Art | Giving Life to Found Objects, Two by Two
By JORI FINKEL
Published: Published: April 29, 2007
LOS ANGELES | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The children's space at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles was inspired by Noah's Ark and its parallel stories in many cultures.
| All Aboard "IT'S a law of nature: When the eyes are wet, the animal is alive," said Chris Green, stroking the head of a wooden deer. Most of the deer, which he built out of odd parts, looks rather abstract. The body is hollow, its form outlined with folding rulers and rigged with a faucet and other hardware to suggest the animal's own plumbing. The ears are found objects, a pair of wood shoe stretchers. But the face is sweetly realistic, a carving made of basswood with big, brown, glassy doe eyes. Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Green was pulling late nights back in his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to finish building the deer and a couple of dozen other life-size animals. Crowded into a 400-square-foot room there, "they would freak me out," he said. "You're tired, you're working after hours, and you forget you've set up a coyote at eye level. But there he is, head carved, eyes glossy. In the back part of the brain, your lizard brain, your fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in." Now the doe and other animals preside over the entrance of a new 8,000-square-foot exhibition space here at the Skirball Cultural Center, really a children's museum that takes the form of Noah's Ark. | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The display features puppets and sculptures, like this giraffe.
| An experimental puppeteer who has worked on shows with the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont and Basil Twist in New York, Mr. Green has brought a few animals to life before. In a puppet production of Stravinsky's opera "Oedipus Rex," he was the raven, bearer of omens. And he once, on his own, made a pocket-size marionette of a deer. But this is the first time he has created an entire menagerie â€" sculptures, semi-kinetic sculptures and puppets â€" for a more permanent stage set. The zoo of an installation fills the second floor of the Skirball's south hall. At 75 feet wide and 17 feet tall, the wooden ark will accommodate up to 125 visitors at a time when it opens to the public on June 26. | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times Kids can load pairs of animals onto a ramp to send into the ark.
| When Mr. Green walked around the ark during a moment of quiet before a round of focus groups, puppetry rehearsals and operational tests, the animals owned the place. There were more than 300, representing some 150 different species â€" from a giant tortoise made of a basketball hide to a green anaconda made of upholstery springs. Most come, as you would expect, in pairs. Outside the ark sit pairs of small foam penguins, giraffes and other animals, which kids can load onto a ramp to send into the ark. Inside, animals hang from all levels and sit in its boxy compartments. Deeper into the structure, past a bridge, the wood of the boat looks worn. Time â€" maybe the 40 days and 40 nights of the Bible â€" has passed. The rabbits have multiplied. The idea for the ark came from Skirball's founding president, Uri Herscher, who started thinking about a children's destination in the early 1980s, a good decade before the building opened. His trustees encouraged him to put adults â€" and the completion of their Moshe Safdie-designed museum â€" first. But the notion of a children's space was so compelling that he asked Mr. Safdie to design a flexible gallery space for it, although Mr. Herscher had no idea what the space would eventually look like. | |
 Ir al Video
| "We had been looking at children's museums for several years, and we never left terribly excited by what we saw," he said, citing the Boston Children's Museum as an exception. "Most of them have the same bright colors, the same building blocks, the same fire trucks. They are playgrounds, and they may be lovely playgrounds. But we wanted to do something more meaningful. We wanted a story." Then, seven years ago, he visited the art collection of a Skirball trustee, Lloyd E. Cotsen. Mr. Cotsen, the former president of Neutrogena, is known for amassing textiles and children's books from different cultures. Mr. Herscher discovered that he also collected miniature "folk arks" from around the world, more than 100 dollhouse-size arks from a range of countries. Mr. Herscher found his concept. "Noah's Ark is a timeless story with parallels throughout the globe," he said. "You can find a flood narrative from every culture that has a river, starting with the cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia." He pointed out that all the stories share some basic symbolic elements: "They all have floods. They all have arks. And they all have rainbows â€" signs of hope and renewal." | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The ark's animals are made of found and repurposed objects.
| He sees the lesson as one of survival through collaboration. "Noah's Ark is about second chances," he said. "And it is about diversity: different animals learning to live together under a single shelter." All Aboard The story is not, at least in this incarnation, much about Noah. Although the Skirball is a Jewish museum, it left the Old Testament hero and his family out of the installation. And it supplied little text. A few phrases projected onto the floor of the ark encourage visitors to board it and "journey together." A book in the exhibition gathers flood legends from around the world. What happened to Noah? "I'm not a worshiper of a lone ranger," Mr. Herscher said. "I love biblical heroes, but I think biblical heroes are a compilation of many characters. Noah represents more than one person in his generation." Mr. Green is more direct. "That's an easy one: You're Noah, we're all Noah, we're all working together to save the planet." What might be harder, he says, is if children ask about God. "We haven't really discussed that yet. My feeling is it's probably better to answer a question with a question, like, 'What do you believe?' " | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times An instrument case forms the crocodile's mouth.
| Building the ark at the Skirball museum was itself a major collaboration, taking six years and costing $5 million. The museum secured funds from Wells Fargo and Mr. Cotsen, who donated his folk arks. And it brought in many species of consultants, from animal-behavior experts to exhibition designers. A specialist in ropes and challenge courses built climbing walls into the hull of the ark. A sound-effects expert helped to develop a "conduct-a-storm" display, where children can work together to simulate the sounds of rain, wind and thunder. A lighting designer figured out how to float a rainbow on the show's last wall. And Mr. Green was not the only one building the animals. He had help from Eric Novak, who carved most of the heads. They handcrafted about 30 of the most prominent animals, while Alan Maskin designed hundreds of background animals, which he sent out for fabrication. This work was a departure for Mr. Maskin, an architect with the Seattle firm Olson Sund-berg Kundig Allen. Best known for building high-end art museums and homes, the firm beat out dozens of children's exhibition designers to land the job of raising the ark. Mr. Maskin, who once worked as a children's educator, took the role of art director, overseeing much of the collaboration and discovering a knack for whipping out animal sketches at a breakneck pace. | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times Chris Green, puppeteer, is the mastermind behind the ark's creatures. Mr. Green has brought a few animals to life before for plays, but this is the first time he has created a complete set of animals, some of which are semi-kinetic, for a more permanent stage set.
| His colleagues at the firm focused on the construction. "There's a sort of abstract relationship between our building and real boat construction," Mr. Maskin said. "It approximates a boat with its beams and ribs, but it would not actually float." (This being Los Angeles, however, the ark was built to survive an earthquake.) As for the ark's contents, Mr. Maskin aimed high. "The big shift in children's museums in the '60s," he explained, "is that designers started getting on their hands and knees and looking at the world from the children's point of view. That was radical and important, but it left out adults who are five or six feet tall and have different perspectives. We made it a priority to engage adults as well." One way to do this, he suggests, is through the artistry of the animals. Marni Gittleman, who now has the title head of Noah's Ark at the Skirball, knew Mr. Green from her days as an exhibition developer in New York. Two years ago she invited him to come to the Skirball and meet the team. She described Mr. Green's initial talk as "thoughtful and magical â€" he was wearing a backpack and started unloading these creatures." One was a bee made out of an antique hand drill. Acetate wings, glued onto a wooden dowel that ran through the body, would spin when the handle was cranked. | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times Mr. Green visited the Bronx Zoo and used photographs by Eadweard Muybridge of animals in motion for inspiration.
| "There was a transparency to it, so you could see how it worked," recalled Mr. Green. "It was like an old Victorian toy." Transparency was one of the basic design principles established by the Skirball. Durability, one reason many animals in the ark lack tails, was another. And of course safety was an issue. But the Skirball team was also working with a notion of sustainability â€" which generally meant using wood, avoiding plastics and synthetics, and incorporating repurposed objects. Every animal Mr. Green designed for the ark features something scavenged or repurposed. A pair of flamingo puppets have pouchy pink purses as bodies and fly swatters as feet. The jaws of the crocodiles are formed from a violin case (for the female) and a viola case (for the male), with the humps made from pieces of a car tire. The zebras' haunches consist of black-and-white rotary ventilator turbines, and their manes are made of salvaged organ keys. All Aboard Mr. Green sees this kind of resourcefulness as a staple of the puppet business. "A lot of us are drawn to the puppet world because we have many interests," he said. "You can be a sculptor, a writer, a performer and a researcher all at once. Sometimes I create an entire show just because I want to build stuff for it." For the ark, his research meant visiting the Bronx Zoo and consulting photographs, including some by Eadweard Muybridge, of animals in motion. While Mr. Green was not going for realism, he wanted to capture the animals' natural scale and form. "The problem with using found objects is that they can be clunky," he said. "If you can make a woman out of a tin can, it's still a tin can. I worked hard on the line of the animals to give them a kind of grace of movement â€" nothing too blocky or cutesy." The repurposing also has an environmental bent, illustrating how to make the most of limited resources. "No piano was killed to make the zebras," he said. "These are replacement organ keys I bought on eBay for $70." | |
 J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The animals were designed to be durable and sustainable, which generally meant using wood and avoiding plastics and synthetics.
| And the type of zebra he chose was not random. Mr. Green modeled his semi-kinetic sculptures on the Grevy's zebra from Africa, known for its very narrow stripes and its fast-shrinking population in Ethiopia and Kenya; it was declared an endangered species in 2000. Likewise, he identifies his deer as the critically endangered sika deer from Siberia, China and Manchuria, and the crocodile as the rare saltwater crocodile from Australia. If all goes as planned, this kind of eco-history will not be lost on visitors. Mr. Green spent a week here this month training a dozen new Skirball employees to involve kids in activities and teach them about the animals. He also showed them how to work the puppets, which will be taken down from their perches for performances. He taught a modified style of bunraku, the traditional Japanese puppetry known for putting three people on one puppet â€" one on the puppet's feet, another on the left hand and a third on the head and right hand. "I come from the dance puppetry world, where the puppeteer is visible, not hidden," Mr. Green said. "The physical movements of the puppeteer are integral to the performance." Then he made a connection to his standing sculptures. "But you know I see the sculptures as puppets too," he said. "They are also alive. They are just paused puppets. If you turn your back on them, they'll sneak up on you." | | | | | |
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home