Last month I made a trip up to New Hampshire to meet some of the folks I’ll be working with for the month of October during an art residency in Keene. Social Practice Artist’s Residency (Keene) or SPAR(K) is the brainchild of the artist Craig Stockwell, who I originally met several years ago when he was part of the Marie Walsh Sharp Foundation artist’s residency program in Brooklyn. SPAR(K) is an interesting and unusual artist’s residency, very much unlike VCCA, the one in Virginia that I helped run for twenty-five years. At VCCA there are twenty-plus artists in residence at one time. In Keene, at SPAR(K) there will be only me. They host just one artist a year, usually for the month of October, when New Hampshire is at its most beautiful. At VCCA, artists work on discrete long-term projects like a novel or a symphony, or a body of paintings; at SPAR(K) the artist is asked to integrate into the community and make an artwork somewhat like an intervention, something that draws on the community and reflects it back to itself.

So I’ll be arriving without any notion of what I’ll create and I’ll have to create something over the course of the month. And it’s all on me. No one else is in residence.

Scary.

As readers of The Conceptual Artist’s Cookbook, you know that I have been there before, done this kind of thing in the past. Still, I can’t remember ever having to do it under such a tight deadline and with so much pressure. As a reader of my Substack himself, Craig Stockwell saw some of the things I had posted and decided I would be a good fit for an idea he’d been mulling over: a collaboration with the estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, coincidentally located twenty minutes from Keene. Gordon Matta-Clark is a deeply interesting artist who sadly passed away at the tender age of thirty-five, but not before his work had attracted enough attention to ensure it did not disappear. He is an artist whose interests and values are much aligned with my own.

Early on, as an effort to call attention to the problem of homelessness, he made works he called Garbage Walls using detritus picked up from the streets of the South Bronx. In 1970, he teamed up with a couple of other artists to create FOOD, a restaurant, artists’ gathering spot, and ongoing conceptual art project on the corner of Prince and Wooster in Soho.

Although he trained as an architect at Cornell, Gordon had an early experience in Ithaca with a legendary Land Art exhibition that shaped his thinking, influencing him to work more as an artist than an architect. He was also the son of the well-known Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who had, himself, trained as an architect, so perhaps the die was cast at an early age. (In this case maybe it is more appropriate to say that the DYE was cast.)

On the way home from New Hampshire, I caught the train out of Brattleboro, VT to Penn Station so I could see the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Modern and spend a couple of days with my pals Pinkney and Janice Herbert. We spent several hours at MoMA and I’ve got a lot to say about that show, but for now just this: As I see it, Duchamp and Matta-Clark are both grounded in the same ethics and convictions as The Conceptual Artist’s Cookbook. Their work indicates clearly that they opposed, even reviled, the corrosive influence the art market has on the arts and they searched for ways to question it and subvert it. And I think a case could be made that both of them used their own life as their true artwork.

So stay tuned for dispatches from New Hampshire. But before that, Sheila and I are off to France so I can do some repairs to the big sculpture I made for the village of Auvillar more than a decade ago. If I have a moment, I’ll send a dispatch about that, too.

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I’ve been absent here on Substack since the end of March, working steadily on a new book, keeping distractions to a minimum. While I have found producing The Conceptual Artist’s Cookbook great fun, it is more of a distraction from a daily writing routine than I expected it to be, even though huge chunks of what I posted were already written. So, while I may be posting from time to time, it won’t be the weekly+ pace that I kept up for all of 2025 and the first of 2026.

I note with interest that while NOT posting, I seem to have attracted plenty of new subscribers. For those of you who have subscribed since beginning of April, welcome! You have no paywall! and nearly the entire memoir that is still out there seeking a publisher is here for you to read from beginning to end or by dipping randomly into the mostly stand-alone chapters.

I do have a couple of updates on upcoming projects that I’ll be posting soon, but today the thing that has pulled me back here was an email from my friend Paul McMahon. Some of you probably know Paul or know of him: an unsung artist from the Pictures Generation group. Those of you who have been reading from the early weeks might remember Paul from this post about the show I curated for The Upstairs Artspace.

That was an exhibition made by asking artists for instructions for making one of their artworks. A multimedia artist, musician, and polymath comic genius, Paul sent a proposal for that tenth anniversary show that was quite beautiful, and he’s the guy that I mentioned ran his own alternative space in Woodstock, New York. That space is called The Mothership, and Paul has been operating it for nearly two decades, programming music, performance and tons of other interesting art events. Largely, he has supported it himself. The building is now in need of major repairs and Paul is seeking funding for that.

Perhaps the crucial idea driving my memoir is the idea that an artist’s real work is the life he or she leads. I am trying to make the case, here, for a different paradigm for being an artist; one less about cultivating unique exceptionalism and more about engaging inventively and poetically with a broader community. This is a somewhat radical idea and one that meets resistance from many quarters, but it is safe to say that in this endeavor Paul is a true fellow-traveler. Plus, he has a heart of gold. I invite you to take a look at the website for The Mothership and if you feel inspired, I invite you to make a contribution, or just buy a funny bumper sticker.

Here is Paul’s pitch:

The Mothership provides the space and opportunity for many cultural events to happen in Woodstock, and a good number of musicians and artists have had their first shows here. Since 2007, we’ve hosted thousands of events. The porch is a wonderful venue in its own right and many concerts and readings have taken place on it. We simply need to save the porch by giving it a new roof.

The porch roof has been leaking for many years and is now showing signs of structural damage. I need to raise a significant amount, likely over $10,000 to repair the underlying supports and reshingle the porch roof, which is large -750 sq ft. You can donate through this gofundme:

Or, tax deductible gifts can be made in Paul’s name to the Franklin Furnace, which will take a small percentage to cover administrative costs.

If you have ever wanted to own a classic Paul McMahon artwork now is the time. Please look at https://paulmcmahon.tv/art-home. Choose something you want and offer what you can afford by texting Paul at 845-443-5247. He will respond, confirm and make arrangements. Many products are also available at https://paulmcmahon.tv/shop

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE! I love you!

-Paul McMahon

If you believe in the restorative power of art, especially when it happens in out-of-the way places, I encourage you to join me in chipping in to help that happen. I thank you. Paul thanks you.

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A guest post from Sheila Gulley Pleasants

This is my go-to recipe for friends and family who are having a hard time…a new baby, a recent hospital stay, a death in the family. These muffins travel well, freeze well, and are wonderful when they are cut open, buttered, and toasted. They are hearty, but not heavy. Nutritious and not too rich. They are just what’s needed in the days after surgery when the digestive system is waking back up. They are also great for traveling…for those days when you wake up in a hotel room and don’t want to head out into the world for breakfast. With coffee from an in-room coffee maker and a muffin, you can linger in your hotel room until you are ready to face the day.

I originally found the recipe on the side of the box of Kellogg’s All Bran cereal. I never wrote it down. I just bought another box of All Bran and used the recipe on the side. I was caught short when the recipe disappeared from the side of the box. What?!

Luckily, I was later able to snag a box with the recipe still on it. I immediately cut off the recipe and to this day it hangs on the side of my refrigerator, ready to be whipped up when the occasion arises.

The original recipe does not call for raisins, but I find them essential. I add tons of raisins. Because Craig can’t eat dairy, I make these muffins with almond milk, and they are just as good.

When our daughter Julia was in high school, she took the bran muffins to her boyfriend’s family. His father was surprised at the thought of a bran muffin. Julia asked, “Haven’t you ever eaten a bran muffin?”

“Not on purpose!” was his reply.

I have been making these bran muffins for over 30 years. They have become a staple in our household.

The (Adapted) Original All-Bran Muffins

Ingredients:

2 cups Kellogg’s All-Bran Original cereal

1 ¼ cups milk (almond, soy or regular)

1 ¼ cups of all-purpose flour

½ cup of sugar (I use a bit less)

1 Tablespoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 egg

¼ cup vegetable oil

Raisins…lots..half a cup? Maybe more, I don’t measure

The original recipe calls for two bowls: one for dry ingredients and one for the combined cereal and milk (which is to stand a bit), with the egg and oil added later.

I streamline the process, using only one bowl.

First, Turn the oven to 400 degrees. By the time it is preheated, the muffins will be ready to put in the oven. Use Smart Balance (or butter) to coat the inside of the 12 cups of the muffin tin. Be generous, and the muffins will come out clean without the waste of muffin papers.

Combine the cereal and milk in a large mixing bowl. Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, egg, and oil. Stir until combined. Add the raisins.

Portion evenly into twelve 2 ½ inch muffin-pan cups (which have been coated with Smart Balance). I use two soup spoons to portion out the batter from mixing bowl to muffin pan.

Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden brown. After removing from oven, use two forks to tip each muffin on its side in its cup, so that muffins can cool without becoming soggy.

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If you have been reading this Substack for a while, you may remember the post called Et in Arcadia Ego. It described a complex and ambitious piece I made for the North Carolina Museum of Art in July of 2000. That piece was on view for six months and when the show was over, I disassembled the two hundred pieces of charred poplar and brought them back to my home at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and stored them in an unused run-in shed on the property.

Three years later, when I was invited to make an outdoor piece as part of an exhibition at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I salvaged those boards and created a piece called Infidel. That piece reprised my fascination with structures that employ a gothic arch and reprised the method of construction used in Et in Arcadia Ego: a simple log-cabin-stack. But this time, unlike that forbidding edifice that kept viewers at bay, I allowed viewers to inhabit the piece, sort of. You couldn’t get inside, but you could sit on a porch-like bench on the front, sheltered and not sheltered at the same time. The oblique title, Infidel probed the notion of The Other by referring to two things: the conflict raging in Iraq, and the fact that St. Mary’s College of Maryland sat on a prime peninsula, where the Potomac flows into the Chesapeake, that had for millennia been used by indigenous people.

Here is a statement I wrote about that piece:

My sculptural work draws on my interest in alternative modes of habitation and shelter, especially as practiced by cultures without a tradition of architecture. I am drawn to the aesthetics of the impromptu, the makeshift, the nomadic, because I see in them the imperative and power of necessity.

My piece The Three Little Pigs as it was originally passed into English folklore in 1620 is about the way cultural artifacts create the culture rather than embellishing or commenting on it. I find myself recently fascinated by the ways in which the person at the podium influences the way the people in the audience understand the world, if only by delivering the first interpretation. More often than not, this interpretation is a fabrication which has an agenda of economic or political gain.

Both of my pieces for this show make reference, if only obliquely, to the Yoacomaco, the tribe of Algonquian Indians who lived on the grounds currently occupied by St. Mary’s College and St. Mary’s City. By not having the podium, (or, as the Europeans told us, even a written language) the Yoacomaco, like the Powhatan of my Three Pigs story, relinquish their story to the one that is told by the English. For this reason the Indians are portrayed as somehow less than the Europeans, allowing them to be justifiably moved off a desirable piece of property “for their own protection” and like the present-day Iraqis or Sudanese, they become subject to what amounts to extermination.

That piece was in place for several months and when I disassembled it, once again I saved the charred boards and put them back in the shed. Two years later, in 2006, as a gift to the Fellows of the VCCA, with the assistance of my young friend Gabriel Lane, I built the piece below, which I called Heliotrope. That lovely word simply means “follows the sun.” The piece was sited at the top of a rise and also included a porch-like bench that faced west into the setting sun. Some of the VCCA artists told me they regularly used it as their studio.

Heliotrope lived at VCCA for more than a decade, but one day the farmer who hayed that field, having had too much to drink, ran into it with his tractor and because it was held in place only with gravity and the weight of the boards, knocked it over. I collected the charred 2 x 4s and built something resembling a large chair, which I don’t have a photo of. That fourth iteration made from the poplar boards stayed in place for a few more years and by 2021, it had fallen into serious disrepair.

In July of 2021, as the VCCA was re-opening after eighteen months of Covid-related closure, I built a final piece, the fifth piece built using the same charred poplar 2 x 4s that had first been used at the North Carolina Museum of Art two decades earlier.

I invited the community and the VCCA Fellows to participate in a ritual burn at sunset on the first new moon after the summer solstice, burning off the plague and all the related bad juju that had accumulated around us for the months we had been besieged by the corona virus. “Destroy the old, welcome the new” said the invitation.

That little performance piece was called Corona V. Yes, we drank a case of Corona.

Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian scholar and historian of religion, in The Myth of Eternal Return, wrote about cultures that experience time through cyclical rituals, returning to an origin story, a sacred space where all power resides. This cyclical sacred space is set in opposition to the “profane” space of linear, historical time. By re-enacting the original event, then, the ritual seeks a moment when the sacred or the supernatural breaks through into the quotidian world.

Thus, Eliade says, any act of remembering is also an act of creation.

I have found this to be profoundly true, but it goes further. Even the act of participating in the memory, the mere act of hearing or reading the story, is also an act of creation. Each person reading the story, then, re-creates the story as it progresses, visualizing it, imagining it, experiencing the emotions of it. This remembering, this imagining, this mundane act repeated and returned to every day by every person is the very heart of human experience, yet we barely notice it as we go about the business of making plans, making dinner, even making love.

Why?

The Conceptual Artist's Cookbook

How to open your eyes, create beauty, catalyze change, keep food on your table, and end your chronic back pain, in one easy step.

By Craig Pleasants

Six months after a Derecho blew through Central Virginia, snapping off three-foot diameter trees and damaging hundreds of buildings, a story appeared in the Amherst New-Era Progress that said Amherst County was planning to tear down the Baptist Church in the center of town. This building had been abandoned by its congregation and in 2006 had been purchased by the County for $350,000 because it sat just along Second Street across from the County Administration building. Six years later, when the powers-that-be discovered how much it would cost to bring it up to code for governmental use, they threw up their hands and decided to tear it down and use the land it occupied as a parking lot. No kidding, that is really what they said.

I saw the story in the Amherst New Era Progress and forwarded it to Suny Monk, my collleague at VCCA for many years, by this time retired. She responded a few hours later with a single line: Let’s make trouble. I responded, Hell yes, and by the end of the day I had sent the link on to six other people, asking them to join us at a strategy meeting to discuss what could be done. Steve Martin, a local attorney, offered his Main Street office as a meeting place. One of the six also invited a person from neighboring Nelson County who had worked on a similar project for an abandoned school. From this initial meeting, we put together a list of potential advocates who could join us. Steve Martin drafted a letter of complaint to the County Administrator and soon we assembled a group of citizens and descended on the Board of Supervisors meeting to protest their decision to destroy the building. Within a few months we had assembled an ad-hoc board of directors of artists, arts administrators, an attorney, a graphic designer, a developer specializing in repurposing old buildings, a local chiropractor, and an historic preservationist. Working with the County Administrator and the one member of the Board of Supervisors who saw potential value in the second oldest building in the town, by the end of the year we secured permission to undertake a trial run the coming summer to demonstrate the building’s potential as a community art center.

September, 2013. The organization now called Second Stage Amherst, has secured a 501c3 designation from the IRS as a non-profit organization and has just completed a summer of programming. Nineteen events have been presented: a theater showcase by the best theater company in the region, a Grammy-nominated Renaissance ensemble, a magician, jazz classics, bluegrass and even a drumming circle. Early on, Sheila had casually mused that it would be really nice if a farmer’s market could be held on the grounds under the 300-year-old live oak. The idea was such a brilliant observation that everyone who heard it thought it had been their own idea and this had been made manifest, too, every Thursday from 3 to 6. Local businesses and individuals ponied up seven grand to support concerts; ticket sales brought in three thousand dollars; by the end of the summer, local farmers had walked home with nearly forty thousand. By any reckoning, the trial run had been a raging success.

March 2014. County Supervisor John Marks made a motion to demolish the building. “Let me just say this: I am not willing to spend taxpayer money to redo that church. I stand by my position that the land is more valuable than the building itself,” he said to a local newspaper reporter. Sherese Gore, that young reporter, was the only reporter for the local newspaper, yet her seriousness and professionalism were a continuing source of support to our efforts. She wrote a series of articles chronicling the unfolding story, which was so important to informing the community, that I tried my best to have her editors nominate her for a Virginia Press Association award. Thanks to her work and to the good will generated by the summer of programming, John Marks’s motion did not carry.

In May, another motion to raze the building was put forward and this timing allowed the County to deny our use of the building for the summer of 2014, although they could not find a way to deny us the use of the parking lot to continue the farmer’s market. Again, with support of local businesses, we used that permission to book musicians to play during the markets each week. We even got a contribution from Claudia Tucker, our one supportive Supervisor, and her husband Bill, to help finance the musicians. This continuity undoubtedly helped anchor the organization in the community.

Thanks to the work of Sandi Esposito, our historic preservationist board member, a field representative of Preservation Virginia wrote to the Amherst County Supervisors in the fall encouraging them to re-purpose the building. “By reusing historic structures, we are being good stewards of buildings that are witnesses to history,” she wrote. A representative of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources wrote to say the building had potential to be put onto the National Register of Historic Places. Our board and a group of volunteers cruised the farmer’s market each week circulating a petition to save the building. We accumulated 2000 signatures. A new County Administrator had been hired who recognized the historic value of the property and he had included the building in an assessment of county property space needs. Our ongoing nemesis, Supervisor John Marks, made a motion to remove the church from that assessment. Again, we marshaled supporters to crowd the Board of Supervisors meeting to advocate for saving the building, this time using our petition and the support of the Department of Historic Resources.

Over the next weeks, Suny and I had many meetings with the new County Administrator, Dean Rodgers, former military, a JAG attorney. Not one to be pushed around by the Supervisors, he helped us negotiate the political territory. Then, in November, we marshaled supporters to work on the campaign for the County Supervisor seat of one of our staunchest opponents. Our candidate, Kenneth Campbell, was the man who had worked for many years as the County Building official. Rotting fascia and sagging gutters had given three of the five Supervisors ammunition to claim the building was unsafe and so we had asked for an official opinion. I accompanied Ken as he did an assessment of the structural soundness of the building, hovering beside him at every turn, suspicious, not knowing what his sentiments were. He found the building to be remarkably structurally sound. Despite this, a Supervisor that will go unnamed quietly pushed Ken to claim otherwise. Incensed over this, and now of a certain age, Ken retired as Amherst County Building official and ran against the man who had asked him to lie.

Ken’s election in November shifted the tide — the Supervisors knew very well the advocates of Second Stage had worked hard to insure Ken’s victory. Shifting the tie-breaking vote from a no to a yes, proved too much. In December, the Supervisors voted to approve the contract Dean Rodgers had helped us forge: a five-year lease at $10 per year with the agreement we would spend $10,000 per year on upgrades and maintenance of the building. Each party had an opt-out option, but I had a plan to beat that. Using my knowledge and experience from two decades at VCCA, I began writing grants to support the organization. Imagine an organization working to save a lovely nineteenth century building threatened with demolition, while at the same time creating a community art center in a rural, impoverished town that had never had one. Every grant I wrote was approved.

I then agreed to lease one of the ancillary rooms — the one I chose was the former Pastor’s Study — to create an art gallery as a way of kick-starting a lease program that might provide another income steam for the organization. A yoga teacher signed on to lease a large upstairs room and a jeweler took the tiny, secretary’s office with the big glass window. Funders ate it up. By the time we held the grand opening in August, we had already invested fifty thousand dollars in upgrades, securing our place for the entire five-year lease: new accessible bathrooms, roof repairs, fresh paint throughout the entire building, a new HVAC system, theater lights and a used sound system; a local paint company even re-painted the eighteen-foot-high pressed tin ceiling as a donation.

In this transformed space, Molly rises from her seat at the front of the room, takes her father’s hand and steps up onto the not-yet replaced red-carpeted stage. The house lights go down and the new theater lights come up. The crowd quiets. Seated in a hard-backed chair, Molly leans into the microphone.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION

It’s the middle of the night. I’m just a little loose on beer, and blues,

and battered air, and all the ways this nowhere looks like home:

the fields and boarded houses dead with summer, the filling station rowdy

with the rumor of another place. Cattle pace the distance between road

and gloaming, inexplicably awake. And then, the bathtubs, littered in the pasture,

for sale or salvage, or some secret labor stranger than I know. How does it work,

again, the alchemy that shapes them briefly into boats, and then the bones

of great felled beasts, and once more into keening copper bells, before

I even blink? Half a mile out, the city builds back up along its margin.

Country songs cut in and out of static on the radio. Lord, most of what I love

mistakes itself for nothing.

At the tail end of that summer, in mid-September, we produce a coup-de-grace, of sorts. Donald Trump has sowed the evil seeds of discord throughout the country. Our board was decidedly split politically, but also recognized it remained possible to sow our own seeds of cooperation and goodwill on a local level, to insert antibodies into the vast Trumpian virus. Having worked over several months, with plotting and planning directed like a military operation by Suny, on this warm clear evening, exactly one month after the Unite the Right rally fifty miles north in Charlottesville, we host a community dinner on the big lawn alongside the building. We decide the event will be called Come to the Table. We have worked hard to bring together constituencies from the black community, the Latino community, and the Monacan Indian community that had lived in the county before any of the others of us had come. Each constituency has prepared part of the meal. We have spent hours in the archives of the County Historical Museum, the Monacan Nation Museum and Sweet Briar College archives to gather photos to sketch the historical picture of the county. The Chilean artist Edgar Endress, who had lived for a while in Lynchburg, created a slide show of these photos that would be projected on a big screen. I have designed and hired a skilled carpenter to help me create the table at which the community will gather.

Here is the final image: Under an enormous magnolia, a light table one hundred feet long and four feet wide stretches across the lawn. It is lined with more than a hundred seats filled by members of the community. Scattered across the expanse of white plexiglass lighted from below, are three hundred 8 x 10 black and white photos printed on transparencies, so that, as the daylight fades, the light from below transforms them from what appeared to be regular photos into something more like magic lantern slides. People file past the food tables, heaping on fried chicken and collards and a Peruvian version of Brunswick Stew and gather at the table to eat. There are far more people than places. Under the looming magnolia I see Pat, the graphic designer whose work has made us look impressively professional and her husband Michael, another board member. Kelvin Brown, the town’s first African-American police chief, holds the cake he won in the cake walk. I see Sheila across the way talking with Kenneth Branham, former chief of the Monacans who, I discovered in my conversations with him at the Monacan Museum, was born only a few hours before I was. Off to the side, I see Suny talking with Claudia and Bill Tucker, and there, beside them, I see John Marks, the Supervisor who so assiduously tried to raze the building. He is speaking animatedly to the other three and his face is lit up with what can only be described as genuine happiness.

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Cy Twombly, Gaeta, Italy

April 13, 2011,

Dear Cy,

When spring rolls around, I think of the photos and carbon prints you used to make of tulips. I hope you are admiring the flowers these days. We certainly are, though it’s a few days early for tulips here in Virginia.

When I saw you in October, I mentioned that VCCA would be having a fortieth anniversary event in the fall at our beautiful facility in Gascony, and suggested that you might find it an enjoyable trip. I promised to write to you in Gaeta when I knew the details. We have now set the dates for that gathering. We will be in Paris September 13 and 14, to see your ceiling in the Salles des Bronzes and to visit some studios of VCCA artists and then we will go to Auvillar from September 15 to 20.

We’d love for you to join us at any of this, of course, but we’d especially like to honor you at the gala we are planning for Friday, September 16 at Le Moulin à Nef, our facility that sits on the banks of the Garonne. If this is a possibility for you, I’d be happy to arrange accommodations for you. The hotel in Auvillar (the only hotel) is quite nice, a bit upscale in comparison the La Louisiane, but a bit less expensive! Plus, they have a terrific chef.

The other thing about the region is that wonderful restaurants are everywhere. One nearby tiny village boasts “one of the six top chefs in all of France.” As you can imagine, we eat there often. So let me know. Give a call or drop a postcard. It would be lovely to see you.

I hope all is well with you and I send you best regards from all of your friends here.

Craig

On a cool September evening in the south of France, I find myself under plane trees, dressed in a white shirt and a jacket, surrounded by dozens of people, mostly French and American. They sit at long tables covered with white tablecloths; I stand in the darkening cement courtyard bracketed by two brick buildings dating from the seventeenth century. I had arrived in mid-August to be in residence at Le Moulin a Nef, VCCA’s satellite artists’ residency program in Gascony, and had been picked up at the Toulouse airport by John, the husband of Cheryl, Directrice of VCCA France.

In 2003, VCCA Director Suny Monk had come into my office with an 8 x 10 foldover flier. She stuck it out and said, “What do you make of this?”

A slick publication with pictures of a beautiful facility nestled in “one of France’s 100 plus beaux villages,” the flier said the facility would be given away: two completely renovated seventeenth century buildings and two acres. I turned it over. The contact on the back was tonylewis@hotmail.com. No phone number, no web site for the alleged Foundation, I took one look, pulled a face, and said, “I’ll see what I can find out.” By the end of the day, I had determined the Donnell-Kay Foundation was in fact a real foundation ­­–– whose focus was public education in the Denver area –– but that also had significant resources, controlled by a single family. I suggested Suny reach out to the bogus-sounding email address. Thus began a two-year dance, but here’s the short version: Suny and our board President, Linda, flew to Denver to talk with Tony, whom they found legit and charming. I wrote a proposal suggesting VCCA should be the recipient of this lovely property, then, at Suny’s insistence, I asked for an additional $90,000 to help VCCA get it off the ground. Two of the foundations’s trustees –– Lucy, the daughter of the CEO and Alain, her French husband –– came to VCCA for a site-visit and were themselves charmed by Sheila’s fluent French and bowled over by the VCCA operation but disappointed when I told them, no, VCCA would not consent to operate a vineyard on the property and if that was a condition, we would not be interested. Lucy’s response to that was “I had no idea how hard it would be to give something away.” For our part, Suny, Sheila, and I had no idea how difficult it would prove to convince our board to accept a gift worth a half million dollars.

Despite all this, eighteen months later, the property was transferred to VCCA.

I had been to Auvillar a half-dozen times by now, but always to work building the residency program VCCA began in 2004. For those trips I had arrived via the A-62, speeding through the countryside without really seeing it. This time I arrived as an artist and John brought me to Auvillar using back roads. We drove through fields of sunflowers stretching into the distance. We wound into valleys and up inclines offering stunning views of rolling hills; vistas sometimes punctuated with a copse of trees but mostly naked, making visible the sensuousness of the land, the way it moves and rolls in random and unexpected ways.

My work as an artist finished for the present, now in the cool courtyard I ease back into the role of Program Director of VCCA. Aperitifs had been served an hour earlier, and the staunch local black wine, the Bruhlois from Domain de Thermes, has been flowing. The deeply resonant clink and clank of cutlery and glasses overlaid with the hum of conversation has lulled the sixty or seventy people into one of those fine mental states human beings have loved and longed for and catered to for eons. The spectacularly prepared Gascon dinner is just about at its conclusion but dessert has not yet been served. A few others have spoken already; the mayor of the village spoke of the richness VCCA has brought to the village, Suny, of the welcome and generosity of the villagers. Sheila, the one person in our delegation fluent in French, has brought everyone together in the inimitable way she does, smoothing the wrinkles for those who do not understand English very well or those who do not understand French, drawing them in with the Southern cadences inflected in both languages, complimenting and extolling their own part in this.

Besides the bracketing buildings, the courtyard is shielded on one side from the Esplanade du Port and the Garonne beyond by a wicker construction on which grow plants and vines. The one open side of the courtyard looks across an expanse of grass ascending to a plateau perhaps four stories above where we sit. I am now invited to say something about the large sculpture at the top of that hill. I have been in France for a month working on this sculpture and from this vantage point, I hope it appears close to something like a finished state, though it is not. What is visible is an ethereal form, Delft blue and shaped in a double Gothic arch made from steel rod and woven wire fencing. It rises four meters above its base on the plateau, and beyond it, visible through the diaphanous wires, are green trees and the slope ascending up to the D4 into the centre-ville. The evening before, in anticipation of this moment, I had written down remarks to be delivered, but thanks to the Bruhlois, I speak off the cuff, saying something like this:

In the early 1950s Abstract Expressionism was at a point of high achievement and had become a bit of a cul-de-sac for the next generation of artists. Cy Twombly and his two friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg blazed a trail that led out of that cul-de-sac into new ways of working. Where Johns and Rauschenberg veered toward popular culture and opened the door to Pop Art, creating work that was more cerebral, Twombly moved away to Italy and blazed a different path, toward classical culture, insisting on the emotional power of the artists’ hand…. less head and more heart. Cy sought ways of holding onto the raw power of mark-making by undermining the facility of his hand. He used housepaint, childrens’ art materials, crayon, pencil, and when he became too adept at painting he started making sculpture.

In the early nineties, Twombly decided he would stop living full-time in Italy where he had been for fifty years and would buy a house in Lexington, Virginia, where he had grown up, and would spend part of each year there. He claimed he wanted, to “come home like an old dog, to die,” although at the time he was still in his sixties. I was introduced to him by some of the artists in Lexington and we hit it off, visiting each other’s houses for dinner, traveling together to New York to see the big Jackson Pollock retrospective. I even convinced Cy to come to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to have an artist’s residency, and later to join our Board of Advisors. When I met Cy in 1995, he had launched on a series of human scale sculptures. He was making frequent trips to the Lexington Antique Mall, buying interesting objects that struck his fancy and putting them together in unexpected ways.

One day I went over to Lexington to visit him and in his living room sat three or four plaster pieces, about as tall as a man, with slim vertical elements and fairly substantial bases – pedestals, really. I had not seen sculpture by Cy before, didn’t really know he made sculpture, and before I could think about what I was saying I blurted out, “Cy, these put me in mind of Giacometti.” I was thinking in particular of the Giacometti with an elongated human figure standing on a set of large wheels, called Chariot. Cy said nothing, and I was abashed at having said it, not knowing if I had insulted him somehow. All artists are keenly aware that being compared even to the most outstanding artist makes one feel as if you are possibly being accused of being derivative – the most devastating insult of all. I stopped talking and moved to the other side of the room, uncomfortable in the silence.

On a low table, I noticed a book open to a photograph of a handsome young man. Remembering the photos Rauschenberg had taken of a beautiful young Cy, I thought this could be a transition away from the awkward comment and I said “Cy, is this a photograph of you?” He looked over and in his laconic Southern drawl, he said, “No.” long pause. “It’s Giacometti.” I looked again, flipped to the cover, and sure enough, it was a photo of Giacometti.

Cy had always seemed open and generous with people who came to see him in Lexington, but that day I felt as if I had stepped across some threshold and into his good graces. A few weeks later, when I admired a round wooden Chinese rice bowl he had acquired from the Lexington Flea Market and that obviously was going to become a pedestal, Cy made a gift of it to me. In return, the next time I went to visit him, I took him a little maquette. It was very simple, a horizontal circle of wire as a base with two other circles coming up from it, each bent at its apex into a gothic arch. When covered with blue carbon paper, these gothic arches facing each other looked a bit like a bishop’s miter. You may know the valve in the human heart called the mitral valve is named because of its similar shape, a shape that had some mysterious grip on my imagination and that I had returned to many times while generating sculptural ideas on paper. This little maquette was the first time I had realized it in three dimensions. I gave it away, and so, for fifteen years, Cy owned a little piece of my sculpture.

Then, in October of 2010, I visited Cy again. I told him about the VCCA’s fortieth anniversary and the events we were planning for the following year. When I told him about the event in Auvillar, he perked up and seemed intrigued, hinting he might like to try to come. For that reason, Suny and I decided we would do a special tribute to Cy at the Auvillar event. So, when Cy left for Italy in the fall, I began writing letters to him about our plans. Then two things happened. In the spring, I was invited by VCCA/France and the village of Auvillar to make a piece of sculpture for this lovely promontory overlooking the Garonne and the entrance to the village. And then, in July, Cy passed away.

I had not even known he was ill.

So, what you see on the beautiful plateau there, overlooking the valley of the Garonne, is Cy’s little piece of sculpture finally realized in full scale. It is called Coeur de Mon Coeur – Heart of my Heart and it is dedicated to a great artist and a lovely generous man.

Here is a photo of what the sculpture looked like that night from the courtyard. The stone and brick seat were barely sketched out, but fortunately, not visible from the courtyard below. Seen from there, the partially visible arch might have called to mind a melon blossom or the top of one of Cy Twombly’s tulips peeking up from the ground. It would be two years before I finally made it back to France to complete the piece.

The idea of “heart” flows through the piece in many ways. Of course, there is the shape of the mitral valve, the arch that is the most visible element as you come across the bridge over the Garonne into Auvillar, but there is also the shape of the bench anchoring the wings of the mitre. By breaking and opening the base of the mitre, a heart-shaped bench results, allowing a passing villager a place of respite and refuge, encircled and protected by the arches.

Auvillar in the seventeenth century had been the heart of the production of Fäience pottery. Hundreds of artisans were employed in the old Port where the sculpture sits. To include the villagers in the creation of the sculpture, I put out a call for broken pieces of tile and pottery. From the hearths of many of the homes in Auvillar, I pieced together those broken tiles and embedded them into the bench as a tribute to the villagers and their tradition. Climbing the hill to spend a few quiet moments looking out over the Garonne valley, one of them might put their hand on a piece of their own crockery.

Auvillar is a stop along the Chemin de St. Jacques. Hundreds of pilgrims pass by this spot every year on the way to Compostela. When we first arrived, the Maison Viellhezcase that now houses VCCA Fellows was being used as the pilgrim gite for the village. A few years later the town created a new gite in the upper village on the bluff overlooking the Garonne. It is considered the most beautiful pilgrim gîte in France and there the Auvillarais proudly and generously welcome wayworn walkers from all over the world.

The sculpture’s placement at the top of the hill beckons to those passing below, pilgrims or villagers or artists, offering, in exchange for a steep climb, a quiet refuge from which to drop into an aesthetic reverie; one brought on not by the object that pulled them there, the steel and brick construction they may or may not even consider art, but by the view across the river and its valley, composed organically over hundreds of years–– the tiny village of Espalais placed with remarkable perfection among the trees, the steeples of Valence d’Agen on the next rise, the poplar trees growing in rows–– all so resonant that Cy Twombly himself might have wept with delight. That beckoning gesture is my small gift to the beautiful village that has welcomed us and opened its heart to weary pilgrims for hundreds of years.

Here’s the epiphany, then; why did it take me fifty years to grasp? Being an artist isn’t about me creating artworks compelling enough to grab and hold someone’s attention. It certainly isn’t about creating artworks someone will pay me in order to own. It isn’t even about my being able to create an artwork that will cause a sudden realization that will change someone’s mind. The epiphany is this: there is no epiphany; there is only the work, the relentless, ongoing, intractable work, even as I write these words. There are no instant transformative changes – everything is change. The reality of being an artist is about working, alone or with others, to set a table sufficiently beckoning and welcoming that other humans will feel safe enough to come to it and open their heart.

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One of my most memorable meals was prepared as a birthday gift for me by Francis Comte, a beloved chef in the little Gascon village we had been visiting for a decade. I was in Auvillar to finish a big sculpture for the village that had been commissioned by VCCA France (see next week’s post) and Sheila and her brother Tad and his wife Anne joined me there for my sixtieth birthday. We were heading off for Les Eyzies, the “world capital of prehistory” in the Dordogne to visit several of the caves (one of the most profound art experiences of my life, btw). Francis, who we’d heard had been the chef at The Ritz in Chicago, and his wife Jo, a journalist, invited us over for Coq au Vin. I wish I could give you that recipe, but sadly, I cannot. It was the classic with lots of whole small mushrooms and very good red wine, which, to my mind inflicts upon the old cock a somewhat ghastly shade of purple.

I have found that substituting a hearty, fruity white like chardonnay (or that bottle of champagne you didn’t finish) instead of red will produce a similar sumptuousness without the adverse visuals. Eh bien, voila, my version of coq au vin blanc.

Ingredients

eight bone-in skin-on chicken thighs

eight ounces mushrooms (I like shiitake because I grow them but use chanterelles if the ground is moist and you know how to find them. Or use oyster or button or …)

two onions

two large carrots

flour, salt, pepper, tarragon, garlic

a bottle of white wine

Preparation

Pour one glass of the wine for the chef

Pat the thighs dry, salt them and dust them with the flour and pepper then brown them on all sides in a heavy Dutch oven, three or four at a time, setting them aside as you go, leaving the rendered fat in the pan

Quarter the onions longways and sauté them in the rendered fat until translucent and beginning to caramelize (use shallots if you are feeling rich, but I can’t tell the diff)

Add the mushrooms, the roughly chopped carrots, two tablespoons of tarragon and cook for two minutes, then add two sliced garlic cloves and cook for another minute and then deglaze the pan with 1/4 cup of the white wine. The flour you dusted on the thighs and all the brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pan will create a beautiful roux. Add another 1/2 cup of wine and cook until reduced by half, then add the chicken and all the remaining wine. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for forty minutes or until the chicken is very well done.

Serve over egg noodles with another bottle of the wine and a crusty boule. It will be even better the next day if there is any left.

I am reclining on my back in a reticulated chair, a bright light positioned above my face. In my peripheral vision I can see a man with dark hair, the doctor. He holds a syringe with a long needle. Gently, he uses his left hand to open the lids of my left eye and steady my face.

“Look straight up. Don’t blink.” Swiftly he plunges the needle into my eyeball and thumbs the syringe down. Immediately he says, quietly, as though to himself, “I might have missed.”

For many years I was blessed with a magical eye. I could see things other people could not see, but I also had to make adjustments most people don’t. Maybe I was born that way or maybe it happened one day when I was ten years old and watching a baseball game at Camp Cheerio. One of the counselors hit a pop fly and he slung the bat. Sitting in the grass behind him, the bat hit me square in the face and broke my nose. I’ve never considered the possibility it also damaged my eye, but suddenly I wonder, could this incident be the source of my double vision? When I relax my eyes into their normal resting position, my left visual field droops, pointing down and to the left, causing me to see two of whatever I’m facing, a second image hovering slightly below and away from the first. As a kid, you pay no attention to these things, so perhaps I was born this way, but as an adolescent when my eyes were checked, they gave me glasses, except the corrective lens was only on the left - the right lens was plain glass.

Or perhaps it was related to the first time I had a needle plunged into my eye:

Anyway, I lived this way my entire life, using glasses with one lens, using a single contact lens in my left eye, at first one of those horrible things made from hard plastic, later the more comfortable soft lens. I even made myself a monocle for fun from an old pair of round glasses. But if that left eye was my challenge, it was also my gift. It could focus like a macro camera lens, allowing me to get close enough to tiny objects that I could see things most people could not. My right eye could see into the distance with perfect clarity and my left eye could see up very close with perfect clarity. I was the go-to expert for removing splinters, able to put my eye inches away and still focus on the tiniest sliver.

Then one day walking across the yard at night a small branch stuck into my left eye. The next day, looking in the mirror, I realized I could not see up close the way I always had before. Had the branch done that? I made an appointment with the eye doctor who told me my blood pressure was sky-high and that I had had what he described as a tiny stroke in the back of my left eye. “A retinal vein occlusion.”

This is the seventh time I have had a needle plunged into my eyeball. The first three times the doc used a chemical costing two thousand dollars per shot. He used this expensive chemical several times, each time the damage to my retina clearing a little only to re-assert again a few weeks later. A decision was then made to switch to a less expensive steroid which might prove more effective but that predictably would cause a cataract to form. The hope was that the damage caused by the retinal vein occlusion could be healed by the steroid and then cataract surgery would restore normal vision. This is the first shot I’ve gotten after the cataract surgery, so the needle can’t be plunged directly in as usual, but must go in from the side. Thus, his difficulty aiming the needle.

This time the damage that had been ameliorated every few weeks was not ameliorated. This time the vision in my left eye remained distorted, this time I am told, there is nothing more to be done, the damage to my vision is permanent. I will always see a distortion, “it’s the same distortion Giacometti likely saw,” the retinal specialist says, knowing I am an artist. Images elongated up and down, squished left and right. A distortion severe enough to prevent anything directly in front of my left eye from being seen clearly, like Vaseline on the lens, or a generative AI distortion.

The job of an artist is to see the world differently than other people see it. Or: a person becomes an artist because he sees the world differently than other people. Years ago, peering into a fritzed out fluorescent light fixture with my friend Carrie looking on, I read aloud something written on the ballast in pencil, probably by the previous owner of my house, that explained the problem.

Frowning at me, looking closely at the ballast, she said, “How can you see that? I see nothing,” and then, in her extraordinary way of seeing the world – through the metaphorical eye of a novelist, she said, quietly, almost to herself, “What does that say about you?” At one time it said I could literally see things other people could not see; that I had a magical eye. Now, it is merely a metaphor. Worse. Now it means the organ thought to be most critical to an artist does not function as it should. Now it means I must imagine a new way to see the world.

No matter. I’ve long since begun imagining a new way of being an artist.

This piece, made from fifty red shirts sourced from thrift stores, is to be experienced from the inside as well as the outside. It is entered by opening the buttons of one of the shirts on the front. Similar in size to The Metaphorical House, and created soon after it, the title calls it up by referring back to the Taíno people, the indigenous people of Haiti and Hispaniola.

A few weeks after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince in 2010, I was invited to make an artwork that used, as its point of departure, an artwork of my choosing from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. For several years, I had explored issues of home and habitation in my sculpture, drawing heavily on vernacular builders from around the world. The earthquake and its devastation were fresh in my mind when I explored the museum’s collection, so it is not surprising I was struck by a modest painting called Family Portrait by Robert Gwathmey. Set in Gwathmey’s rural south, the painting depicts an extended family of African Americans gathered on the porch of a simple house with a low-pitched, gable roof. This scene could have been painted in rural Haiti in 2010. The house is remarkably similar in size, shape, materials, and vintage to houses currently in use in the Caribbean.

The sculpture I built refers to Gwathmey’s house and by extension, those Caribbean houses, the pitch of the roof, the diminutive size, the simplicity. And it holds in mind the natural disaster that killed 200,000 people and left a million and a half homeless. The sculpture could actually be deployed as a functional 72-square-foot house that would shelter a family far better than a tent, would withstand high wind and seismic activity, and would still be useful fifty years from now. For that reason, its sale price of $50,000 included a commitment to manufacture and ship ten copies to Haiti.

In contrast to the make-do aesthetic of much of the housing in Haiti, I built the sculpture using a high-tech building panel to posit an alternative method of building that would be less prone to earthquake or hurricane. This is a building method I had already been exploring with the purpose of creating affordable houses by borrowing from the idea of the sculpture multiple: one design, multiple copies. I used this exhibition as a way to get to know the building panels; to give the idea a test run before trying something a bit larger. For the cost of a tent and a “transitional” house provided by FEMA or the Red Cross, something like this would be small, but safe, secure and permanent, and it could be added to later in the manner of “casitas” the world over. Sheila and my daughter Margot, then sixteen, assembled this little house on our deck in about two hours using only a battery-powered screw gun. I rebuilt it in five hours on un-level ground in Richmond with the help of two college interns.

A year after the earthquake struck Haiti, a million and a half people were still homeless. Less than 5,000 transitional houses and virtually no permanent dwellings had been put in place. There are many reasons for this, but principally it boils down to logistics and land ownership. Ownership of land has been at issue for many years in Haiti, dating back to the slave rebellion that created the independent nation. This was made far worse by the earthquake, so finding a place to put permanent housing presents a big problem. Another problem was millions of tons of rubble that buried Port-au-Prince. Before the roads and bridges can be made passable, the rubble must be cleared. These are some of the issues I grappled with as I thought about immediate needs and then what would be needed in coming years.

The artwork was met with radio silence ­­––unreviewed and unmentioned––from the media and the art world, so I decided to hire someone to write a review to accompany the artwork in its next exhibition venue in Charlottesville, VA. I chose Bascomb Letelier, a young filmmaker and the principal character in my unpublished novel, The Marketplace of the Dead. Here is what Bascomb wrote. I encourage you to follow him slowly, referring back to the images above.

Craig Pleasants’s Metaphorical House

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, in order to remain intellectually relevant, some artists have staked out ever tinier and more obscure back-channels of philosophical discourse and others have given in to the cynical production of luxury goods for the super-rich. Craig Pleasants has chosen another path, mostly untrodden, especially in the developed world. By temperament, Pleasants is inclined more towards poetry than philosophy. In aesthetics, he is less inclined toward the glitz and sheen of the market and more toward the make-shift, the hand-made, the object that has slowly accumulated the glow of grime Jun’ichiro Tanizaki writes about in his landmark In Praise of Shadows.

Pleasants’s sculptural objects have seemed to appear organically, sometimes almost without the artist’s intervention, certainly without the fussiness of aesthetic choice. As early as 1989, Bill Arning, then curator of White Columns, wrote, “A small patch of floor covering, irregular in shape, its design faux-elegant and its colors faded from time and use, would seem to be the least likely of materials to allow for rich layers of interpretation. Craig Pleasants’s work is based on just such refuse, and through a remarkable series of barely perceptible interventions he creates a unique and quite beautiful body of work.”

This attitude has been maintained over many years through the use of materials that have come to the artist’s hand; used broomsticks, cast-off lumber, steel bed frames, old shoe boxes, all of which have been used to create objects and structures poised as delicately between sculpture and architecture as they are between poetry and politics. Seedbed, a house-sized sculpture made from stacked, baled grasses planted with marigolds, points to the brilliance of the home-grown building material invented by nineteenth century American prairie dwellers while slyly tweaking the brilliant absurdity of a seminal Vito Acconci performance. The Gypsy posits discarded cigarette cartons from a Gitane factory in Marseilles as viable shelter, and the resulting sculpture is as carefully proportioned as a Japanese teahouse.

At first glance The Metaphorical House (OLU 2.0) would seem to contradict this attitude. The artwork could be described as a very small house - it is literally a nine-foot diameter octagonal structure. It might just as well be described as a three-dimensional history painting sixty-four feet long and nine feet high. The reductive elegance is still present, as is the frank use of an available material, but the material is now steel and polystyrene - purchased and not found. They are high-tech building panels, lightweight, durable, structural and insulative all in one. The artwork, then, proposes an alternative method of building that would be less prone to damage by earthquake or hurricane, providing safe and permanent housing that is quickly and easily assembled by unskilled workers.

While the construction of the piece is handled in the matter-of-fact way of Pleasants’s earlier work, the surface has now been painted -unheard of in past work- and, in fact, seems almost decorative. Circling the problem of housing and homelessness once again, this time as it relates to the devastation of the earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince in early 2010, he uses the street maps of that city and of Leogane, the actual epicenter, overlaying those with unvarnished factual information about collapsed buildings along those streets. Collapsed buildings are indicated by simple red circles, evoking an old-fashioned magnifying glass or a spyglass. The paint handling of this information and of the larger red circles representing the human destruction is loose and chaotic, sculptural rather than painterly.

Tracing along a road that turns out to be a major route out of Leogane toward Port-au-Prince, one bends around the octagon toward one of the three doorways leading into the structure. Alongside the doorway, one finds the only blue line on the painting -a river, one must assume- and the only letters, written in pencil. This tiny notation is the key that unlocks the multiple meanings of the piece: the longitudinal notation of 72 degrees 35 feet NW, and the name of a tiny village, St, Mesmin, situated near the river. Pleasants has suggested that hamlets close enough to Port-au-Prince to be reached by those fleeing the devastation may serve as a place to begin to rebuild. St. Mesmin is one such place.

Passing through the doorway at St. Mesmin into the house, one enters an entirely new world, the world of pure potential, the possibility of a renewed Haiti. Inside, the colors are dreamy and light, the paint handling, though still simple house paint, more refined and serene. Using a visual language that evokes Japanese wood block prints, Pleasants now calls up basic human necessities: food, fuel, shelter, and suggests ways those needs could be fulfilled. On one wall is depicted the edible leaves and pods of the moringa tree, on another the fuel-producing seed pods of the jatropha tree, the two “miracle trees” of Haiti. There are figs, there is bamboo, and there are small octagonal living units, which is where the overarching concept of this comprehensive artwork is headed. More than anything else, The Metaphorical House should be read as a piece of conceptual art that pushes the boundaries of conceptualism right past the engagement of ideas and into the realm of direct social impact upon those ideas. Pleasants proposes the sale of this artwork will finance the manufacture and delivery of ten similar houses to Koneksyon Ayiti, a Haitian non-profit that partners with The Haitian Sustainable Development Foundation. Koneksyon Ayiti will provide the houses to single women in Jeremie, the “city of poets” north of Port-au-Prince.

The Metaphorical House offers three doorways into and out of its edifice. Entering the structure, the portals could represent simply the three basic necessities of life: food, shelter, fuel. They could also be metaphorical entry points to a different world in the way St. Mesmin might be the threshold to a renewed Haiti. But once inside the dreamy blue-sky world of potential, we realize there are now three portals leading back out. Toward what? Should we consider them in the context of the realities of Haiti? Given the title of the piece, Pleasants seems to acknowledge how little impact his project could have on a problem of near-biblical proportions. Perhaps instead, we should return to the larger idea of how art engages the world. In several projects over the last twenty years, Pleasants has asked himself and his audiences not only to bear witness to a problem, not only to recognize its impact on human lives, but to take concrete action to ameliorate the problem. As acknowledged in his titles, (Warning: Not a Lifesaving Device; The Metaphorical House) the impact of these actions on the problem itself is inconsequential. The impact on the person who undertakes the action, however, can be considerable; it can be a doorway to another world.

Four years after this show I quit my job at VCCA and used these building panels and the same principles to found Sculptorhouse, LLC, a company dedicated to re-imagining housing to make it more affordable, more sustainable, and more beautiful. Sculptorhouse sells two kit homes: the 450 square-foot octagonal living unit OLU 3.1 and a 570 square-foot OLU 3.5. A three-person crew can assemble our kits in three to four weeks. Heating and cooling costs are less than $150 per year in a climate that spans zero degrees to 100 degrees. The story of that venture must be told elsewhere.

Among the adventurous artists I had met at Black Mountain College in 1989 was Greg Edmondson, a lanky fellow with a deep voice and great command of the physical materials he used to make sculpture. We stayed in touch over the years and in the mid-90s he had come to VCCA for a residency and then, in 2005 he wrote to invite me to participate in an ambitious show of landscape sculpture he was organizing at the Thomas Jefferson School, the prep school in St. Louis that had hired him as artist-in-residence. The school would fly me to St. Louis, he said, there would be a catalog, there might even be some financial support. The series of exhibitions he envisioned was to be called Erga Topika (Works on Site). This was to be the first one.

The war in Iraq was raging. Thousands of civilians had been killed there and I had been deeply moved seeing some of the survivors, in a truly pathetic attempt at marking the graves of their loved ones, using scraps of wood or tin scavenged from a bomb site or a destroyed home. Taking that moment of pathos as a starting point, I gathered scraps of rough wood myself, painted them white and packaged them up to be sent to the Headmaster of the school. In the same way I had imagined the tenth-anniversary Upstairs exhibition –– the works being created from only a set of instructions from the artist­­–– I used that idea for my own work for this exhibition as you see in the catalog description below.

On the first day of classes, I sent to Mr. William Rowe, Head of Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, eighty-eight blank grave markers, one for each student at Thomas Jefferson School, plus one for artist-in-residence Greg Edmondson and one for myself. These markers were distributed to each student by the Head of School and the artist-in-residence.

The students, aged 14 - 18, were asked to find the name of an Iraqi civilian who had been killed during the fighting of the previous three years and write that person’s name on the grave marker. If possible, students should select someone of about his or her own age and gender, and someone whose name began with the same letter as his or her own name.

The TJS participant was told that he or she could inscribe anything else on the grave marker that felt fitting. Each person at TJS was then to plant his or her grave marker within a pre-selected eighty-eight-foot diameter circle on the grounds of Thomas Jefferson School some time before October 7, 2005.

By selecting a visible spot on the campus of Thomas Jefferson School, and using an eighty-eight foot circle, I prescribed both the size of the overall piece and the density of the markers. One marker per foot of circumference yielded spacing of approximately six foot intervals –that of a human body. By producing markers of a single color and a limited range of sizes and shapes, and by allowing students to place the markers as they saw fit, I incorporated the rhythm and repetition of similarity as well as the beauty and power of randomness. On several of the markers, including the one I myself produced, I inscribed the Arabic word “Beloved” in black India ink.

The resulting installation is pictured above. Again the question arises, what is the artwork here? Is it the one marker the artist made or is it the event the artist set in motion? Is it the individual marks made by each person or the installation of markers set in the ground that this small group of people joined together to make. Or, could it be simply the individual moments experienced by the teenagers as they searched the internet for names or searched themselves for their own feelings about the deceased young stranger they discovered?

What difference does it make? How does it make you feel? As Duchamp said, the artwork is not complete until it has been experienced by an observer who ultimately assigns meaning.

I never went back to Saint Louis to retrieve the work. Does it still exist? . . . where might it now reside? Only on these pages? The memory of a few 35-year-olds from Saint Louis? Does an artwork that resides only in human consciousness actually exist? Asking for a friend.

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The folks who are paid to tell you how to cook want you to think this classic mid-winter dish from southwest France is a multi-step two-day affair that only pros undertake. Bah! It’s peasant food and the proper way to do it is like any good peasant, off-the-cuff with what you have at hand. I’ve made it a dozen times and each time I make it easier and it never fails to be as delicious as it was when I did it the hard way.

Cassoulet was created by folks who didn’t have lots of money but knew how to make a dollar holler, as we say. You use what is leftover, what’s inexpensive, what overwinters well, and then add enough fat to keep you warm all night. Traditionally it uses white beans, garlic sausage, and duck confit, stale baguette and the reserved duck fat from any fowl you have rendered. But it is also very forgiving and my version is adapted from the know-it-all paid chefs at NY Times Cooking and an old French recipe book called La Cuisine Familiale, given to Sheila by Madam Philippon, a wonderful cook herself, when Sheila was just out of college and teaching in Orléans. The paid chefs will say you must use Tarbais beans, because that’s the bean local to SW France, but ignore them. I use whatever white beans I have on hand: cannelli, Great Northern, navy, or if you are feeling adventurous like I was this time, you can try what I call Carolina Cassoulet and use dried baby limas. Superb.

Ingredients:

1 pound dried white beans

1 onion

6-8 cloves garlic

2 carrots

1 stalk of celery

4 - 6 chicken legs

some kielbasa (optional)

1/4+ cup duck fat (substitute chicken fat and/or bacon drippings, or if you must EVOO)

1 cup bread crumps from an old baguette (or use panko)

spices: quatre-epice (white pepper, ginger, nutmeg, cloves -or use allspice), paprika, black pepper, salt

fresh parsley

1/4 cup tomato paste

1/2 cup white wine

chicken broth

Preparation:

Soak beans overnight or use the quick method by pouring boiling water over them and letting them soak an hour. Pour off soaking water and cover with chicken broth a couple inches above the beans. Add two whole garlic cloves, chopped parsley and celery and cook until beans are almost tender.

Meanwhile, rub the chicken pieces with the spices and salt, roast for one hour at 400, pour off the fat (save for later use) and use some white wine to scrape up the browned bits, which you add to the beans.

In a little duck fat, sauté onion, roughly chopped carrots and the kielbasa if using it, adding the remaining whole garlic cloves for the last minute. Deglaze pan with a little wine, let it cook down a minute, then add the tomato paste, stir and mix it all into the beans.

When the beans and chicken are cooked, put half the beans into a large crock or dutch oven, nestle in the chicken and sausage, then pour the remaining beans on top of that. There should be enough liquid to just cover the beans without submerging them.

Toast your old baguette, thoroughly crunch up a cup or more and cover the beans completely. Pour a generous 1/4 cup of melted duck fat over the bread crumbs and put into the oven, uncovered, at 400. Open a bottle of Bordeaux and sit back until it is all until nice and brown, an hour or so.

Traditionally, folks let the top get cooked, break it and let bean juice seep out onto the crumbs, then bake it some more. You want a nice brown crust and plenty of cooking time so the meat falls completely off the bone, the top has the visual appeal of an abstract painting, and the contents nourish you physically and spiritually in the long winter of your night.

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The installation views above and the two below are from a solo exhibition called SALVAGE that I mounted in the big Soho-like gallery at Riverviews after I had left the board. Almost everything in the show was built from materials that originated in this same building.

You’ll notice that three of these pieces can be experienced from outside as well as inside, Dodecahedron, only by lying on your back and sliding into the slot visible on the far side. That gesture allows a viewer unprecedented control over how they experience the piece (stand in front and admire or get inside and become part of the art - and be admired yourself) and also challenges a tenet that art not be “useable,” a challenge I will push to its logical conclusion in years to come.

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CARBON AND OXYGEN

In 1981 Craig Pleasants and his wife Sheila Gulley Pleasants built their own house in a clearing near the small South Carolina town of Campobello. Made of salvaged wood from plans scratched on a napkin, the house measured twenty feet across and had eight sides, “as a reaction,” Craig recalls, “against rectangles.” Equal parts Fullerian dymaxion house, and shack, Sheila’s brother named the structure the Octagonal Living Unit or O.L.U.

Pleasants and his wife lived in the O.L.U. for three years, and continue to use it as a summer house for their family of five. “The funny thing is though,” Pleasants wrote me recently, “l don’t really think of it quite qualifying as a house.” Set down hard by “real houses,” the O.L.U. is a real-life example of low-cost building, and a three dimensional argument for the democratization of housing in our nation. On another level, it is also Pleasants’s first large-scale sculpture on the subject of what as human beings is our most fundamental need as well as our most basic right-- a place to live.

In the nineteen years since the O.L.U. was begun, Pleasants has continued to explore the subject of house and home by constructing simple structures out of straw, bamboo, clay, jute, and in one exquisite gesture, marigolds rooted in topsoil atop stacked bales of grass. Whether sited on a hillside in New York State or installed in a museum in France, these pieces do not quite qualify as houses either, but embody, with humility and grace, the more complex metaphor of what we understand as home. Whereas shelter can be understood to imply a barrier against the harshness of natural phenomena, as these structures made by hand show us, for Pleasants, home is at once a safe and private environment, and a world in which the organic and the human are in harmony.

This idea of home, in the sense of dwelling and also in the larger sense of a place in the world, mirrors a peculiarly American notion of a democracy that is less theoretical than concrete. “Democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency,” wrote the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, “but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature.” l Pleasants’s works embody this notion of democracy as an active dynamic that we continually reshape in accordance with our environment. They exemplify the idea that to be at home in the world is to work with, amongst, and for our neighbors and our natural surroundings.

Pleasants’s structures have often incorporated the polyhedral format of the O.L.U. which results in spaces more round than square, capped by dome-shaped roofs. The use of the dome as a recurring motif, outside, on, and inside the gallery space relates directly to the notion of home as a place that we construct for ourselves to dwell, and also as a place from whence we came, and where we, as a community belong together. First and foremost, the dome is humankind’s model of the heavens above from which our Gods have traditionally looked down upon us. Since ancient Rome, the domed roof has connoted power and the omnipotence of religious or civic control, and thus has been the universal architectural detail of choice for public and religious buildings. As reinterpreted by neoclassical architects from Brunelleschi to Jefferson, the dome continued to serve as a metaphor for the celestial roof but one that specifically sheltered the human community, and thus symbolized the populace and their political and social unity. 2

Pleasants’s processional from a soapstone-lined inverted hemisphere sunk into the ground, to an igloo-shaped structure constructed out of a stack of salvaged planks, maps out an evolution of the dome from a naturally occurring symbol of the ideal of the democratic community, to a concrete embodiment of a place to live. The almost fifteen-foot bowl scooped out of the earth is lined with soapstone, and is called Oculus after the circular hole at the apex of a dome through which light beams like the burning eye of God. In this case however, it is not the heavens that we see when we look through, but the earth. Flipped so that we look down, rather than up into it, it is a mirror image of the celestial bowl above.

In the gallery space the dome appears four more times: as a thin blue outline of the oculus that has been drawn on the wall, as fragmented white arcs on carbon paper panels--the ghost image of the oculus shape on the opposite wall, as a delicate hoop of grass suspended from the ceiling, and then, as a human scaled structure made of charred wood. Although we have only been given its barest outlines, when we enter the gallery and stand under the grass hoop, we feel as if we have entered a domed space in all of its public grandeur. True to the double significance of the dome-shape, under the larger dome is a smaller, more private one made of sticks. Called Dodecahedron, we immediately recognize this modest, vulnerable structure as a house. More important though, we also recognize it, tucked under the civic and above that, the heavenly dome as home, or at least its promise.

In a passionate argument for social action to supersede academic nattering, the philosopher Richard Rorty has written “You cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become as well as in terms of what you know it to be now.”3 “The country of one’s dreams,” concludes Rorty, “must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands.”4 Almost twenty years ago Craig Pleasants began to dream of a country if not a world in which all could be housed and everyone could be at home. We can feel fortunate that he is still hard at work building it, dwelling by dwelling.

Laura Hoptman, April 1999

l. John Dewey as quoted in Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country, Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. (1988. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), p. 18.

2. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. London 1996) p. 78.

3. Rorty, p. 101

4. Rorty, p. 102

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if you are looking at this video on your phone, don’t bother. If you are on a computer screen, please click the square in the lower right to expand to full-screen.

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I am gonna open a door here and many of you will not want to go through that door with me. Those of you who have been along for this ride for many months will know that we’ve been following a more-or-less chronological path and as with any route, any exploration, there will always be the side track, the little road you could go down just to see what’s there, telling yourself that you can always come back to where you got off the main road, retrace your steps and pick up where you left off. But I have not offered those doors very often here. We all know the appeal of those little side trips, the possibility they present for enrichment, for discovering something unexpected, but they also distract from the main arc, The Story, as it were, the one your editor advises you to stick with so as not to lose your readers.

So this is not for everyone. But for those of you who are intrepid, I invite you to come along on a little diversion. It begins about where we are in the story, and I stumbled on it myself thanks to this ongoing memoir-type project I’m embarked on, stumbled on it by simply picking up one of my sketchbooks to check something, at which point I discovered that for this particular year, let’s say late 1998 to early 2000, I had filled four 100 page sketchbooks! Here’s why:

During that period I was working on major shows or commissions at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the VCCA, the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, and Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, and I was doing proposals for an outdoor sculpture festival in Poland, a competition in Richmond, and a new park being developed in Amherst County. (Somehow I also drove with Sheila and our three girls from Virginia to San Francisco in late June)

What I discovered in those sketchbooks was kinda unbelievable to me. I was developing ideas for artworks at a pace I can’t now imagine. I selected 145 of those sketchbook pages, took photos of them and downloaded them to my computer. For me, it is an enlightening peek into the artistic process; first and crucially, the permission to let oneself have dumb ideas, but then, what do you throw out, what gets another look, what gets an iteration or two, or three, and what artworks actually come out the other side. From these 100-plus ideas, I ended up making six or seven artworks. If you were to look closely at them all, you’d see the genesis of those few pieces, see how they changed as they got developed. I can’t put them all here, (“your post is nearing its length limit”) so I’ll look just at the commission for the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News.

For a few years, I had been fascinated with the indigenous people of Virginia from pre-contact, what is called the Eastern Woodland culture. The Mattaponi and the Pamunkey and the Chickahominy people, who lived along those rivers that flowed into the York and the James and created the peninsula at Newport News, created ingenious mechanisms for survival, including their woven huts and their woven fishing weirs. Beautiful objects I wanted to draw on and pay homage to.

so . . . I thought about wire, woven wire, basket forms,

But I was also doing research for the show at the NCMA that was going to run at the same time as a big show of the work of Auguste Rodin, so I was looking deeply at him.

The human body - moving architecture. Nice. I looked at art history for guidance about the human body and the ways in which its proportions draw the eye and the psyche

the other Auguste–the ethereal Ingres, and then Il Divino himself, Michelangelo . . .

the beautiful drawings for the Lybian Sybil

and the iconic David, looking at M.B.’s use of the golden mean

and finally from their real source, the living, breathing torso of a twenty-year-old co-worker - the moving architecture of the human body. And then I realized that in tidewater Virginia I would have ready access to the wonderful structural material of bamboo. I combined that with the method of building wooden curves I had learned from the Clemson architectural research and ended up with the piece you see in the drawing below and the headline image above.

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Two days later. Sheila came inside and said “there is a really strange and scary animal sound coming from the woods below the orchard.”

Broad daylight.

Stepping through the front door, I heard a distinct high-pitched scream; a hint of tremor in the back of the throat like a woman in deep distress. Very close, one scream separated from the next by only ten or fifteen seconds. I felt my hackles rise but also felt myself pulled, tromping down between the fruit trees. A faint whiff of peach blossoms brought me back to myself and I went back up to my studio and grabbed a heavy walking stick. I didn’t want to encounter something more agile than me with sharper claws and teeth, particularly if it happened to be rabid. The sound was more feline than canine, so my first thought was bob-cat but red fox was there, too. No matter, I wanted to see it, even if it put me at risk.

Sheila grabbed a walking stick too and by the time she got to the orchard I was already into the woods. On the far side of a stream separating our properties, our neighbor, Becky Vail, who has boarded horses for thirty years on a hard-scrabble farm next door called out.

“I never heard anything like it in my life.” She and someone else were also compelled toward this sound, but, bumbling humans, we always make too much noise and whatever was making the sound evidently heard us. The sound stopped.

I stopped. Paused another moment, then moved deliberately, placing each foot to avoid a cracking stick, toward where I’d last heard the sound and suddenly it came again, twice, farther into the woods. Afraid it would get ahead of me, I stumbled through the underbrush toward it and again it stopped. I pushed on, darting glances back and forth, imagining something big lying in wait to ambush me from behind the next big oak.

Then nothing. The sound did not come back. I pushed through low branches just beginning to bud out and came upon the path we use often on our walks through the woods. Moving down this path a few strides I looked down and saw two fresh, shiny animal turds, two inches long, as thick as an old magic marker, one on top of the other. I bent over, looking carefully for signs of timing. I leaned in and sniffed. Nothing but the sweet smell of moist earth. I grabbed a stick from the forest floor and poked to see how long it had been there. It gave. I decided not to pry it apart, but this called to mind another encounter from a week earlier; another turd, this one on the edge of my driveway beside my mailbox.

That scat was drier, obviously placed days before and extraordinary to see. So filled with hair, it appeared to be only hair. Twisted and smoothed all in the same direction like a forty-dollar sable brush, but the color, because of its age, its level of desiccation, or the animal that had been eaten, was gray. This turd was larger and a little thicker than the one in the woods, but the important thing about both was the placement. This was the tell. Fox.

As often as they can, foxes drop their turds where they can be seen… in the middle of a path, on the edge of a driveway, beside a mailbox, in the middle of the road. Perhaps foxes are aware that they themselves are one of nature’s beauties, proud of what their bodies create. Apparently, they want these objects to be seen and admired; a distillation of their consumption, bits of rodent hair, undigested seeds; an amalgam of the life they have led for the previous days. Yes, territorial marking, but also something more. Slow down, take a breath, and you can see not just a beautiful object, filled with carefully smoothed hair, dotted with burnt umber seeds as if from an oversized apple, but also the fruit this animal ate and digested and even the blossom that preceded the fruit; the sleek gray fur of the squirrel or the rabbit is visible, but look again and see the fresh green growth that nourished the rabbit and the sun and soil and water that created that green growth. Before long, it will all be soil again.

Is this a gift to the world or is it pathological narcissism on the part of the fox?

Looking back over a lifetime of making art, it is easy to accuse oneself of narcissism or frivolity, especially if you number yourself among the thousands who have seriously pursued an art form but have never achieved the stardom necessary to create the financial rewards that, in our society, signal that one is successful and respected. Have I have frittered away fifty years by pursuing the life of an artist or could I see it another way: the hundreds of sculptures or paintings I’ve left on the trail are not my real body of work. The real body of work is everything that went into making those leavings: the experiences, the relationships, the struggles, the failures, the community activism. The objects are merely what cannot be used, the waste product. Yes, the artworks have been created in the service of an idea or an ideal, but maybe it isn’t the idea that’s pre-eminent, maybe it’s the exploration, the transformation, the life lived in a liminal state. The real work of the artist, then, can never be experienced, even by the artist himself unless that artist or someone else familiar with the artist’s life offers it up complete, as it were. And even if such an offering were put forward––as a memoir, say––it, too, becomes yet another dropping, just a much longer one.

Gnothi seautón, says the Oracle at Delphi.

In the summer of 2000, I phoned a sawmill outside Raleigh and asked them to mill three hundred poplar 2 by 4s, ten feet long, and deliver them to the NC Museum of Art. A few days later I drove down to Raleigh and with a propane-powered flame-thrower that sounded like a jet engine, I stood in the hot July sun burning them so black that each piece of lumber became deeply crazed and shiny like the skeletal remains of a burned house or the post of a tree after a raging forest fire. It took two eight hour days. Then I loaded them into the back of my primer-gray Chevy S10 van, hauled them to the front of the museum and set them on leveled stones at the crest of a berm; board upon board like a log cabin until I had a cube 10 x 10 x 10. The smell of creosote was strong from twenty feet away and, viewed from there, tilting one’s head back and forth, a kind of see-through moiré pattern shimmered.

On top of this cube, I placed a layer of burned 2 x 4s on edge, side by side, to create a ceiling – or a floor for the next level – and on that floor I constructed the second level of 2 x 4s, this time oriented vertically in a slimmer cube about six feet tall. On top of everything I put a hip roof to evoke the guard towers surrounding the perimeter of the museum, which weirdly, shared grounds with a former youth prison. But contradicting the prison image, the black roof of my structure had slightly turned up corners like the roof of a pagoda meant to ward off evil spirits or express heightened awareness.

So here’s the question: is this the artwork? The faux guard tower with the subtle pagoda roof? Look again and you see the tower is placed in a bed of 10,000 multicolored marigolds in full bloom grown from seeds I collected from an earlier artwork called Seedbed. The smell of the flowers amplifies and complicates the creosote. But wait. Walk away from this tower and the marigolds and you come upon five imposing brick prison towers that are now also black because I have gotten approval from the NC Museum to paint them, coopting the entire Museum grounds and the grounds it shares with a former youth prison into the artwork. This is a very elaborate piece, but it is only one artwork in a group exhibition titled Interiors.

Coincidentally, my artwork, called Et in Arcadia Ego is on view at the same time as a major exhibition of the works of Auguste Rodin, one of the most celebrated and influential sculptors of the last hundred years. The NC Museum of Art is filled with shiny bronze creations by Rodin, many retaining traces of hand-worked clay that seem to intentionally conjure the visceral workings of the human body. Which of these, The Thinker or Et in Arcadia Ego speaks more forcefully to the person visiting the museum, say the visitor from somewhere east of Fuquay Varina?

If you embrace Marcia Tucker’s dictum that art is like a church picnic, each person brings something different to it and ultimately, each person consumes the thing he or she brought, then coming to the NCMA with enough knowledge to correctly identify The Thinker as a famous sculpture, a casual viewer might go away saying to himself, “I have just seen a famous sculpture,” or perhaps, “it’s much bigger than I thought it would be,” or even, “what is he thinking about, why is he so roughly constructed, and what is that random chunk of bronze on his head? Is that supposed to be a turd?” Whereas a casual viewer seeing the faux prison tower on the hill that obscures the parking lot might say, “what the fuck is that?” and that might be the end of it. Unless they wonder about the marigolds, or push on around the grounds of the museum and recognize the other black towers and begin to construct in their own minds the fuller elaborate piece that is Et in Arcadia Ego, even asking themselves, “Why did he give it a title often used in seventeenth-century paintings?”

It is also possible someone might experience Et in Arcadia Ego simply corporally, as bodily sensation. The imposing size, eighteen feet tall, its exposed interior perfectly scaled to hold a single human body with arms spread like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, yet barring the possibility of entry; the expanse of brightly colored flowers extending beyond peripheral vision and evoking for some, The Day of the Dead. The smells of fire and flower might eclipse the intellectual processes in the same way the intellectual musings about The Thinker are eclipsed by the imposing mass of muscled bronze.

One hundred years on, The Thinker is still present, as are the other visceral squeezings Rodin had cast in bronze, but after a few months, Et in Arcadia Ego becomes a distant dream and one of the most ambitious and most viewed of my artworks has faded into oblivion like a dried turd and exists only here on these pages. I admit the artwork, like much of my work, was intended to be temporary, ephemeral even, but absent a physical presence, absent an ongoing emotional or intellectual response from other humans, does the work cease to exist? Does the smell of marigolds mixed with charred wood remain in anyone’s consciousness? Does the shiny, crazed blackness carry long-term anxiety for anyone?

Beyond that, what about the massive amount of work never exhibited, never seen? Long-term, has this lifetime of work affected anyone other than the person who created it? Does every artist ask this excruciating question? It’s a problem I ponder as I struggle with an ambitious multi-platform piece, with the working title The Autobiography of Paradox. Is it possible for me to sufficiently resurrect Arcadia here so you might smell the peppery marigolds, the deep char of the burned poplar? Lie down on this floral carpet and let the weight of your body crush the flowers and release the familiar aroma. Pass your fingers along a burned plank. Are your fingertips now black? Rub your thumb against your first two fingers beneath your nose and breathe in… camp fire? forest fire? house fire? The smudge remains on your fingers like an ache that can’t be quenched. Wipe it on your trousers and move off down the slope; soon it will all be soil again.

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As we gather with family and friends to close out the year, here are a few photos to make you think of a warmer season. Another architectural sculpture that made use of the polyhedron and the gothic arch, with this piece I also stepped across a line, challenged a notion long held in the art world: that art must have no purpose but its own existence. It is the way the art world held the world of craft at arm’s length, the way it still wants to assert some vaguely defined higher value. Up until now, my architectural sculptures were closed off, permitted no entry; they were only objects of contemplation. Yes, a viewer might place herself inside through the use of her imagination, but these objects could not otherwise be put to use. With this one, though, with the simple addition of an arched doorway, I changed all that. I flipped a little bird at the art world and said, “welcome in.”

Similar to Exclusive commissioned by St. Anne’s Belfield school in Charlottesville that you saw last week, but even larger and now for the first time, habitable. It is an idea I had explored seventeen years earlier when I made the Octagonal Living Unit, but one I had not followed up on since that time. But it is an idea I will continue to explore in the ensuing years. Can an object meant to be used also attain the status of art? Yes, it can be beautiful, but that is not enough. An object that is merely beautiful is not necessarily an art object. What tips it over into the other realm?

Eleanor collecting seeds to be planted the following year.

This piece lasted several years at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. After morning glories, it was covered with Jefferson beans, also known as hyacinth beans, which could well be the magic beans that Jack planted. A few years later it was renamed Arbor and covered with climbing roses, as seen below. It was a sweet place for a dinner party or a quiet retreat, its usefulness understated but also unequivocal.

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In honor of that, I offer you a dish to prepare when you want to throw money around like an artist. The ingredients are expensive, but oh so worth it. You have never tasted anything like it.

The story goes that André Daguin, the chef and owner of the Hotel de France in the Gascon village of Auch, an hour south of VCCA’s outpost in Auvillar, hated throwing away the breasts of the Moulard duck he raised to make the signature and ancient Gascon dish, foie gras. One day in 1959, he decided to grill a couple of them like a steak. These breasts have a very thick layer of fat because of the rich diet needed for foie gras and M. Daguin rendered that fat slowly in a cast iron skillet and served the breast very rare, like a good steak. Soon the novelist Bob Daley stopped in, tried one and was transported, wrote it up in the New York Times and and voila! Magret de Canard, the new signature dish of Gascony was born! The real story is not so precious. Daguin tells Robert Daley that his grandfather made the dish in the nineteenth century and it probably goes back just as far as foie gras (references to which show up in fifth century BC) which, of course, is also not very precious, but, to be honest, is also a gastronomic delight.

I was introduced to magret de canard by Cheryl Fortier and John Alexander, who have been the heart and soul of VCCA France for more than a decade, so I will offer Cheryl’s recipe, but the method cannot be varied much and undoubtedly, this is very close to what André Daguin himself cooked for Robert Daley that fateful evening. Really, the only variation is what sauce you use to deglaze the pan.

You will need the breast of a Moulard duck, nothing else will do. They can be purchased online from D’Artagnan, a company begun by the daughter of M. Daguin. A few grocers, like Wegman’s, carry D’Artagnan. It’s the only source of true Moulard in the U.S., as far as I can tell.

Let the breast come to room temperature, place it fat side down on a cutting board and remove any white membrane by slipping a small sharp knife under it and carefully slicing it off. Trim a little of the fat along the edges by cutting at a slight angle.

Turn it over and cut a crisscross pattern through the fat, being careful not to cut into the meat. Season with salt and pepper.

Place the breast fat side down in a cold cast iron skillet and cook on medium heat until the fat has cooked off and is golden and crisp, pouring off the excess fat as you go and saving it for later use in your cassoulet (coming soon). This will take five to eight minutes. Do not burn the fat.

Flip the breast over and brown the top slightly. Do not overcook. (If you want to check the temp, it should be 125 to 130 degrees in the center, but Cheryl never does that, nor does anyone else in France.) Serve it “rosé” - rare to medium rare.

Remove and let it rest while you make the sauce.

Drain the remaining fat, leaving a tablespoon and the remaining brown bits. Sauté minced shallots in the pan until tender, pour a little orange marmalade, (or a slice and squeeze of an orange with a bit of honey) and sauté that for a minute, put a dash of balsamic and reduce.

Slice the breast, arrange it on a platter and drizzle the sauce over it. Sprinkle with chopped parsely and fleur de sel and serve with a good black wine from SW France like Brulhois or Fronton, if you can find one. Or Pauillac or Cahors, if not. Or anything with substantial percentage of Cabernet Franc. Cheryl serves her duck with a slaw made from carrot, fennel, and peppers in a warm orange dressing. Proportions? I ask. “Wing it!”

Bon appétit!

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Clemson University, South Carolina’s agricultural state school, adapted the strength of the pointed arch in the sixties to create a very cost-effective way of making a greenhouse. Each rib is made of a single two by four ripped into boards 1/2 inch x 1 1/2 and then bent in a jig and glued back together and then attached to a partner rib on the other side (see below). The addition of segments of square stock 2x2x6 every couple of feet significantly increased the structural strength. For the cost of ten 2 x 4s and some plastic sheeting, you could make a sizable greenhouse. Coming on the design as I researched alternative building methods was a revelation. I adapted their tunnel design to a polyhedron and used it in the creation of many architectural scale sculptures, including the one below.

The beauty and perfection of the form created by such an arch captivated me and I would return to it again and again over the course of my career. Clemson had also done some research into bamboo as a building material and found that pound for pound, its structural strength rivaled that of steel. They even used it to replace the steel in ferro-cement. I embraced bamboo as well.

I also embraced the dynamism of the multiple-segmented form. A hexagon, a pentagon, and of course, an octagon. The carbon paper ones shown here have never been seen, so I’m happy to give them one moment in the sun here on Substack.

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