinder-website.)
Now I have finally seen them! They are wonderful. The people call them Yellowfin, after the first one who was seen in Southeast Asia, with yellow sails. Definitely the future of the species Windvinder...
A small one was even built at sea by one of the fishermen on our canoe, after we had left the big Windvinder. (There was no material on board to build a bigger one...)
He blessed his boat with the blood of a Yellowfin tuna and left it alone on the ocean."

You can follow up on this fascinating work of art, with many more photos and reports, at the Windvinder website. Wipke plans to begin an Expedition to the Origins of the Wind late this summer aboard Thor, a classis wooden yawl about 50', I'd guess. She's looking for crew for the journey, "The voyage goes from the North Sea to the North Sea, with a detour around the world.
Starting summer 2010.

CREW WANTED

Requirements:
We need creative, enthusiastic, seaworthy people with practical and improvisation skills
People must have good English skills, any additional languages are an advantage
Boatbuilders, aerodynamicists, navigators, oceanographers and anthropologists – graduates or not – are especially welcome
but above all: only experienced sailors!
(in other words, people who know and respect the sea.)"

If you are interested, there is an email address on her website.

Skin and Bones

Entering

The Exhibition

This vitrine shows a typical set of onboard tattoo making tools

An image of Lady Liberty greets the visitor as you enter the show.

The original can be found on the ditty box on the left

Another example of sailors craft, here sailwork from the early 20th C.

Samoan tattoo tools

Image of an early Pictish warrior, with full body tattoos

A tattoo artist's box, with a rather nice painting

The exhibit uses many examples of sailors art to show how tattoos would have looked.

Here's a close up

This little bag serves the same purpose, and like many of the objects in the show, is exquisite.

Tattoo artists created 'flash books' of their designs to inform the sailors of the available designs. The museum created duplicate flash books for the visitor to thumb through.

This large ceremonial razor was to commemorate a 'Crossing of the Line" ie: the Equator, usually presented at a day long festivity which involved ritual indignation's directed at the novice 'Pollywogs' as part of being imitated into the veteran 'Shellbacks' .

An example of a document of passage presented at such a ceremony. This one invokes Rex Neptunis, king of the sea.

Here we see the tools of the electric tattoo artist, Cap'n Bill Coleman. Electric tattooing began in 1891 with artist and inventor Sam O'Riellly. Colemans kit includes early electric needles, dry pigments which were mixed with alcohol and a small statue which depicted an array of designs as a full body of tattoo.

A poster of designs

Tattoo magic. In a delightful interactive display, this cutout tattoo artist will draw with light one of the four designs seen above the table.

He'll also solicit your business.

Here a very young sailor gets a light tatoo announcing that she has sailed 5000 miles, the swallow design.

A little more revealed

Viola!

A continuing legacy

Independence Seaport Museum's curator Craig Bruns has outdone himself with the latest exhibit, Tattoo. It's intriguiging, informative, interactive and deep. Though nominaly about tattoo, it presents a wide range of sailors's craft, particularly in the age of sail, to give a context for the tatoo as a part of the sailor's life. The word tatau entered the English language at the time of Cooks voyage around the world in the Samoas, 1770's. It was an alliterive, recalling the rythmic tapping of the skin ink artist. It quickly morphed into tatoo which was already an English word depicting the drum beat to quarters. Inked skin drawing was not soley the province of the South Seas, however. Examples of the practice fade into the dawn of prehistory, and include, among others, the New Zealand Maori, Amerindian tribes and notably the wild tribes of Scotland, the Celts and Picts. But make no mistake, it is the sailor who brought this art form into the contemporary world. Mr. Bruns and the Seaport have created a vital, exciting and vivid history of the sailor's world and tatoo's place within it. I have only scratched the surface here, and the show has mch more to offer, including lots on the practice in the 20th C., which I have scacely mentioned. Check the museum's website for events and talks to be given before the exhibit closes in October. This is not to be missed. One of the really interesting things I learned from this exhibit is that there is a certain tatoo iconography, with certains images attesting to accomplishment, as in the sparrow denoting 5k nm. at sea, and in the case of the iconic image of feet the museum chose for it's display, the rooster and the pig, depict animals unable to swim and are a talisman against drowning. The U.S. Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Richard Sambenedetto Jr., whose feet bear these two tatoos, will be present at a museum event in October. See you there.