The sculpture of DAVID MOORE by Lydia Schrufer@Arts & Opinion

sculptor revealed

DAVID MOORE

by
LYDIA SCHRUFER

___________________

This summer I was privileged to visit the sculptor David Moore. David and his companion Jolanta, an installation artist, have transformed their bucolic setting in rural Quebec (Canada) into an oasis of creativity. The house overflows with artwork, books and music and is adjacent to a large, multi-purpose, old barn which serves as an exhibition space for visiting artists. A ground floor studio and the barn's cavernous loft feature David's large sculptures and another work space. It is always exciting for me to visit artist's studios, and in this case even more so, since I've admired and been moved by David's work for many years.

Viewing David's sculptures and the materials he works can induce at one extreme a cathartic response, and at the other, a contemplative response; sometimes collective memories are awoken. His sculptures speak to a certain unease and discomfort. One cannot remain unengaged when viewing David's installations.

I wanted to know how David became an artist and to explore what it is about his work and materials that have such a profound effect on the viewer. David proved to be both articulate and very forthcoming about his background and his philosophy of art-making. The following is more of a long conversation than a traditional interview. I resisted editing so as not to lose the nuances and insights that David has developed over many years of teaching , making art and thinking about what it means to be a fully engaged artist

LYDIA SCHRUFER: You've been creating art for a long time, would you tell me a bit about your career?

DAVID MOORE: I first had the thought that I would like to be an artist when I was quite young, I think about nine or ten, when I saw a reproduction of The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. I was trying to paint like Hals and not succeeding but it didn't seem to matter. I remember there was music playing and I was suddenly possessed by the very serious thought that I would always listen to music when I painted. It strikes me as quite ludicrous now except that it says something about how I really needed to create a parallel world very different from the conventional Irish middle-class milieu that I found myself in.

My father, a doctor, was severe, with lots of ideas about discipline. I was quite afraid of him and I think the whole household was. too. I don't ever remember being hugged or played with by him. My father was well-liked by his patients, a good man who just didn't know how to be a father. I was actually shocked how well-liked he was by the number of people who attended his funeral. It seemed so contrary to my impressions of him, yet he was my own father. I'm not a father now so I can hardly make a criticism but I think I didn't want to be a father. I was afraid of becoming like him.

Being born Protestant in an almost wholly Catholic country that practiced religion assiduously meant that we, as kids, were not supposed to mix with neighbouring kids. It was strange, lonely and incomprehensible to me. They seemed to have more fun and I guess my attraction to art was basically an attraction to the romantic world that their lives seemed to represent. I drew boxers, terrible caricature-like creatures with big unshaven chins and crew cuts giving each other black eyes and split lips. I would enjoy showing them proudly to genteel visitors sipping tea from Dresden china cups. They loved it and I thought it was a hoot.

Between the ages of fourteen and seixteen, I was supposed to think seriously about what my future would be. I couldn't think of anything that was considered serious: only a sailor, or later, a surveyor, or else a forester. They all got you away somewhere else. Unfortunately I was good at everything at school. I was what you call a good boy despite everything I've written here. I learned the rules, or as the adults put it, knew my place. Only the occasional revolution. So the result of having good marks in school resulted in me being enrolled in economics and political science at university, despite voicing the desire to study art at an art school. I had been told that there was no security in that and that I would starve. I was too young and compliant to defy my parents. It didn't matter that I had been spending all my spare time in the art room. I was the younger son who was supposed to be docile and compliant while my two elder brothers, twins to boot, were so obviously the favourites and inheritors, that if they had been roosters crowing from on top of a pile of manure I would have enjoyed them better. It was really hard to find myself, who I was, when every natural aptitude and preference I had was dismissed.

So after my father suddenly died of a heart attack, I was rushed, thanks to my grades, to university at the young age of sixteen, studying a subject I came to detest heartily. Price theory, tariffs, monopolies, the good words of Adam Smith and Samuelson all rolled off me like water off a duck's back. I had no discipline. Nor was my heart in it. Then I failed, but not enough to be out. I continued at a more humble level, adding art history to the general subjects. On my own initiative I attended an evening drawing group with a French master of the old school. So, plumb-line in hand I learned how to draw a bucket with willow charcoal. It was very serious. I learned who Cézanne was, and Chardin and Corot. Then I fell in love with a Catholic girl. It lasted two years, the time it took to finish university, the intensity of my emotions being matched only by the resistance of her parents to the idea of their daughter having anything to do with a Protestant.

I came to understand the relationship between politics, religion and sex. I cannot say the bedroom because it never got that far. Suffice it to say the parish priest had the last words of advice. Carmel was full of tears and regrets and I felt that I was up against a mountain of prejudice all around. Disheartened I took the boat for Canada.

LYDIA SCHRUFER: Your work has an organic visceral quality which, for me, seems to illustrate the idea of collective unconscious. Is that deliberate or a result of the materials and forms you work with?

DAVID MOORE: I have a lot of sympathy for the theory of the collective unconscious and have been led from that to Carl Jung's writings on alchemy which was actually more interesting to me than the collective unconscious theory. I have had a lot of writers respond to the mythological aspect they see in my work, but often it was overly coded, and made me feel like the work was reiterating something from the past. That made me quite uncomfortable, for much as I enjoy myth and how it supports the idea of the collective unconscious, I feel that the dynamic unfolding of the present ongoing myths we live out are being completely ignored. The fact that myths evolve and have variants and inversions and shifts through time and in how we read meanings into them is completely and diametrically opposite to this coded notion of old story frozen-in-time notion of myth. Too intellectual, just like the collective unconscious theory.

I mean this from the point of view of a practicing artist who is not a simple illustrator of something external, but is living out a breathing version of the myths that are so close as to be invisible.

We get so caught up in the idea of facts and objective truth that we forget that the artist in the broadest sense (writers, musicians, etc) are revealing little bits of the untold nameless myth that someone, a lot later, a lot further down the line, will pin down like a butterfly to a piece of cardboard and give us its exact name and genealogy.

We tend to forget that any theory about the unconscious is a conscious construction about something that is hidden. Art, dreams, slips of the tongue do give us some pointers, but, by definition the unconscious is hidden and unknown so it's a field day for wonderful hypotheses. But they do help in as much as the blind can lead the blind. The Pied Piper was a great myth about how everyone follows the fellow who plays the beautiful tune, and I suppose I could say that the collective unconscious is a sort of beautiful tune. For studio practice I don't give it the time of day. It's useless.

© David Moore Nothing can replace the struggle with material, and the mysterious golden feeling of when you have arrived somewhere and you can say the work is done and sigh a sigh of contentment and let it go. Just to believe it and not keep worrying it to bits is a great spiritual victory that the work can actually articulate something very deep, which cannot be expressed in any other way except the via miracle of transformation.

It's all alchemy. Carl Jung's discussion of alchemy, the mysterious marriage of matter and mind, the euphoric multiplication of delightful variations, the bitter struggle with the dragon to get beyond your first nice and easy idea, to be lost in the wasteland of despair, to sleep on it, which means not much sleep and to be tormented by self doubts, and to emerge with some little seed, a suspicion that it all should be abandoned, and then the awakening to discover that the moment of abandonment revealed the work. The distance between the gallery wall and the garbage bin is no more than a sneeze. I hazard to guess that countless wonderful works have been tossed away because one was not ready to acknowledge what had happened. In the same way I suspect some dreadful second-rate works have found their way into our culture because the artist was not ready to make that fatal break with conformity, what one might call pleasing the parent. There has to be a little bit of the rebellious streak.

Returning to your question which I’ve approached from a different angle, the visceral quality comes from the material itself, the process of exploration and its ability to bring me down to earth. I try to turn the limitations and qualities of the material to good account, which often means allowing time and change to be inscribed in the work. I look at archeological fragments and find their incompleteness leads in two directions, one, in a broad sense, is the idea of culture being an ongoing project, never complete, always demanding of the spectator an imaginative engagement in the completion of the work, and on the other hand the breaks and interrupted surfaces reveal an inner structure that may be at odds with the illusionistic nature of the surface. That seems honest to me, that a surface shows what supports it. Take a wood sculpture. I embrace the fact there are cracks and knots and more than one join. This new work, In Circa, where I show a huge tree trunk that I have hollowed out, goes further and makes the wood bark, the surface of the tree, which I didn't make, into the front of the work. It masks, like in a masquerade, the inner work where I have hollowed the tree, allowing the marks to witness a kind of excavation process. This is a reversal of the idea from archaeological fragments, where the surface was worked and the inner part was revealed by time, wear and tear and breaks. I would think that it indicates also my understanding of the purpose of art, or at least my art, to work from things and situations which are connected in the most general sense to my understanding of our collective life and try to reveal something under the surfaces. I know a lot of art now is about surfaces primarily, but mine, at least the work with wood, is more about the disintegration of the beautiful surface into some trans-personal melting pot of natural energies which connects with geology and physics. Regardless of the notion of marks of time being indications of some moment in the past, I see them more as a present acknowledgement that all is change and flux just like what Heraclites is reported to have stated.

The visceral quality you speak of derives from the material I use. I also do drawing and collages, as well as videos, and I think it holds true for that too, but to a less obvious degree. For example in drawing and painting the idea of drips and smears, erasures and re-drawings have been so assimilated as part of a general vocabulary of the last thirty or forty years that they have become a little bit academic.

It takes a very good artist, like Betty Goodwin, who is already gone, to be able to reassert the original thought about time and change without it becoming simply a mode of work.

I mention archaeology as a source of inspiration and reflection. Right at the beginning of my art practice I had got to the end of the French academy of figure drawing. I had done a lot of it and the figure, along with objects, was central. But it was all disconnected on some deep level with what I was experiencing in my life. I went through a period of abstraction, and that too became too much like designing a good piece of furniture. Abstraction has that in it. It used to have heroic meaning in its alliance with revolution, but that's all been lost. There's no revolution in abstraction any more. It has been academized over the generations. What I was looking for was some other approach to the figure which did not deny anything from abstraction nor the French academy of the figure, but could bring the figure on to a new terrain. First was the mirror. The spectator sees himself or herself. The figure had to approach the scale of the person looking at it to have this mirror effect. It's a bit like theatre. You could think of my countryman Samuel Beckett and the theatre of the absurd, incidentally part of my Celtic lineage. Alchemy is not far away through Bosch.

But where does the fragmenting of the figure come from, apart from archaeology, which shows us sites again and again with stone legs, stone feet, stone torsos, but few hands, heads and other extremities, the few surviving examples being hoarded away in museums like so many gold nuggets.

Flashing back to my father's surgery which was in our house. The walls of his surgery were covered from floor to ceiling with cross-sections of various parts of the human body. I am sure his patients were endlessly impressed because I, as a little boy, certainly was with the sections of knees, hands, spleens, hearts, brains, throats, feet, spinal chords, livers, kidneys, bladders, fingers, specific parts of which had been blocked in with flat colours of the purest of Bauhaus hues, reds, greens, blues and yellows. This was to help distinguish one part from another in order to better understand the body. I remember being very impressed with all those joyful colours inside these ominous human parts and asking my father if we really look like that inside. He assured me that we do, and for a long time I was convinced that we were full of colours. I think of it now from my present point of view as just one more contradiction between the surface and the inside. To this day, I’m still not sure if this was an unconscious influence on my figure work or if it was entirely coincidental. It may be once more being led along by the Pied Piper who plays a beautiful tune.

LYDIA SCHRUFER: You divide your time between Canada and Greece. Does your location influence the kind of work you do?

DAVID MOORE: Since my first visits in the late 70s right up to now, I have been struck by the intense sensation of being enclosed in tiny, crowded, icon-infested, incense-laden, obscure, glowing warm comforting caverns of orthodox churches that dot the landscape everywhere, even the most unlikely place such as hilltops. Inside is invariably one icon which stands out because it is festooned with silvery metal images depicting legs, arms, feet, hands, breasts, heads, ears, babies, houses, penises, eyes, noses, pigs, cows, donkeys, boats, everything that a supplicant might want to pray for, to have, or to cure. The images are like wishes.

I started to understand that this was an aspect of my work with parts of bodies that, while not being a conscious driving force in my decisions, could very easily be a wish for wholeness. The part represents the whole. Many times I have made a sculpture of a leg, for example, which, by its proportions, resembles the whole body when seen from a certain angle. The wounded self was a portrayal of the healthy whole.

Healing is a movement through time and space brought into action by the mind and the correct conditions. Outside -- that it is a mystery and one can look to karma and find comfort in that. Suffering takes many forms and the principle of kindness is what binds us, and the art work has always had some kind of diplomatic role to connect what has become disconnected. It is just here, present, but not a concern that I think about when I'm making a work. The work just has to feel right after a number of initial decisions which direct the area of research.

Another reflection I got from those icons was from the predominance of gold in the background. Many icons were smoke-darkened by the myriad little oil-lamps hanging in front of them, to the point that all that was visible was the glowing gold background like a floating abstract shape. The saint had gone, just a dark patch. Maybe it’s true that the most important and the most long-lasting part of us is our aura. It confirmed for me Matisse's lesson of the equal importance of the space around the figure. Here it was holy, metaphysical, full of medieval spiritual ardour, gold, whereas Matisse would simply speak to the idea of 'wholeness,' and the inner satisfaction coming from the image which transcends the appearance of the figure. My sculpture, in the same way, I consciously resolved should have a simplicity which serves to activate the space around, which includes us and all the rest.

To answer your question about Greece’s influence on me is not simple or direct. The first time I stepped from the airplane onto Greek soil, I felt an amazing lightness and sense of freedom and of me being completely me. It had nothing to do with Greek culture or light or landscape, which, in themselves would be enough for anyone. In truth it was a profound spiritual feeling which has never changed since. I still feel it after more than thirty years of going there.

Sometimes I have missed a year, but not often, only when there was no money or some kind of major upheaval in my life. The place I go to now is a small village on the Peloponnesian coast tucked under the mountains and with a plunging view to the sea. I awaken to the sounds of the village, the animals, goats, donkeys and hens gently complaining, the twitter of birds, and raucous voices preparing donkeys for the day no less than my love, Jolanta, turning in her sleep. In the same village are houses owned by French, German, Belgian, Swiss, people not unlike me, who have fallen in love with this place and come for respite, beauty and wonder. Three doors away there is the house of Hilary Spurling who wrote the recent prize-winning biography of Matisse, and John her playwright husband.

So Greek peasants living just as they lived for thousands of years, whose sons and daughters are madly trying to catch up with cars, cell-phones, are living in close proximity with middle-class professionals from all over Europe who stay in exactly the same kind of old stone houses, properties sold off by the more ambitious villagers who now have made more modern houses down by the sea, half an hour away by foot.

Greece gave me a beautiful spiritual substitute for my country of origin, Ireland, from which, by an unfortunate turn of family circumstances, I became estranged, like Joyce, like Beckett, like Bacon and many others. It was Joyce who so aptly said “Ireland is the sow that eats its farrow.” Ireland was indeed for me a place of slow melancholy rain staining ancient walls, that and a history of aborted uprisings against England, and an incomprehension of visual art.

Fortunately, on my first trip, I arrived in Greece with Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi in one hand, and something of either of the Durrell brothers in the other. That was the right introduction for that time. Greece struck me as out of time, slightly crazy, abrupt and shocking, but real. It was wonderful to be in a place that felt so real. I was craving for the real after so many illusions. I looked on insults as better than sweet reassurances that amounted to deferred rejection.

I never had a problem with Greeks bearing me gifts. The little handful of lemons discovered on my doorstep, or any other of the many spontaneous gifts I have been enriched by, were given with a feeling of caring for your neighbour, even if he was different in so many ways, and a stranger come from very far away.

LYDIA SCHRUFER: Recently you've incorporated technology such as Photoshop while maintaining the natural sensibility in your work. Is technology a means to an end, just another art making tool? In general, how has computer technology has impacted on your art?

DAVID MOORE: I have a very pragmatic view that they are tools. I started as a painter but try to keep that quiet. I don't have that ethic about devoting myself to it every day for so many hours. I'm more of a thinker who thinks his way into a medium. First the brain, then the hands, then the machine. I just don't want either the brain or the hands to become a machine.

For me, having a set program is too machine-like. It's the brain becoming a dictator. I would like a robot in the studio, it would free me up to go forward in the logical consequences of a line of thinking. I see the computer as a sort of robot that's been boxed in and imprisoned on a screen. But very smart, very useful. And it doesn't tell me what to do. You see I want the mobility to move around in my mind. I want the freedom.

When I walk into the studio it's a mess. But it's my mess and it says I am free. If it gets too much I spend three days cleaning things up. You see I'm also a collector. Found objects find their way into the studio. Sometimes they are the element in a work that bring it alive.

I fight boredom. If a material is starting to bore me and I see a certain predictability and repetition it's time to change. If an image becomes obsessive I turn it on its head, do the opposite. The moment my mind poses the question of wondering how something would look if . . . then I have to do it, It becomes imperative. I don't ask myself if it will be good or not. My curiosity is greater than my insecurity. So I do it. My sketchbooks are full of unrealized works. That's where I am most free. But I cannot physically do them all. Some just wait and wait and then, one rainy day when I am looking for a point of departure, I look through my old notes and sketchbooks and it clicks. I am doing a work right now in wood and metal which comes from a sketch I did about fifteen years ago and never found the appropriate moment. Others were forgotten, dismissed or rejected. So this one withstood fifteen years of periodic scrutiny. It never seemed old or dated. It was begging me to give it the light of day.

To the computer, I think it's wonderful how clean and seamless a collage can be from taking bits from different sources to recombine them, that and dealing with text as visual material. Computer technology has permitted an evolution and development of a visual idea about ten times faster than I would normally expect with an equivalent work in the studio. What that does to a process is exponential. If it is ten times faster, my mind is freed up nine tenths of what normally takes my attention, and that part of my mind can move and evolve many times more than ten times. In fact, the problem is the opposite of the studio. It goes too fast. If an artist goes too fast it's not good. All those delicious discoveries become redundant and never see the light of day. So, apart from photo, for which I think it is a natural extension, I see the computer as the place for preparatory work, but the studio is irreplaceable for the creation of the actual physical entity which will fully satisfy our need for a full spectrum of sensorial data. The computer appeals to the mind and can carry us far away into other dimensions, spaces, atmospheres, dreams, way beyond mundane considerations like gravity and weight, but has the consistency of smoke or a mirage. It sets us up. It doesn't put us down. It is the opposite of grounding, which a physical art work does. It is not good or bad, it's fantastic and is helping to give a visual education to more people than otherwise might have been.

When I work on a wooden sculpture I have already sketched that work on paper many times over. But the sketch has nothing of the visceral quality. That comes later. When I work on the actual piece I get very absorbed in the doing and try to give it the sense of anticipating the wear and tear of age. I don't deliberately try to be expressive. I just try to work with the inner structure of the material, setting up a dialogue between the surface and what is exposed under the surface. With wood it means knots and cracks and the marks of the saw. I see the marks as akin to cross-hatching in a drawing. I can lead the eye in different directions around a piece just by the way a network of marks wrap the volumes. Then a smoothness may suggest an inner form swelling and pressing its way in an effort to resist the containment of the network of saw marks.

The different media do influence each other. In my six years of drawing installations between 1999 and 2005, I was drawing directly on the gallery walls, interrupting the drawing with light and objects. There were also objects on the floor which continued the drawing. I did about a hundred different installations, each very elaborate, in the corner of my studio. Almost nobody saw them. I took photos from pre-planned positions and the photo became the work. In fact the drawings evolved from the view from the camera, which, right from the start, had been set up in anticipation of the photo.

I had painted the floor of the corner of my studio white, so it was a bit like evolving a work inside a white box, using drawing, objects, light, mirrors, shadows and reflected light. I wanted something extremely subtle that could not be reproduced a second time in any other site. The subsequent photos I called portable installations, and that's what they were. I wanted to do a book of them but never had the funds to do it. I'm still hoping. Some of them are very very beautiful because I introduced coloured light which gave them the feeling of the magic lanterns of the beginning of cinema about 1900.

I spent ten years hoping that computer-generated imagery would fade away like a passing fashion, basically because it was putting everything I had learned into question: the uniqueness of the art object as the exchange-value of art. I was somehow prepared however by my conceptual approach a long time earlier in the late 1970s when I did the Project Pompeii, 1977-79. It was based on the question of what the individual in Pompeii experienced in the few minutes before realizing that death was imminent. It was not an object-based approach and, if I had known computer technology as I know it now I would have had amazing options open to me as to how to develop something very immediate and moving. I did the best I could with photography, plaster bandages and a tape-recorder, simulating those last moments with my own body. I did another project, Blasket Project, in 1978 on Blasket Island, a small island off the coast of Ireland, very archaeological, going through the houses of the one abandoned village, doing various interventions 'in situ,' using photography, archival material, excavated artefacts and fragments, words and drawing. The feeling of abandonment was everywhere in the mouldering roofless cottages, open to the wind and storms from the Atlantic ocean, filled with knee-high nettles and scurrying rabbits. That too would have been immensely enhanced by the knowledge of computer programs.

So eight years ago I set aside a time of six months to master this technology. I was alone in the village in Greece with a small digital camera, a laptop and taught myself Photoshop and other programs. But I don't abandon my object-based practice. I recognize limits within each. The
virtual world of digital imagery is a genuine experience in as much as it triggers our brains in specific ways. It is sensual and immensely malleable. For this reason alone it has become the meeting place of all major art disciplines, as well as any information-based discipline including all of the sciences. This is immensely important for the development of the arts, because, in a society that is marked at every corner by the sciences, the arts have, up to recently, excluded the sciences from their subject matter. We now know that pure science is highly intuitive and shares visions as extraordinary as any conceived by poets or artists.

So this meeting place is to be celebrated in a world that is starting to have a coherent vision of itself. Think globally, act locally is a potent slogan particular to our time.

But, as a sculptor in traditional material I am not satisfied to ignore the world of virtuality, but to think about it as an expansion from traditional object-based concerns. I will give a concrete example. I made a wooden sculpture of a life-size figure in 1995 with outstretched arms which appear to be taking off into space, and called it Isis. It's very beautiful, slim, feminine, mysterious, other-worldly. You could not have a more traditional sculpture. Then, much later, I made, with the help of a digital technician, a 3-D digital model of this sculpture, put a black background and rotated it as if it were drifting off into planetary space. I made a 3-minute DVD which I looped and projected with a video projector onto the floor. The impression was that we had a ten foot square hole in the floor we were looking down into, seeing the sculpture of Isis moving very slowly in an unpredictable way, sometimes tumbling over and over, sometimes moving out of our vision to reappear again from another side into an infinitely deep space. It was incredible, vertiginous.

I put a partition so on one side one could experience this projected vision in semi-darkness, and on the other side was the sculpture, lit up normally, that one could examine and walk around. The artwork was the two parts, the comparative and complementary experiences of the sculpture and the video projection. It was not two works but one work. I finally finished it in 2007, a work that took twelve years in the making. I called it Isis Exploratrice as a counterpart to all the maleness of the space jargon of Apollo Explorator.

Digital technology doesn't replace anything. It is different. It genuinely creates language when used creatively. But its difference puts immense pressure on so-called traditional artists to rethink what they had taken for granted. It either makes them entrenched in their beliefs prior to computer-technology or inspires them to transform. Some disciplines respond more easily than others, but it’s primarily a response of the individual practitioners than disciplines as a whole which becomes important.

LYDIA SCHRUFER: I thank you David for sharing your time and wonderful insights.