Interview with Jacopo Crivelli -Visconti on the occasion of the Retrospective of Saint Clair Cemin at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Sao Paulo, 2009 (in Portuguese)

JCV: Gostaria que você falasse do período brevíssimo, de intensa produção, e que viria a ser fundamental no desenvolvimento da sua trajetória, em que você se descobriu como escultor. Como isso se deu, o que você fazia antes, aonde foi...

SC: No verao de 1983 eu estava vivendo no East Village em Nova Yorke. Era um pequeno apartamento que me servia de atelier ao mesmo tempo. Nos ultimos dois anos eu havia realizado inumeros projetos e no momento estava desenvolvendo uma ideia que ha muito me interessava. Tratava-se duma obra conceitual: eu queria investigar a realidade existencial do artista en seu atelier. A ideia era da definicao dum espaco limitado onde o artista (neste caso eu) teria um certo numero de materiais e instrumentos e sua tarefa era a de executar “qualquer coisa”. A base da ideia era esta; o artista tem liberdade absoluta mas nem um criterio. Esta seria uma situacao similar aquela quando alguem lhe poe um microfone e pede que diga algo, qualquer coisa, o que geralmente nos reduz a ao silencio pois “qualquer coisa” nao e uma informacao, nao temos ideia de onde comecar.
Eu tinha uma mesa com argila, gesso, papel de desenho, lapis, e outros materiais bem basicos.
Sentei-me e comecei a trabalhar. As primeiras coisas que sairam de minhas maos eram em argila. Comecei a fazer canecas, canecas com cara, com olhos nariz e boca. Algumas tinham as orelhas como alsas. Depois comecei a fazer cinzeiros, alguns com temas eroticos. No fim do dia tinha uma mesa cheia de figurinos os mais diversos, bibelots que iam desde cachorrinhos ate penguins de geladeira (um desses era o “tai-chi penguin”). O fato que nao havia tocado no papel era significativo., havia so trabalhado a argila e feito objetos de escala reduzida. Continuei neste afa todos os dias da semana, trabalhando de 9 as 5, fazendo mais e mais objetos. Muitos comecaram a parecer escultura. Meu metodo era simples: eu havia nivelado todos os criterios usados na producao duma obra, o material, a ideia, memorias, estilos, etc. estavam todos no mesmo plano, fiz tabula-rasa do sistema de valores ao realizar um trabalho. No fim de uma semana me dei conta que o enquadramento conceitual do trabalho estava vazando. Que a atividade mesmo a qual me dedicava estava criando informacao nova que depassava ou transbordava minha intencao conceitual. O que eu estava fazendo era um tipo de experiencia muito semelhante a escultura, dependendendo como a definimos, com efeito, era escultura. Assim que continuei a trabalhar sem me preocupar com desculpas conceituais para minha atividade frenetica e heteroclita. Eram formas que simultaneamente pertenciam a mundos diferentes. Coisas que isoladas poderiam ser confundidas com curiosidades de mercado-das-pulgas mas que em companhia umas das outras testemunhavam um inconsciente coletivo e pessoal vasto e misterioso.
A vantagem da liberdade completa e que ela nos permite de experimentar com todos os parametros do fazer. Eu fazia um bibelot tentando faze-lo belo, depois me dedicava a criar algo de grotesco, quase repugnante ou de fazer o mais feio objeto ja concebido “ Un Morceau de Laideur”
ou a “Granny Ash Tray” que o critico Alan Jones, um de meus grandes amigos na epoca, disse ser um “cuspe no olho do publico” o que muito me encorajou. “Granny” e um cinzeiro que se forma entres as pernas dum nu que esta ajoelhado. Este nu, um corpo duma mulher ja duma certa idade, nao tem bracos mas cotos e tem como cabeca uma caveira. Outros trabalhos eram menos ofensivos mas tambem sugestivos. fiz uma mae com crianca no estilo Unesco, um acolito segurando um prato na maneira altamente estilisada da Igreja no tempo do Concilio Vaticano II, alem dum grande numero de pratos, canecas, elefantes, cavalos, mulheres, casas, automoveis, passaros que derreten-se como gelo, etc.
E dificil descrever a quantidade de descobertas e intuicoes que esta fase inicial de meu trabalho produziu. Uma delas foi a descoberta dum dos paradoxos centrais da arte conceitual que e o seguinte: o artista conceitual comeca seu trabalho baseado no fato que a obra de arte na sua atualidade consiste numa representacao na mente do observador, isto e, nao e um objeto material mas “cosa mentale”. Sciente disso o artista procede com a intencao de controlar esta representacao, tentando fazer uma obra completamente racional e consciente. E ai esta a contradicao. Se a obra e reconstituida na mente do observador, entao nao ha maneira do artista controla-la. a unica maneira seria a de simplificar essa obra de tal maneira que ela tornar-se-ia efetivamente inexistente.
Eu me dei conta por outro lado, que a necessidade de controle deveria cessar mesmo antes, que o artista nao so nao tem necessidade de controlar a mente do observador, como mesmo a sua propria. A razao esgota o sentido do trabalho assim que decidi que seria melhor para mim de mostrar o trabalho sem um quadro de referencia conceitual, deixar que aquela populacao de objetos fizesse sua propria vida no mundo, que eles mesmos, como haviam achado uma forma de existir atraves de minhas maos, que achassem uma forma de ser entre outros objetos cotidianos.
Depois dessa decisao comecei a trabalhar a pedra, o marmore, o alabastro e a pedra dura.
Fiz uma esfinge de marmore negro da Belgica com a cabeca humana em gesso, fiz um cao estilizado, uma gamela em pedra da Turquia e um cisne cuja cauda fazia pensar a um vaso sanitario, em marmore.
Minha primeira exposicao com este trabalho ocorreu dois anos depois, na galeria Daniel Newburg em outubro de 1985. Eram mais de cinquenta obras, todas em pedestais da mesma altura. Era como uma floresta ou como um templo pagao com seu idolos.

Saint Clair Cemin:

Violoncego (The Blind Cello), 2006

Ever since the gold leaf horns appeared as support structures in the Annunciation Table of 1986, there have been a number of 'musical instruments' in Saint Clair Cemin's work: a bronze Bell (1986); the trombone-like creatures budding along the stem of Mercury Fountain (1990); the colorful, paper-thin, wooden figure joyously playing the harp in The Harp of Happiness (1992); and the green guitar with one string (a piece of wire) that comprises First Lesson (1992), one of his most infamous sculptures, just to name a few. Although in form Violoncego (2006) resembles most First Lesson, but with a bronze 'arm' and a body made of wood painted flesh-tone pink, its theme reiterates the one in The Harp of Happiness. They say that the performance of a piece of music is not perfect unless the instrument and the player of the instrument become one. This appears to be what has happened in Violoncego: the 'body' of the cellist has been fully integrated into the smooth, stringless, pink, wooden body of the cello, and the gruff, bronze 'arm' of the instrument alludes perhaps to a Baroque composition. Except that we cannot hear it because the 'mouth' of the instrument, or its strings, have been ironically silenced by virtue of the integration of the instrument and the player, a union which seems to have become absolute in this work.

Is Cemin asking us to listen to the silent song played by our own bodies or is he asking us to listen to the Baroque or symphonic silence of the universe, which is to be found everywhere and nowhere? Violoncego is a very forceful, moving piece that remains strangely mute or reticent. It is evocative of the early Neo-classical Surrealist compositions by Picasso. If First Lesson seemed subliminally to reference Picasso's Old Guitarist (1903) from the Blue Period, then Violoncego seems to pick up on works by Picasso from the 1920 and '30s that depicted figures with musical instruments and dancers, some of whom possessed flesh-toned hues. It is as though, after all these years, Picasso's figures ('players' of a sort) had finally become one with Cemin's cello to produce a silent but great Neo-Classical / Baroque composition!

It was T.S. Eliot who once argued, in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that great art, an individual form of expression, in the present can change how we look at history, and can, to a degree, actually change the great traditions of the past. That it was not only the past that put pressure on work in the present, but such seminal works could change not only how we view the past but the very meaning of its works. While it is true that we cannot look at Cemin's sculpture without looking through the history of art, it is also true that the greatness of art in the present can be measured not only in the way it forces itself into the pantheon or status quo but by the manner in which it challenges and permanently alters our most venerated values and institutions. Suddenly, and often without noticing it, we are looking at the Pantheon of the Arts and its most venerable works and figureheads in a different way. This is what Cemin's art has always done, and this is what Violoncego does, powerfully and subtlety. It changes not only what we look at (or hear) but how we see it. It is always the mechanism of perception itself that is at stake in a great work of art, and this is very much the case with Cemin. Violoncego continues this great tradition in his work.

by Richard Milazzo, November 10, 2008
Author of Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta
(New York: Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005)

Saint Clair Cemin is an artist who has fabricated sculptures out of bronze, plaster, marble, steel, and wood. As varied as the materials, so is the scale from table-top height to towering out-door fountains and statues. His interest in public sculpture started in the early nineteen-nineties with his first public-art commission Mercury Fountain(1990) for a town square in Reston, Virginia. In nineteen-ninety-six, the bronze version of Hood Ornament(1996) was purchased by Grounds for Sculpture for permanent installation at their museum and sculpture park in Hamilton, New Jersey. Recently, three commissions for monumental scale bronze sculptures were installed in permanent out-door public sites around the world, Tree(2000) in Bergen, Norway, Spring(2000) in Bastad, Sweden, and Open(2000-2001) in Schamburg, Illinois.

When the town of Reston, Virginia desired a public fountain for the town square they organized a committee and invited artists to submit proposals to a jury. Saint Clair Cemin, who is known for his bronze and marble sculptures that combine abstract and figurative elements, won the competition with his proposal, Mercury Fountain(1990), which stands twenty-seven-and-a-half feet tall. A bronze classical statue depicting Mercury, the mythological winged-footed messenger, stands posed for flight atop a carved marble column. Encircling the column are twelve decorative bronze elements resembling abstracted horns or seashells, from which water cascades into a 9 x 10 foot basin carved from a single piece of marble and then overflows into several levels of collecting pools at the base of the fountain.

When the hydrocal sculpture Hood Ornament(1995) was presented at Robert Miller Gallery in New York, it's grand scale of eleven-foot high by eleven-foot wide and four-feet in depth took up the entire floor space of the exhibition room. Cemin had fabricated Hood Ornament out of cardboard triangles and squares affixed to a simple wooden armature and reinforced on the exterior with hydrocal. Using the cardboard form as a mold, he cut it in half and cast the inside in white hydrocal. All of the seams where the cardboard sections had been joined and even the tears in the cardboard material were visible. When the piece was cast in bronze at Johnson Atelier, the many faceted surface caught and reflected light off the metal in an interesting way. The bronze version of Hood Ornament(1996) stands surrounded by a field of green grass at the out-door sculpture park at Grounds for Sculpture.

After the experience of casting Hood Ornament in bronze, Cemin was interested to continue to fabricate large scale out-door public artworks. In nineteen-ninety-nine, the opportunity came in the form of three separate commissions. Over the next two years, Cemin designed, had fabricated, and installed three bronze sculptures of the monumental scale, which were each destined for a different city around the world. All three projects were realized by the artist at foundries in China. For an artist who lives and works in New York, China is on the other side of the world. So why China?

Cemin clarifies that in nineteen-ninety-nine while visiting the Beijing Fine Art Institute in China, he met Li-Gang, a young artist who introduced him to the model-making studio and foundries that cast bronze sculptures of an epic proportion. Cemin learned that for the last century China has had excellent experience in fabricating gigantic public monuments. To this day, the Chinese foundries employ traditional model-making methods that were perfected in nineteenth-century France. These techniques were passed from France to Russia and then onto China, arriving just after the Chinese Revolution.

Cemin, who already had the designs completed and approved for the two public art commissions for sites in Norway and Sweden, understood the value of fabricating his proposed large-scale sculptures in China. He hired Li-Gang as his on-site assistant and translator, and began working immediately. From the artist's specifications two models were started out of clay over a steel and wood structure. As the project progressed over the next few months, Cemin made several visits over to China, twice to work on the clay models, and again to oversee the bronze finishing.

One commission was for the Telenor Corporation, in Bergen, Norway. Through the Galerie Lars Bohman in Stockholm, which represents Cemin's work in Sweden, the artist was introduced to Claes Söderquist, who organized the connection to the Telenor Corporation. The Telenor commission was for a sculpture designed specifically for a twenty-five meter site on the grounds of the new Telenor building in Bergen, Norway. When the artist visited the site in Bergen he was impressed by the surrounding view of pine trees. In his design, Cemin considered the color, form, and scale of the sculpture to echo the Norwegian woods, and reference the World Tree, Yggdrasil of Norwegian mythology. Tree (2000), stands majestically tall, weights four-and-a-half tons, and the bronze is finished with a green patina.

Material and scale can greatly effect the feeling of an artwork. For example, in 1998 Cemin completed a group of marble carving that were exhibited at Galerie Lars Bohman. Included in this group were Tree and Woman (1998), both carvings are approximately thirty-eight inches in height. The marble Tree (1998) sits as a solid mass on a square base, with layer of leaves forming a crown-like shape. The out-door bronze sculpture Tree ( 2000) raises from a ten-foot base to a towering twenty-six-foot height. Reaching towards the sky the form twists and turns as it spirals up to a pinnacle.

The surface markings on the marble carving Woman (1998) seem to caress the statue from head to toe, while she stands perfectly still. Her whole body is formed from a single mass, with no definition of the arms, face, or legs. A year later Cemin produced another sculpture of the female image, this time out of bronze, entitled Order and Progress (1999). I n the bronze a large woman carries a smaller woman atop her head. The features of the two woman are more defined and there is a more fluid movement to the body, as if caught in mid-stride. It seems that when translating from marble into bronze there comes a lighter and more elongated form.

A much larger version of Order and Progress (1999), was later fabricated in bronze and re-named Spring (2000) for Cemin's second public-art commission for the town of Bastad, Sweden. The commission came about because the Swedish artist Peter Frie who lives in Bastad knew that there was to be a competition to design a public fountain for the town plaza. Peter Frie recommended Cemin for the project. Cemin proposed to enlarge the existing sculpture Order and Progress from forty-six inches to twelve-foot in height and transform the statue into a fountain by having a small stream of water emanate from the hand of the smaller woman who sits atop the larger woman. From that height the water gently arches outward and forms a small pool just at the larger woman's feet.

When Cemin enlarged the figure from fourty-six inches to twelve-foot in height, he altered the texture and refined curtain details. There are rough marking all over the surface of Order and Progress giving the illusion that the fabric which drapes the larger figure is of the same material as the skin. In Spring, the women's skin is smoother and the fabric folds are deeper. This allegorical statue stands with courage and strength in the center of the town of Bastad, as if Winter would be carrying Spring on it's shoulders.

Both Tree and Spring were being worked on at the same time in the Beijing model making studio. At any given time there was a crew of fifteen people working on both projects. The photographs of Tree were taken at the foundry in China, showing the crew that worked on the casting. When the finished clay models for both pieces were approved by Cemin, the second step was to make the plaster mold. A plaster positive was cast and the clay model was destroyed. The final model going to the foundry was a plaster sculpture, which was transported by truck four hours from the model studio in Beijing to the foundry in the Hebei province.

This particular foundry was an expert at bronze sand casting. Each detail meant a separate piece, resulting in over twenty sand molds just for the woman's head of Spring. The sand casting for both pieces took two months. Cemin went back to China to inspect the finished pieces which he found to be perfect, and then the sculptures were trucked to a port where each sculpture was sent on a boat, Tree to Norway, and Spring to Sweden.

Open (2000-2001), was the third sculpture to be fabricated in China. Carrie Secrist Gallery of Chicago, Illinois arranged the meeting between the artist and the Motorola Corporation. Cemin proposed an enormous bronze sculpture which stands eighteen-and-half feet high like a giant rectangular doorway or frame. Within this framework are four cut-out shapes. Fluid bronze ribbons surround open spaces which represent abstracted images of an antenna, bird, bridge, and a woman holding a shell to her ear. This five-and-a-half ton artwork was bronze cast in five pieces, welded together and then cut in half for transportation by boat from the foundry in China to the United States. Once in Illinois the sculpture was welded back together and installed with local finishers from Chicago.

Saint Clair Cemin thinks seriously about perspective. He realizes that large-scale public sculpture ideally is meant to be seen from a distance. More often than not there are too many obstacles like automobiles, buildings, or trees, which get in the way of a clear long range view. As an artist fabricating monumental public art, Cemin is keenly aware of the fact that artworks seen in a public setting are often viewed from a foreshortened perspective. Conscience of this fact, Cemin considers the sculpture from up-close, from a few feet away, and then again from twenty feet in the distance. Most importantly to make sure that the image holds it's shape from any vantage point.