BLADES ARE MY BODYGUARDS
WHY I MAKE MACHETE BLADE SCULPTURE
Yes, I do machete blade sculpture. And, my, the comments it triggers. “What’s a nice, pretty girl messing around with intimidating knives?” “Why don’t you do something less threatening?” “I’m not going to fool around with you!”
And, then, the inevitable question: “How did you ever get into doing art with machete blades?” Well, it’s a multifaceted story and I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll lay bare what I know or can guess.
During the 1980’s, I was producing a sculpture series called Scepters--fantasy tools and ritual objects of an imaginary civilization, accompanied by a “history” that I invented to go along with each piece. Hung from the walls or free-standing, these sculptures were meant to be handled in ceremony or dance. I came to this series having always loved tools and hands-on utilitarian objects, especially those with embedded fragments that might reveal time or place. Created with an imaginary function in mind, these art pieces were akin to the tools that I loved. It was rebellious of me, especially a decade ago, to like tools as much as I did; they were a male domain. Nonetheless, I pursued this theme, exhibiting my scepters across the country and abroad.
One day in 1989, walking along Canal Street in Manhattan, I saw a barrel full of machete blades for sale. I was intrigued. The blade seemed to have an internal attraction for me--but as what? As a symbol of power? Hey, I’m the same person who jogs around ants in the road and would never go to a boxing match, no less grab a knife to threaten someone.
Yet, I was moved to start experimenting with the blade in my sculpture. I became preoccupied with combining the steel with curvilinear pieces of wood, so that the two disparate elements unified into one. Then, in 1989, I was asked to be in an exhibition entitled BADGIRLS, curated by Corinne Robins. I was encouraged to make an outrageous sculpture and the theme of the machete fit right in. After the exhibition, rather than dissipating, the urge to incorporate the blade in my art became more and more compelling.
Why? All I know is that visually and viscerally, I was obsessed with the machete’s long, slow curve. It was different than any other kind of knife. Its duality held my fascination: hard, cold, strong steel yielding to its own soft, curving shape. I must have felt that it embodied an androgynous, sensuous combination of opposites: power/vulnerability, masculinity/femininity, aggression/passivity. And if I look back over my career, I realize that my fascination with these opposites occur again and again. Even as a figurative painter, when I developed a semi-abstract series of facial profiles, I heightened the distinction between the angularity and strength of the nose as compared to the voluptuousness of the lips and chin.
Moreover, late in 1989 another influencing factor was psychologically at work. Violence seemed to be breaking out all around. The Gulf War was imminent and the newspapers were constantly reporting on the daily overseas events. Media attention was focusing on crime in the streets, which was at a peak. Concerned by the growing number of women being murdered, raped and battered, my friends and I were repeatedly discussing safety threats in the Big Apple: How late at night should a woman ride the subway? (Our answer: 8 p.m.) What is the best night-time street posture for a woman walking alone? (Our answer: Walk briskly with a countenance of determination, preferably in the gutter and not near doorways.)
I continued to work with the machete. I filed its edge until it became dull. I removed its handle and instead, fused the steel with large soft curves of wood. Sometimes I suspended a finished sculpture from the ceiling so it could gently sway and turn. Was I reversing the destructive potential of the blade? My gallery exhibits were entitled Violence in New York, Reversing Violence, Transcending Violence, the Psychology of Violence. At gallery events I began to moderate panel discussions with psychologists, experts on aggression, security police, religious authorities and counselors to battered women in an attempt to address violence and our fear of it in our lives, particularly women’s lives. I sought the comfort of dialogue and invited viewers to become involved in my work by completing the phrase “These blades make me feel. . .” I framed and hung these written responses in subsequent gallery exhibitions.
Writing a catalog introduction for one such exhibit, Dr. Ronny Cohen, critic and art historian, may have accurately portrayed me. She wrote, “A New Yorker, intent on staying in the city, she found herself, like many citizens at the beginning of 1990, mulling over the subject of violence. The artistic and political strains of thought coincided. The subject of violence struck a resonant chord in her imagination, becoming a catalyst for bringing to mind an array of personal associations in addition to past and present experiences, which she needs to express through words as well as images.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my obsession could also be traced back to childhood dreams of being chased and threatened. In these recurring and frightening dreams, I sometimes found myself being cut rhythmically. I couldn’t prevent it or defend myself. It seems that incorporating the blade into my art translated in my mind as doing now what I couldn’t do then. By fusing the wood and blade into a single form I was mentally and physically fusing the terrifying threat expressed in the steel blade, with my childhood need for warmth and cradling as revealed in the softly shaped wood. The addition of the wood was very important to me. Remember, Freud related wood to mother.
Has the steel machete become a symbol of what frightened me as a young girl, or of my fear itself? Is it an extension of my anger for having felt intimidated by the bad guys trying to catch me and hurt me? Does my bending and twisting of the blade in my sculpture exorcise my Kafkaesque dream script and my inability to fight back?
Interpretations come after the fact and, of course, one can only guess at meanings. When I’m creating a piece, I just work with the materials and my unconscious guides me. I use an acetylene torch to bend the machete and I integrate it with other objects, tools or even musical parts. As I work, I forget it’s a blade and simply relate to the forms and textures.
I embed calligraphic printing plates, bone, rock or different metals into my sculpture and try to fuse them together so the finished piece looks as though it was that way when I “found” it.
The work has a pull-push tension. The viewer is welcomed and drawn in by the sensual forms and playful details and at the same time startled and intimidated by the seriousness and strength of the sculpture.
The results are similar to how we may be as people in our relationships: seductive on the one hand, scary on the other. Wanting our mates to be close to us and available, but not too intrusive or clinging.
I don’t think about these things, though, when I do my art. In fact, I don’t think at all. As my hands saw, drill, sand, weld, epoxy, my head is otherwise engaged. It’s miles away, listening to cassette tapes and trying to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets or crying through “A Tale of Two Cities.” The more difficult the tape, the more it works for me because my mind is totally absorbed.
Only at a point when I have to make an important decision involving a change of direction in my art do I have to shut the tape off to pay total attention to the process. Otherwise, I’m on “automatic.”
I tend to agree now with Arlene Raven, author and writer for the Village Voice. Her observation is that my blades are a symbol of my artistic liberation as a woman--adventuring into the “forbidden” with tools and materials and a force once considered male. I guess I am reliving and relieving my recurring childhood fears, but this time from a place of strength.
My blades have become my bodyguards.
© Linda Stein