CHRIS FREMANTLE

“Come for the Fire Stay for the Art”

“Meet Melt Make”

These are the strap lines on T-Shirts in July in Kidwelly, Camarthenshire: more than a hundred artists taking over an industrial museum to live and breath casting iron. Hard hats, leather aprons and jackets, work boots, gloves, face masks, lots of moulds being made and poured

This isn’t the cool clean sculpture of the London art world.  This also isn’t a conference centre – its a temporary working environment – a sort of pop-up Sculpture Department/Workshop/Symposium/Camp. In fact you’d be forgiven for thinking that this has nothing to do with contemporary art at all.

But then I was invited by Mary Bates Neubauer to moderate a panel on digital sculpture.  In a series of presentations we saw work using the most cutting edge technology – software like Rhinoceros, and haptic interfaces, 3D scanners using lasers, Rapid Prototyping, CNC and 5D routers, 3D printing technology, Sintering: systems with which you can model anything and then watch it made in wax, metal, plastic and even wood (apparently if you’re willing to go out of warranty on the equipment rice flour produces great results).  Laura West‘s presentation was particularly informative on the range of technologies.

The urgent interest in what can be done with digital modelling and outputting might seem a million miles from charging a furnace with coke, huge fans blasting air and temperatures of more than 2000 degrees.

Mary Bates Neubauer points out that foundry processes and rapid prototyping technologies are doing basically the same thing – exploring means of reproducing three dimensional objects. So, whether you are modelling in clay, taking moulds, making waxes and then making moulds into which to pour hot metal, or modelling at a computer, downloading 3D wireframes into CNC machines, the concerns are fundamentally similar. This is the interface of art and technology (in both cases old and new). It’s the edge where sculpture and the readymade touch each other.

Duchamp’s infamous Fountain is important because its in a state of flux between the everyday functional object and the sign – take it out of the gallery and its a urinal, put it in the gallery and its an artwork. That’s not to say that all the artworks on display in the exhibitions associated with the 6th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art are as sharply on the edge. Infact the good ones are gallery quality art objects and the bad ones are trite.

There are aspects of the aesthetic of this bunch of artists which slide off into biker culture or simply regurgitate stereotypes such as flowers growing out of pistols. Whilst the conference seems largely organised by women, and there are as many women working furnaces as men, the title for one show, Iron Maidens, could be more imaginative. Stand out works include Deborah la Grasse’s Torn; Dilys Jackson’s Sulphur Growth and Starry Growth, both investigating the relations between made and found materials, and her two beautiful drawings Spread I and II where the simple act of pinching a piece of paper, perhaps in a vice results in exquisite works; Cynthia Handel’s drawings; Julie Ward’s Pink Clam Clutch, a cross between a giant clam shell and an elegant ladies’ bag; Carrie Phoenix’ Sewn Leather, another work which touches on the domestic. The whole show is basically monochrome (apart from the pink inside the Clam Clutch). It’s largely domestic in scale and one of the most interesting currents running through is the domestic, a concern with everyday work and activity which isn’t considered of high value.

Adjacent is an open exhibition where the work varies in quality (viz. the pistol I mentioned), but amongst that note-worthy work includes Christopher Keating’s Frozen Moments, simple bowl shapes poured and allowed to cool so that the surface of the bowl is the captured ripples and eddies of the liquid caught at the moment of change from liquid to solid; Matthew Tomalin’s Bowl; Nick Lloyd’s Between; Harvey Hood’s Carnac Man and Mary Neubauer’s Anomalies in Global Positioner. This last work, a chrome-plated cast iron abstract ring shape has a surface pattern derived from data taken from exactly what the title says: anomalies in global positioning systems. Neubauer fed the data set into a 3D modelling programme and through a process of testing algorithms established a form. This was then output using rapid prototyping to a wax and into a mould which was then cast and chrome-plated. The object visualises and creates form from data involved in modern navigation systems.

Making, exhibiting and seminars are put aside in the evening for events: furnace operation as performance. It is a visceral experience of heat, noise and smell in a foundry and taken into a public setting it can be cathartic like good drama. Bear in mind that at SSW we used to work with artists including George Beasley, Matt Toole and David Lobdell (all of whom are here) to do such events, so I’m interested in this form of work. And the Blue Cowboys intimate performance, entitled I believe Great Balls, dressed disco divas (earth and wind), using Lobdell’s fire arch to play out instructions provided by their Polish collaborators had the right level of irreverend punk culture about it.

Blue Cowboys' performance Great Balls at the Iron Conference in Kidwelly, 2010

Last night’s performance, created by the team from the Crucible on the West Coast raised some questions for me. The noise created to accompany the process, made with instruments improvised from scrap bicycles and plumbing was grounded in a metronomic beat of a wheel on a suspended arm moving a length of wood trapped in a wooden box amplified to catch the impact. That ‘heartbeat’ was joined at strategic moments by a sound like a steel guitar, but made by an incongruous contraption, an organ blown by gas cannisters, and a percussion instrument made of white plastic plumbing and beaten with flip-flops.

The two furnaces sat under the old chimney of the Kidwelly works looking quite animalistic, foursquare on their legs, tended by teams of workers. Around the mould in the middle of the performance space, at several points groups of artists carrying or wearing flaming torches writhed. Given that the operation of a furnace has a choreography of its own, is it useful to overlay that with stereotypical modern dance referencing ‘ancient fire rituals’?

This evening is Toole’s event. See what he does.

Going back to the panel session, the presentations covered two territories: one is the range of technology currently available, from high-end commercial equipment to ‘makers’ build your own rapid prototyper. The other is historical and draws a line from Alhazen, the 11th Century Iraqi who discovered the conical nature of human sight and thereby established the scientific principles of perspective, through the Italian Renaissance scientist Marino Taccolo, to Descartes, Francoise Willeme’s photosculpture and John Parsons invention of CAD. To this are added Vitkine and Bezier. Descartes role in this, inventing Cartesian geometry (xyz axes for locating things in space) underpins digital culture. The third territory, perhaps the z axis, which was insufficiently discussed, was the aesthetic. All this stuff exists, we didn’t just invent it, but we do need to talk about aesthetics.