The Path to a Youthful Brain

I started trying to write this blog post yesterday. I started with the line “It has become obligatory for me to start these blog posts with some version of..  "Wow it’s been a long time since I posted!”

I started slogging through the first few sentences. It wasn't coming naturally.

I’ve now fallen far behind on writing about the two sculptures that I built and installed this summer in Örebro, but I couldn’t remember how much I had already written about the sculptures on this blog and I didn't want to repeat myself so I went back over my last few posts to check. After getting lost for a few minutes reading some of my old posts, I came away thinking “Oh my God, the writing was so good and so thoughtful in those last few posts… And I’m really not in the right headspace to effortlessly turn out such beautiful prose. I should probably give up."

So I gave up.

And now it’s today. And I’m sitting in my hot tub, my thoughts totally lost in my next project, and I’m realizing that all my free headspace these days is going into this project… which I will tell you about in a minute… and a few other projects that I’m also keeping alive on the side… that I really don’t have the free brain space for the kind of insightful philosophizing that I usually like to build my blog posts around.

And that’s OK.

So I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been doing. It’s a lot.

In the month leading up to my last post, I was working feverishly to finish the two sculptures that were commissioned by OpenArt Örebro. One of them is called Emotions Are Like The Weather. This sculpture features three mask-like faces in different emotional expressions which are suspended on a three-way balance mechanism, allowing them to go up and down in patterns that are balanced and reciprocating and random all at the same time. There is no power source in this sculpture; people are invited to push the faces up and down as they see fit. The sculpture speaks about the impermanence of emotions. You may be sad one day, but the sadness will invariably be replaced by happiness, or worry, or elation, or surprise or whatever. The festival placed this sculpture in what might have been the very best location in the whole city, exactly in front of the castle.

The second sculpture is called Reaching Through Time, and this one features a male figure and a female figure situated opposite each other in a large stainless steel ring. They are reaching towards each other across the center of the space. The ring is suspended on bearings and is able to be spun by members of the audience. I was not so much a fan of the placement of this sculpture, as it is behind a little fence and in front of a visually busy building, which I think distracts from the strength of the sculpture. While In Örebro installing the piece, another participating artist asked me why I felt it was necessary to make the figures nude. I was so happy to receive this question, as if I had secretly been hoping somebody would ask. My rambling answer had many dimensions, but the core of it was really “because there is simply nothing better or more beautiful on this planet then a nude human figure." I think there must be something slightly wrong with people who don’t understand this basic truth. Or maybe there's something wrong with me, who knows. In any case, my answer seemed sufficient for her; there were no followup questions.

These are my first publicly displayed realistic figurative sculptures, of any scale.

As I write this, I am only one day away from traveling back up to Örebro to dismantle my sculptures and bring them back to Skåne. They have been installed for three months, and now I begin the process of casting around for the next place to show them. Of course, selling them would be best, and I have already applied to one municipality here in Sweden which is looking for outdoor sculptures to purchase. I will hold my thumbs (the Swedish version of crossing your fingers).

Not long after installing the sculptures I traveled to San Francisco with Kodiak for a week to attend my father‘s funeral and do my small part in the process of wrapping up his estate. San Francisco is always lovely to visit.

Upon our return from San Francisco, we had a series of houseguests, in between which we continued the never-ending process of working on our house.

In July my mother came to visit, which afforded Christina and me the freedom to attend Borderland, a Burning Man affiliated festival situated across a string of meadows and forests in central southern Sweden. Borderland was a wonderful surprise, and in many ways much more enjoyable than Burning Man. The main thing Borderland is missing, frankly, is big sculpture, but hat’s a small problem which I may try to remedy next year as I got inspired enough to propose a new idea. I built a tall bike in the week before we left, which was really fun and an easy way to stand out from the crowd… even if I did fall off it and injure my knee and ankle!

There were many highlights of Borderland for me, and I’ll briefly recount two of them. The first one is actually hard to describe. It was a 2 1/2 hour workshop in which 25 men were welcomed into a very feminine and maternal space and given the message in various ways, by 25 women, that we men were valued and needed. It was intense. There was a lot of crying. I think our culture understands on a certain level that women carry a lot of wounds around men, but what the organizers of this wonderful event understood is that men also carry a lot of wounds around women. I’m very grateful to the women who took part in this; it was a very generous thing to do. 

Here is how it was presented in the program.

The second highlight was the circular dance after the main burn. At Burning Man (the original event in Nevada), there are two main burns, The Man on Saturday night and then the Temple on Sunday night. Once these two wooden structures have sufficiently collapsed such that they are deemed safe from further collapse, the safety perimeter is dropped and the crowds rush in and run and dance and sway in a moving circular mass of people around the fire. It’s very ritualistic, very primal. At Burning Man there are always a few people… Maybe 50 or 60 people in a crowd of 5000, who decide to strip off their clothes and run around this fire naked.

In the minutes leading up to the main burn at Borderland, which this year was a Temple to the Sun built by a crew from Latvia (or was it Estonia?), I was standing with my friend Malin talking to an older fellow who had attended many times. Malin said she was considering running around the fire after the structure’s collapse, and this fellow replied that if she was serious, she would have to be ready to take off her clothes. I thought to myself "Come on, no one NEEDS to go naked. This guy is just being a lecherous old flirt." However, as soon as the temple collapsed, something like 2000 people from the crowd immediately stripped off all their clothing and ran towards the fire. I was absolutely not expecting this, and it was absolutely amazing. I considered joining them, but I couldn’t figure out the logistics of where to put my clothes so that I could find them again! Two thousand naked people swarming in a circular mass around a huge fire, chanting and howling and singing and dancing. It was fucking amazing. It was really something you just never see. I plan on joining the crowd next year. There are no pictures of this, anywhere... which seems correct.

The burning temple, before the crowds swarmed in...

Why was Borderland better than Burning Man, you might ask? Oh, so many reasons. It was smaller; the difference between 5000 people and 80,000 people is significant for the experience. It was green; there is grass and forests and it's a lush and nurturing environment. The Black Rock Desert is many things but it is not nurturing. There are several lakes where you can swim. I swam every day, in lieu of a shower. It was so lovely. There are other reasons but these are my big takeaways. 

As I mentioned I got inspired to propose a sculpture for next year's festival, and I am currently working on prototypes. I have in mind a motion which is actually kind of hard to achieve mechanically, so it's a bit of a mind-bender.

After Borderland I was contacted by Burning Man to create a series of 12 graphic designs which would be CNC (computer) cut out of wood panels, and which would decorate the staircase of the base of the Man. The timeframe was tight and 12 panels was ambitious, so I split them 6-and-6 with Christina. The assignment was that the panels should depict the progression of the universe from "the beginning" (however you want to interpret that) through to the cosmos. I chose to put a drawing of a woman at the center of each panel and that became the unifying motif for my 6 panels. 

Here is one panel. You can see all 6 of them HERE

The biggest project I am working on, though... the thing I mentioned at the beginning... is a graphic novel. Yes you read that right. A graphic novel. A long-form comic book. 

I have never thought of myself as a storyteller. In fact I've always thought of myself as quite bad at it. In my 20's I decided that I was so bad at storytelling that I needed to take a class in fiction writing. I dropped out after 3 classes; I couldn't hack it. And then, for 30 years or so, I just worked with the idea that narrative fiction was outside of my wheelhouse, like playing a musical instrument or surfing.

Over the last several years I have been kind of obsessed with the idea of a beautiful nude woman riding a flying shark. I couldn't really explain why I liked the idea so much, but I couldn't get it out of my head. I proposed this idea in the form of a sculpture to Burning Man (rejected), I've drawn it many times, and I've tried to turn it into a tattoo design. 

And then my dad died. And an almost-fully-formed idea for a fictional narrative just sort of dropped into my head. The story is autobiographical, and uses my relationship with my father as the starting point for a story that goes off in some wild and exaggerated science-fiction directions. The main character is a beautiful, sexually adventurous lesbian who rides a flying shark. I am working out the story, day by day. I think about it all the time. I found a very good book about story structure. Every time I read a chapter in the book, I have a new idea about how to improve my narrative. The whole process is fun, and challenging, and totally engrossing. I live in my head all the time... working out this story, and that's why I forget to feed the cats and think up smart things to say in blog posts. 

Although I draw kroki every week and consider myself an artist, I don't have a ton of confidence in my drawing skills, especially when it comes to people. I think there are artists who draw beautifully from their imagination, and there are others who need a reference image... something to copy. I find that my drawings are much better when I have a reference image. This is not to say that I can't draw from my imagination, but the drawings I make that way are usually inferior. So if I'm going to make a graphic novel, with potentially hundreds of individual drawings, how am I going to do that? 

My god what a temptation it is for someone in my position to just use AI. I actually wrestled with the idea of simply using AI to generate my images; it would be fast and easy and look amazing. (Can you see how tempting that is??) But at the end of the day I talked myself out of it... for two reasons. Firstly, everyone hates to look at an AI image which is purporting to be "art" right now. I know I do. I prefer to look at a hand-drawn image, and so that's what I'm going to do. And the second reason is something that the singer Nick Cave articulated better than I ever could, which is that the WORK... the STRUGGLE of making art is actually where the value lies, for the artist. The value is not in producing the slickest, most flawless result (which AI can do in a few seconds), but rather in the BATTLE of making the work. That's where the growth happens. I could certainly argue that I am struggling and battling to produce the writing part... the story, (and I am definitely struggling and battling in that regard... and I have not even been tempted to use AI for that part), but I'm supposedly an artist, and artists draw, so I need to draw. If I produced this graphic novel using AI, I would not be a better artist at the end of the project. But if I draw every single panel, I absolutely will be. 

So to answer the question of how I will make these drawings, I will use many tools. I will use reference pictures from the internet, I will use photos that I make of posable art-reference dolls, I might end up taking pictures of a live model if I really need to, and I'm sure that I will occasionally use AI as one tool among all those others. Try not to hate me.

If it's really true that learning a new skill is the secret to a youthful brain, my brain is going to live forever. I'm learning Swedish, wrestling with the difficult mechanism of this new sculpture I want to build, writing a fictional narrative, and trying to draw in a way I never have before, on a scale which is unprecedented for me. And also, I draw kroki every week, another thing I always feel I sort of suck at. 

Oh, and I went to see Anna Von Hausswolff the night before last in Lund. (Do yourself a favor and click that link!)

She is SO GOOD!

And so nice!

Until the next time... Bye!

Pop

I have been gearing up in the last few weeks to write a blog post about what I've been doing lately, artistically, but now that's going to have to wait for a bit.

A few days ago, on Tuesday, June 9th, my father died. His name was Dr. Brunno Von Ristow, and he was quite an incredible man. 

My father was born in 1940 in Brusque, Brazil, a town founded in 1860 by German immigrants. 80 years after the town's birth, German was still widely spoken there and my father grew up speaking both German and Portuguese. As a child of around 8 years old, or so the legend goes, he decided he would grow up to be a plastic surgeon. In the late 1960's he moved to New York City because it was the only place where his new young wife, who had leukemia, had any chance of getting life-saving treatment. By the time she died a few years later, my father had already re-started his medical training and he decided to make his permanent home in the US. Not long after, he met and married my mother, and in the next few years I was born, followed by my brother Trevor. 

Upon completing his studies, he decided to follow the suggestion of one of his colleagues and move to Los Angeles; his friend had told him that LA was where a plastic surgeon could get rich! But on the way to LA, he and my mother stopped in San Francisco and fell in love with the beautiful city by the bay. They never made it to Los Angeles.

Like many people who grow up in financially challenged circumstances, my dad resolved early in life to become rich, and he succeeded spectacularly. In fact the desire for wealth may have been the chief reason he focused so early on plastic surgery. My father lived the American Dream, moving to the US poor and doing incredibly well for himself. But there was basically only one secret to his success, and that was hard work. He worked all the time. And... ok maybe there was a second reason... he was so damn good at what he did! He was good because he actually cared. He wanted to be the best. He specialized in facial cosmetic surgery (face lifts), and his results were incredible. 

At one point about 3 years ago I had a great conversation with him about his work. He lit up talking about his results, how he achieved them, about facial anatomy and innovations he made in his field. In fact there is a space within the tissues of the face which is now referred to as the "Ristow Space" because my father discovered it, or at least drew the attention of the medical community to its importance.

When I was young, my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a surgeon. Between the ages of about 10 to 12, I was my father's operating room photographer; I have vivid memories of photographing his surgeries. In retrospect it's easy to see that he was trying to get me interested in the discipline, and probably also to give me a head start on my eventual education as a doctor. I think these experiences contributed significantly to my love of the human body and its anatomy. There's a great picture that I really should insert here, of 10-year-old me watching him operate, but the photo is back in Taos so I guess it will be a while before I can include it. 

I think the pressure my dad put on me to become a doctor, and the ways that I increasingly veered away from that path, were the primary sources of a certain friction that existed between us in my 20's and 30's. Even into my 30's my dad would occasionally say things like "You know, it's never too late to go back to school and take up medicine"! And this was when I was already establishing myself as an artist! Of course there were ways in which I could have been an excellent surgeon, such as my interests in the human body and in aesthetics, and my dexterity in working with my hands, and I think my father was was quite observant in noticing these tendencies in me. But as I grew through my late teens and twenties I began to see that there were other aspects of my personality that fit much better with the life of an artist than that of a doctor. It took me a long time to be able to confidently say "I am an artist," and I think the person to whom I was most afraid to make that statement was him. It's so interesting, the power our parents have over us. In hindsight it seems quite clear that he probably just wanted a stable and clearly-defined and rewarding career for me, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's quite fatherly, really. And there I was, making sculptures and building robots and staging clandestine performances; he must have thought I was crazy!

There's a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson which goes: "We will be soldiers, so our sons will be farmers, so their sons will be artists." Ironically, it was my dad who first told me this quote (and I'm pretty sure that in his re-telling, "farmers" was replaced by "lawyers and doctors"). Sometimes, if my father expressed doubt or concern about my career, I would remind him of this quote, and he would chuckle. 

The other thing that caused occasional friction between my father and me was our opposing political persuasions; he was a "Reagan Republican" and I've always been liberal / progressive. 

But there was a noticeable positive shift between us in the last few years. I think it began, subtly, about 15 years ago, around the time Kodiak was born, but really only solidified in the last two years or so, after the death of his third wife. I think the easiest way to explain it is to imagine my father, just a few years ago, speaking words something like these: "You know, Christian, there is a lot we don't agree on. We don't agree about politics, and I think your career is strange, and I don't really understand it. And for these reasons, we might not be as close as we could be. But what is more important than any of that is the fact that I love you, and I want you to be happy. So let's not talk about the ways in which we don't align. Let's connect instead about family and about how we care for each other." This contributed in later years to the fact that our conversations were sometimes rather short and superficial, but they were always sweet and mutually supportive. There was a lot of love between us.  

From time to time I find myself musing about all the things my father gave me, and I'm grateful. His wealth afforded my brother and me excellent educations as well as certain other advantages which made it possible for me to become an artist. (Thanks for being the farmer, Pop!) But much of what he gave me was less tangible. I mentioned earlier that he was passionate about his career and wanted to be the best. Sometimes, when I am going over-time or over-budget on a project because I just want to achieve the best artistic result that I can, I see echoes of my dad's passion and commitment in me. Thanks for showing me the value inherent in the 'pursuit of excellence,' Pop; not everyone understands that. I also credit him with instilling in me a love of female beauty and a love of the human face, both of which have been hugely influential for me. Sometimes when I am sculpting a face, I think of the many specific things he taught me about facial beauty, such as the gentle curve at the root of the septum or the proper proportions of the nose, and I feel the generational continuity flowing from his career into mine. Thanks, Pop. 

As his health began to fail in the last two years of his life, I was able to visit him a few times, and on some of those trips I was able to bring Kodiak. It was important and special that they got a chance to know each other. But it was during these last years that my brother Trevor really stepped up in a big way, flying from his home in New Hampshire back to San Francisco almost once a month to spend time with my dad and help him in the many ways that he needed. Trevor was there with him in his last days, holding his hand and playing him the classical music he so loved. Thank you Trevor, for showing up so well for Papa.

As my mother succinctly put it recently, "Brunno lived an incredible life. He achieved everything he ever wanted." Bravo, Papa. Well done.

I love you, Pop, and I will miss you. 

And thank you.

❤️

Around the World (Not Really) in 80 Days (22, Actually)

As I sit here in my house in Sweden, 12 hours after getting off an 11-hour flight from a 22-day trip 9 time zones away, I am feeling a little manic. Sometimes I struggle to build a narrative worthy of a blog post, but right now I feel I have more than enough to say!

I am now going to write a post which will be unusually far-reaching, unusually honest, and possibly unusually long. I’m going to take you to New Mexico, to Nevada, to California, and back to Sweden. But I’m also going to take you to health scares, to panic attacks, to billion-dollar corporate events, to the psychology of beauty and to the beauty of skulls, and finally to some of the hard differences between Sweden and America, and how soft people might fit into those hard differences. And all the while, this multi-week American adventure will provide the narrative backbone.

It all began a few months ago when some nice people from Production Club of Los Angeles asked me if the Hand Of Man was available to run for a 5-hour long corporate party in early December in Las Vegas, Nevada. Many months, many conversations, many contract iterations, and many dollar discussions later, I was ready for a 3-week trip to the States. I would spend 10 days in Taos working through my jet lag repairing and sexing-up the Hand, followed by 5 days in Vegas running the piece for an elite group of tech VIPs, followed finally by 3 days in San Francisco visiting my dad and my brother.

Now one thing to understand about this trip is that there was a health scare looming over most of it. The trip was ‘set in stone’ about 6 weeks before my departure… I was locked in to going. But about 3 weeks before departure, Christina suddenly experienced the onset of some very worrying symptoms that defied easy interpretation. While our first guesses revolved around a mis-calibrated stress response, the intensity and consistency of the symptoms started to point in other directions, and conversations with Christina’s (wonderfully sensitive and responsive) doctor inevitably began to reference possibilities of long-term debilitating conditions. It was against this backdrop of disability and worry and fear that I set off to the wild high desert of Taos, over three weeks ago. 

The last time the Hand of Man saw action was for Transfix, the ill-fated festival that almost cost us the shirts off our backs (along with every other artist unfortunate enough to be involved), coincidentally also in Las Vegas. So I hadn’t seen the sculpture since it was used by other people, maintained by other people, and put away into storage by other people. I scheduled about 10 days in Taos to repair it and spruce it up… and I needed just about all 10 of those days. 

Outdoor welding on the mesa...

I was lucky enough to stay with Matt and Richard, two of my very favorite people in Taos.

A few days after arriving in Taos, I broke down. I’d been moving so fast, my attention so unerringly focused on the tasks in front of me, that I had not yet taken time to feel the fear and sadness of dealing with a potentially life-changing diagnosis in my partner. I will now tell you something that it’s taken me a long time to learn: Anxiety and panic are signs that you are burying difficult or uncomfortable emotions, and the cure for anxiety is simply letting those unbearable emotions out. Cry. Cry some more. Maybe scream a little. If you’re lucky enough to have a friend who will put their arm around you and tell you to just breathe… and that everything is going to be alright, then take advantage of it… lucky you! (Thanks Richard.) Cry and scream. It works. You will feel better. (Of course it can be difficult to let those unwanted emotions out when they are so buried that you don’t even know they are there. But try crying and screaming. Just try it.) 

I want to make a movie about this. Matt, do you remember the painting you were encouraging me to make? I want to make that, but as a movie. Not just me, but others, many others. On repeat. I’m not being specific here because I don’t want someone else to steal my idea… but Matt, and you too Richard, you know what I’m talking about.

One of the things I like to do when in Taos is root around inside my shipping container of personal goods -clothes, books, artwork and knickknacks - all the stuff that did not ‘make the cut’ to come to Sweden, and see if there’s anything that I actually miss. I usually find a shirt or two and a book or three that need to come back. I have always, since I was a teenager, had a tendency to fall superficially in love with famous women, supermodels and actresses, and in that shipping container I have a huge variety of books and magazines - mostly magazines - that focus on beautiful and frequently naked women. I have the entire run of Penthouse Magazine from issue #1 in 1969 until approximately 2007, and I have a few hundred Playboys as well. Actually, I don't so much fall in love with these famous women as much as I become transfixed with their beauty. Beauty is enjoyable; beauty can inspire obsession. Many books, fiction and otherwise, have been dedicated to the topic. My father used to do the same thing. He was a plastic surgeon and so looking at beautiful women was research for him, but I know he also just enjoyed it.  He was partial to Rita Hayworth.  I am a sculptor and painter… so even though I also just enjoy it, it’s research for me too. 

But as I thumbed through these old Victoria’s Secret catalogs and old issues of Maxim and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, something occurred to me. It wasn’t a brand-new thought, but it came with new clarity. Why are individual people attracted to individual faces, and what could it tell us about their psychology? That is the question, and to me it is a deep and interesting question. It is often said that the 1990’s were the golden era of the supermodel and so for me it’s an easy place to start fleshing out this question. Many young women became famous in that decade just for their faces, their beauty, and yet I find very few of them to be truly gorgeous. There are, in fact, some fashion models from the era who I find to be quite unattractive, even though they enjoy a level of fame which clearly suggests that many people would disagree. But why? Why do I find one girl gorgeous while I can’t even understand how the next girl got a job in modeling... while there is presumably someone else somewhere who feels the exact opposite? Is it their nose? The unique shape of the mouth corners or the canthal tilt? The squareness of the jaw or the size of the chin? And what do these preferences say about me as a person?

To the degree that I have thought this through, I observe three parameters; youth, androgyny, and cultural associations. Let’s start with youth. Youth is traditionally considered to be a marker of beauty. But what does it mean when someone is attracted to a young face? I propose that there is no one answer to this. I imagine that some of those who are attracted to youth are trying to recapture their own youth (in other words seeing themself through the other) while others are looking for someone who is easily manipulated and controlled. And what about when someone is attracted to a face which shows signs of age? Is that person secretly looking to be parented? Are they hoping to absorb wisdom or obtain guidance? I think it’s interesting that for most people these dynamics are invisible; we just like the faces that we like and we don’t know why.

And what about androgyny? Sexual dimorphism is the opposite of androgyny; a very feminine face is sexually dimorphic (at the feminine end of the spectrum) while a very masculine face is sexually dimorphic (at the male end), and androgyny is in the middle. I think most heterosexuals are drawn to sexually dimorphic faces of the opposite gender, but some are more drawn to androgynous faces. Could it be that a preference for an androgynous face reflects a (perhaps unconscious) androgynous impulse in the viewer? Could a preference for a sexually dimorphic face reflect political conservatism (a man should be manly, and a woman should be feminine)? Or could it alternatively reveal a hidden insecurity which an association with beautiful / handsome members of the opposite sex is intended to obscure? I’m raising more questions than I’m answering here because I think the field is wide open, and indeed the questions and their interpretations are almost endless...

The last of my observed parameters is cultural associations. Why are some people only attracted to members of their own race or culture, while others prefer members of another race? Is it true that white men who are attracted to Asian women are secretly looking for a partner who is easy to dominate and control, or is that a stereotype? Are those people who are attracted to members of another race simply attracted to those facial features for aesthetic reasons? Or did they perhaps grow up among caregivers or sympathetic elders of that race? Or are they (unconsciously?) making a political statement by their choice of partner? Again, I raise more questions than I answer, and indeed I am asking only a small fraction of the questions which could be asked on this broad topic.

The human race is bewilderingly heterogeneous; 8 billion individual people should be expected to present with 8 billion complex and individual constructs for who they find attractive. In an effort to dive deeper, while in Taos I looked up “the psychology of physical attraction” and to my surprise there is a book called “The Psychology of Physical Attraction”! I ordered it, and as I sit here writing this it has just arrived. If I get around to reading it, among the other two or three books I’m supposedly reading right now, I will report back. In the meantime I continue to think about mouth corners, jaw profiles, and eyebrow arches. A square jaw signals sexual dimorphism in a man and androgyny in a woman. A short upturned nose signals youth. A heavy brow ridge telegraphs male, while a small chin signals female. And in much the same way that I enjoy trying to interpret the psychology of artists through their artistic output, I believe you could theoretically learn a lot about an individual’s inner workings by analyzing the faces they find attractive. I find it all endlessly fascinating. 

The timing of my trip to Taos was lucky and I was able to spend Thanksgiving with Matt and Richard and some of the amazing and intelligent people in their circle. It was so easy to have good, deep conversations with several of their friends, people I barely knew, or didn't know at all. More on this later…

With the Hand finally ready, mechanically and aesthetically, I loaded it onto a semi-truck on a Friday morning. I then drove all over Taos doing last things, drove down to Albuquerque with my trusted pal Cedar, and was sleeping in Las Vegas by that night. It was just one of many long and exhausting days in the last few weeks. The next day we took delivery of the Hand and completely assembled it in about 5 hours with some local help. It’s a wonderfully straightforward sculpture to build and unbuild, if I do say so myself.

The Hand, assembled 

Me and Cedar

The next few days in Las Vegas were a mix of hard work and leisurely inactivity. We wandered around, we watched a digitally reimagined version of The Wizard of Oz on the world’s largest interior LED screen at The Sphere (which was totally amazing), we saw interesting sculptures and not-so-interesting casinos, and I met with a venue which might display my sculpture With Open Arms. On at least 2 occasions we struck up friendly and surprisingly deep conversations with people who were working at retail stores. I love that about America; people are open and friendly and if you treat them with genuine curiosity and attentiveness they will tell you about themselves. This is how people connect with other people.

The Wizard of Oz… as you’ve certainly never seen it before.

Of course I love the fact...

that the female nude is everywhere in Vegas.

It’s like Barcelona...

… without the good taste!

These great animatronic faces, which look just like Scarlet Johansson, are featured in South Korean eyewear manufacturer Gentle Monster’s stores all over the world.

Of course they remind me of my own Face Forward. Unfortunately all the Scarlet Johanssons were broken and not running. Click here for a random Youtube clip of them working. I would have loved to see that. 

About half-way through my time in Vegas, Christina finally got the results of all her medical tests. She had undergone neurological tests, blood tests, CAT scans, and finally an MRI. And what the doctors eventually found was… nothing! Physiologically speaking, Christina is in excellent health. And so, perhaps, our early guesses about stress and stress management were actually closer to the mark. As I write this, Christina’s symptoms are finally gone and she is feeling much better, which is a huge relief to us all. Now her interesting work begins… in trying to understand what this all might have been about, on an underlying psychological level. (I never wrote about this on my blog because it’s not very sexy, nor did I discuss it widely, but about 2 years ago I had a debilitating series of anxiety attacks. I was eventually able to pinpoint the underlying cause, which was related to our dislocation into this new and foreign culture. I want to stress, though, that the emotions which precipitated this crippling wave of anxiety were essentially invisible to me at the time. Once I came to understand the feelings that I had been burying, and once I screamed and cried about it all, the anxiety dissipated. The anxiety was real and it was exhausting, but ultimately I held the keys to dispelling it. I just had to dig down into some uncomfortable places to find them. The mind, and its connection to the body, is consistently amazing!)

The gig for the Hand was on Thursday, and we fucking nailed it! The set design for the Hand was the best I’ve ever seen, involving custom-painted shipping containers, multiple dilapidated cars, and multi-colored lighting and smoke effects. For the first time ever, I had a microphone up in the control chair so I could narrate live the ongoing mayhem, and I was joined by a hilarious and charismatic second MC on the ground named Shondel. She and I hyped up the crowd and gave every operator a countdown (to drop the cars) and generally succeeded in making the whole thing feel exciting and ridiculous. Throughout the entire evening, our crowd never waned; we reliably had 300 - 400 spectators and never lacked for operators. One operator threw the car back towards us in the control chair and I’ve never come closer to a dangerous situation running the Hand! It was hilarious and absurd and a great success. Production Club loved us and I made connections with many other artists and people on the crew who might in time become friends, or at least professional contacts. Many people came up to me to tell me that we “crushed it,” and for the most part the double-entendre was unintentional!

We operated the sculpture until midnight and at 7AM the next day Cedar and I were back onsite to begin the dismantling. While we had 4 extra people for the assembly, we got no help on disassembly day… but it didn’t seem to matter. Disassembly is always easier and Cedar and I had the whole piece palletized and strapped and loaded up onto a semi-truck in 5 hours. 

A quick shower, a taxi ride, and a flight, and it was goodbye Las Vegas and hello San Francisco. My brother Trevor coordinated a trip to SF and what followed was two-and-a-half relaxed days with my brother and father. My dad is suffering from poor health which was initially brought on by the death of his wife almost 2 years ago, but the good news is that after a nadir in his condition about a half-year ago, he is slowly improving. He has a new live-in caretaker who is attentive and a good cook, and his sense of humor is making a comeback! It was great to see him, and always great to see my brother. 

Me and Trevor eating burritos in the Mission

If you read my blog you’ll remember that a few months ago I was going through a major resurgence in my interest in skulls. Around that time I found a really beautiful human skull for sale online that I really wanted, but no matter how I tried I could not justify the expenditure. But just then, as if the god of unnecessary indulgences was smiling directly down upon me, I received in the mail a residuals check from my years as an animatronics builder and puppeteer back in Hollywood… in an amount that more-than-comfortably covered the purchase of the skull. (One day I will write a blog post about those Hollywood days… they were fun.) Because the vendor would not ship the skull out of the US, I had it shipped to Trevor in New Hampshire, and this trip to San Francisco finally marked my meeting with her. I say ‘her' because it is the skull of a young female; there are ways you can tell the age and gender. (Age is only discernable up to about 25… and again after about 55; in the middle years it is harder to gauge.) After a vaguely stressful transportation of the skull in my carryon bag (it’s not illegal but I worry anyway), she has now joined my slowly growing collection here in Sweden. Welcome to your new home, young lady!

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am now back in Sweden. It is in the nature of ‘recurring things’ that they come back again and again… and so here, again, I return to the theme of the difficulties of making social connections in Sweden. But fear not, in the spirit of my jet-lag-induced delirium cum honesty, I think I have something new to say on the matter. I’ve mentioned already that I had a very easy time striking up conversations with strangers in the last 3 weeks, both in Taos and in Las Vegas. It’s as if I was a corked up bottle of champagne, a bottle filled with ‘excitement to talk to people’ that had been forcibly shut tight by years living in Sweden and was suddenly free to open… and my gregarious enthusiasm was met freely by just about everyone I tried to chat with. That openness is a well-known feature of Americans, and something I love. In contrast, Swedes are reserved and hard to ‘crack,’ a national trait that is also well-known. But... is it too easy to just blame the Swedes and their national character? Or do I also bear some responsibility for my difficulties in connecting with these people?

I spent a week in Las Vegas with my good friend Cedar, and half a week in San Francisco with my brother Trevor. These two men, both of whom I am quite close to, have very different temperaments in terms of how they present themselves to the world, and I found that in subtle ways I presented differently to the world depending on who I was with. Cedar is fairly reserved and engages in conversation selectively… and I found that I was really quite gregarious while romping around Vegas with him; I willingly initiated conversations with strangers all week. Trevor and I have always had a dynamic in which he was the more outgoing of the two of us, and it was natural and comfortable for me to ease back into the role of the more reserved one with him. (Although, coming directly from Vegas, I felt less reserved and more boisterous than usual). My point is that, without meaning to or consciously directing myself, I have the capacity to adapt myself to the social dynamics of the situation. I imagine everyone does this to some degree. 

So… Sweden. Why not just manifest here in Sweden that same boisterousness and assertiveness that came so easily to me in Vegas? I think there are various elements to consider in trying to answer this question. For one thing, my Swedish is still not great, and so any conversations, random or otherwise, need to be in English for now. This can have some advantages (charming, signaling that you’re not Swedish and so can be held to a different set of cultural expectations) but also disadvantages (signaling also that I’ll never be ‘in the gang,’ never a true Swede). But… language aside… to what degree am I adapting myself to the cultural expectations of those around me, and to what degree is that healthy? Yes it’s true that if you try to initiate conversations enough times with people who in return send signals of disinterest or disdain, you will eventually close down a bit. But what if I were simply to take the position that this is their problem, their shortcoming, and not mine? There are various cultural / historical explanations for why Swedes are reserved and closed towards strangers, but what if I were to simply adopt the attitude that they are doing it wrong? Sometimes I really do feel that they are doing it wrong! What if I were to just keep on being nice, and chatty? To stop adapting myself to their provincial and closed attitudes? Sometimes, if you’re nice, they respond. 

Let's see if I have it in me… if I have the energy. Sometimes, you know, it’s actually nice to have zero expectations of friendly banter… to know that you can go out, run your errands, and not be expected to talk to anyone. Other times, though, it’s lonely. Swedes are statistically some of the loneliest people in the world, a fact that does not surprise me. And it’s hard to build community when it’s so hard to meet people. I feel thankful for the few good friends we have here. Thank you Krister and Ylva and Brian and Tina and Scott and Kasey and Kate and Victor and Birdie and Marc and Bianca and Carina and Dante. We cherish your friendships. We look forward to seeing you soon. 

OK, that’s all I’ve got. 

Happy Santa Lucia Day!

Cheer up!

-Christian

Mumbo Jumbo

I visited a museum the other day and read something that was enough to finally get me off my ass and write another blog post. The museum is dedicated to one of southern Sweden's local heroes, Axel Ebbe, primarily a sculptor of the female nude. What caught my eye, and started me thinking, was an explanatory plaque about one of Ebbe's pieces which read: 

LIKE A MELODY

"A work of art should captivate immediately. It should speak to the emotions through the eyes like a melody does through the ears." _ Axel Ebbe

Axel Ebbe wants his art to be experienced directly, with the heart. Using mythological motifs and creatures from folklore, he tries to reach into the subconscious to awaken feelings, memories and associations. The works come to him as a sudden vision he wants to share. Based on the initial idea, he creates his work through symbols and metaphors: longing for the fleeting sun is symbolized by a woman with a sad expression who stretches her body backwards, upwards. He creates his own interpretations of well-known myths from the Bible and Norse mythology. He recasts the Greek poet Orpheus as Orphea: a damsel playing a harp made from the body of a hunchbacked troll.

Do you like art when is impacts you immediately and emotionally? Or do you prefer work that satisfies intellectually, even if it sometimes requires reading or other contextualization in order to come fully into focus?

For me the choice is clear; I'm with Ebbe on this one. Ebbe, Jassans, Bacon, Hirst, McQueen, Helnwein... all my favorites hit you hard with the image first. In some cases a little follow-up intellectualization can deepen the experience, but it's not a requirement for the enjoyment of the work.

If you read this blog and you think this all sounds familiar, you're right; I've written about it before. If I have anything new to add, it's this: I wonder if that sort of art... art that tries to speak about universal truths through recognizable forms like the human body, is a bit out of fashion these days? In the "old days" (by which I mean, you know... 100 years ago...) it seemed like it was enough to sculpt a nude figure, give it a wistful facial expression or a or restless turn of the body, and call it something like "The Wind" or "Discontent". Or maybe put the nude on a wild animal and call it "Europe," or "Night." I think this is called Symbolism. It certainly seemed to work for Ebbe. It worked for Jassans too, but Jassans was a superior sculptor and his work would stand apart... get noticed and appreciated... no matter what it was called. Ebbe was not so great a sculptor, in my opinion, but the formula worked for him. He got famous and many Swedish towns have an Ebbe in the town square. 

Maybe the world is tired of that kind of thing. It seems to me that these days... in order to get into a museum or whatever, sculpture needs to have an axe to grind, or at least a backstory. Oftentimes the work is "identity-based," which is to say that the meaning of the work centers on a revelation of some core truth about the artist's racial, ethnic, geographic, or socioeconomic identity. Interestingly, the Ebbe museum has been recently renovated to include a new wing to show temporary exhibitions, and the current one features mostly work that needs a bit of reading to really understand it, much of which has been made by members of "marginalized" populations. The museum made no mention of the stark contrast between Ebbe's approach to sculpture, and the approach taken by most of the contemporary artists showing in the new wing, but to me the difference was so clear. I do understand that after so many years of domination of the art scene by white men (and women to a much lesser degree), it's important and valid that members of marginalized groups get a chance to break in. But when the message of the work feels more like a history lesson it can sometimes feel boring to me. Maybe it's just my white privilege / guilt, but I would rather experience a work of art by a Yanomami woman (or other marginalized group-member) which addresses love or death or the struggle for self-actualization from a Yanomami perspective, rather than the experience of being oppressed by the "dominant" culture. In other words, I'd rather see universal human stuff. Of course oppression at the hands of another culture is probably a commanding experience for oppressed communities and any commanding experience is a valid subject for art, but I wonder if work like that will stand the test of time in the same way that art which attempts to address more universal human struggles will, other than perhaps as history lessons or morality warnings? Maybe it's unfair to expect anything other than art about oppression from oppressed peoples until oppression itself is a thing of the past? Maybe that overarching experience needs to be resolved before the way can be cleared for other kinds of art. (And that unfortunately doesn't feel like it's going to be happening any time soon...) 

I'm in danger of rambling here, but I'll just bring it back around and say that any artwork that hits hard in the beginning with an emotionally evocative image (or narrative) has... I would say... a better chance at affecting its audience. If that emotional sledge-hammer is enough to get the viewer to read an explanatory plaque or do a follow-up web search about the artist and learn more, then that's great; the artwork will have succeeded even more. But it needs to hit you hard first. If it's too academic or esoteric and relies too much on explanatory text, it is not... in my opinion... successful. 

"Postmodernism" isn't a term I use a lot, but I know enough to understand that postmodernism is characterized by the breakdown of widely-held, universally accepted symbols and structures of meaning, and the emergence instead of "the many truths," meaning itself having been fractured into a billion meanings. I'm no fan of modernism, but I don't see much to like in postmodernism either. I think I prefer Symbolism!

OK, enough with all the pompous art-theory mumbo-jumbo... let's make the big leap to the psychology of art!

_______________________

Making art is like learning to see. That's my thesis. 

In my post way back on June 20th I talked about a grant I'd received to build 2 new sculptures for a festival here in Sweden, and I've now begun to work on those. I'll be building the one I mentioned in June, "Emotions Are Like the Weather," as well as a second one featuring two figures, a man and a woman, reaching for each other across a circle. 

Here, once again, is the proposal image for Emotions Are Like the Weather...

...and here is an image of the first face, almost done. 

As I write this I am preparing to make the silicone and plaster mold for this first face, which I will then cast in Jesmonite (which is a water-based casting resin... a bit like fiberglass but non-toxic). Once the mold is made, I will then re-sculpt this face into an angry one, make a mold, and then finally re-sculpt it again into yet a third emotion, and then mold and cast that one. (This third emotion is yet-to-be-determined; I want it to be somehow neither at the "happy" end of the spectrum nor the "sad," and so it's hard to figure out what it should be. I think it needs to be a subtly mixed emotion which is somehow also not boring or too arcane to read.) Then of course I will build the steel structure to carry them.

Here is the proposal picture for the second sculpture, which does not yet have a name (my working title might be too pretentious, too Symbolist!)

The ring in which the figures rest (or are trapped?) will be able to rotate within its frame. These two sculptures are the first time I am combining traditional figurative sculpture with metal fabrication and mechanics... and I am pretty excited about that. It feels like it could be the beginning of a new direction for me. 

The process of sculpting the first face has been fascinating to me from a psychological, or perhaps neuropsychological perspective. This face is fundamentally symmetrical, which makes it easier to explain what I mean. As I sculpt the face I am going through a non-stop process of the correcting of errors. I must see the errors, and then correct them. In a symmetrical sculpture like this one, the seeing of the errors often takes the form of the observation of unwanted asymmetry - things like "the left eye is too big," or "the right cheekbone is too high." In an asymmetrical sculpture the process is the same... always error correction... but often even harder because there is no mirror-side for comparison. But even the simple act of seeing and identifying the errors is not always easy! Sometimes it happens like "I can see that there is something wrong with the mouth, but I can't figure out what it is." Then you must look at the sculpture from every angle, look at it in a mirror, sometimes wait a day or two and come back to it... before you can correctly identify the problem. This in itself is fascinating! Why can't we see the errors right away? What is going on in the brain of the sculptor - my brain - that allows me to notice that something is wrong but not be able to pinpoint it? Or to fail completely to notice a problem? As one does this kind of thing more and more... painting, sculpting, drawing... one gets better. One learns to see! To make art is to learn to see. 

And then, when the sculpture or painting or drawing is finished... what is it other than a reflection of the artist's abilities and shortcomings? The work of art is a portrait of the artist's brain, their capacity to see and manually reproduce that thing that they want to make into art. If the artist has a neurological inability to perceive proportion, that failure will be in the artwork. On the other hand, if the artist has the imaginitive ability to see 'beyond' reality, to see rhythms and patterns that aren't literally there, or to distort reality in intentional and gratifying ways, this will also be in the art. The face I sculpted above was sculpted without reference images; I sculpted it just from my head... my idea of what a happy face should look like. And it has a certain 'look,' a certain unreality. Where does that come from? Why did I sculpt it that way? I don't know the answers, but surely if those answers were ever uncovered, they would say something interesting about my brain.

I guess this is one of the reasons I think art made by generative AI is so boring. Yes the artworks themselves can sometimes be amazing, but they don't reveal anything about anyone. And so AI art completely misses the exact thing that I find most interesting about art, its capacity to reveal something personal about the artist. 

_______________________

Sometimes I feel like a retired film star. You know how when movie stars reach a certain level of fame they just sort of disappear from the public eye? Like they don't really have anything to prove anymore. Sometimes I feel that way. I feel more and more these days that I am just making art for myself. Like I don't really care what other people think. Sometimes it seems as if I don't even care if other people see it. I certainly consider myself to be my most important critic; for me the most vital criteria for whether I consider one of my pieces to be good... is whether I like it. Of course none of this is absolute; I will still post on Instagram (although as I write this, I haven't done that in months), I will still try to show my work... especially to people I care about, and I will still try to get grants. But this feeling of not giving a shit, of doing it for myself, is definitely creeping in. And I like it. There's a lot of freedom there. 

I often think of the example of sculptor Lee Bontecou (and I think I've even written about her before.) After achieving some fame in the 1960's and 70's she then retreated from public view for about 30 years. But even though she made almost no attempt to have her work seen during those three decades, she never stopped working. When she was 're-discovered' in the early 2000's, she had a huge body of highly personal work. I think that is so cool! I think having the courage and self-confidence to just say "fuck off" to the world and disappear into art-making is so strong. Anyway, that's how I think of Lee Bontecou!

_______________________

This next point I want to make is definitely not mine alone, although the kernel of this idea did occur to me all by myself while driving one day..  and it pisses me off! Remember how in the 80's and 90's (and earlier) everyone owned their own copy of whatever entertainment media they liked? If you wanted a particular album, you bought an LP or a CD... and it was yours. If you loved a particular movie, you would buy it on VHS or DVD... and it was yours! Nowadays the big digital corporations just want you to stream everything... and so now instead of being an owner... you are just a renter. Not only that, you're a renter without consistent access to your rented property; what happens when you want to listen to your favorite album or watch your favorite movie, but you have no wifi or network connection? You're shit out of luck! I've heard it called "digital feudalism," and just like ye feudal lords of olde, these new digital corporations prioritize profit above all else, profit earned off your back. And when you think about the fact that they are simultaneously collecting all your data... your likes and dislikes and shopping patterns... just to be able to effectively sell you more shit, it's pretty fucking Matrix. I say: buy DVDs and CDs (or torrent and download if that's your thing) and resist being a cell in the giant battery! (Gotta admit, though... streaming is pretty convenient...)

_______________________

I'll be in the States soon. I'm running the Hand of Man at a private event (which I'm not supposed to say much about) in early December. So I'll be in Taos for 10 days in late November, and then in San Francisco from December 5-8, more or less. It will be fun to see old friends, but I'm also sort of scared to go to the US! It seems like a scary place!

It's been so long since I've posted that of course lots of other stuff has happened. We continued our workshop renovations over the summer, built 2 decks affording beautiful views over the neighboring fields...

Deck

...and we are making good progress on Christina's studio. 

I've also been a few fun trips, like Athens with Kodiak, Oslo with Cedar, and Barcelona with Christina. 

Cedar and me, having ridden our rental scooters all over the roof of the Oslo Opera House... Jesus that was fun!

Damian Hirst's Anatomy of an Angel. Such an epic sculpture.

Barcelona, visiting with our old friend Carla

I should probably do another post focusing on those trips; they were fun.

My verdict on living in Europe: no complaints. 

Cheers