Against the Elements: Roy Staab's
Chaise Ile
Posted02-01-2012
Every artist grapples with the
elements of his medium. To a certain extent, the only question left after the
work has been conceived and begun is the limit that those elements present. In
painting, it was for many years the boundaries of the canvas dictating the
frame within which one worked, until Modernism spat on the edge and called that
residue a material. In the performing arts, the limits tend to belong to the
body—physical exhaustion, the muscular failure of one's singing or speaking
voice, or the possible range of motion an individual body style can command. In
writing, as in any art, limits include—but are not limited to—infelicity with
language, distraction, narcissism, and most often, the assumption that style
alone can trump substance, that the wrapping paper is worth more than the
gift. In the work of landscape artist Roy Staab, this idea is meaningless.
The word limit is not in his lexicon. I learned this firsthand on a
frigid, windless day in late November, after eight hours with him in a canoe.
At its
essence, Staab's work is simple to describe: he makes artworks in nature from
nature, using only the materials that the natural world provides. In a career
spanning three decades, he has made works around the globe, from his native
Milwaukee to cities such as New York, Tokyo, Borgo Valsugana, and most
recently, New Orleans, where he was in residence at A Studio in the Woods.
Incorporating Buddhist principles of transience and immateriality directly into
his work, Staab creates ephemeral pieces at specific points in a given
landscape which, while formally intricate and geometrically inspired, leave
little to no impact on that landscape and last only as long as the materials
themselves. His materials include reeds, grasses, twine, hand-woven ropes of
hemp, stone, snow, and the earth itself. When he designs and constructs a
piece—in conversation, he calls this “making a work,” a rapid turn of phrase
that bespeaks his years in the practice—he sketches it out, assembles the
materials, builds it, films it or photographs it, and leaves it there to fall
apart or rot.
The
process of actually building a work, however, is tougher to describe,
especially when it involves nine fifteen-foot bamboo poles, three twenty-foot
hand-woven bloodweed ropes, a three-foot-deep bayou with an unstable layer of mud
and silt, two canoes obtained on borrowed time, and, to top it off, a current.
We began the November day in mid-morning, overlooking Bayou Bienvenue in the
Lower Ninth Ward. Three young bamboo shoots, waving in the breeze as if in
welcome, marked the planned location of Staab's next work, Chaise Ile.
We lowered the canoes into the water—the five of us, Roy and his four
volunteers—and fetched the tallest of the bamboo poles.
It's one
thing to canoe down a tranquil, bubbling creek, with the sunshine overhead and
a picnic basket in hand. It's another entirely to pilot that bamboo pole
against a constantly-moving current in search of a spot beneath the water
marked only by a single shoot, then anchor the canoe with a stick while a man
drives each pole into the soft mud, dislodging it and hauling it up when the
angle is off-center or when the tip strikes a submerged tree trunk, the rocking
of the boats and the shifting of the weight threatening to overturn the canoe
the entire time. Repeat this process nine times over, and the result—along with
a torrent of what might be politely termed “Navy words,” for one is, after all,
on the water—is the skeleton of a piece, the scaffolding of the work that is to
come.
When we
finished the first phase of Chaise Ile, it was beautiful by itself:
three neat sections of three poles each forming the points of a perfectly
spaced triangle in the water, the warm greens of the bamboo glowing against the
pale morning mist and the fog occluding the shore of the bayou on the horizon.
It was almost enough to leave just there, to observe how the creation of that
geometric form had—even before the rest of the work—imposed order upon nature,
as Staab's work always aims to do. We feared, for a moment, that the poles
would fall, but the ground he had found was deep and firm, and in the absence
of a storm, the poles would hold.
We broke
for coffee and for lunch, stamping our feet on the platform and greeting the
cyclists that visited the area. Bayou Bienvenue, as one of the more important
waterways in New Orleans, both for its history as a cypress swamp and its
changing ecology after the closure of the Mississippi-River Gulf Outlet, is now
a scientific research site and a tourist destination. Staab's piece originally
called for a triangle of bamboo to be joined by six bloodweed ropes, the first
three forming the sides of the structure and the second three meeting in the
middle at an axis of shifting empty space, a form he has explored in works
elsewhere. But time was not on our side: the canoes would have to be returned
by close of day, and it was not clear that the first tier of woven ropes would
slot immediately into place.
They did
not. Back out on the water, now carrying the ropes between the two
canoes—struggling to keep them from falling in, as water both weighs down and
swells the fibers—Staab soon realized he had woven them too long for the sides
of the triangle, and each rope would have to be taken down and hewn to size.
This was not uncommon, he acknowledged: in past works, he had found that a
degree of approximation was necessary, and that experience had taught him to
over rather than under weave a piece in length. All well in theory. In
practice, this meant the tedious work of hoisting each rope over and through a
thin wire band, pulling it up and through as from a pulley, measuring once one
end of a side was tied at one of the three points, steering both canoes to the
adjoining point to measure how far up the rope would reach, then cutting it to
size after Staab had eyeballed how far above the water it would have to
suspend. Each one, by default, sagged at least a foot below the surface, but as
none of the sides of the triangle were perfectly equal, and all of their sides
would adjust as each was tied to the other, the length was impossible to
determine before we were on the water. All this, as before, while canoeing
against the current in the freezing cold, anchoring each canoe with a cut
stick.
On shore,
the observers—high and dry—shouted encouragement, and laughed as they caught
our stray Navy words. Lunch and coffee were long forgotten as we fought to keep
the canoes in place, and Staab as he wove, cut, rewove, recut, and hoisted each
new piece into the sky. As the triangle slowly took shape, and the brown arc of
the dried bloodweed began to create a space within the structure where none had
been before, we began to understand his design. Had a mechanical engineer
stumbled upon the scene, he or she would have found no complaint: the piece
held, held beautifully, and by the end of the afternoon, despite a slight sag
in one of the sides—which Staab labored to no avail to correct, the
foundational point of the bamboo having bent too far—we gasped not at the early
winter chill, but at the work that had emerged.
Staab
calls the work Chaise Ile in order to evoke a sense of reclining, of
resting in space, but in truth, the work requires no name. For the cyclist who
happens upon it on a tour of the neighborhood, it looms like a silent
compliment to the beauty of the landscape, echoing and framing the cypress
snags that litter the rest of the bayou, and giving both the water and the land
both a human presence and a human dimension. John Taylor, of the Lower Ninth
Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, lifelong resident of
the neighborhood and custodian of one of the canoes, observed that in the early
morning, the sunrise casts a shadow in the center of the work that bisects it
cleanly, a feature that Staab has denied orchestrating, but which, at the
launch of the work a week later, he celebrated by pouring out his wine into the
water.
Only
Staab knows his full intentions. Those of us who served as his assistants were
privy more to his mental and manual dexterity than to the contents of his
innermost vision. Even as he fought against a pole or a woven rope, he teased
us mightily, to a point which casual observers would have thought was
offensive. Part of this activity was distraction; the banter of manual laborers
who would sooner talk about anything than the job at hand, and who consequently
bond through insult. The other impulse, perhaps, was compensation: it became
clear as the work progressed that it would be impossible to incorporate the
second tier of ropes, that they would cause the bamboo poles we had spent the
morning erecting to collapse underneath their weight, and so Chaise Ile
was left solely as it was.
But
it was complete.
if you want to see the images with this article please open this link:
http://pelicanbomb.com/home/post/204
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