Concerning Lampshades and My Issue with Kimonos
While I was born in the town where Thomas Alva Edison grew up and my babysitter had a convoluted connection with Edison by marriage, my seeming fascination with lampshades has nothing to do with lightbulbs. Yet it is interesting to point out that the invention of the lampshade is perhaps the first secondary contrivance to follow the birth of the electric lightbulb.
A lampshade is a simple contraption and serves a limited purpose.
Edison’s initial version of the lightbulb, was either on or off. It was an uncomplicated choice of very bright light or no light. The lampshade, not an Edison “invention”, modulated that light. Let me leave the subject of the bulb and its brightness and cut to the lampshade and its shape. The usual shape of a lampshade is a truncated cone. A smaller opening on top and a larger diameter ring on the bottom. The smaller ring allowed the heat generated by the bulb to escape. The larger diameter ring of the cone put the light where it was wanted. The lampshade is a universal structure. The truncated cone is a relatively modern form, similar in shape to the megaphone.
Artists have always questioned the conventions of art. Must we only draw on cave walls? How about we paint on canvas? One of the more simple questions was: must artworks be limited to a rectangular format? Were non-rectangular objects, such as painted vases, not valid artworks? Had looms for weaving canvas not been invented might artists still be creating portable art on animal skins? By practical convention and thanks to the industrial revolution, paper and canvas are efficiently and economically produced in rolls and bolts compatible with a rectangular system of use and display. Imagine if this was not so. Consider if books were made as if we were honeybees, hexagonal pages instead of right angled. Reimagine a library whose collection was entirely of scrolls or stacks of mammoth skins or clay tablets of various shapes and sizes. There is comfort in consistent shapes and forms. However, Art is not always about comfort. Sometimes it can be about a new perspective or looking through fresh eyes.
I was, back in the 1960s, making drawings and prints and understood how paper was formed and how by necessity books relied upon the rectangular paradigm. Prints were not only on rectangular sheets, but also had margins that were redundant echoes of the exterior shape. To my way of thinking, the art of printmaking seemed to be tied to and therefore subservient to bookmaking. I wanted to see prints independent of the conventions of bookmaking. I began making prints that had no border and after learning how to make my own paper realized I could control shape. Eventually I discovered, by trial and error, that non-rectangular shapes were virtually unintentional Rorschach tests. All shapes triggered memory and recognition; therefore free-form shapes carried the potential for unexpected, unplanned associations for viewers, something the Surrealists might encourage. I was not, however, a Surrealist. Other shapes were too specific, such as the kimono and fan shapes. The kimono shape unfortunately diverted viewers to focus on wearable kimonos, which was not my intention at all. My purpose was to present non-rectangular forms upon which to work, anything to avoid the standard right angled format. At the time many artists were introducing non-western forms and concepts into western culture. It was a common and age old method for injecting fresh and alternative ideas into a society. I was looking at non-western art to find shapes unexplored or rarely used by our tradition. In western tradition the rectangular shape upon which artworks were made had become ubiquitous, “invisible”. The rectangular format was imperceptible rendered so by the simple fact that the square cornered frame was nothing more or less than a window, a picture window through which one gazed upon a flat image rendered magically with such trompe l’oeil devilishness to cause the onlooker to marvel at the painter’s talent. The border, white blank page, was a wall that vanished as we gazed upon the image. My intent was not so much that the viewer see the wall, I wanted there to be no wall. I wanted to insert another dimension. Shape was a missing component.
The addition of shape as an element of design, as I would eventually discover, could potentially also create a virtual minefield. I did not want to suggest that the viewer “see” or imagine freely, only that the image was more or less a thing of its own and not a page with borders snipped from an old folio. But, regarding snipping, one can easily create a shape by cutting or tearing. Easy was not what I was after. I wanted an authentic shape. Handmade paper, being ragged with deckle edges was an indication of freedom and authenticity, especially because I was the papermaker creating the shape in the vat and not clipping the sheet later. I especially like the honesty of the feather deckle. A particular sheet of paper defines and announces its border. Whereas the razor cut edge of an illustration freed from a book looks to me like a broken chain attached to a shackle still around a bare ankle. I wanted ankles without shackles. Therefore I explored forming handmade papers in a variety of shapes upon which to work, shapes without any more baggage than necessary.
Shapes, as I sadly learned the hard way, were laden with endless associations. Kimonos, which I first used as a straightforward expression of theme-and-variation, ala Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, became more than shapes. Still I soldiered on. In truth, whether or not they have borders or even desire to be illustrations in books, prints are prints. Illustrations are illustrations and Art may or may not be Art. I was protesting what did not need to be protested. I even learned to not worry so much about the triggers of shapes. I winnowed my shape-making to a manageable visual vocabulary: kimonos, fans, disks, spirals, and wedges; accepting that even those were susceptible to unintended associations. I try to remind those who look at my work that my kimonos are as much about soup as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup were about kimonos. But, let me speak, now, of lampshades and neither soup nor kimonos.
Did you know that if you remove the paper skin from a truncated conical lampshade, laying it out flat, it looks much like an unfolded Japanese paper fan? Perhaps I am only attracted to the shape because it is simultaneously as much inconspicuous as it is ubiquitous. These are practical shapes we overlook and accept. This bent or arcing, elongated rectangle on a pivot is much like the shape your windshield wiper would make on your car’s windshield if the windshield were flat……when car windshields were invented they were flat, and wipers made such perfect fan-shapes. Your present day windshield wipers clear your view and do not assert themselves. They do not demand attention.
The fan/wiper/flattened lampshade shape is only special in that it does a task without inviting unwarranted associations. It is never a horse head, mushroom, or political symbol, which were reactions suffered by other of my non-referential shapes. The fan/wiper/rolled fan acts as a blocker of excessive illumination, a visibility aid, a curious scroll, a stabile plinth, a maker of cooler breezes, a wiper of windshields.
During a recent visit to the local thrift shop I found myself drawn to photograph discarded lampshades. I was not sure what caused me to focus on them. Compelled might have been the verb and familiar in an unseen way was likely a good excuse for making the pictures. In the thrift shop there were an unlimited number of other objects I might have aimed my camera at, but did not. It was something about the lampshades that only later revealed itself and then led me to muse about a long forgotten lampshade from my childhood. As a little boy there was a lamp in the bedroom that stood on the table next to my bed. It appeared to be a regular little lamp with a white lampshade until it was switched on. Only then did the image inside of the lampshade become visible: a sailing ship on a calm sea. This might have been sufficiently magical for a little boy as his head rested upon his pillow and his eyelids grew heavier and heavier. What made it more captivating was that the warmth of the lightbulb animated an interior screen that shimmied, which in turn projected light from behind creating the illusion that the water was moving. I could almost hear the water gently slapping the hull of the sailing ship.
So, there I was, snapping photographs of discarded lampshades in the thrift shop when I recalled the ceramic pieces I made back in 1992. I had used a galvanized pail and a lampshade as inspiration of forms from which to create the Inverted Earthenware Lampshade series. I literally cast a plaster mold from a lampshade to create these non-functional, three-dimensional paintings. By making them out of clay light could not pass through. I wanted to indirectly celebrate the quiet shape of the rolled, not folded fan, to give the lampshade a moment in the spotlight.
I can almost hear water gently slapping beyond the flat rectangular wall.
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