I’ve been looking into the margins of the visual world, for as long as I can remember - from childhood actually; and don’t ask me why, but instead of following those generations that followed Abstract Expressionism into some new visual idiom, I managed to get on a ship going backwards in time. At the time, I had no idea I’d wind up in the 19th century.
My formal training in sculpture at what was then called the School of Fine Arts at Boston University, came closest in spirit to that of Rodin, Bourdelle or Maillol – It was academic and quietly expressionistic for 1969 - indeed one of my instructors worked with a model Rodin used frequently, and I was sent on a mission to meet Oskar Kokoschka as young student in 1971 by one of my instructors who assisted him after the war. I’ll tell you that story another time!
The College of Fine Arts at Boston University - one of the last academies where rigorous drawing, painting and sculpting skills were nurtured - mounted an exhibition in 1971 based on the book by Ralph E. Shikes called The Indignant Eye: The artist as social critic in prints and drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso, and this exhibition had a profound effect upon me at the time.
After leaving school in 1973, I spent a year working in Pietrasanta, in Italy, where the influence of the academy soon left me, but not before seeing something that testified to the power of image making even at that late date in the 20th century.
I was taken one day by my friend Michael Esbin to have lunch and visit a small marble carving studio above Carrara. That Lunch, and the black truffle pasta, would not be soon forgotten, because Michael had arranged a visit with some artigiani friends who had a studio in the nearby village.
These marble carvers were very courteous but spoke no English and admittedly our collective Italian was pretty much kitchen variety. Nevertheless, we were briefed before we entered that we would be seeing some extraordinary objects - unlike anything we’d ever seen before.
It was a typical marble carving studio - I lived next door to one in Pietrasanta that still had its marble delivered by a team of oxen, which meant on any given day I might find myself face to face with a small herd of animals delivering tons of white marble for someone’s future sculpture.
I say it was typical except for one small difference, this studio held a not so secret secret. They had been contracted to produce a pair of marble sculptures of Juan and Eva Peron, and after Juan Peron was deposed in 1955, agents of the Argentinean military junta paid a visit to the studio of these two marble carvers instructing them that the image of Peron was not only no longer wanted but had to be destroyed
The new military regime went to great lengths to destroy both the President's and Eva Perón's reputation, and part of that job meant destroying any image of the two that might inspire some future popular revolt – after all many people had died in the lead up to Peron’s ouster.
The agents, according to the marble carvers had insisted that the two creators of the marble portraits destroy their own work, but both apparently refused, and the men from Buenos Aires took matters in to their own hands. They hammered the sculptures beyond recognition and then cut both heads off. That day in 1973 when we saw the decapitated marble heads of Juan and Eva Peron, they were in their final resting place at the bottom of closet high above the town of Carrara, a very long way from the center of power in Argentina- only now… furthering the claim to fame the sculptors could make, since the defiant act of cutting off the head of a marble sculpture was an act of state, it created a new story and not so small fame for the sculptors, who were now leveraging their brush with political misfortune.
It may not surprise you that the sight of those two heads has never left me. Indeed they testify to the power of image making especially in the political world where the creation of certain images can still have a galvanic and often times powerful and surprisingly untoward effect. Witness the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy or the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s giant bronze sculpture and the impact both of those events has had on recent memory.
A few years after my Italian sojourn, I found myself living in Minneapolis when a friend came through town on his way to the Iron Range in Hibbing Minnesota - his Exhibition Design Company had been contracted to design a new cultural history museum. When asked if I would create a proposal for the use of three dimensional sculptural figures for this new museum, I never had the slightest idea (this was in 1975, by the way) that by passing through Minneapolis, Bill Ruggieri would seal the deal on what would eventually become StudioEIS.
My girlfriend and I were commissioned a year later to make the first project that would, over time, become just the first of hundreds the studio would produce, and as it happens the memory of those two dead white marble heads has always reminded me of the power of the human image - something I think the studio has sought to exploit for the benefit and purpose of visual storytelling for the past 30 odd years.
