The Sense of Permanence and of Change in My Transformable Wood Objects

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 205-206. Pergamon Press, 1980. Printed in Great Britain. THE SENSE OF PERMANENCE AND OF CHANGE IN MY TRANSFORMABLE WOOD OBJECTS Giorgio Careri* I INTRODUCTION The importance in art of a proper balance between expected and unexpected effects is well known. This kind of combination displayed by a visual artwork was discussed recently by Gombrich [1] in terms of the sense of permanence and of change, and I shall not consider it further here. Thus the sense of the expected, necessary and permanent, on the one hand, and the sense of the unexpected, due to chance and change, on the other, seem to be complementary in art. A balance between these two senses is often found in musical compositions, where the unexpected is introduced in order to produce a feeling of tension. To produce such tension in a visual artwork I devised a way that consists essentially of imposing arbitrary changes to a piece of natural material. This can be considered to be like the experimental method of science in which an observer wilfully perturbs a system being investigated, while keeping a record to permit others to verify the results obtained. Only some natural materials are particularly ~uited for my purpose, yet the artworks I produce using them should not be confused with those called 'found objects'. Fig. 1. 'Wood Objects', transformables, Lebanon cedar, (Top) 30x8x9cm, 1977. (Bottom) 47x17x8cm, 1977. (Collection of Mrs. M. Nazzaro, Rome) (Photo: Dario Rocca, Rome) 'Physicist, Via Orti Famesina 541B, Rome, Italy. (Received 27 Dec. 1979) 205 n DESCRIPTION OF THE ARTWORKS I begin with a piece of material, usually wood, and divide it into two parts. At least one portion of the surface of each part has the visual characteristics of a piece of wood found in nature. The artwork may be transformed by varying two parameters: the distance separating the two parts and/or the angular orientation between them. Artworks, such as these, that viewers can manipulate at will are called transformables [2]. Each of the two objects shown in Fig. 1 is a block of Fig. 2. 'Wood Object', transformable, Lebanon cedar, 46x9x7 cm, 1977. (Photo: Dario Rocca, Rome) 206 Giorgio earen wood that split into two parts while being dried, and the internal structure of the wood is revealed. Three views are shown of each object with their two parts in different positions. The object shown in Fig. 2 is a piece of wood, one portion of whose surface has natural contours, that was cut into two parts. DI DISCUSSION Transformables of the above kind permit one to become aware of a sense of permanence or expected effects induced by the evident natural characteristic of the material and of a sense of change or unexpected effects induced by variations in the relative positions of their parts. One observes that when the parts of one of these objects are separated beyond a certain distance the appearance of their unity is not preserved and that when this distance is not exceeded one obtains more of an impression of unity of the object than when the parts are not separated. When the parts are sufficiently close together, they seem to offer a kind of support for the gap between them. I think of the gap between two of these parts as an interval of silence or a rest in a musical composition, a 'gap' that is a part of the music. Thus the sense of change and of permanence are interlinked in a way as expressed in a poem by T. S. Eliot, '... as a Chinese jar still/Moves perpetually in its stillness'. The effects described above could be accounted for by Gestalt psychology of visual perception [3], because the tension evoked by similar, yet not identical, forms has been found to be stronger when the two forms are placed near each other. However, I am not much interested in explanations of my own emotional reactions to visual experience. My aim is to evoke a sense of permanence and of change by means of artworks, especially of the kind displayed by biological forms found in nature [4]. REFERENCES 1. E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the...