Weisberg, Wingate and Wallace Stevens

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Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,  
And round it was, upon a hill.  
It made the slovenly wilderness  
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.  
The jar was round upon the ground  
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.  
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,  
Like nothing else in Tennessee.


 –Wallace Stevens
 

This poem, along with many great works of literature like Moby Dick and the plays of Shakespeare, is introduced to high school students well before they can be expected to grasp its profound meanings. It is a rare 15 year old who is ready to comprehend the ramifications of a jar in a Tennessee wilderness.

I remember puzzling over this image when I was that age. With time its portentous provocations have revealed themselves to me. The amazing thing, thank you Wallace Stevens, is that this elemental and unadorned image has astounding staying power. Once introduced, it will never depart.

There’s commentary galore about the many philosophical implications of this poem. That is not what brought it to mind however. Anecdote of the Jar also serves as an exemplar of how an object, no matter what size or form, can transform the environment around it. Something as simple as a jar, placed in a wild place, alters our sense of the jar, our sense of the landscape, our sense of ourselves and where we are situated in a multivalent reality.

Recently I had two visual art encounters with Stevensian jarness. Each is, in its own way, an example of how simple materials and a deft hand can alter the atmospheric zone around an installation. They are both lessons in large scale leveraging with the simplest of tools.

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DEBRA WEISBERG

HOLDING THE CENTER STILL: REDUX
Five Points Arts
Torrington CT

Debra Weisberg, a well known Boston sculptor, has laid claim to the gallery space at Five Points in Torrington Connecticut. With the unchecked energy of a life form on its own agenda, this installation first claims the floor and then climbs up the walls and columns.

Constructed by hand from paper, wire and the deconstructed fragments of prior embossed and printed works, Weisberg’s imagery feels organic and earthy. Suggestions of forms from nature come to mind, like ubiquitous underground mycelial networks, the intricacy of ocean foam, or the goosed up tangle of a spider’s web. Another phrase from Wallace Stevens seems apropos: “concupiscent curds.”

But there is also an otherworldly and imaginal quality in these Weisbergian artifacts. They could be alien lacework, peculiar life forms or a burning fire petrified into paper. There’s also a nod to the sorcery of the Macbethian heath–the frothy top of a witch’s brew fomenting from a fiery cauldron.

Full of layered references and connotations, Weisberg’s installation has transformed the gallery into a staging zone for a force field all its own. It has taken on its dominion, expanding out beyond the walls, in every direction.
 
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion” (Edgar Allan Poe)

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GEORGE WINGATE

YOU COME TOO
An Appreciation
An Installation
A Place
Residence, Wenham MA

Over the last few years, George Wingate has become an afficionado of art pop up-ism. (For images from his previous undertakings by year: 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016)

Wingate works with common objects and whatever is at hand. Then, like the Tennessee jar, it all takes on a gravitas of its own. One line drawn on the ground creates a fierce delineation of the space. One object, moved to a keystone spot, shifts the entire perception of a room.

Once again, Stevens has the best words:

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,  
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,  
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,  
As the night descended, tilting in the air,  
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,  
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

(Idea of Order at Key West)

The most recent Wingatian undertaking is a final homage to the landscape surrounding his former home in Wenham. The barn where he had his studio for many years is now being stripped back to its 19th century bones by the new owners. As a final gesture of gratitude for this Wenham wilderness, You Come Too offers a meditative connection between object and nature, between a mark made and none at all.

To quote yet another Stevens poem, this is engagement with “the beauty of inflections” and “the beauty of innuendos.”

Wingate’s adieu is a quiet and contemplative one. Even so, these minimalist markings still touch into Stevens’ “blessed rage for order.”

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,  
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,  
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,  
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

A blessed rage for order or a blessed rage for being released from the need? To be determined.