Page 58 - Studio International - April 1974

The new piece is called Synthetic
Toronto letter
There were three or four interesting
things to look at in Toronto recently :
Murray Favro's Synthetic Lake
(Carmen Lamanna Gallery) and two
pieces by Boston sculptor Tonia
Aminoff, both in permanent
installation at the Ontario College of
Art.
Miss Aminoff's sculptures, one
of which is titled Yesterday and the
other one Today, both involve
nailing ; in the former a roll of plastic
wrap on the floor just at the foot of the
wall is unrolled upward on the wall to
a height of about six feet and fixed
there with about one hundred nails;
the other piece presents two vertical
and parallel rows of nails about three
feet apart beginning about a foot
from the floor and again ending at a
height of six feet. To each of these
nails is attached a length of copper
wire (each of the same length). The
unattached ends of these wires bear
Murray Favro Synthetic Lake 1973 Over-all size 24 x 10½ x 3½ ft.
another nail which drags them down
into a kind of spatial trough in the
middle of the piece. Wherever
possible the artist has nailed the
formerly free ends of wire into the
floor of the gallery, in front of the
sculpture.
Yesterday, the plastic wrap piece, is
a wonderfully evocative analogue of
certain emotional states—and it braves
the dangers inherent in such
statement-making. Certainly, as an
enactment of aggressiveness, the
hammering of this membrane (so
frequently linked in North America
with domesticated life and love) up
onto a wall with a couple of hundred
nails is like breaking a butterfly on a
wheel, and the spectator is landed in
the middle of a sermon-in-stone
about hostility and pain : the
violation of the sheer and the
hysterically delicate by the blunt
everydayness of nails. Today, the
copper nail piece, presents an equally
virtuoso alignment of materials to
suggest emotional correlatives, but
this time with an additional formal
achievement and some infra-art-
historical relevance. Here there is a
presented vertical plane
acknowledged and driven home by
nailing. Similarily claimed is the
acknowledged horizontal of the floor.
Finally, suggested by the activating
obliques of the drooping ends of the
wires, there is a third plane of an
implied volumetric wedge of local
aesthetic work space. This space is
crowded with intellectual incident.
The choice of copper wire, with its
incorporated readings of electric
aliveness, is useful to the artist as an
aid to the supra-formal articulation of
her sculptural space; its use reinforces
the reading of the piece as the tracking
of mental activity; it allows for the
proposing of the pieces as a
paradigmatic structure which displays
a juxtaposition, for example, of the
security and aspiration of the climbing
verticals with a fall into division in the
middle. Similarly, the sculpture not
Tonia Aminoff Yesterday 1973
only links the vertical space of the 72 x 12 in. Photo: Maggie Dault
Lake. It is a gallery-sized construction
of wood, canvas, and fibre-glass
using a motor and projection — a film
loop this time. A small motor powers
a system of gears which eventually
turn a long fibre-glass screw which
lifts, at different intervals, a series of
lath strips_set up parallel to one
another. A bare canvas covers the
strips from the back of the piece to the
front of it (about 30 feet) where it
billows down to the gallery floor.
When the motor runs, the strips move
langorously up and down moving the
canvas with them. At the front of the
gallery, Favro has installed a 16mm.
movie projector which casts onto this
moving canvas a film loop of waves
beating on a Lake Huron beach. The
size and rhythm of the filmed waves
(needless to say) perfectly match the
lift and roll of the canvas machine;
the filmed waves (accompanied by
the creaking and groaning of the
machine) seem endlessly to roll in,
break, and wash up on the shore
ending on the canvas beach at the
spectator's feet.
understood picture plane (from the
Again there is the vibrating
front the piece suggests the residual
Platonism : the filmed waves are
ghost of a Louis Unfurled) with the
quasi-ontological wave-motions,
floor space of sculpture, but also
abstracted, film-looped into and
advertises a certain aloneness and living in a contemplative space of art
transitoriness of the copper tracery
activity between the physical waters
elements, and dilates upon the
of Lake Huron and the partly funny
wistfulness of 'only connecting'. All
and partly moving (in the emotional
in all, Miss Aminoff strikes me as a
sense, I mean) overproduction of
splendidly authoritative inventor of
Favro's machinery. In Favro's art
metaphorically meaningful sculptural
there is no reward for accuracy of
spaces.
depiction or performance, he takes a
For some years now, Murray
technician's interest in making things
Favro's work has involved the
well, but the real matter is the physical
construction of large colourless
production of a visionary occasion.
wooden mock-ups of commonly
Favro's work is made only as well as
found objects or situations upon
it is necessary; the machine rattles
which have been projected coloured
and the film is scratched. By such
slides or films of the real things. Favro
aesthetic distancing the anxious
has always foreshortened the white
mimetic is subverted and replaced by
models so that when they received
a realism that is only posited— and
their projected coloured images, the
thus still reverberatory and potential
images dropped over them as
and alive. Synthetic Lake is a lake by
accurately as if they had been painted
apostrophe : by being addressed as
on. Last year, Favro made a 2/3 scale
such by the artist. Salvation for Favro
Chevrolet Corvair, white painted
is a constructed vision (literally, a
wood and Plexiglas, ostensibly
view) — a construction (a proposition,
stopped by the side of a country road,
a way fo viewing) onto which is
the entire woodland scene
projected light, a Yod (so that we
constructed from cut-out flats and
might all of us see when the artist is
platforms. The coloured light hitting
not there with us), an idea carried
the advanced perspective of the
home by the artist in a cannister, an
construction produced a kind of
idea projected later in this Marabar
sliding into life of the piece, the low
cave of a gallery to go 'Boum' in the
glowing illumination a 'geometrically'
Canadian mind. Objects are at
accurate but only eerie approximation
considerable perceptual remove in
of the actual situation (as far as we
Favro' s art. His complex structures,
are able to reconstruct it). One senses
made to sidle up asymptotically to the
a concern in the artist for such ideas
real thing and then left a little
as an animating intelligence, a
curtailed in their reality, offer just
visionary 'bodying forth', a lurking
what Synthetic Lake offers :
Platonism. About this last, it is
tableaux. The set beats like a heart;
difficult to resist the substitution of
with each roll of canvas and flash of
'Corvair' for Plato's free-floating bed —
wave-film Favro presents a moment
the result being the proposal of the
in his syntactic chain of
three classical Corvairs : the ideal
interdependent film, machine and
Corvair of the mind, the 'real' one as
lake. Over a period, these elements
manufactured some time ago by
roll up in the mind's eye into a
General Motors and purchased by the
complex work of a highly satisfying
artist, and the copy of the copy,
kind.
glowing with surrogate life in the
gallery. Gary M. Dault.